#why dis historical events have to happen when i became an adult

[ellianasdeadpointeshoes]

If you are an eligible American voter. GET YOUR ASS UP. GET UP....

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[kinsey3furry300]

A very confused Star Wars Fan desperately tries to justify their belief that “Caravan of Courage” shows the way forward for the franchise. No, really.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved Star Wars. And I mean, all of it. The books, the games, the Lego, the spin-offs: I even enjoy the Holiday Special in a The Room so-bad-you-just-need-to-see-it sort of way.  But particularly the films. But here is when we run into the big problem: I’m just the wrong age. The original trilogy launched before I was born, the prequel trilogy hit cinemas when I was already a teen and while I went and saw them and enjoyed them, I was at that age where I was self-conscious about seeing a “kids” film, and hyper-aware of how silly and cringy those films were in parts. So my indoctrination, my inoculation with the Star Wars bug didn’t happen in the cinema, and it didn’t happen with any of the main franchise works. It happened on home video, on a skiing trip in the French Alps in the early 90’s. I’d have been about 6, and this was the first time I’d ever been abroad other than to see relatives in Ireland.  And I loved it: to this day I love skiing, but more than that, I have very, very fond childhood memories of this trip. This was shortly before I lost my biological mother to cancer, she’d have received her diagnosis just after we got back from the trip. This was when my younger sister stopped being an annoying screaming thing and became and became an actual person I could talk and play and share ideas with, this was before the combination my mothers long illness and my father having just launched his own IT start up meant I didn’t see him or her any more, despite the fact they were in the same house as me. This was this wonderful, nostalgic child-hood bubble when my family was intact, and nothing could ever go wrong. I skied all day with mum and dad, and would come back to the chalet in the evening. It was an English speaking chalet, I met my first real-life American there, and having grown up in the 90’s in the UK nothing was cooler than making friends with an actual American my own age. He had a hulk Hogan action figure with springs in the legs so if you put him on a hard surface and punched his head down, when you let go he’d jump really high in the air. We used to play with it together in the bath, back in that weird 90’s time-bubble when it was possible to convince two sets of parents that this kid you’d just met was you best friend in the world and of course shared bath time was, somehow, normal and appropriate. And fresh from bath time, tired from the day, the parents would give us some hot coco, dump us kids in front of the tv and grab the first shitty low-budget VHS they could find to keep us distracted while they went to the bar. In this particular time, in this particular place, that shitty low budget cartoon was the  complete set of the 1985 Lucasfilm/ABC Ewoks cartoon, plus the two spin off movies, and to this day that cheap, kitschy, kind of bad series has a special warm and cosy place in my heart. I remember being enthralled by the world, in love with the characters, applied by the bad guys and the injustice they caused (to this day I’m still irate about that time Wicket lost his set of beads documenting his progress towards becoming a full warrior and the older Ewoks basically said, tough, you need to re-earn all those merit badges from scratch. This struck me as exactly the sort of bullshit an adult would pull, and pissed me off) and on tenterhooks about what would happen to the characters.

It was also, by a coincidence, the first ever Star Wars media I was exposed to, and the above combination of events probably explains a lot about me.

So I was surprised, the other day, when scrolling Disney+, to find they’d added Caravan of Courage AND Battle for Endor to the roster in my region. Surely Disney wouldn’t want their slick, cool brand associated with this old trash? Surely there could be no place for this in the post-Mandalorian Star Wars cannon? Surely this is a horrible mistake some intern made, right?

Unless…. What if I’ve miss-remembered? What if it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, and it’s, in fact, secretly really, really good?

I rushed to my comfy chair, got a blanket, dimmed the lights, made some coco (with rum in it, because why the hell not?) and sat down to re-examine this lost gem.

And wow: it’s every bit as shit as you’d expect.

It has aged exactly as poorly as you’d expect a cheap, mid 80’s direct to video spin-off to age. Caravan of Courage? More like Caravan of Garbage, am I right?

And yet… I still enjoyed every moment.

And it was sitting there, in my pyjamas, watching a cheaply made direct to video cash-grab from just before I was born, seeing it again for the first time in nearly 30 years, and I realised something.

It doesn’t really matter if this film is bad, so long as I enjoy it. And if it doesn’t really mater if this is bad, then I, like many Star Wars fans, wasted a huge amount of time and emotional effort on being butthurt about stuff I didn’t like about the Rise of Skywalker and it’s ilk. Because somewhere, right now, a tired and frustrated parent is putting Disney+ on to keep their kids quiet for two hours. And they won’t think too hard about what they put on, so long as it keeps little Timmy busy for a bit. Somewhere, right now, a kid is watching Rise of Skywalker, and it’s the first Star Wars media they’ve ever seen.

And that’s okay. Because we don’t know what that kids home life is like. We don’t know if it’s good or bad. Maybe it’s great, maybe it’s about to take a dramatic plunge like mine did, and this moment here will be the cosy, warm memory they look back on in 30 years time, and that’s beautiful.  They’re getting introduced to a fun, wonderful fantasy world that could be with them all their lives, through good times and bad, and as fans we should be happy about that.

Star Wars will never, die: it’s too darn profitable, Disney will never let it. And while I hope they learn from their mistakes and make sure every future Star Wars is a timeless gem of story-telling, statistically, if you keep making enough films, some of them will be bad. And while I’d like them all to be great, it’s still okay if they’re bad.

Because nothing can take away my memories of that week in that chalet. Nothing can take-away my memories of when they put the original trilogy on in cinemas for the special edition and I had my jaw hit the floor with how good it was on the big screen, not knowing or caring who shot first. Nothing can take away you memories of the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, or the Clone Wars. Nothing can tarnish the bits of the sequil trilogy that you like, and there are good bits in there.

But wait, what about continuity? What about the sacred, perfect written time-line that used to exist?

Well, what about it? Have you seen any other big, epic fantasy universe before? They’re all a mess. A work of fiction, particularly fantasy, can be extensive, or tightly written, but not both. Harry Potter is only seven books, and the last two feel, tonally, like they’re from an entirely different series. I love them, but the grim-dark kicked in so fast you’ll get whiplash. The Hobbit is a perfect written self-contained novel, and LOTR is *The* big boy high-fantasy trilogy: fast forward 50 years, and Christopher Tolkien is desperately squeezing every last drop of money out of his father’s corpse by finishing and publishing every unfinished note JRR ever wrote right down to his shopping lists. Even Dune goes of the rails with sequels. I can only think of four fantasy works that are both extensive and consistently tightly written, Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time, Malazan: Book of the Fallen and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. And even then, the prequels and spin-offs mess with the timelines: the Dunk and Egg novella’s change some character’s canonical ages and timelines, Wheel of Time was going slowly off the rails even before the Jordan died, Forge of Darkness made what was a good metaphor for the creation of it’s world into a literal war deep in the past, and Sanderson’s first Novel Elantris got a re-write to bring it more in line with the rest of the shared universe. The MCU, oft held up as the modern example of tightly planned, well thought out ongoing storytelling, is a lie: it was never as pre-planned out as Disney wants us to think; the first Iron Man, apparently, barely had a script, with Downey ad-lib-ing most of his scenes. None of the MCU films are direct sequels to each-other other than Infinity war and Endgame. There are three Iron Man films, and Three Thor films, and none continue an ongoing story line across multiple films, and the Cap films barely continue an arc, but only where Cap’s relationship with Natasha and Bucky is involved.  Much like these, Star War’s cannon is a complete, nightmarish, confusing, tangled, illogical mess. And it has been since 1984, as Caravan of Courage proves. It was never consistent and well planned.

And that’s okay.

I used to care about plot holes. I used to care about which works were cannon in Star Wars lore. I’m over that now. I’m happy to imagine the books, films and games not as a blow-by-blow historical account of a galaxy far far away, but as campfire stories from within this fun, imaginative world that we’re all invited to listen to. Stories that are in-universe myth and folklore, that we can all snuggle up and listen to while drinking highly alcoholic rum and remembering better times, knowing that wherever the future throws at us, no matter how the world goes to hell around us, we’ll still have the memories, and the ability to make our own new stories in the wonderful Star Wars world we all share.

And that’s okay. No, more than that: that’s beautiful.

Also Star Wars is completely unambiguous on the fact we’re allowed to kill fascists no matter how many times they keep coming back with a new logo, so that’s timely I guess.

So, there’s my hot take two-years after everyone else stopped caring about this stuff, as per bloody usual. Tell me why I’m wrong below, and does anyone else have any truly awful spin-off shows that they kind of have a nostalgic soft spot for?

[quoteablebooks]

Genre: Historical Fiction, Mystery, Retelling, Adult

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Summary:

'Reader, I murdered him.' JANE STEELE is a brilliant Gothic retelling of JANE EYRE from Edgar-nominated Lyndsay Faye, for fans of LONGBOURN and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES. 'I loved it' - Elly Griffiths.

Like the heroine of the novel she adores, Jane Steele suffers cruelly at the hands of her aunt and schoolmaster. And like Jane Eyre, they call her wicked - but in her case, she fears the accusation is true. When she flees, she leaves behind the corpses of her tormentors.

A fugitive navigating London's underbelly, Jane rights wrongs on behalf of the have-nots whilst avoiding the noose. Until an advertisement catches her eye. Her aunt has died and the new master at Highgate House, Mr Thornfield, seeks a governess. Anxious to know if she is Highgate's true heir, Jane takes the position and is soon caught up in the household's strange spell. When she falls in love with the mysterious Charles Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him - body, soul and secrets - and what if he discovers her murderous past?

*Opinions*

This book has been sitting in my “to read” list on Goodreads for a couple of years easily, so when the next books in the series I am currently binging didn’t show up on time, I figured it was time to give it a try. Jane Steele is set in a universe where Jane Eyre is a novel and our main character, Jane Steele, reflects on her life is similar and different from her favorite literary character. Given that setup, it is not hard to guess some of the beats of the novel, but Jane Steele is a very different character than the sometimes meek Jane Eyre and how she faces a world that is not gentle or caring for anyone, but especially young women. Now it had been a while since I’ve read Jane Eyre, and it took me a while to truly enjoy the literary classic, but I believe Jane Steele is a retelling that masterfully pulls on the reader’s memories of the classic, for better or worse, while weaving a story that is truly its own. As I mentioned above, I don’t remember the finer details of Jane Eyre as it’s been a couple of years since I’ve read it. That being said, much like the source material, I found the time at the school to drag a little pace-wise, but it is important to understanding both Janes. When Jane got back to Highgate House I had a hard time putting the book down, but it took me a good couple of days to get to that point. Still, this retelling really dives into the darker areas of England during this time period, of the schools, girls were forced into, and the English interests abroad. Jane Eyre does not make the world seem easy for young women without means by any means, but Jane Steele delves into the dirt and darkness because she believes she belongs there and that gives the reader a look into the lives of women we don’t see in Jane Eyre.

As for English interest abroad, the novel does not pull any punches in regards to the East Indian Trading Company and what they did in India, though this novel was focused on Punjab. The information about Sikhism and those that follow that religion was enlightening and I’m happy that Faye included reference books to look into the history of the region and religion further. That being said, so many novels of the time (that I’ve read) completely ignore what is happening in India and what the British presence, either as the East India Trading Company, military, or missionaries is rarely addressed. Faye had the benefit of hindsight and no concern of dealing with being accused of treason, but I found Jane Steele’s London more well-rounded and real than Jane Eyre’s, even with all its ugliness. I love how Faye handles Jane’s character arc and what it says about how childhood events and traumas shape how we see ourselves. If Jane hadn’t felt as if she killed Edwin (who deserved it and would have been a beast of a person like Jane Eyre’s cousin ended up being) then she would have never run to Lowan Bridge School and none of the other deaths would have followed. Jane believed herself wicked due to how those around her treated her so wicked she became. While it is easy to excuse all of Jane’s murders, as Mr. Thornfield does in the end, it is clear to see why Jane has such a low opinion of herself but also why she trust her out abilities, maybe too much confidence in her own abilities. When someone reframes her childhood and her relationship with Clarke, it changes everything about the Jane way sees herself. Obviously, it doesn’t absolve all her sins, but it makes her feel as if she is worth something and that can change a lot about the way someone moves through the world. The secondary characters are also vibrant and well-rounded. From the enigmatic new residents of Highgate House to the girls that suffered in Lowan Bridge School and even Jane’s mother and Agatha. No matter how much page time they received, every character felt real and that they had a life outside of their interaction with Jane. The villains are horrible but in ways that make sense and the heroic characters are far from perfect. Mr. Thornfield has his own trauma to deal with, but that makes him a good fit for a romantic partner as Jane’s whole life has been made up of traumas. It is a match that makes much more sense than Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester honestly. There is also the representation of non-straight and non-white characters, in a positive light, which is always nice to see in a historical novel. While it took me a while to become invested in the novel and Jane’s story, much like Jane Eyre, I came to love just about everything about the book. I will probably pick up a physical copy at some point just so I can reread it because I admit that I read through the last couple of chapters so quickly because I was anxious about what would happen next. It’s been a long time since that happened. Jane Steele is a four-and-a-half-star book that I am rounding up to a five-star. The half star was the slow start and the distance between Jane and the reader at the start, which I know emulates the original text but I wasn’t a fan of it there either. While I expected Jane to be a little more wicked, I truly enjoyed my time with this novel.

[uomo-accattivante]

Fantastic (but long) article about Theater of War’s recent productions, including Oedipus the King and Antigone in Ferguson, featuring Oscar Isaac. The following are excerpts. The full article is viewable via the source link below:

Excerpt:

“Children of Thebes, why are you here?” Oscar Isaac asked. His face filled the monitor on my dining table. (It was my partner’s turn to use the desk.) We were a couple of months into lockdown, just past seven in the evening, and a few straggling cheers for essential workers came in through the window. Isaac was looking smoldery with a quarantine beard, a gold chain, an Airpod, and a black T-shirt. His display name was set to “Oedipus.”

Isaac was one of several famous actors performing Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” from their homes, in the first virtual performance by Theater of War Productions: a group that got its start in 2008, staging Sophocles’ “Ajax” and “Philoctetes” for U.S. military audiences and, beginning in 2009, on military installations around the world, including in Kuwait, Qatar, and Guantánamo Bay, with a focus on combat trauma. After each dramatic reading, a panel made up of people in active service, veterans, military spouses, and/or psychiatrists would describe how the play resonated with their experiences of war, before opening up the discussion to the audience. Since its founding, Theater of War Productions has addressed different kinds of trauma. It has produced Euripides’ “The Bacchae” in rural communities affected by the opioid crisis, “The Madness of Heracles” in neighborhoods afflicted by gun violence and gang wars, and Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” in prisons. “Antigone in Ferguson,” which focusses on crises between communities and law enforcement, was motivated by an analogy between Oedipus’ son’s unburied body and that of Michael Brown, left on the street for roughly four hours after Brown was killed by police; it was originally performed at Michael Brown’s high school.

Now, with trauma roving the globe more contagiously than ever, Theater of War Productions had traded its site-specific approach for Zoom. The app was configured in a way I hadn’t seen before. There were no buttons to change between gallery and speaker view, which alternated seemingly by themselves. You were in a “meeting,” but one you were powerless to control, proceeding by itself, with the inexorability of fate. There was no way to view the other audience members, and not even the group’s founder and director, Bryan Doerries, knew how numerous they were. Later, Zoom told him that it had been fifteen thousand. This is roughly the seating capacity of the theatre of Dionysus, where “Oedipus the King” is believed to have premièred, around 429 B.C. Those viewers, like us, were in the middle of a pandemic: in their case, the Plague of Athens.

The original audience would have known Oedipus’ story from Greek mythology: how an oracle had predicted that Laius, the king of Thebes, would be killed by his own son, who would then sleep with his mother; how the queen, Jocasta, gave birth to a boy, and Laius pierced and bound the child’s ankles, and ordered a shepherd to leave him on a mountainside. The shepherd took pity on the maimed baby, Oedipus (“swollen foot”), and gave him to a Corinthian servant, who handed him off to the king and queen of Corinth, who raised him as their son. Years later, Oedipus killed Laius at a crossroads, without knowing who he was. Then he saved Thebes from a Sphinx, became the king of Thebes, had four children with Jocasta, and lived happily for many years.

That’s where Sophocles picks up the story. Everyone would have known where things were headed—the truth would come out, and Oedipus would blind himself—but not how they would get there. How Sophocles got there was by drawing on contemporary events, on something that was in everyone’s mind, though it doesn’t appear in the original myth: a plague.

In the opening scene, Thebes is in the grip of a terrible epidemic. Oedipus’ subjects come to the palace, imploring him to save the city, describing the scene of pestilence and panic, the screaming and the corpses in the street. Something about the way Isaac voiced Oedipus’ response—“Children. I am sorry. I know”—made me feel a kind of longing. It was a degree of compassion conspicuous by its absence in the current Administration. I never think of myself as someone who wants or needs “leadership,” yet I found myself thinking, We would be better off with Oedipus. “I would be a weak leader if I did not follow the gods’ orders,” Isaac continued, subverting the masculine norm of never asking for advice. He had already sent for the best information out there, from the Delphic Oracle.

Soon, Oedipus’ brother-in-law, Creon—John Turturro, in a book-lined study—was doing his best to soft-pedal some weird news from Delphi. Apparently, the oracle said that the plague wouldn’t end until the people of Thebes expelled Laius’ killer: a person who was somehow still in the city, even though Laius had died many years earlier on an out-of-town trip. Oedipus called in the blind prophet, Tiresias, played by Jeffrey Wright, whose eyes were invisible behind a circular glare in his eyeglasses.

Reading “Oedipus” in the past, I had always been exasperated by Tiresias, by his cryptic lamentations—“I will never reveal the riddles within me, or the evil in you”—and the way he seemed incapable of transmitting useful information. Spoken by a Black actor in America in 2020, the line made a sickening kind of sense. How do you tell the voice of power that the problem is in him, really baked in there, going back generations? “Feel free to spew all of your vitriol and rage in my direction,” Tiresias said, like someone who knew he was in for a tweetstorm.

Oedipus accused Tiresias of treachery, calling out his disability. He cast suspicion on foreigners, and touted his own “wealth, power, unsurpassed skill.” He decried fake news: “It’s all a scam—you know nothing about interpreting birds.” He elaborated a deep-state scenario: Creon had “hatched a secret plan to expel me from office,” eliciting slanderous prophecies from supposedly disinterested agencies. It was, in short, a coup, designed to subvert the democratic will of the people of Thebes.

Frances McDormand appeared next, in the role of Jocasta. Wearing no visible makeup, speaking from what looked like a cabin somewhere with wood-panelled walls, she resembled the ghost of some frontierswoman. I realized, when I saw her, that I had never tried to picture Jocasta: not her appearance, or her attitude. What was her deal? How had she felt about Laius maiming their baby? How had she felt about being offered as a bride to whomever defeated the Sphinx? What did she think of Oedipus when she met him? Did it never seem weird to her that he was her son’s age, and had horrible scars on his ankles? How did they get along, those two?

When you’re reading the play, you don’t have to answer such questions. You can entertain multiple possibilities without settling on one. But actors have to make decisions and stick to them. One decision that had been made in this case: Oedipus really liked her. “Since I have more respect for you, my dear, than anyone else in the world,” Isaac said, with such warmth in “my dear.” I was reminded of the fact that Euripides wrote a version of “Oedipus”—lost to posterity, like the majority of Greek tragedies—that some scholars suggest foregrounds the loving relationshipbetween Oedipus and Jocasta.

Jocasta’s immediate task was to defuse the potentially murderous argument between her husband and her brother. She took one of the few rhetorical angles available to a woman: why, such grown men ought to be ashamed of themselves, carrying on so when there was a plague going on. And yet, listening to the lines that McDormand chose to emphasize, it was clear that, in the guise of adult rationality and spreading peace, what she was actually doing was silencing and trivializing. “Come inside,” she said, “and we’ll settle this thing in private. And both of you quit making something out of nothing.” It was the voice of denial, and, through the play, you could hear it spread from character to character.

By this point in the performance, I found myself spinning into a kind of cognitive overdrive, toggling between the text and the performance, between the historical context, the current context, and the “universal” themes. No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was.

Excerpt:

The riddle of the Sphinx plays out in the plot of “Oedipus,” particularly in a scene near the end where the truth finally comes out. Two key figures from Oedipus’ infancy are brought in for questioning: the Theban shepherd, who was supposed to kill baby Oedipus but didn’t; and the Corinthian messenger to whom he handed off the maimed child. The Theban shepherd is walking proof that the Sphinx’s riddle is hard, because that man can’t recognize anyone: not the Corinthian, whom he last saw as a young man, and certainly not Oedipus, a baby with whom he’d had a passing acquaintance decades earlier. “It all took place so long ago,” he grumbles. “Why on earth would you ask me?”

“Because,” the Corinthian (David Strathairn) explained genially on Zoom, “this man whom you are now looking at was once that child.”

This, for me, was the scene with the catharsis in it. At a certain point, the shepherd (Frankie Faison) clearly understood everything, but would not or could not admit it. Oedipus, now determined to learn the truth at all costs, resorted to enhanced interrogation. “Bend back his arms until they snap,” Isaac said icily; in another window, Faison screamed in highly realistic agony. Faison was a personification of psychological resistance: the mechanism a mind develops to protect itself from an unbearable truth. Those invisible guardsmen had to nearly kill him before he would admit who had given him the baby: “It was Laius’s child, or so people said. Your wife could tell you more.”

Tears glinted in Isaac’s eyes as he delivered the next line, which I suddenly understood to be the most devastating in the whole play: “Did . . . she . . . give it to you?” How had I never fully realized, never felt, how painful it would have been for Oedipus to realize that his parents hadn’t loved him?

Excerpt:

If we borrow the terms of Greek drama, 2020 might be viewed as the year of anagnorisis: tragic recognition. On August 9th, the sixth anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown, I watched the Theater of War Productions put on a Zoom production of “Antigone in Ferguson”: an adaptation of Sophocles’ “Oedipus” narrative sequel, with the chorus represented by a demographically and ideologically diverse gospel choir. Oscar Isaac was back, this time as Creon, Oedipus’ successor as king. He started out as a bullying inquisitor (“I will have your extremities removed one by one until you reveal the criminal’s name”), ordering Antigone (Tracie Thoms) to be buried alive, insulting everyone who criticized him, and accusing Tiresias of corruption. But then Tiresias, with the help of the chorus, persuaded Creon to reconsider. In a sustained gospel number, the Thebans, armed with picks and shovels, led by their king, rushed to free Antigone.

“Antigone” being a tragedy, they got there too late, resulting in multiple deaths, and in Isaac’s once again totally losing his shit. It was almost the same performance he gave in “Oedipus,” and yet, where Oedipus begins the play written into a corner, between walls that keep closing in, Creon seems to have just a little more room to maneuver. His misfortune—like that of Antigone and her brother—feels less irreversible. I first saw “Antigone in Ferguson” live, last year, and, in the discussion afterward, the subject of fate—inevitably—came up. I remember how Doerries gently led the audience to view “Antigone” as an illustration of how easily everything might happen differently, and how people’s minds can change. I remember the energy that spread through the room that night, in talk about prison reform and the urgency of collective change.

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Again, the full article is accessible via the source link below:

[collectsfallenstars]

WARNING: Absolutely long post

IN DEFENSE OF KIM EUN SOOK'S "THE KING: ETERNAL MONARCH"

The King: Eternal Monarch has been getting mixed reviews 10 episodes into the season and it has boggled my mind as to why this has been happening. It’s a grand project, has a robust storyline, beautiful cinematography the likes of which is done for full-length films, and has a love story between two adults who behave like adults and not in perpetual high school. It is very different from most Korean dramas I have come across, and that alone is reason enough to watch it.

 

Granted, I have not watched many of them so maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But what I am sure of is that I get tired of things very easily when they’ve become predictable.

 

See, before watching The King: Eternal Monarch, the last Korean drama I watched was Something Happened in Bali back in 2004. Then coronavirus happened, billions of pesos were to the government but no mass-testing happened, ABS-CBN shut down, people speaking against the government were being put in jail, and I thought, hmm let’s go to Netflix to escape. K-dramas with beautiful autumn colors should do the trick.

 

I watched maybe one or two series in full but soon found myself giving up on the ones that came next. Watching them one after another made it clear that they were built like romance novels – no matter how different each premise was for a series, they always followed a pattern. And patterns, while they may be dependable, can sometimes be boring.

 

And then I decided to give The King: Eternal Monarch a try even though the binge-watching monster inside me disagreed with it. So there I was last week, Netflix open and a lunch of Sinigang na Baboy with rice laid out in front of me.

 

The series opened with a serene view of a bamboo forest, wind blowing gently through it, and the voice of a man talking about the legend of a bamboo flute back when monarchs ruled Korea. Oh, a historical series.

 

1 minute and 40 seconds later, it cuts to a man covered in blood, in a police interrogation room in modern day Korea. Oh, it’s also detective fiction. Gotta watch out for red herrings then. Oh but wait, the man covered in blood, Lee Lim, is supposed to be 70 years old but he doesn’t look a day over 30. I mean, yes Korean genes and skin care are magical but not to this extent. The idea of immortality is introduced which suggests that the series has supernatural elements too. This means world building for these magical elements and forming rules that govern them. (I mean, Bram Stoker and Anne Rice made their vampires perish under the sun and Stephanie Meyer chose to make them…sparkle.)

 

And then 4 minutes in, we get a flashback to winter of 1994 in the Kingdom of Corea. Uhm. Typo? No? Lee Lim, the bastard son of the former king, murders his half brother, the current king, in order to steal the bamboo flute that grants the owner much power. The king’s young son, 7 year old Lee Gon, witnesses his father’s murder, struggles with Lee Lim, splits the power laden bamboo flute in half, and nearly dies if it weren’t for a mysterious figure coming in to save him.  The mysterious figure drops an ID card with the name and picture of Lt. Jung Tae Eul on it and Lee Gon clutches it along with half of the bamboo flute. Lee Lim escapes to the forest with only a broken half of the bamboo flute. He comes upon a pair of obelisks, passes through it and lands in Korea with a K. Lee Lim comes face to face with the face of the person he had just murdered, except he isn’t a king anymore. He’s just an unkempt unemployed man. We now have the introduction of parallel worlds and doppelgangers. It had only been 18 minutes into the first episode.

 

I put it on pause, finished my lunch quickly, cleared the table, and settled down on the couch to watch. I did all that before resuming to watch it because it clearly wasn’t the kind of K-drama you could easily watch while eating, glancing up and down between the screen and your food, missing bits of the subtitle here and there and not paying any mind. Because of its structure, the kind of story it wants to tell and the breadth of its narrative, it demands your full attention.

 

I get why people find it difficult. I found it difficult. But it was infinitely exciting. It’s as if someone laid out a puzzle with a thousand pieces, a maze, Connect the Dots, Spot the Difference in front of me and told me to play with them all at the same time.

 

What kind of story did the writer, Kim Eun Sook, want to tell? She began with the murder of the parents of Lee Gon by his bastard uncle, Lee Lim, who feels he has been deprived of power for too long and intends to take it all for himself. It becomes a story of both sides seeking justice for their own separate tragedies. To flesh out this story, she has to give Lee Lim a plan for world domination and give Lee Gon a defense strategy in place, as well as an active pursuit to entrap his uncle. She has to give them motivations, conflicts, moments of doubt and triumph. If this were the only story she wanted to tell, a linear storyline with flashbacks and flash-forwards should be enough. Throw in a romance, love triangle, one final obstacle, 2 chaste kisses, 1 passionate kiss, 1 tearful kiss, 1 reunion kiss and you will arrive at your happy ending.

 

But Kim Eun Sook wanted to do more. She expanded Lee Lim’s plan for world domination into two parallel worlds. Adding science fiction to the mix complicates matters because you will have to build another world that is visibly different from the other even if they are parallel to each other. Audiences should be able to tell one apart from the other quickly in order to keep up with the story. The difficulty that The King: Eternal Monarch faces is that the Kingdom of Corea and the Republic of Korea look almost exactly alike. It takes almost a few seconds to recognize the Royal Seal, or the European inspired trams running in the background to ascertain that the scene is in the Kingdom of Corea. But once the characters appear, it becomes easier to tell which world we’re dealing with. Jung Tae Eul and the police force belong to Korea. The Royal Staff and family, Prime Minister Koo and cabinet members belong to Corea. The only ones to traverse between both worlds are Lee Gon and his uncle.

 

Therein lies one of the criticisms for Kim Eun Sook’s work – the pace is too slow. I would argue though that the pace is just right when you’re creating two worlds, with very different characters in each, whose stories run parallel to and interweave with each other. It is very easy to place all evil characters in World A and all good characters in World B. But that’s lazy writing, and also ugly.

 

Kim Eun Sook humanizes and fleshes out a significant amount of the supporting cast with such care, developing them alongside the major characters. Usually in dramas, the side characters will get hints of a back story in an episode or two, and then have just one episode dedicated to them. Kim Eun Sook did so much more and in effect, her two parallel worlds became so concrete, with real, moving characters contributing their bit into the two separate forces of Lee Gon and Lee Lim that are about to clash. It creates anticipation, excitement, and spreads your heart out amongst many characters instead of investing your emotions into just the main leads.

 

But aside from the science fiction element, Kim Eun Sook also takes on the task of writing detective fiction into her already robust narrative. Lee Lim is essentially building an army of doppelgangers from the Republic of Korea and planting them in key positions in the Kingdom of Corea. He then takes the dead bodies of these Corean citizens and dumps them in the Republic of Korea, leaving Lt. Jung Tae Eul and her squad in the police force with a trail of unsolved cases. Detective stories are by themselves difficult enough. You begin with a dead body, a search for clues, weeding out which clues are significant, chasing a lead, failing, planting and then ignoring red herrings, closing in on a suspect, interrogation, a surprise turn of events, and so on until the murder is solved.

 

But Lee Lim didn’t leave just one dead body in Korea. There’s an entire army of them and Jung Tae Eul has to be on the trail for some of them in order for her to work with Lee Gon in order to solve them and in turn, help him uncover his uncle’s evil plans.

 

This brings us to one of the major criticisms of this drama – the romance between Lt. Jung Tae Eul and King Lee Gon. Apparently, there’s not much of it as it has taken a backseat to the struggle for power in Corea by the Prime Minister, Lee Lim’s murderous spree and body switching between the two worlds in a bid for a two-world domination, and murder investigations that Jung Tae Eul and her squad must carry out in Korea.

 

Would I like to see more of the actors Lee Min Ho and Kim Go Eun on screen? Why, yes of course! But as early as the 1st episode, it was already apparent that this was not going to be the usual K-drama. They weren’t going to meet cute, fall in love, fight their feelings, work on a murder mystery on the side, finally confess, become a couple, fight the final boss side by side, and then live happily ever after. Fantasy, science fiction, and detective fiction all seem bear equal weight with romance. It was different, and I found that absolutely interesting. And just because romance doesn’t dominate 80% of the story does not mean that the romance is lacking.

 

The first episode tricks you into thinking that there is very little romance in this drama. The lead characters of Lt. Jung Tae Eul and King Lee Gon meeting each other for the first time in the last 6 minutes of an episode that was 1 hour, 12 minutes, and 15 seconds long. What can possibly develop and deepen in 6 minutes? Not much, right?

 

But what happened in the last 6 minutes? Lee Gon rides into Gwanghwamun Square on his white horse after having crossed over from Corea and into the parallel world of Korea. He creates a slight commotion what with his royal handsomeness and almost ethereal white horse. Lt. Jung Tae Eul reprimands him. Lee Gon recognizes her as the woman on the ID card his savior had left behind 25 years ago. And in dramatic fashion, he alights from his horse, walks towards her, stops, and then engulfs her in a tight hug. He tells her, “I’ve finally met you” and the episode ends with a shocked Jung Tae Eul in the arms of an almost reverent Lee Gon.

 

In Kim Eun Sook’s other, wildly popular work, Goblin: The Lonely and Great God the first meeting between Kim Shin and Eun Tak also had that moment of finally finding the one they’ve been searching for. But for the Goblin, his bride’s existence was merely functional, as he needed her so he can finally die in peace. So their first meeting was your typical first meeting in K-dramas. There were no feelings yet, but they develop from there. So the whole drama then became a stage to establish the growth of their relationship that would give him the will to live instead of dreaming of death all the time.

 

But now, in The King: Eternal Monarch, the first meeting isn’t an easy blank canvas.

Lee Gon bursts into the first episode, already halfway in love with Jung Tae Eul long before he’s even met her. As a child, Lee Gon had held on to Jung Tae Eul’s image as his a savior. There is deep gratitude.  As a young orphaned monarch, he held on to the idea of her to ease his loneliness. His first duty as a king was to bury his father and learned to cry only in the privacy of his own room when he was 7 years old. But somewhere out there, there was someone who had cared for enough for him to have saved him. This thought sustained him as he grew up.

 

And at this point in the first episode, we’re working with the idea that time travel hasn’t been introduced yet. Which means we’re treating time as a straight line, allowing Lee Gon and Jong Tae Eul to age at the same time. So if Jong Tae Eul had been 25 years old when Lee Gon was 7 in 1994, then she would be 50 years old and he would be 32 in the present year, 2019.

 

Then, as a man in his 30’s, he still keeps on searching for her. But in his head she is frozen in time as the 29 year old woman in her ID picture, and at this point he might possibly be half in love with her already. And when he finally meets her in the flesh, he had spent nearly all his life loving her in different iterations. Finding out that she hadn’t aged as he thought she would have gives him another possibility of loving her as a man would a woman.

 

Now the audience has to grapple with this idea, that he had loved her for 25 years already, prior to seeing her in the flesh. But then if you add the idea of time travel as hinted at by the 10th episode, then this first meeting becomes heavier. Not only would he have loved her for 25 years, but he also would have loved her for 25 years multiplied by the number of timelines he had crossed as a time traveller.

 

That’s why their first meeting had to happen in the last 6 minutes of the first episode. Everything that happened in that first hour and 6 minutes, all the murders, plotting, collision of worlds, and clash of doppelgangers in the past 25 years had to happen in order to bring Lee Gon and Jung Tae Eul to that fated meeting at Gwanghwamun Square. Kim Eun Sook had played with the idea of destiny with Goblin: The Lonely and Great God’s Kim Shin and Eun Tak. Now she takes the same idea of a fated meeting between two souls, Lee Gon and Jung Tae Eul, and proceeds to tear them apart with time loops, parallel worlds, and a frozen dimension to test how their love can endure all of that.

 

There can be no slow burn; there is no chase that starts with attraction, denial, bickering, jealousy, no you-make-me-worry-so-much love confession that is so often found in K-dramas. The lovers don’t even have that poor girl-rich boy/immortal-mortal or whatever uneven power dynamic that’s so popular in dramas. I guess that's what most people inevitably look for because these things were built to be formulaic.

 

But now you have a writer who is trying to build a bigger, more ambitious story, who is willing to take some risks with that formula in order to tell a love story that can transcend time and universes.  The stakes had to be raised higher, the backdrop made grander, in order to hold a love story as epic as this.   How can this not be romantic enough?

 

There are six more episodes left in this series.  Quarantine has been extended. Give this series a chance. 

[lovewillthaw-j]

Forest of Shadows review

I finally read FoS, because my recent post on the “Secret Room” led me to search FoS and I also had some time on hand. I’m writing this post to share my views and invite conversations. Spoilers ahead! Also; I have not read any other full reviews of FoS. This is also the first Frozen-related official fiction I have read other than the Dark Horse comic True Treasure. Long post ahead.

Background: Ever since joining the fandom, I have seen mentions of FoS by other bloggers and get the general feeling that it’s a great book; thus I had high expectations of FoS. I had obtained the book in early February, read the first chapter and found it interesting. Didn’t have time to finish the book till now. Unfortunately, to be honest and true to myself, I did not like it.

The Good: I give credit to the author for 1) Exciting writing, it is truly quite a page turner, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in a day, reading into the night way past my usual bedtime. 2) A complex plot that did not feel drawn out for the sake of filling pages 3) Focusing on the sisters throughout and the climax being about their love for each other 4) The new characters do not take too much focus away from the sisters 5) Countless F2 references such as the scarf, Iduna singing the lullaby and cuddling both children, mention of a Dark Sea on the map, mention of Runeard and the Northuldra. 

The Bad: I will touch on 6 areas (with some unavoidable overlap): 1) The premise 2) Anna’s characterisation 3) The Nattmara 4) Aren and Revolute sword 5) Myth vs Reality 6) Plot holes. Spoilers ahead!

1) In this story, Elsa is 24 and Anna is 21 - 3 years post Frozen 1 and in the same year as F2. The premise of the story is that Elsa is fearful of being a bad queen, and Anna is insecure about how Elsa feels about her. Elsa is also about to leave, without Anna, on a world tour on a ship. Elsa has planned for Anna to be the “keeper of the kingdom” while she is away but for some reason, has not told Anna, even up till 3 days before the voyage. The Blight starts and Elsa feels powerless, amplifying her fear, which brings on the wolf form of the Nattmara. Anna, who is insecure for almost the whole story, gets freed from her insecurity when it is revealed to her that Elsa intended for Anna to be the “keeper of the kingdom” all along. And then, Anna figures out the Nattmara is Elsa’s nightmare (and not Anna’s) and in the climax, uses “true love” to free Elsa and the whole kingdom. I feel that the entire premise of this story is thin and very OOC for the sisters, at least in my headcanon. 

It is illogical to me that after 3 years of rule, Elsa feels fearful of being a bad queen. Surely she would have feared she would be a bad queen for the entire time since Agnarr died 6 years ago? Why now? Why would she feel this way 3 years after the great thaw and when she has Anna by her side? It is illogical to me that Elsa wouldn’t bring Anna on the world tour, and illogical that she would make Anna the keeper of the kingdom but not tell her about it or even give her some preparation and instructions, up till 3 days before the voyage. In the library, the sisters spent a whole afternoon together reading books and they couldn’t find the time to talk to each other? 

Regarding the climax, I acknowledge that the author found a clever word play with “Revolute” being an anagram of “True Love”. But, using an act of “True love” to save the day felt stale and rehashed from F1, as if Anna’s act of true love in F1 was insignificant. I was sorely disappointed when I reached the climax.

2) I was very irritated with how Anna was characterised in this story as it clashes with my headcanon of how 21 year old post F1 pre F2 Anna should be. The author decided that “Anna is really, really, REALLY insecure” and bombarded us with reminders every few sentences about it. For example, when the sisters talked to SoYun, Elsa told SoYun “you did the right thing coming to me” and Anna felt insecure that Elsa had not said “us”. When Anna suggested to send Kristoff to look for the trolls, Elsa hesitated and Anna felt insecure that Elsa did not seem to like Anna’s idea. When Anna discovers the secret room, she is reminded of how she was always “the last to know” as a child. When Elsa talked to Gerda, Anna “would have been even happier if Elsa had told Gerda that Anna had found something important”. Anna also has a nightmare that there is another “Anna” that Elsa and Kristoff interact with, while she, the real Anna watches from outside. Why is Anna so insecure 3 years post F1 when she knows that Elsa’s love for her is so great that Elsa would willingly lock herself away from her? The book also tells us that Anna felt that she needed to “prove her worth” to Elsa, and this led to Anna becoming fixated on fixing the Blight, to earn Elsa’s approval and to bring her on the boat trip. To me, Anna giving up her life for Elsa in F1 has “proved her worth” for all time!! The author also took pains to bombard us with reminders of how ditzy and clumsy and awkward Anna is eg always waking up late, walking into the great hall in her nightgown, interrupting Elsa and embarrassing Elsa in front of the people, running off with Revolute sword with no plan. This is not what I headcanon 21 year old post-F1 Anna to be. She might be awkward, yes, but not to this level.

Anna also did a couple of immature things. 2 big examples: Elsa held a meeting in her bedroom and Anna wasn’t invited, but Anna could hear that the meeting was going on (outside the door) and was upset and fled to her room. I would have expected Anna to knock on the door and go in and be helpful, after all, she is the royal princess and Elsa’s confidante. Anna’s belief in the spell that grants dreams is also rather immature, as a 21 year old adult I would have expected her to know better. 

I also expected Anna to sleep in Elsa’s bed every night to be there for her, especially when Elsa has been troubled by events (think about F2). Since when does Anna put anything, including her own insecurity over her love for Elsa? but no, upon finding Elsa’s bedroom empty, she goes back to sleep in her own room, and Elsa also didn’t come over to look for Anna. Why couldn’t the sisters just TALK to each other?? At the end of F1 they couldn’t stop touching each other, holding hands, hugging each other, making up for lost time.In summary:

I just cannot see my darling Anna as this person, sorry! 

Yes she could have been like this before F1, but not after her epic F1 journey to save Elsa and not after 3 years with Elsa by her side. 

3) The Nattmara. I have trouble with the Nattmara’s existence. As mentioned above, Elsa should have been fearful of being a bad queen 6 years ago - Nattmara should have appeared way earlier, why now? 

The powers of the Nattmara were also ill defined. First, it was a sickness on animals and crops. Then it became a literal, physical wolf with capabilities to inflict real physical harm. Then, it also gained the ability to scare humans (not as a wolf, but as some unseen, spiritual force) but additionally, turn humans into zombies (Kai and Gerda, while half-awake, were able to hold weapons against Anna) Next, the Nattmara gained the ability to turn into black sand, reform into a wolf, and turn back into black sand effortlessly. IIRC, the Nattmara only demonstrated the ability to turn into black sand after they read about it in Sorenson’s book, and then it started to use this power extensively. But even more confusing, when they were leaving the Huldrefolk and rushing back to Arendelle, they met up with Sorenson who was “possessed” by the Nattmara but didn’t have the yellow eyes and was able to speak normally and deceive the main characters about a magical water source. And after that, “possessed-Sorenson” (an old man) gained the physical ability to take on Kristoff in a fight. 

I feel that the author twisted the powers and capabilities of the Nattmara to keep the reader on the edge. (doesn’t everybody like zombies) I’m not sure if the Nattmara is just darkness or does it have a mind of its own? And every normal person has nightmares and fears, why hasn’t Nattmara appeared before? In chapter 9, it is stated that “Anna had dreamed of the wolf her entire childhood” - what is the explanation for that from a Nattmara perspective?

4) Aren and the Revolute sword are confusing as the author first introduces it as a myth (a sword that can create an actual, geographical fjord miles wide, is a myth) and the sisters acknowledge that it is only a tale. Sorenson debunks Aren and Revolute. Inexplicably, after Sorenson debunks it, Anna immediately says “So we need Revolute!”, showing that she now believes that there is a real Aren and a real sword, and this leads them to look for the Huldrefolk because “the Huldrefolk always find that which is lost”. To put it another way, a group of adults decided to enter dangerous, abandoned mines, based on the thinnest of suggestions that a mythical sword exists and a magical people that may not exist, somehow have it. Their quest to find the sword then leads them back to the tumulus, which they now believe is Aren’s. After some difficulty, they actually find a physical sword named Revolute, but my question is, do the sisters believe this is a real, normal sword owned by a normal human warrior called Aren or do they now believe they have found the mythical, fjord carving sword? They then try to use a physical sword against a mythical creature - doesn’t that contradict the “myth to destroy a myth” bit? 

Nattmara destroys the sword, and eventually the “myth to destroy a myth” is revealed to be True Love, which happens to be the anagram of “Revolute”. Clever, but too convenient! What does the sword have to do with true love? Couldn’t Anna have figured out that the answer was true love by another way? 

Historically speaking, warriors would be buried with their swords next to them or laid on their bodies with their arms crossed over the sword, so why is the sword found in the ship’s dragon mouth? And, the book said that the tumulus may be thousands of years old, how can a sword that old not have rusted and disintegrated by now?

Additionally, the Earth giant’s passage starts from the castle and passes the tumulus of Aren; Iduna knew the existence of the passage because she wrote about it in her book, so why wouldn’t any other king, Agnarr included, have examined/exhumed the tumulus and made it a museum, or store the artifacts in a museum, and research to see whose tomb it was? These are the 1800s after all, archaelogy had already begun post-renaissance.

5) As an extension of point 4, the treatment of myth/magic and reality is confusing. The story starts off on the premise that aside from Elsa’s magic and the rock trolls, we are in the real world dealing with real botanical and animal farming issues. Sorenson is introduced by Oaken as a “mystic” but in person, Sorenson is actually a scientist (reminds you of Varian from RTA/ TTS). Sorenson makes an excellent speech debunking the Nattmara, Huldrefolk and Aren and Revolute. When I got to this point in the book, I thought, that’s an absolutely correct 21st century mythbuster/human psychology explanation of nightmares and magical creatures and other unexplained phenomena. The book that he is holding is even called “Psychologia”. I was expecting that there would be a real world, logical explanation for the wolf and the Blight and Kai and Gerda going mad (Zootopia and the “night howlers” serum causing savageness comes to mind) However, the author then throws this away and the Nattmara is shown to be a real magic force, the Huldrefolk are shown to be real, Aren and his sword are actually real. Sorenson is the one who said “you can only defeat a myth with a thing of myth” but in the same breath says that all of these don’t truly exist; Yet, the rest of the story rests on defeating Nattmara with a thing of myth. 

 If the author had intended to portray this as a magical world and Sorenson as the “skeptic”, she didn’t write it clearly enough; or she shouldn’t have inserted so many sentences on debunking to maintain the suspension of disbelief. 

6) Plot holes: Why is Elsa the only one who can deal with mundane problems like cracks in chimneys and animal illnesses? Hasn’t she heard of delegation?

Why isn’t Elsa interested in the contents of the secret room, as an educated adult and ruler? She took one look at the portrait of Aren, thought about “great leaders”, felt consumed by fear that she isn’t one, and decided that she will shut the secret room and inexplicably says “mother and father intended for it to be hidden, so it should stay hidden”. A great leader would read extensively and do research and build on what your forebears have done; here is a treasure trove of work done by her parents, the previous rulers.

If Elsa could make the massive snow bear, Bjorn, then why didn’t she make an army of snow bears to fight possessed-Sorenson? Instead she left Kristoff to face him alone?

When Elsa was consumed by the black sand and Anna ran towards her, it is clearly written that Elsa attacked Anna with the black sand, but in the next chapter Anna is still Anna and not zombified.  

==

Wow, I have really written a lot. I guess I was really invested in the story, but my disappointment at the ending and the overall premise is too great. I really wanted to like this story. I don’t mean to start any wars, I hope I haven’t offended anybody and I’m willing to consider other perspectives. Please talk to me in the comments! Thanks for reading if you reached here!

[lunararcher]

SPOILERS FOR TALES OF ARCADIA!

Seriously though!! ALL the spoilers, up through Wizards!

Because have I got a RANT for you about some FREAKING CONTINUITY! It’s...kinda long. Proceed below the break at your own risk.

So, we have info on the past Trollhunters from the show (mostly Trollhunters and Wizards, though we get a peek in 3Below at Kanjigar as the Trollhunter REALLY early on in the Trollmarket settlement, though no specific date) as well as some comics, which gives us all kinds of good stuff like Trollhunter names and species and personalities and when they served and all that! Trying to make a combination of these coherent, though...kind of ruins a proper timeline, especially because of Wizards. Actually, mostly because of Wizards. THAT tells us that Deya was the FIRST Trollhunter because Merlin had only JUST finished creating the Amulet, right?

WELL

Even discounting ANY of the alternate materials and only pulling from the show (which is all I’ve seen, actually. Haven’t read the comics, just heard of them, so my observations are almost purely show-based) this doesn’t really make any sense. AT ALL. See, because Gunmar’s war had been going on for a long long time, right? Before Killahead ended it (sort of). And Trollhunters were there to protect good trolls from just such a thing. A great many died in this service, while none could defeat Gunmar. Kanjigar even SAID that the blade of Daylight has fought Gunmar many times, but has never beaten him. If you look at the Wizards timeline, though, Deya apparently got the Amulet first, fought Gunmar in her very first battle with it, then successfully banished him and all the rest of the Gumm-Gumms (except for dearly departed-by-YEET Bular) into the Darklands via Killahead. So...if Deya really WAS the actual first Trollhunter (which no one SAYS until Wizards, they just say she’s the GREATEST) then it wouldn’t be true that Daylight has fought Gunmar many times; it didn’t even fight him TWICE.

(Also, remember that time or twenty when Draal said he’s waited his whole LIFE to be worthy of the Amulet? But then we see him as a grown-ass adult the first time the Amulet is ever even mentioned?)

I mean, this doesn’t even GO INTO Angor Rot’s origin, in which the war was ravaging his village and people so badly and for so long that he became MADLY desperate for the power to protect them, going to a Morgana who was already well-known as The Pale Lady, Baba Yaga, and all the rest of that jazz, but was NOT YET sealed away by Merlin (or Douxie, as the case may be). Then she goes on to command Angor to kill Merlin’s champions, the Trollhunters. All this while Gumm-Gumms are still on the loose. So...either the Amulet was already made, Trollhunters were a thing, and she’s super salty about Merlin taking her left hand for the project, leading to her vengeance motive to sic Angor on the whole lot of them OR, she, like, knew that was GOING to be a thing and wanted to take really extreme preemptive action? If we are to believe Wizards, even Merlin didn’t know he was gonna need Morgana’s hand to finish the amulet and her self-proclaimed hatred of Trollhunters didn’t crystalize until AFTER that. 

All of that to say, look, I get why Wizards did what it did. They wanted to put all of that wonderfully juicy backstory stuff into the time frame when our protagonists could be there to see it. The falling out of Merlin and Morgana (and actually seeing THAT gave us the chance to see Morgana pre-Dark Side, opening up a path to redemption for her via Claire), the creation of the Amulet, the Battle of Killahead Bridge, the first Trollhunter, not necessarily in that order. Those are all really cool things and yes, I am kind of glad we got to see them because they WERE all very cool. I just kind of wish they had been more creative with, like, visions of the past and such to make it happen, instead of trying to cram all of those historically significant events into the period of only, what? A few days? Doing that just massively screwed up their own established timeline. Dropping four modern-day people into the middle of all that is NOT excuse enough to say they messed it all up.

Holy crap, I just wondered if the way to fix all of this would have been to throw different characters into different parts of the past. Douxie WAY the heck back to when Merlin first creates the amulet (using non-show material now, it’s mentioned that Spar the Spiteful was Trollhunter 5200 years before Jim, so that puts him at something like 3180-ish BCE. That’s, like, *brief messy Google search* just before the *squints* first dynasty of Egypt? Apparently? Okay, that’s a little...MUCH, but you get what I mean) and then jumping forward until he meets up with Claire, who is in the past of Camelot for that meeting with not-evil Morgana, but then Jim and Steve not quite so far back being set in the time leading up to Killahead, making the two mages present for the fall of Morgana, then Douxie having to sacrifice himself or something to throw Claire forward in time to meet up with the other boys, Douxie just having to catch up by living his immortal wizard life or something. Meanwhile, Jim and Steve have their own adventure (how cool would it be to introduce Angor HERE and give Jim the chance to keep him away from his super tragic fate? Maybe doesn’t fit great, though) and Jim STILL gets to know Calysta before she becomes a Trollhunter (she’s just not the first; that milestone wouldn’t change anything about her story, really) and in the end everyone STILL participates in the Battle of Killahead. Because as far as I can remember, there isn’t anything that dates that battle, right? Nothing said it HAD to be in the 12th century, unlike the Morgana nonsense, because THAT’S all part of the Arthurian legend and is pretty well fixed in history.

So why do I even care? Because I wanna write a fic from the perspective of the Trollhunters in the Void giving commentary on the events of the show. Because I think it would be funny. ESPECIALLY from the perspective of Deya having already met Jim, but not necessarily recognizing him right away, so writing her ah-HA moment is gonna be a highlight, lol! This is NOT helped by canon firmly ignoring the question of what kind of time-altering path they were gonna take, but I’m ignoring that for the sake of light-hearted fic writing. 

[rachellevic]

As I sit here, thinking about the end of supernatural, reading all the beautiful tributes and articles, I feel a very great sense of loss. Not because I believe this is the end, the real end, that’s not possible with the Winchesters, but there is something much deeper going on and I can’t quite put it into words, so maybe that’s why I’m writing it down.

Maybe it’s a little bit selfish, maybe I’m just not ready to watch to ‘the end’. Rarely has a show done this to me, and believe me, I have a ‘brand’ of television that I get into. Confession, I only started watching supernatural because someone told me that Kim Manners was a producer on it and I was a huge, I MEAN HUGE, fan of the X-files, and I didn’t feel this way when that show ended. It was also several season in before I started watching supernatural because, truth be told, I very strongly dislike ‘vampires and werewolves’ stories and what media has done to lore and historical context; I’m looking at you Bram Stoker, you started this and opened the door to things like sparkles and Stockholm Syndrome and that’s not okay. But Supernatural had something that I had been missing in TV, in life, and I very quickly became a fan...thank you for fixing vampires and werewolves by the way.

I like endings. I like beginnings. I love the journey to get from beginning to end. Maybe I am feeling something more than a loss of a show, but a loss of a way of life, a path, the road...I don’t know. To be honest Supernatural is one of the last shows that I have tuned in to on the regular, week after week, to watch because the way we watch TV has changed. The way people experience a serial show has changed. I don’t know if Supernatural would have been what it was if it had found a life on a streaming service to begin with. But they didn’t exist, or were just in their infancy when supernatural started. What I will miss the most, I think is the episodes in between. Rarely do you find a show that can start a plot episode one and carry it over many season, reinventing itself, playing off its past and building a future. It has built such a future that regardless of how it end, whether they die or they live, they will always live, they will always live in the stories that we know and the stories that we will tell. Jared and Jensen will go on to do other things, as they had done other things before this, but they will always be Sam and Dean and whenever you see their faces, your first thought will be Sam and Dean. Like Anthony Hopkins will always be Dr. Hannibal Lector (so will Mads Mikkelsen, just saying) and Colin Firth will always be My Mr. Darcy. Misha, though an antagonist to us all, is literally an angel in real life. I said what I said, change my mind.

This thing we call Gish has it’s own life now, and will continue to do great things, but we are deeply bound to our Supernatural roots. Looking back on 15 seasons, the good the bad and the ugly, (*cough* Bugs *cough*), what would the show have been if it were a max of 9 or 12 episodes a season? I mean, honesty, if you are a fan of Lucifer, who has watched it on Fox and now on Netflix, it just isn’t ringing the same. It’s good, but there is something missing and I think what that is, is the passage of time. The episodes in between the big plots, the monsters of the week, and the goofy playful, ‘I killed Hitler’ And ‘Sam hit a dog’ moments. We know a milk run is never just a milk run, that life is big and bold and in your face, even though it seems a little slow right now, and that sometimes, staring a books and computers too long is going to force you out into the world to just look for some trouble. Supernatural has taught me a lot about life and what is out there in the world, the good, the bad, the people, this planet we live on and some of our fundamental flaws as humans. Nothing is ever going to be perfect, but if we work at it, we can touch perfection. It’s the moments and the anticipations, it may also be the glimpses of joy when the world is crashing in around us.

It has been a long time, 15 seasons, 320 plus episodes, and yes it does feel like an end, but not for Supernatural, for the way we watched TV. I like a mini series as much as the next person but I don’t think you can do what supernatural did in a handful of episodes even if you can keep yourself going for as long. I don’t think a community like this will ever happen again in the same capacity because the interactions on episode night wont be the same if they just throw everything up onto a streaming service. We have been so lucky with this show and the cast’s willingness to interact with us as much as they do and recognize the power of the fandom as a force for good. Networks were always just looking for viewership, but seemed to forget that the viewers make or break a show and I feel like Supernatural found a way to take views and unite them, to appreciate the fans and see the power that people can have when hey get behind something. That wasn’t the networks doing, it was the cast, it was the fans, I think that is very obvious. So, maybe this is where my feeling come from, maybe I just don’t see how a show doing as well, doing so much good outside of the show, making money, bringing in viewers, being the longest running show of its kind, could just be cut off when there could have been so much more to be done...Do I blame the network for the fall of TV and that they are grasping at straws for an old way of viewership? Yes, yes I do. I believe that they see the streaming services have been a mighty blow to their structure, that it has made TV so much more accessible and frankly so much less annoying with no commercials, but what I think the streaming services of the world have wrong is the limited number of episode and the anticipation of a new episode week after week. Sure, I hate a hiatus as much as the next person, and when I want to watch 15 season of supernatural all in one shot, I do have the DVDs so F you Netflix for taking it down and putting it back up and taking it down again only to put it back up, I have the collection and I can watch it any time I want! But, where is my live viewing party, the gasps and shock you can literally hear over twitter. The standing and singing Carry On when you know it’s going to play. You don’t get that binge watching a show on Netflix...Supernatural is so much bigger than the money maker it was for the networks.

Truth be told, I’m kind of over TV. I rarely turn the thing on in the off season. I didn’t watch anything new this whole pandemic, but instead went back to the familiar, the comfortable. I marathoned all of the X-files in order from beginning to end with two movies, two event series, and cried over their Kim Manners tribute. (Word to the wise, it may not be the best show to watch in a pandemic with all it’s government conspiracies and alien viruses...but the 90’s fashion in the early seasons, and so many actors who we know and love from supernatural were just babies back then, and yes almost everyone is in it. Baby Crowley, Baby Lucifer, Baby Meg (First Meg not Second Meg...sorry Rachel!)) And when I was finished with The X-files I jumped right back into season one of Supernatural.

Supernatural has kept me coming back every week, and it’s been around for almost half of my life (do we even count the years you can’t remember?). I’m about as old as Sam, I was in university when I started watching supernatural but I’m also an older child and I grew up on my dad’s music, and he had a classic car that I remember but my brother doesn’t and my dad isn’t with us anymore (2012). I found so much to connect with in Supernatural, like I relate to Dean on a level that I can’t even explain; from having a little brother to pie is the superior celebratory dessert - also pie for breakfast is totally okay not because there is fruit in it but because I’m an adult and I’ll do what I want! Go team free will! Does that make me a Dean girl? I don’t think so, because You can’t have one without the other. This whole time, it has been about family, more specifically siblings. Dean isn’t Dean without Sam and Sam isn’t Sam without Dean. But yes I’m a Dean girl for other reasons.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, I doubt it, but supernatural hits the family feels, it came into my life at a time of transition, it was there when my dad died, and has been there for 15 years. Thinking back to the ‘where do you see yourself in 10 years’ question, and not being at all where I’d thought I’d be, there has been something very constant in the inconsistencies of the road so far. Remember back in season one when we didn’t even know demons were a thing and now our biggest issue is literally Chuck? What a metaphor for adult life. For dealing with this crazy world and society and all the weird that seems to be oozing out of the pours of humanity. We’ve grown with this show. I’m not going to say grown up, because I sure didn’t get any taller in 15 year, but I did evolve, and maybe in some ways I have also digressed, but we keep pressing forward because no one else is going to save my world but me.

Supernatural reminds me of so many part of my life. I saw so much of the X-Files in there, the show that formed my younger years, and was devastated when Kim Manners passed away. There was a familiarity in Supernatural. The idea of seeing Sam and Dean come back, in event series (like the x-files) gives me hope, because we know that death isn’t really death for the Winchesters, but there will be something very profoundly missing from the world going forward. Maybe it’s the last of the magic, something that I’m holding onto in my adult life from time before, the spark that has managed to light up a really strange time, and I don’t just mean 2020. Maybe its a Millennial thing, I am an elder Millennial, right on the edge of two generations and I’m not even 40 yet. I’ve lived in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, 10s and here were are almost through the first year of the 20s (its going to be a very different kind of roaring 20s but um...very similar. History repeating itself a little too literally at times)

I don’t think the Supernatural Family is going anywhere any time soon, I don’t feel like I’m losing that, but this is an end for us. Maybe it’s the end of one book and the beginning of the next. Maybe it’s now our time to carry the legend of the Winchesters forward. I can only hope that somewhere, somehow we’ll see the world expand, the characters lives on; this isn’t the end of the road, but I guess the road can only go so far. I don’t want it to be over. I feel the loss, the lump in my throat, the tears in my eyes that I am fighting back even though no one is going to see them. It’s all good. All good things come to an end, or do they? Regardless, we’ll always have Tuesdays.

Carry on, everyone. I hope that you’ll be okay. Sorry for the long rambling journal entry that didn’t actually come to any real conclusions...thanks John! (Oh yeah, my dad’s name was John too...)

#supernatural #SPNFamilyForever #theroadsofar #lastdaysofSPN #theend

[urfavmurtad]

Well folx it’s that time of year again: the Starving For Allah festival begins shortly. (I’m only gonna be fasting in public this year and will be stuffing my mouth the second I get into my room, for the record.) As a Special Ramadan Series, I’ve dug through my asks to find the most common question that I get, and the resounding answer is: sectarianism!!! People raised Sunni, people raised Shia, and non-Muslims whose knowledge of this part of history is “some people think the fourth guy should have been first” all wanna know Shaikha Urfavmurtad’s hot take on the mess that unfolded following the death of our beloved prophet (PUBG). And I will give the ppl what they want!

Let me give you a brief rundown of the sources for everything that follows. Written Islamic history began in the mid-8th century, over a hundred years after these events unfolded, though it built upon a systematized oral learning tradition. By that point, the first two dynasties of Islam had faded away, and the third, called the Abbasid dynasty, was freshly in control of the majority (but not all) of the territory conquered by the first generation of Muslims. The Abbasids were descended from a member of Mohammed’s extended family, and this fact was essentially their sole claim to rulership. They engaged in constant propaganda against their predecessors, called the Umayyad dynasty, who by this point had been reduced to a tiny stub of their former territory. The Umayyads were descended from the same tribe as Mohammed, but were not specifically descended from his family within that tribe.

For reasons that will eventually become obvious, this means that all accounts of the complete political clusterfuck that was the caliphate in the 50 years following Mohammed’s death have to be looked at with some degree of skepticism. There were reasons why authors writing in this period would feel compelled to characterize certain individuals as evil or at least misguided and others as pure souls, and they doubtlessly exaggerated and embellished some reports. And even the reports that truly do seem to go all the way back to the first generations of Islam can’t be fully trusted--these people were talking about their own lives, defending their own actions and criticizing those of their political enemies. Despite that, we have enough solid reports from enough people on different sides of each divide to put most of the story together. The main events of the story actually don’t differ that much between sources--the differences are mostly in the ways people are depicted during those parts.

Full disclosure: I was raised Sunni. I do not have the emotional attachment to certain historical figures that Shia people do. Even non-religious Shia people have a tendency to cry when they hear some of the stories that we’ll talk about, whereas I just think “lol that’s a biT much tbh”. However, given my current belief that all of these guys were dumb assholes, I feel that I can offer my fairly unbiased take on which dumb asshole deserved to be King of the Dumb Assholes.

After reading this, I believe you’ll come to agree with my thesis statement, namely that the true hero of Islam is the one who probably didn’t even believe in the damn religion.

And so I present my pre-Ramadan gift: part one of The Death of Crazy Mo.

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE QURAYSH: The tribe in charge of Mecca and essentially the only relevant people in the story. Prior to this whole fiasco, they made a living primarily as merchants, traveling along caravan routes to other lands. They also catered to polytheistic pilgrims visiting their shrine, called the Kaaba. Most of Mohammed’s early followers (including Mohammed himself) were from clans of the Quraysh. Though most of the Quraysh originally strongly opposed Mohammed, they were worn down by years of conflict and “embraced Islam” following the conquest of Mecca. The leader of the Quraysh’s military prior to Mecca’s conquest was Abu Sufyan, a member of the Banu Umayya clan. Abu Sufyan is the father of one of Mohammed’s wives (Ramla) and several other children, including a son named Muawiya. He and his sons “converted” the day Mecca was conquered and have served Mohammed ever since. Muawiya currently works as one of Mohammed’s scribes.

MOHAMMED: Some old guy from the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh. Spends most of his time in a state of fever-induced delirium while ranting about religious minorities. Had several children, but all but one--his youngest daughter Fatima--have died of disease.

ABU BAKR: A wealthy, well-connected merchant of the Quraysh who converted to Islam early on and brought a bunch of people into the religion. He knew his fellow merchant Mohammed before Islam’s creation and grew to become his best friend. Mohammed bestowed the title of “as-Siddiq” or “the Truthful” upon him when Abu Bakr affirmed his belief that Mohammed took a round trip to Jerusalem on a magic horse/donkey in the middle of the night. As the years went on, he established himself as Mo’s closest confidante and has been vested with a great deal of political and military authority in the Muslim community as a result. His daughter Aisha was married off to Mohammed as a child and has been his favorite wife ever since.

UMAR: A belligerent asshole from a well-known family of the Quraysh who was also an early convert. He is another one of Mohammed’s fathers-in-law via his daughter Hafsa. Everyone knows that Umar is unpleasant, but they are forced to tolerate his existence because Mohammed and Abu Bakr are his buddies. Serves as The Big Guy and is good at yelling at people to whip them into shape.

UTHMAN: A wealthy merchant and old friend of Abu Bakr’s, who converted at the latter’s insistence. Went on to marry two of Mohammed’s daughters, Roqaya and Umm Kulthum, both deceased at this point in time. As such, he is also a member of Mohammed’s inner circle. He is from the Banu Umayya clan, meaning that Abu Sufyan & Sons are his relatives. This will cause drama later on.

ALI: Mohammed’s cousin (the son of his father’s brother) and son-in-law via Fatima, with whom he has two young daughters and two young sons, Hasan and Hussein. Mohammed was raised by his uncle, Ali’s father Abu Talib, after his own parents died. As an adult he returned the favor and helped raise Ali when Abu Talib was in a tough financial situation. Ali converted essentially right away as a teenager due to the fact that he lived with Mohammed and his family. He has been one of the Muslim army’s most notable soldiers since his early twenties and is one of the most prominent members of the community despite his relative youth. Like his father and cousin, he is a member of the Banu Hashim clan.

ABBAS: One of Mohammed’s uncles (his father’s brother), though the two are actually very close in age. Originally a successful spice merchant, he converted to Islam shortly before the conquest of Mecca and served in his nephew’s army. His son Abdullah ibn Abbas is only a teenager at the moment, but he will be relevant in the future. From the Banu Hashim.

THE ANSAR: The Muslims from Medina, mostly from the Aws and Khazraj sister tribes. After getting kicked out of Mecca (because the Ansar pledged to assist him in battle and the Quraysh learned of this stunt), Mohammed moved to Medina and brought a couple hundred of his followers from Mecca with him. Medina became the Muslim base of power, and the heads of the two tribes were made essentially subservient to him. Anyone who opposed him was gradually “dealt with”, and now the Ansar are more or less 100% Muslim. Whether their loyalty extends to Mohammed’s entire tribe is an open question.

MUSLIMS WHO ARE UNRELATED TO THE ANSAR OR QURAYSH AND NON-MUSLIMS IN GENERAL:

PROLOGUE: IN WHICH THE JEWS AND/OR COCCOBACILLI BACTERIA ARE AT IT AGAIN

Mohammed falls sick with a sudden, debilitating illness. We don’t know exactly what it was, and it’s blamed on The Devious Jews in many sources, but it was clearly one of the many infectious diseases that battered the Middle East throughout the sixth and seventh centuries. Islamic sources state that Medina in particular endured some sort of plague around that the time. He’s described as becoming shaky and fever-ridden essentially overnight, and so his companions put him on bed rest.

His condition is not improving, and it soon becomes obvious to everyone, including himself, that he is probably going to die. His followers move him into the home of his youngest and favorite wife Aisha, and he is given around-the-clock care. Mohammed’s fever worsens, though he remains lucid for most of his illness. He spends most of his time in bed, but sometimes he gets up and is sort of dragged around with the help of a couple of guys.

A few things happen around this time that will be relevant later. First of all, due to Mohammed’s illness, he can no longer perform his role as the imam (leader of prayers). So he appoints Abu Bakr to fill in for him. Abu Bakr has been Mo’s bestie and a member of his inner circle for decades, so this doesn’t surprise anyone. But appointing someone the leader of Medina’s prayers has certain implications.

The immediate issue is that Mohammed serves as the head of his state’s government, military, and legal system in addition to serving as the head of its official religion, Islam. Whoever succeeds him as the leader of this state--which is in a constant state of warfare in order to extend its borders--will likewise have to serve a triple role as a religious, military, and political authority figure. This will not be easy, as the new Islamic nation includes a number of people who are not particularly happy about living under its rule, and their numbers grow every month as the attacks continue. Ibn Ishaq’s sira states that before he fell ill, Mohammed had ordered raids both south and north, into Yemeni and Syrian territory. His nation is still almost entirely located in Arabia in this era, but it is getting quite large and complex, and there isn’t really any appropriate bureaucracy to deal with it. Whoever takes over will have to come up with that on his own, and will need everyone to go along with his decisions. Mohammed’s own claim to rulership comes “from Allah”, and it looks like Allah isn’t interested in conferring the same honor on anyone else.

That brings us to the second thing, which is something that did not happen: Mohammed never actually stated who he wanted to succeed him. In hindsight, this is a puzzling decision. By this point in the story, Mohammed knows he is seriously ill and probably going to die. He is pretty old (a grandfather in his sixties). He is very sick, but he’s still able to communicate with people in a clear manner, until, like, the very last day of his life. And he’s always been more than happy to issue orders for how his followers should eat, shit, and breathe, in addition to a litany of other religious, social, and political rules. Why he not only neglected to name a successor but even a process by which that successor could be named by others is a mystery. He just evidentially made virtually no preparations for what would happen after his death. Maybe he was in denial--he obviously wasn’t planning on dying at that point, and had unfinished business related to conquest and/or ethnic cleansing. Maybe he thought he had a little more time. Maybe he believed it was obvious that he wanted Abu Bakr to succeed him. In any case, he never named his “heir”.

There is one hadith narrated by Abdullah ibn Abbas that is sometimes believed to be related to this topic:

When [Mohammed] was on his deathbed and there were some men in the house, he said, 'Come near, I will write for you something after which you will not go astray.' Some of them said, 'Allah's Messenger is seriously ill and you have the Qur'an. Allah's Book is sufficient for us.' So the people in the house differed and started disputing. Some of them said, 'Give him writing material so that he may write for you something after which you will not go astray,' while the others said the other way round. So when their talk and differences increased, Allah's Apostle said, "[Get out]." Ibn `Abbas used to say, "No doubt, it was very unfortunate (a great disaster) that Allah's Messenger was prevented from writing for them that writing because of their differences and noise." 

What was he going to write? (“Wait, I thought he was illiterate!” was he tho) Another hadith says one of his last orders related to the state was just a “remember to FUCK UP the polytheists, lads” thing, and Ibn Ishaq’s sira says that his last command was to "let not two religions be left in the Arabian peninsula". But that can’t be what we’re talking about, because everyone already knew that Operation Bring Everyone Into The Loving Embrace Of Islam was the plan. They didn’t need it written out for them. A third hadith informs us that Umar was one of the people who refused to give Mohammed something to write with, believing him to be delirious and declaring that the Quran contained all the instructions they needed anyway (lolololol). So because of goddamn Umar, we really don’t know for sure what Mohammed meant to do there.

A story involving Ibn Abbas’ father, Abbas, provides a hint as to what some people wanted him to write:

[Abbas said to Ali:] “By Allah, I think that [Mohammed] will die of this illness. I recognise death in the faces of the Banu Abdu'l-Muttalib when they are dying. Let us go to [Mo] and ask him who will have this authority. If it is for us, then we will know that, and if it is for other than us, we will know it and he can advise him to look after us." Ali replied, "By Allah, if we ask him for it and he refuses us, then the people would never give it to us afterwards. By Allah, I will not ask it from the Messenger of Allah." 

Abbas and Ali here are both from Mohammed’s clan, the Banu Hashim. (Abdul-Muttalib was Mo’s grandpa.) When Abbas says that he wants to know if Mohammed’s empire “is for us”, he means for their clan. So while Mohammed is dying, it’s clear that at least some people believe that he might keep the leadership of the state/theocracy/whatever within the family. If Mo did opt for that, Ali was a reasonable choice. He was young--like 30 years younger than Abu Bakr & Pals--but he had been vested with a great deal of military authority already, he had been given the honor of carrying Mohammed’s banner in battle, and he was the closest thing Mohammed had to a son (besides Zayd the Ignominiously Un-Adopted, but he’s dead by now so whatever). Mo was very protective of his almost-son/cousin, as evidenced in this adorable hadith involving slave rape, and described him as the Aaron to his Moses. He told everyone that they must view Ali as their ally (some of Ali’s followers would later interpret this as Ali being declared Mohammed’s heir, though it was obviously not viewed as such at the time).

But again: at this point, Mohammed’s days are numbered, and he hasn’t indicated he wants Ali or anyone else to succeed him. And Abu Bakr is the one leading the prayers. It’s easy to dismiss the whole account above as some dumb Abbasid story--the Abbasids are so named because they are descended from Abbas--but it seems like it either actually happened or was strongly believed to have actually happened by the early Muslims. That’s because there is a sort of competing hadith to the one about the would-be letter declaring Ali the rightful caliph, this one narrated by Aisha and involving a would-be letter declaring Abu Bakr the rightful caliph:

A'isha reported that Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) in his (last) illness asked [her] to call [her father] and her brother too, so that he might write a document, for he feared that someone else might be desirous (of succeeding him) and that some claimant may say: “I have better claim to it”, whereas Allah and the Faithful do not substantiate the claim of anyone but that of Abu Bakr.

So the idea that Mohammed was going to write something related to the succession seems to have truly been A Thing  in the first generation of Islam, with different camps offering different spins on what he wanted to write. Obviously, no letter was ever actually written, thus the problem. But there were plenty of reasons why Abu Bakr also made sense as Mohammed’s successor, apart from his high standing in the community and his appointment as the designated imam. He was fanatically loyal to Mohammed and had joined him in holy broship, so he was viewed as unlikely to “betray” Mo’s final wishes. Mohammed had entrusted him with increasing religious authority even prior to his illness, and in the year following the conquest of Mecca, Abu Bakr had been put in charge of the pilgrimage to the Kaaba. He had also led platoons of Muslim soldiers (more slave rape in that one jsyk!) and was treated as essentially a substitute teacher at times:

A woman came to the Prophet (ﷺ) who ordered her to return to him again. She said, "What if I came and did not find you?" as if she wanted to say, "If I found you dead?" [Mohammed] said, "If you should not find me, go to Abu Bakr."

Plus, the guy was old. Around Mohammed’s age, actually, in a society that prized the wisdom of elders. So Abu Bakr had quite a bit going for him at this juncture. The one thing he permanently lacked was Ali’s close blood relationship to Mohammed--and Ali held multiple advantages here. It wasn’t just that he and Mo were cousins, it was also that Ali was the husband of Mohammed’s daughter and the father of Mohammed’s only grandsons. Abu Bakr’s daughter was Mohammed’s wife, but neither she nor any of Mohammed’s other wives from his polygamous days had any surviving children. Fatima’s boys were the only males around with his blood. (Mo had granddaughters too, from both Fatima and one of his other daughters; the latter granddaughter also ended up marrying Ali.)

A final note is that not all Muslims were eager for either Abu Bakr or Ali to succeed Mohammed. Some weren’t interested in living under permanent Qurayshi rule. In particular, the Ansar of Medina wondered why exactly the Quraysh were seemingly destined to rule them just for being related to Mohammed, when the Ansar were the ones who sheltered Mohammed and his followers for years after the Quraysh kicked him out of town.

As people ponder all of this and the power struggles start to heat up, Mohammed is still in his bed, dying of disease. Oh, and just a teensy problem: some people have gotten word of his illness and think that now is a great time to try their luck and break away from the proto-caliphate. Some are in open revolt and refusing to pay tribute to the state, while others have even declared competing religious movements and have started building up their own armies. Mohammed’s successor, whoever he is, will have a lot to deal with. As all of these people will learn within the next two decades, it turns out running an enormous expansionist state is actually a shitty job with a lot of headaches, many of which involve being stabbed to death.

CHAPTER 1: PRESS ﷺ TO PAY RESPECTS

Despite his followers’ best attempts to cure him by using the “methods” he’d taught them, Crazy Mo dies in Medina around noon on a hot June day in the year 632. He was 62 years old, and had served as the self-declared prophet of Islam for the last two decades of his life.

The Muslims are, naturally, distraught by their leader’s death. Mohammed’s wives immediately begin hitting themselves (uhh... it was a custom) in mourning when his heart stops in Aisha’s room. The news slowly spreads. Some wail; others are frozen in fear. Some like Umar take a more denial-of-reality approach to hearing the rumors. He addresses a crowd of people and begins rambling:

When the apostle was dead, Umar got up and said: "Some of the disaffected will allege that the apostle is dead, but by God he is not dead; he has gone to his Lord as Moses went [for] forty days, returning to them after it was said that he had died. By God, the apostle will return as Moses returned and will cut off the hands and feet of men who allege that the apostle is dead."

“SO THIS MOUNTAIN, SEE?!”, exclaims Umar, who is in a state of mania. “THE MOUNTAIN IS JUST, LIKE, IN AISHA’S APARTMENT. ALLAH MOVED IT THERE, THEN SHRANK IT, THEN MADE IT BIG AGAIN, BUT YOU CAN’T SEE IT FROM HERE--LIKE THE MAP OF NI NO KUNI, YOU KNOW?--AND THE PROPHET CLIMBED IT TO GET SOME TABLETS LIKE MOSES. HE’LL BE BACK WITH THOSE TABLETS, WHICH WILL SAY ‘FUCK Y’ALL’, AND THEN HE’LL MURDER EVERYONE WHO SAID HE WAS DEAD. YOU’LL SEE!!!”

“That sounds incorrect, but I don’t know enough about mountains to say it is false,” decides an onlooker, thoughtfully.

Abu Bakr pushes through the crowd that has gathered to gawk at Umar. He visits Aisha’s room to observe Mohammed’s corpse and confirm his death. Satisfied with the deadness of the body, he returns to Medina’s center to put a stop to his buddy’s maniacal ranting:

Umar was still speaking and he said gently, "Umar, be quiet." But Umar refused and went on talking, and when Abu Bakr saw [this] he said: "O men, if anyone worships Mohammed, Mohammed is dead, but if anyone worships Allah, Allah is alive". Then he recited this verse: "Mohammed is nothing but an apostle. Apostles have passed away before him." By God, it was as though the people did not know that this verse had come down until Abu Bakr recited it that day.

(Hmmm at that last part.)

“Umar,” says Abu Bakr, gently.

“BRO! YOU’RE WITH ME, RIGHT? EVERYONE’S SAYING ‘THAT’S THE DUMBEST FUCKING THING I’VE EVER HEARD’, BUT THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT THE FLYING DONKEY, YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE WHO BELIEVED!! NOW YOU’VE GOT MY BACK, RIGHT?”

“Of course,” Abu Bakr replies, sweetly. He then slaps Umar across the face.

Stunned, Umar shuts up for a moment and everyone accepts that Mohammed is, in fact, dead and had not somehow gone missing inside his wife’s bedroom.

Mohammed’s only surviving child, his daughter Fatima, is obviously among the most devastated by his passing. Fatima’s mother Khadija had died when she was still a young girl, her sisters all died of disease within the previous five years, and none of her brothers survived their childhoods. Even Zayd the Ignominiously Un-Adopted is gone. So she is the last of her nuclear family at the age of, like, 25 or younger. Her husband Ali is presumably equally distraught, but as one of Mohammed’s closest surviving male relatives, he has to deal with the burial arrangements. Abbas helps Ali wash Mohammed’s corpse, in keeping with Islamic custom. They respect Mohammed’s never-nude wishes and keep his privates covered during the process.

Meanwhile, the news that Mohammed is dead has spread throughout the entire city. The issues that people had previously been grumbling about, related to the succession to Mohammed, immediately start spilling out into the open. The Islamic empire is engaging in constant, ongoing battles--if a new leader is going to be chosen, it has to happen now. There isn’t any time to waste.

But not everyone is convinced that there needs to be a singular leader. Some of the Muslims believe that Mohammed was irreplaceable in terms of being one single authority figure to whom all Muslims were required to pledge their absolute loyalty. He “earned” that loyalty by being The Prophet, and he was The Last Prophet. He couldn’t have a real successor. People who followed this line of thinking began seriously considering the possibility of de-centralizing the new empire, so that different Muslim tribal confederations would be more or less self-governing, as they had been prior to Islam. After all, Arabs were accustomed to living in tribes, not bureaucratic nations. Why not just return to the way things were, with slightly more attacks on polytheistic shrines?

The Ansar are intrigued by this possible outcome. They know that if there is one single ruler, he is doubtlessly going to come from the Quraysh tribe, and they’ll be relegated to the back seat forever. In the interest of preserving their autonomy (or rather renewing it, now that Mo’s dead), they quietly arrange a meeting to discuss this problem. The goal of the gathering is to agree upon a leader for their community, with Saad, a chief from one of their tribes, being the current frontrunner. They invite the senior members of their tribes to the meeting and pointedly do not invite any of the Quraysh. But some of the latter get word of the gathering, and they move to crash the party immediately.

I (Umar) said to Abu Bakr, 'Let's go to these Ansari brothers of ours.' .... we reached them at the shed of (a clan of the Ansar, the) Bani Sa`da.

After we sat for a while, the Ansar's speaker said, ‘...To proceed, we are Allah's Ansar (helpers) and the majority of the Muslim army, while you, the emigrants, are a small group and some people among you came with the intention of preventing us from practicing this matter (of caliphate) and depriving us of it.'

When the speaker had finished, I intended to speak as I had prepared a speech which I liked ... Abu Bakr said, 'Wait a while.' I disliked to make him angry. So Abu Bakr himself gave a speech ... he said, 'O Ansar! You deserve all (the qualities that you have attributed to yourselves), but this question (of Caliphate) is only for the Quraish as they are the best of the Arabs as regards descent and home, and I am pleased to suggest that you choose either of these two men, so take the oath of allegiance to either of them as you wish.’ And then Abu Bakr held my hand and Abu Ubaida bin al-Jarrah's hand

“Hello friends,” Abu Bakr begins. “Y’all are great. Truly. Thanks for opening your homes to us, surrendering control of your city to our cult leader, and sacrificing your money and lives in battle on his behalf. But here’s the thing, folks: we’re better than you are. I’m sorry but these are the facts. We’re richer. We’re from a more well-developed city. Our tribe is more respected. Abraham himself built a mosque where we live. Mohammed was one of us. Frankly, we’re also better-looking. That’s very important for good PR.”

The Ansar stare blankly at him.

Undeterred, Abu Bakr continues: “Now, we’re not going to force you to follow anyone. There is no compulsion in religion. You have a choice here--between two of our tribe’s most famed assholes!” He grabs two individuals from the crowd and presents them. “On your left: Umar ibn al-Khattab, who many of you know as a short-tempered and over-emotional manchild. On your right: this other guy named Abu Ubaida, who honestly hasn’t done much beyond fight in some battles at this point in the story. I guess there was that time he killed his own father while we were trying to raid one of our tribe’s caravans.... anyway. What are y’alls thoughts?”

[Crickets.]

And then one of the Ansar said, 'I am the pillar on which the camel with a skin disease (eczema) rubs itself to satisfy the itching (i.e., I am a noble), and I am as a high class palm tree! O Quraish. There should be one ruler from us and one from you.'

“OK... first of all, what in the name of Christ is that metaphor,” Abu Bakr replies. “We’re also better at poetic imagery than you are. Forgot to add that, so thanks for reminding me. Second of all, as I just told you, we’re above you. Who the fuck lied to y’all and said you were on our level? Lmao losers”

“We’re not better than fucking UMAR?”, the Ansar retort. “Or this other guy who will remain B-tier in relevancy throughout this entire story?! YOU WOULDN’T EVEN HAVE THIS EMPIRE WITHOUT US, YOU UNGRATEFUL CLOWNS!”

Chaos erupts in the hall. People are five seconds away from throwing hands. Suddenly...!

Then there was a hue and cry among the gathering and their voices rose so that I was afraid there might be great disagreement, so I said, 'O Abu Bakr! Hold your hand out.' He held his hand out and I pledged allegiance to him, and then all the emigrants gave the Pledge of allegiance and so did the Ansar afterwards. And so we became victorious

Umar dramatically declares his loyalty to Abu Bakr in the chaos, recognizing him as the new leader of the Islamic empire, henceforth known as the caliph. Frankly speaking, it probably wasn’t that much of a shock to Abu Bakr himself, as he knew that Umar (and... basically everyone else) wanted him to be the first caliph. The whole offering Umar and Abu Ubaida as options thing was just false modesty he knew would be shot down in favor of himself, imo. But that’s my hot take, not something the sources say.

Anyway, everyone pauses for a moment to consider this. It probably seems clear to the Ansar at this point that the Quraysh aren’t gonna just leave them alone and let them do what they want; they will have to pledge loyalty to one of these guys eventually. Given that their previous options were Umar and Irrelevant Guy, Abu Bakr likely appears pretty good in comparison. So perhaps it’s not surprising that most of the Ansar present at this gathering decide: “if we gotta serve one of these assholes, might as well be this one”. They sigh and agree to recognize Abu Bakr as the caliph. (Poor Saad gets roughed up afterwards, something Umar considers punishment for daring to even consider himself for the position of caliph.)

So now the whole succession issue is behind us, right? Well... no. We have a slight problem here: Abu Bakr, Umar, and Abu Ubaida may have crashed the Ansar’s party, but zero members of the Banu Hashim were present at the impromptu coronation of their kinsman’s successor. Because they’re busy preparing his corpse for burial. Oh well!

Team Abu Bakr has a more pressing concern, namely telling everyone else in Medina (and those hundreds of thousands of other people living in the caliphate, but who gives a shit about them?) that they have a new ruler. So the next day, Umar and Abu Bakr direct a general assembly to gather in Medina’s mosque, where the people are told to give Abu Bakr their allegiance. First, Umar gives a brief speech in which he basically says that this decision hadn’t come from Mohammed, but is nonetheless the evident “will of Allah”:

O men, yesterday I said something based on my own opinion and which I do not find in God's book, nor was it something which the apostle entrusted to me; but I thought that the apostle would order our affairs until he was the last of us alive. ... God has placed your affairs in the hands of the best one among you ... so arise and swear fealty to him.

The residents of Medina do so, and then Abu Bakr gives his own speech in which he asks the people to “obey me as long as I obey God and His apostle”. Then he leads them in prayer, acting as the caliph for the first time. The commoners apparently don’t have much of a problem with any of this, or at least none are bold enough to disagree with the leaders of their tribes after the latter swore loyalty to Abu Bakr in the hall. So that takes care of that situation.

But the larger issue, namely the fact that the Banu Hashim and their sympathizers have had basically no say in this process, is still unresolved. Mohammed’s burial occurs the day after the general oath of fealty to Abu Bakr, with the men of his extended family lowering him into his grave. They’re now ready to catch up on everything they’ve missed in the past couple of days. It probably isn’t anything important, since the people of Medina have no doubt been so preoccupied with mourning Mohammed’s death that they’ve hardly had time to do anything else.

(On to part 2!!)

[snow-storm27]

Game of Thrones, or, How to Mismanage Your IP

           This has been coming for a long, long time… Now that it’s over, it’s time to address what I feel went wrong with Game of Thrones.

In April 2011, HBO premiered what would become one of, if not the, most influential television program of the 2010s: Game of Thrones.  Based on the book series A Song of Ice and Fire by author George R. R. Martin, the series began as a gritty, grimy, medieval fantasy drama, rooted mostly in the feudal politics of managing money, conventional weapons of war, arranged marriages, and the ever-present threat of backstabbing noblemen.  However, the show has consistently had underpinnings of a far higher fantasy, with rumors of zombie hordes in the far north and legends of historical, but now extinct, dragons.  As the seasons went on, these two fantastical elements began to slowly take center stage.  In the finale of season one, dragons were reborn into the world, and after four years of once-a-season appearances, the nefarious threat of the White Walkers took center stage in an episode late in season five, as they prepared their army of the undead to mount a threat against the living.

The show slowly progressed from a low fantasy drama about politics and conventional warfare to a high fantasy struggle of the living versus the dead, aided by dragons and giants and other supernatural forces on either side.  However, despite the increase in both budget and viewership, Game of Thrones has reached its end not with a triumphant bang but with a dull whimper.  Why has this happened?  Three major themes of the development of the show have ultimately contributed to its downfall: adaptational changes, overtaking the source material, and poor treatment of minorities within the show.

I.                Changes Made in Adaptation

As with any adaptation of a book, or any other work for that matter, certain changes must be made.  George R. R. Martin is quoted as saying, “I knew that, when writing a book, you’re not constrained by a budget.  You’re not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You’re not limited to any particular running time.”  He is correct.  In his book series, he describes people of fantastically large stature, and creatures beyond the scope of reality, and often he describes creatures and events beyond the scope of what HBO’s CGI budget can pay for.  While his written creations may be as different and varied as he chooses, two major CGI creations have dominated the show: dragons, and direwolves.

The dragons are largely faithfully recreated.  They are the symbol of House Targaryen, amazing beasts rendered in picture-perfect, hyper realistic computer graphics.  They grow incrementally each season, mandating new art and new computer models and more money to render with every passing year. Starting as newborns the size of housecats in the final moments of the first season, the dragons are the size of aircraft throughout the final season.  These creatures have been stated as a major draw of the show, especially to casual fans and fans who have not read the books.  The dragons are huge, dramatic creatures, and whenever they appear, they dominate the action, flying and breathing fire and generally creating a spectacle.

Conversely, the direwolves are treated as an afterthought at best.  They are kept offscreen most of the time, are seemingly forgotten about when not absolutely essential, and have been largely killed off to save money in the CG budget, but more on that in a minute.  This really smacks of poor analysis of the books, is the issue.  The Starks in the novels are subconsciously creatures known as wargs, or, humans that can psychically link with other creatures, feel their feelings, use their senses, and other related abilities.  Each Stark gets a direwolf at the beginning of the story, episode one in the show.  These creatures bond with their owners and allow the protagonists to develop their own psychic powersets.  There is no hint of this in the show, except in the oft-forgotten Bran storyline from the early seasons.  Dragons get to be large and in charge, yet the direwolves, described as nearly the size of horses in the books, are relegated to being somewhat-large domestic dogs in the show, before being killed off.

Part of the tragedy of the final season is that the last living direwolf that has stayed with his master, Jon Snow’s wolf Ghost, is summarily told to leave and head north with Tormund Giantsbane, who has never interacted with Ghost before, at least not in any measurable capacity.  Jon sends him away without so much as a pat on the head because he was too hard to animate, and Jon never really bonded with him. Ghost has been a fan favorite for years, with every second of screen time met with joyous reactions from the fanbase. And yet, he gets sent to a farm upstate by our ostensible hero.  It’s hard not to feel that the direwolves as a whole were completely useless and wasted. They are a thematic tie to our heroes’ home of Winterfell and a reminder of better days gone by.  In the show, they are a liability to be ignominiously killed off for shock value.

Speaking of killed off for shock value, how many characters die in the show before their time in the books?  Around season five, this became less of a rare occurrence, and more of the norm.  Ser Barristan Selmy, a point of view character with a compelling arc in Dance with Dragons and an actor who is a fan of the books, gets killed off in season five episode four in a confusing back alley brawl that doesn’t even happen in the books.  King Stannis Baratheon, a major character in both book and show, first kills his daughter, who is still alive in the books, leading to the suicide of his wife, who is still alive in the books, and he is summarily executed by a character who isn’t even in that location in the books.  At the end of season six, after the time covered in the books, Queen Cersei blows up an entire cathedral full of about a dozen named characters, all of whom are still alive in the books (every Tyrell except for Olenna, Lancel Lannister, the High Sparrow, the entire Sparrow movement). These are merely the more dramatic deaths that occur in the show but not the books.  I didn’t even touch the bizarre treatment of Dorne in the show, the characters that were excluded despite being key focuses of the plot (such as Arianne and Quentyn Martell, Victarion and Aeron Greyjoy, and Young Griff), entire plots that are cut and pasted with different names.  For a more complete list of dead characters, see http://mentalfloss.com/article/65078/dead-game-thrones-tv-characters-who-are-still-alive-books.

Deaths and direwolves are not the only changes made in the process of adaptation, but oftentimes the characterizations of the characters must be changed to better fit the narrative told on the screen.  However, these changes rarely make characters more compelling, no.  They often just serve to make characters either more aggressive or less likeable, seemingly at random.  Brienne of Tarth is a devout knightly figure in the books.  She is a point of view chapter in Feast for Crows, and one of her chapters contains what is arguably the thesis statement of the entire series: War is Hell.  It’s hardly an uncommon theme of fiction set during wartime, and author George R. R. Martin was himself a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.  It is baked into the books that war is never a good thing.

In the show, Brienne of Tarth is an aggressive, seemingly areligious bully.  She swings her sword and rather cruelly pushes around her squire, Podrick, under the guise of tutelage.  Setting aside the fact that Podrick is a child in the books and an adult sexual fanatic in the show, itself a confusing twist of the character, Brienne is charged, as a knight, to protect and defend the weak.  She seemingly traded off her obligation to help those weaker than herself for additional combat training because she gets into a lot of fights that she does not face in the book.  She fights the Hound at the end of season four, gets into a high-speed chase a few episodes later against Littlefinger’s men, and by the end of season five she beheads Stannis after a battle at Winterfell before smugly rubbing it in Stannis’s friends’ faces in season six.  She is rude and arrogant where her book counterpart is kind and just and faithful. Brienne is hardly the only character to undergo such changes.

Brienne’s chosen king in season two is Renly Baratheon, younger brother of Stannis and Robert Baratheon.  He was made more charismatic and sympathetic in the show, less aggressive and more progressive. This had the effect of making the Tyrells, a rather power-hungry house in the books, into a group of kind angels in the show.  A scene was added to showcase the charity of Margaery Tyrell in season three, because the audience was supposed to like them more.  Conversely, making Renly nicer and more likeable made Stannis, his killer, far less likeable. Setting aside the fact that Stannis is in both works for far longer than Renly, incentivizing writers to make him a more tolerable character, Stannis’s positive character traits are stripped from him.  Where he was a caring, if emotionally stunted, father in the books, in the show he is downright abusive and murderous.  In the books, Stannis’s relationship with religion is tenuous at most, but in the show he is portrayed as a zealot.  Stannis ultimately dies a child-murdering religious fanatic, humiliated in battle after being deceived by a foreign temptress with a foreign religion, itself a complex and uncomfortable situation that will be discussed in more depth later. Stannis’s character had to die so that Renly’s could live for all of four episodes in season two.

The show’s relationship with religion is very lopsided as well. Religious characters, such as Brienne, Sansa, Davos, and Jon, often lose their religion in the show where they are still devout in the books.  Meanwhile, religious organizations and priests are treated as insane or villainous, despite their more nuanced portrayals in the books.  Examples include Stannis, who goes from nearly an atheist to a fanatical champion of R’hllor, the Sparrows, who go from a group of concerned albeit religious citizens to violent puritanical moralists with a homophobic streak, and the Hound, who in the books is implied to become a silent monk who finds peace, but in the show is incited back to violence, with an implied message that “real men” are violent, and peaceful religion is namby-pamby kid’s stuff.  George R. R. Martin is not a religious man, but he handles the subject with far more nuance and a wider array of perspectives than the show does.  It would be easy to place the entirety of the blame in the hands of D. B. Weiss and David Benioff, the showrunners.  I wouldn’t say that they are entirely to blame, but I would say that these major changes in theme, character, and sensitivity in the show can largely be attributed to the two of them.

Really, it’s unfortunate.  The books handle a great deal of subject matter with care and sensitivity, but the show seems unable to deal with the inherently morally ambiguous work without drawing hard lines between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.  Renly is Good, Stannis is Evil.  Religion of any kind is Bad.  Tyrion Can Do No Wrong.  Stripping the subject matter of its nuance leaves the whole experience feeling hollow and frankly lesser than both the books and other dramas on television. It’s honestly sad to see such a rich, developed world be reduced to such moral absolutism.

II.              Passing the Books

It was inevitable that the show would, one day, pass the books. Shortly after the release of the first season, the fifth book in the series was published, all the way back in 2011. Since then, eight seasons have come and gone, and the story of the show has finished.  Meanwhile, the last book published is still the fifth, Dance with Dragons.  The next book, The Winds of Winter, is still some distance away, but its plot, as well as its distant successor, A Dream of Spring, has been loosely adapted by the show.  Very, very loosely.

While some early story beats of Winds could be reasonably predicted, from season six onwards, the show went off of an outline from George and the creativity of the show’s writers. It could be easy to presume that Jon Snow, seemingly heralded as a chosen hero in the books, will return from the dead in the next book.  Similarly, the general story of the White Walkers marching south and attacking the living could be predicted.  Daenerys heading to Westeros could be predicted.  These are long-foreshadowed story threads that would be disappointing to see unfulfilled.

However, once the show ran out of material to adapt directly from the books, the writing suffered.  Twists began to appear almost for their own sake, such as Ramsay suddenly killing his own father, and Ramsay killing Osha, and Ramsay killing Rickon. Honestly, the show got way more mileage out of Ramsay than the character deserved.  Brutal scenes of horrific torture and death can only go on for so long, but not with Ramsay around I suppose.  Meanwhile, characters went from developed people to stock tropes almost immediately.  Sansa stopped being an empathetic and caring young woman and she became a frosty ice queen, mistrustful of everyone around her.  Bran stopped being a sweet little kid with psychic powers and he became an emotionless robot, taken from scene to scene to exposit new information.  Arya stopped being a sweet, if misguided, girl and became an autonomous shape-shifting mass murderer.  Jon stopped being a wise, calm commander and became an easily duped and often ignored loser.  And those are just the Stark kids!

Otherwise brilliant Tyrion has not made any good plans since season four. He gets passed across Essos in season five, then he fails to preserve the peace in Meereen in season six, fails to launch a successful campaign against Cersei in season seven, and jeopardizes the more successful campaign against Cersei again in season eight. His wight-capture plan was an unmitigated failure in season seven.  It was an attempt to gain support from Cersei that never came, it ended in the death of Viserion, and it seemed to only exist to set up the scene in the Dragonpit where all our big actors shared some screen time for half an episode.  And yet, despite his constant failure, Tyrion is still propped up by Sansa and Jon and Jorah as a brilliant mind with outstanding potential.  He shouldn’t lose his position as Daenerys’s Hand because he’s still smart, despite all evidence to the contrary.  It feels that Tyrion’s sudden loss in brain cells is due in part to no more existing book material to use that demonstrate his genius.  His failed plan in season six is remarkably similar to Barristan’s book five chapters, which I guess they needed to steal to give Peter Dinklage something to do for another year.

Jaime’s book arc deals primarily with him falling out of love with Cersei, and it happens across the end of book three and book four.  This arc is stretched out and seemingly ignored across seasons four, five, six, and seven, until finally he leaves her in the finale of season seven, only to turn right back around and head back to King’s Landing again to die in her arms, negating his entire emotional journey four episodes later.  There are superficial similarities, such as his sojourn to Riverrun in season six, but a story is more than its locations and characters.  Jaime’s arc is really bizarre in the show.  He seemingly recognizes Cersei’s mistreatment of him early in season four, but then just kind of ignores it or puts up with it for four more seasons of the show.  That’s not even getting into the change from his and Cersei’s consensual sex scene in the book (gross though it may be) into an act of rape in the show that the showrunners, writers, and directors can’t seem to agree is or isn’t rape, which is utterly baffling and sickening.  Jaime’s arc in the books is about self-acceptance, coping with physical disability, and recognizing bad relationships.  In the show Jaime just sort of doesn’t do any of those things. He never feels absolution about his messy past, he seemingly becomes a competent swordsman lefthanded over a couple of sparring sessions, and his recognition of Cersei’s abuse is just muddled by his own horrible treatment of her.

I feel that the character who suffered worst due to lack of available book material though is Daenerys.  Daenerys is established across the beginning of her arc as a liberator and a revolutionary.  She’s an inspiration to all around her, the Mother of Dragons and Breaker of Chains. She frees slaves, deals with harsh consequences of complex political maneuvering, accepts her role as potential ruler of a continent and does her best to become worthy of that title.  The last book ended with her having visions in the Dothraki Sea as she embraces her heritage as a conqueror.  A similar scene ends season five for her, as she is captured by Dothraki.  Since then, she has gone on to return to Vaes Dothrak, she killed the khals, she claimed all of the present Dothraki, she spontaneously learned how to ride Drogon, she returned to Meereen, handed it over to Daario for some reason, and she headed to Westeros.  She then sniped at Jon Snow for a while before apparently falling in love with him, saving him from a horrible wight-capturing plan, saving Winterfell from an invasion of zombies, and promptly turning evil just because the people of the North like Jon more than her, just so she could become a bait-and-switch final boss so a man could swoop in and be the real hero.  Theories abound that she would become her father, a Mad Queen, so to speak, in the books, but little evidence has been offered for that. Furthermore, several changes in other arcs have made hers play out differently.

In the books, Tyrion is allied for a time with a young man named Young Griff who claims to be Aegon the Sixth, son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Elia Martell, who was supposedly killed as an infant during the Sack of King’s Landing during Robert’s Rebellion.  He claims that that baby was traded out, and he is the heir to the Iron Throne.  He leads the Golden Company, and it is somewhat anticipated that he will somehow supplant Cersei in the forthcoming Winds of Winter, and he will likely come into conflict with Daenerys when she lands on Westeros.  And they’ll have elephants in the book too, unlike the show. Tyrion is abandoned by the Golden Company when he is captured by Jorah, and later they join a sellsword company near Meereen as a battle is about to begin, but that is neither here nor there. The point is, the Aegon plot got split a few different ways.  Tyrion did not support Aegon, but Daenerys.  Young Griff is not Aegon, but instead Jon Snow is for some reason, so Daenerys comes into conflict with him.  And the Golden Company that Daenerys will be expected to defeat is in Cersei’s hands, not Aegon’s.

Aegon’s storyline is long and complex, changing many presuppositions about the backstory, as well as affecting many characters in the present.  The Dornish story in the books largely deals with him as well, and his removal from the show’s narrative further makes the Dornish subplot irrelevant.  This large removal has radically altered large chunks of the narrative as it effects the characters, the overall tone and themes of the story, and it thoroughly robs Jon, Daenerys, and Tyrion, ostensibly the main three characters, of any semblance of whatever their future plot in the books may be to compensate for this excision.  Cersei must become hyper-competent, somehow securing more money for the Iron Bank in order to net the Golden Company as a reserve army out of nowhere.  Jon post-resurrection pivots into first filling out Stannis’s book role of recapturing Winterfell from the Boltons before seemingly completing his own arc of stopping the army of the dead, only to pivot once more into becoming Aegon, the highly revered prophesied king of Westeros who comes into conflict with Daenerys.  It’s just a mess and running out of book material really caused the writing to have to bend over backwards to attempt to look like the books while completely losing the characters and motivations and relationships that made the show one of the most successful on television.

I’ll admit to being a book fan first, but the show suffered most when it was divorced from its subject matter.  With no real material to draw from, the show just circled the drain in season six, redoing or reintroducing new arcs for old characters.  Jaime’s trip to Dorne tried to combine his arc from Feast for Crows with the Dorne arc from the same book, but it didn’t work, so season six sent him to Riverrun because it looked like the book.  They hadn’t done the Kingsmoot yet, so that went into season six, despite having far less gravitas and far less significance.  (As an aside, Euron is the ultimate wild card in the books, a pirate warlock bent on world domination, and yet he’s just Cersei’s lapdog/bootycall in the show, which is depressing.)  Stannis didn’t take Winterfell, so they gave it to Jon.  It is sort of expected that Cersei will destroy King’s Landing with wildfire in the books, but that would mean no conflict in the South for Daenerys, so I guess she just blows up Baelor’s Sept because it is superficially similar to something in the books.  Ultimately, these hollow reimaginings of events from the books just serve to cheapen the narrative for book readers and muddle otherwise interesting arcs from the show.  It would have almost been better if the show had fully committed to being fan fiction after season four or so.

However, there remains one more damning mark against the show, the real elephant in the room.

III.            Minorities in Game of Thrones

The worst-kept secret about Game of Thrones is that it treats its nonwhite, LGBT, and especially female characters horribly.  As a disclaimer, I do not claim that all shows must aspire to some fictitious degree of “wokeness”, or else it is a bad show by any stretch of the imagination. I think that for conflict’s sake, all characters must in some way face compelling obstacles that they must overcome in order to have any semblance of a plot.  However, over time, certain patterns begin to develop in the show that leaves one suspecting some implicit biases of the showrunners.

Persons of color in the show suffer disproportionately compared to white characters.  By the end of the show, the only living character who isn’t white is Grey Worm, a castrated soldier who is a former slave.  In addition, his love interest, with whom he was one of the most stable and emotionally balanced couples in the show, is brutally and seemingly randomly killed off mere episodes prior to the finale.  It was questionable that Euron’s fleet would randomly capture one person who happened to be the only black woman in the cast, and then kill her and only her that same episode.

A single episode prior, during the Battle of Winterfell (like, the third or fourth one in the show, the one with the zombies), the entire Dothraki army is killed offscreen.  An entire legion of ethnically diverse characters is killed to demonstrate how intimidating the wights are, I guess.  Or maybe, they were okay all along, because some Dothraki are just kind of at King’s Landing two episodes later.  The writing was crazy inconsistent in the final season.  In any event, it kind of makes Daenerys’s arc in Essos largely pointless if her armies of ethnic soldiers are just used as cannon fodder for one mildly interesting, dimly lit, shot, and then the remainder are shown pillaging the terrified, white, populace later on.

Meanwhile, Daenerys’s arc smacks of white savior tropes.  Setting aside the racially dubious shot from season three where the blindingly white Daenerys is raised up by a very nonwhite crowd in adoration, it was never made clear in the books whether the peoples of Essos were darker skinned or not.  In a show where one’s bloodline and the purity thereof is of paramount importance to many of the major characters, racial sensitivity in casting should have been a higher priority.  Daenerys’s entire arc, and the sympathies of the audience, change dramatically if Daenerys is supposed to be a liberator of the oppressed, but she is presented as merely a white savior bringing civilization to the backwards and savage brown people.  Aside from not representing the books and not playing well on television in the 2010s, Daenerys looks like a monster because she is constantly at odds with the only minorities in the cast.  She seems almost like a white supremacist, dictating that it is her right to rule due to her family’s heritage.  Having a startlingly white woman with pale hair announce to her black former slaves that she is the only person with the right to rule looks really racially insensitive.

Also in her arc, Xaro Xhoan Daxos in Qarth is not a black man in the books.  He is also not dead in the books, nor did he spontaneously steal her dragons in the books. While that change in story may be entirely coincidental, the fact that a major character’s plot was changed to feature a sneaky, greedy black man instead of a kind, albeit self-interested white man is suspect.  The fact that that man dies as a result of the change raises further eyebrows.

Across the sea, Areo Hotah is changed from a white man to a black man.  He is heralded as a tremendously successful warrior in the books.  In the show he is killed without a chance to demonstrate any skills other than standing around looking intimidating, which feels stereotypical of a black man.  Meanwhile, the other Dornish folks are also distinctly not white, and they are all killed in the adaptation as well.  Oberyn suffers the same grisly fate as his book counterpart, but Doran is unceremoniously killed despite being a master-class schemer in the books. Meanwhile, his daughter and son, Arianne and Quentyn Martell, have their subplots extricated entirely due in part to the removal of Young Griff, while his other son Trystane is also randomly killed on a boat in a scene that is played for laughs.  His killers, the similarly Dornish Sand Snakes and their mother Ellaria Sand are brutally murdered on-screen by Euron and Cersei, who isn’t even near them in the books.

It would be easy to pass this off as mere coincidence.  After all, people of all colors and backgrounds die all the time in Game of Thrones.  However, something I find interesting is that as Game of Thrones was winding down, Weiss and Benioff pitched a series to HBO about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War.  While interesting as a thought experiment, it feels strange that creators with such little regard for racial sensitivity wanted to cover such an inherently racial subject as that for their next project.  It has seemingly been dropped in favor of their Star Wars trilogy, but I remain skeptical.  These creators have inspired little confidence in their treatment of minorities, which is deeply troubling and will render the show very difficult to enjoy for any length of time in the future.

Next on the list is the show’s poor treatment of LGBT characters. This is a little less prevalent, but no less obvious.  There have not been many prominent LGBT characters in the show.  Beginning in season one, Renly Baratheon and Loras Tyrell are gay.  The very next season Renly dies and Loras hits on his also-gay squire.  His squire then turns him in to the show-only Sparrow Inquisition in season five who, only in the show, have a tremendous hatred for gay people.  Loras spends the next two seasons in chains, largely offscreen, then he is humiliated at a religious trial before being incinerated by Cersei.  So, yeah.  Our gay men main characters either die or betray each other to religious inquisitions. Not awesome.

In season four, we are introduced to Oberyn Martell.  In the books, his bisexuality is rather implicit, but in the show he is introduced in a brothel, attempting to recruit some mixed-gender company for himself and his paramour, Ellaria Sand.  Already the show falls into stereotypes about the promiscuity and near infidelity of bisexuals, but I guess both of them are into it, so it’s not so bad.  Oberyn dies in the books in about the same way he dies in the show, which is fair enough for an adaptation.

However, then Ellaria briefly hooks up with Yara Greyjoy in season seven.  Yara had demonstrated her interest in women in season six, but it all felt rather forced, as if the depiction of a woman’s romantic or sexual interest in another woman was for show, in order to titillate the audience.  It would hardly be the first time the show used the female body as an excuse to excite a presumably male audience.  In any event, the very scene after Ellaria and Yara get together, Yara is captured by her uncle while two of Ellaria’s children are brutally killed before her eyes.  Ellaria and her third child are also captured, then poisoned and left to die in front of each other in the next episode.

There are no transgender characters in Game of Thrones.

Olenna Tyrell and Tywin Lannister share a scene in season three in which Olenna insinuates that it is a natural part of life to experiment with one’s sexuality.  She implies that Tywin is somehow weird or abnormal for never even considering some homosexual experience in his life.  Tywin is astonished by her suggestion.  Due to the show’s framing of the Tyrells as a more heroic house than the Lannisters, sympathies should theoretically be with Olenna.  However, the show falls pretty hard on the side of Tywin.  By the end of the show, the only character with any same-sex attraction left alive is Yara, who is sexually promiscuous, aggressive, refuses to truly disavow the rapacious practices of the Ironborn, and is left unattached romantically at the end of the show.  All the other characters have died, often gruesomely and on-screen.  The show, which prided itself on being subversive and different, instead seemingly gives everyone a heteronormative, socially acceptable ending, presuming they live.

The discussion of LGBT and nonwhite characters pales in comparison to the utter failure of the show with regard to its treatment of women, however. The show’s gross depiction of repeated, ongoing sexual violence directed towards women in particular is frankly disgusting, and it spans all the way back to the very fist episode of the show. On her wedding day, Daenerys is raped by Khal Drogo.  In the book, the matter is a little more complicated at the very least.  By modern jurisprudence, it’s not like Daenerys could consent at all, as she is a minor in the book, but at least she has some small say in the matter.  In the book, Daenerys and Drogo certainly do not get off on the right foot, but Drogo doesn’t rape her at least.

Also in the first episode, Tyrion is shown cavorting with some sex workers, clearly put in the show to mainly introduce Tyrion’s dwarfism, but secondarily to titillate the audience.  The show continues to use the female form to distract from large amounts of exposition to such an extent that critics coined the word “sexposition” in order to describe the sheer number of sex scenes used to accent plot information. The entire setting of Littlefinger’s brother practically exists to convey information about plot while enticing casual fans with nudity.  Everyone’s motives were revealed here: Littlefinger, Oberyn, Tyrion, Tywin, even Varys, a man who categorically cannot engage in sexual intercourse.

The use of the female body to convey information to the audience is entirely inequitable.  The number of times male genitalia is on screen can be counted on one’s hands, and there would be fingers left over.  Furthermore, the male body is not used in the same way, as a tool to excite the audience.  In fact, the preference seems to be for male genitals to be used to shock or disgust the audience rather than anything else.  Hodor’s prosthetic penis and the Braavosi actor checking himself for warts is about as far from titillating as one could get.  But I digress, there are far worse things in this show’s treatment of women than just the lack of male genitals.

Back on the subject of sexual violence, it seems as though the show cannot film a scene of consensual sex.  The complex sexual dynamic between Jaime and Cersei is shifted into an entirely different, far more concrete, and far less comfortable one in season four when a scene of consensual sex in the books is transformed into a scene of male-on-female sexual violence as Jaime forces himself on Cersei despite her protests, and the scene in question fades into the next to Jaime stating “I don’t care” to her pleas.  The scene is truly horrifying, and when I saw it as it aired in 2014, I was left appalled that the show would throw away such major characters’ entire personalities, but of far more significance was my horror that the writers, directors, and show runners couldn’t decide whether the scene was a consensual sex scene or whether it depicted an act of rape.  It is disturbing that adults of seemingly average sensibilities can’t understand such a basic concept as consent.

Furthermore, rape is used as a tool and a plot element far more often than it ever needed to be.  Sansa is nearly raped in season two, Jon stops an attempted rape in season eight, the Dothraki rape a conquered city in season one, and when Daenerys protests, she is just told to not get in the way.  The Ironborn are notoriously rapacious, as a civilization of pirate raiders, and Yara Greyjoy only agrees to give up their reaving lifestyle in order to form an alliance with Daenerys, which is presumably off the table after her death in the finale.  No change in the culture in-show occurs, and it is just accepted that sexual violence is a part of life for the characters, from episode one all the way to episode seventy-three.

The show’s fraught relationship with sexual violence is best demonstrated through the arcs of two characters: the show-only prostitute Ros, and the vastly altered story of Sansa Stark.

Ros is an invention of the show, a prostitute at Winterfell in the beginning of the show who relocates to King’s Landing for greater business opportunities.  She is introduced alongside Tyrion to further his arc as a philanderer, and she is again shown alongside Theon to demonstrate his affinity for sex workers.  After relocating to King’s Landing, she takes a job at Littlefinger’s brothel, where she features in several “sexposition” scenes across season two.  By the end of the season, she is seemingly promoted to overseeing the other workers and essentially providing acting lessons for them.  It’s somehow the most respectful thing the show does for sex workers, demonstrating that they are actual people with careers and aspirations, no matter how untraditional.  It would have been subversive to allow a sex worker to get to enjoy some semblance of status for a change.  Perhaps she could have been a foil to Bronn, both unlikely lowborn folks with unglamorous jobs who nonetheless manage to rise high due to their wit and cunning. However, whereas Bronn manages to make increasingly ludicrous demands of the Lannisters before being gifted a castle in the finale of the series, Ros faces a much darker fate.  Rumors abound that the actress behind Ros, Esme Bianco, desired greater screen time and pay, as many actors do after a few seasons of a hit television show.  This demand was met with her character being written out of the show in a truly barbaric fashion.  She becomes essentially middle management at Littlefinger’s brothel when she is contracted out by Varys to spy on his political rival.  She accepts the job, and when she is discovered, Littlefinger hands her over to Joffrey for target practice.  The last we see of Ros, she is bound, tied to Joffrey’s bed, and has been shot by a crossbow through the chest and groin.  The overarching message of Ros’s arc seems to be that women who try to take control of their situation are disregarded and removed with great prejudice by stronger, smarter men.

Even more fraught with unfortunate implications than Ros is Sansa’s storyline.  For the first four seasons, Sansa’s storyline largely follows that of the books.  She is a young woman who is engaged to Joffrey Baratheon, a sadist who insists on having her physically abused for his own pleasure.  She manages to escape from the situation with the assistance of Littlefinger, essentially a medieval pimp with an unrequited crush on Sansa’s mother, and whose affections have seemingly transferred to her daughter by the time of Cat’s death.  In fact, once they escape King’s Landing, he forces a kiss on her in the Eyrie’s courtyard, which is a precipitating cause of Littlefinger’s murder of Lysa Arryn.  So Sansa briefly stays in the Eyrie at the mercy of a pedophilic pimp at the end of season four.  But then everything changed between the filming of season four and the filming of season five.  Sophie Turner, the actress behind Sansa Stark, turned eighteen.  I know this because she is literally four days older than me, and I also turned eighteen in there.  Also, the show passed her book plot, and desperately needed to give her something to do, so they took a horrible, tragic plot from the book and gave it to Sansa.

In Dance with Dragons, Sansa’s childhood friend Jeyne Poole is given to Roose Bolton, the traitorous warden of the North, to disguise her as Arya Stark and marry her to his bastard son Ramsay Snow, in order to legitimize the Boltons’ hold on the North.  While she is there, she is forced to marry Ramsay, and he abuses her horribly.  We do get confirmation on the page that she is sexually abused by her new husband, which is horrible, but no actual scene depicting a sexual assault occurs. Meanwhile, in Feast for Crows, Sansa Stark is learning the politics of the Vale in order to marry the new Lord of the Vale for the stated purpose of riding north with the Vale’s knights to liberate Winterfell.  Littlefinger orchestrated both the events with Sansa and Jeyne, and Littlefinger would never endanger Sansa knowingly because of his weird fascination with her.

The show thought that the best version to handle these plotlines would be to send Sansa to Winterfell in order to be raped on-screen by Ramsay.  This scene plays out in perhaps the most-despised episode of the show.  Meanwhile Littlefinger’s defense of this change is that he, a master of spies all over the country, didn’t know that Ramsay, a notorious serial killer and molester, was a notorious serial killer and molester.  It strains not only his credibility as a spymaster, but also the premise of the show that Petyr Baelish wouldn’t know about the most obvious villain in Winterfell, much less that he would give Sansa away from his custody on bad information.  Furthermore, it is downright offensive that this change was made in the first place. The show had faced a similar scandal the previous season, turning a scene of consensual sex into a scene of seeming rape.  They should have known better.  Furthermore, the Vale setting could have been much better integrated by simply not changing things like that.  Maybe Sansa’s season five could have been spent learning how to do political maneuvers, and then the Vale could ride north and be a surprise extra army for Stannis. They could lose and Sansa could still end up going to Castle Black on the run from Ramsay and his forces at the beginning of season six, all without the frankly gross and unnecessary rape scene. There were so many other ways it could have gone.

In season eight, Sansa credits her rape at the hands of Ramsay as a formative moment for her that was essential to her growth into the strong and powerful woman that she became.  I feel that this not only gives Ramsay far too much power in a storyline that didn’t need it, but it seems like the writers just giving themselves an unwarranted pat on the back for a deeply unsettling and unpopular change to the narrative.  The change to Sansa’s story in season five turned her into a victim, seemingly for the benefit of Theon’s character arc, as he ends up having to save her from Ramsay’s clutches.  I credit Sophie Turner and Alfie Allen for their powerful performances, but they never should have had to give the performances that they did.  It is just sad and a waste and a really disgusting misuse of the characters and the actors.

However, the character that I feel was most mistreated by the writers was Daenerys Targaryen, who was thoroughly misunderstood by the entire creative team and her entire storyline suffered tremendously as a result.  To begin with, the scene of consensual sex that she has with Drogo on their wedding is turned into a rape scene.  Already, we are off to a bad start.  Then, when her incestuous, abusive, unstable older brother is killed by Drogo, her reaction is relatively passive.  The writers would later cite this moment as proof that she must be crazy, because her abuser died and she had no reaction.  Later, she was very much neglected in season two because her dragons were expensive to animate and her adventure in Qarth is admittedly a little bit strange.  However, her visions with the Undying are fundamental foreshadowing to the rest of the narrative.  These were cut out, and I understand why.  They could often be a little esoteric and strange, but without those visions, she seems adrift and aimless.  She instead has visions of turning away from the Iron Throne, and meeting Drogo and their unborn child in the afterlife beyond the Wall.  These scenes were evocative, and I’ll admit I enjoyed them at the time.

Later, she enters Slaver’s Bay, from seasons three through six. This part of her story was deeply criticized in the books for feeling like a waste of time, especially in Dance with Dragons where she has mixed success ruling Meereen, and a bunch of other characters go on great quests to find her and are generally disappointed with what they find.  It is easy to feel a little less than enthused about that arc. However, the most damning critique of Daenerys’s liberation quest in Slaver’s Bay comes from the mouth of Tyrion in the show’s finale.  He cites her killings of the slavers and masters, or upper class, in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen, and claims that every time she killed these horrible people, she felt a little more empowered to do whatever she wanted and got a little more crazy and detached from reality.  This culminated in her killing of the Dothraki Khals, which garnered her a Dothraki army.  Tyrion alleged that the adoration went to her head, and she felt empowered to do anything, and Jon presenting even the idea of a challenge to her rule caused her to somehow lose her mind in its entirety, torching King’s Landing in the process.

This sequence of events is fundamentally ridiculous.  Perhaps she felt gratified from receiving praise, but that does not lead to insanity.  Furthermore, her defining character trait, and a constantly restated goal of hers, is that she wants to help the people on the bottom.  She gives water to the dying people of Slaver’s Bay, she opposes the fighting pits to preserve the lives of the poor who might otherwise be forced into them, she fights the slavers over and over again, not to mention the obviously good deed of freeing the slaves in Slaver’s Bay.  In America, Abraham Lincoln is often cited as one of, if not the, greatest presidents who ever lived, for preserving the country while also outlawing slavery.  (As an aside, I am aware of the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception in the case of prisons, which is a problem that we are still dealing with in 2019 with the school-to-prison pipeline and the issue of private prisons, but Lincoln made a big step, and that should be recognized.)  Our society places a high value on freedom, and therefore freeing slaves should be an unequivocally heroic deed.  And yet the narrative punishes Daenerys for doing this, constantly.

In season six, Tyrion criticizes her approach, and claims that reparations should be made to the slave holders, and the plan should have taken longer to occur.  Essentially, Tyrion would rather be kind to the slavers and leave people in chains for longer because freedom would be inconvenient.  Such a thorough undermining of Daenerys’s message is given to Tyrion, ostensibly the show’s main lead, two seasons ahead of his criticism of her entire arc.  Furthermore, no real reason is given why she turns against the common people of King’s Landing.  Sure, she could be a little annoyed that Northerners seem to like Jon more, but those are his people.  It makes sense that his friends would like him.  And yeah, sure, Tormund’s comment about how he’s so cool for riding a dragon would definitely be obnoxious, but that’s hardly a reason to go insane.  The seeming reason for her sudden descent into madness would be the sudden deaths of her advisors Jorah and Missandei, as well as the spontaneous, poorly executed death of Rhaegal.  In addition, the actual betrayal of her confidantes Varys, Tyrion, and Jon would make her descent into madness seemingly justified, rather than an instability.  You’re not insane if everyone around you is actually out to get you, you know.  But, her issue should be with her advisers, and Cersei.  A sensible solution during “The Bells” would have been to destroy the Iron Fleet, destroy the scorpions, kill the Golden Company outside the gates, and then fly Drogon to the Red Keep to kill Cersei.  It is fundamentally out of character for her to turn Drogon, a sentient weapon of war, on the poor, destitute common folk of King’s Landing.  She wants to be a liberator, and up until that very moment, she was a liberator.  Who is liberated when all the people are dead?

In the finale, she gives a very uncomfortable speech that implies that she will kill all the nobility in Westeros before taking her army to take over the world.  The imagery in this speech feels very similar to speeches given by Nazis, given the identical, orderly, masked troops in front of the black-clad and impassioned speaker.  In addition, the shot of her approaching the stairs while Drogon’s wings unfurl in the background was very well-made, and successfully made her look like the actual Devil.  Later, in her scene with Jon in the throne room, she makes a desperate plea for him to join her in her global conquest.  I understand her desire to keep Jon close, after all she seems to love him very much, and he is handsome and charming and all that.  But in her plea to him, she makes a very out-of-character argument that she and Jon have the power to enforce their will upon the world, for the betterment of mankind. Jon asks her why others can’t choose, and Daenerys seemingly says that they are just more important than the rest of the world, “They don’t get to choose.”  What?  Daenerys is all about the common people, or at least she was until she found they were very easy cannon fodder for Drogon.  But it seemed that she was more interested in hurting people loyal to Cersei specifically, even in her discussion with Jon.  So, her sudden disregard for the common people of the world remains completely bizarre.

And then she dies.  Jon kills her, and Drogon flies off with the body.  The entire “Mad Queen” storyline came right out of nowhere after the threat of the White Walkers was dealt with startlingly fast.  It seemed the writers wanted a twist ending, so the Night King was killed surprisingly fast, then Cersei surrendered so Daenerys, a generally kind, good-hearted person could spontaneously become the villain of the piece in the last two episodes.

The writers said in an Inside the Episode feature that when a Targaryen is born, the gods throw a coin and the world holds their breath.  When Daenerys was born, the gods threw a coin, and they allege it landed on madness.  I don’t buy that, because for seventy episodes, she had been a good, fair, just, kind ruler.  Sure, her callous disregard for abusers, rapists, and slavers might be a little cold, but in all fairness, it is hard to feel sympathy for abusers, rapists, and slavers.  Her love of the common people, slaves, and the poor has always been her predominant character trait.  It’s ridiculous to believe that suddenly, she’s just evil now.  The writers blame her flip-flop on her Targaryen genetics.  And maybe the history of inbreeding has damaged her genome some.  But then, if Targaryen genes are the problem, why would Jon be a better fit as king, like all the characters argue for?  He’s a Targaryen too, why has his coin landed on goodness?  It feels very much that he is trusted because he is a man with a penis. Varys says as much when he decides to support Jon over Daenerys, his status as a man will make him easier to support among the lords of Westeros.

In universe and in real life, Daenerys is torn down because she is a woman.  The writers turned her evil because of her seemingly random emotions, which is a stereotype about women, that they are too emotional to be in charge.  Daenerys is given no credit despite her humanitarian accomplishments, yet Jon is supported because he is a man.  To Daenerys, being a Targaryen is a mark against her, a sign of her madness.  To Jon, being a Targaryen is a mark of legitimacy, it makes him the rightful king of Westeros.  Furthermore, Jon’s legitimacy isn’t even all that important, because he gets randomly shipped off to the Wall and Bran becomes king anyway, so I guess both Jon and Daenerys were just red herrings all along.

In Conclusion:

Game of Thrones ended with a resounding whimper.  The defining television program of the last decade has ended, and most fans are just glad that it’s over.  Given the rushed pace of the last two seasons, the directors are probably just glad it’s over as well.  HBO offered them more money for more episodes, but they turned it down.  I’m not optimistic for their take on Star Wars in a few years.  I feel that the actors did their very best, and they deserve praise, but they had really bad material to work with.  And, ultimately, that is the point.  Game of Thrones, as a television show, is already showing its age, and it ended yesterday.  The early seasons especially are awful towards, in particular, women, and the casual abuse of women makes rewatching it unpleasant. Later seasons make wild changes to the plot from the books, the writing suffers as a result, and it feels that without source material, Benioff and Weiss can’t write an original story that respects the lore.  Hopefully George R. R. Martin will finish the final books, and we’ll get a more complete ending.  But for now, this show is what we have.

Allegedly, there are a few successor shows or prequels in the works. The one that has been more formally announced has a woman at the helm, and a woman in the role as the lead. With no specific source material, hopefully that will require more quick thinking, better writing, and better treatment of women.  The cast is far more diverse already.  Hopefully it stays that way.  The legacy left behind by this show will be complicated to navigate.  I have no interest in watching this show again.  Maybe I can get excited about a future project in this universe, but as things are, Game of Thrones was the defining show of the 2010s, and as it leaves its audience with a messy legacy of unfortunate implications in its treatment of the source material and its minority cast members, that is just a shame.

[absolxguardian]

Book of Ga-Huel/Age of the Amulet Lore masterpost

Instead of doing multiple posts about cool facts like I normally do with star wars books, I’m doing a masterpost instead. However, this one will only include new lore the two books have revealed, instead of character moments and the like I’ve marked. Anyway these two books are really good and you should read them! I’ll put all my comments under the cut because of length

The angry words popped into Spar the Spiteful’s mind as he charged through the humans’ pathetic excuse for a city. The Trollhunter never much cared for the hornless, helpless creatures Merlin had entrusted him to defend. And this new village of theirs—this “Sumer,” as they called it—paled woefully in comparison to the jeweled majesty of his own underground home, Glastonbury Tor Trollmarket. At least the Sumerians were asleep at this late hour and not around to bother Spar.

So from this, we can infer that Merlin, and the Trollhunters, predate the age of Arthurian legend. Which makes sense timeline wise, since the comic established that Kanjigar was the only trollhunter after Deya. And depending on how many trollhunters in Spar is, it’s possible that Merlin predates the agricultural revolution. Although that leads to the question of how Merlin was able to develop metalworking before the rest of the human species. It’s possible that the Island of Avalon exists in Trollhunter lore, which was home to technologically advanced magical humans like Merlin or Morgana. Although since historically Glastonbury Tor has been considered a location for Avalon, it could also be that the island doesn’t exist in trollhunter lore and the first Trollmarket is a stand-in. Trolls as a species also probably predate humans, which is probably why they ate them for so long. For a long time, they weren’t sentient, so the act wasn’t morally questionable.

The Amulet lit the tunnels like a torch. Spar crept down the passage, sweeping aside thick sheets of webs and keeping his Daylight Club at the ready.

The weapon of the amulet wasn’t always a sword (possibly because they hadn’t been invented yet), although Spar might have just been modifying his weapon with a gemstone.

“You . . . you are copying what these ancient walls show,” said Spar. “But how can they possibly show events that have just happened—events that have not yet come to pass?” 

“You’d have to ask their author,” answered the Troll, nodding to the carved likeness of the wizard. “He’s left them in countless caves across the surface world.”

Merlin created more future telling wall murals than just the ones located in his tomb.

“Sorta like A Brief Recapitulation of Gumm-Gumm Lore, huh?” joked Jim. 

“Just so, Master Jim,” Blinky confirmed. “The Gumm-Gumm’s former king, Orlagk the Oppressor, commissioned it after learning of the Venerable Bedehilde’s forty-seven volume magnum opus.”

All forty-seven volumes of A Brief Recapitulation of Troll Lore were written before the rise of Gunmar, although it’s possible Blinky is just misspeaking and not all the volumes were written before the book of Ga-Huel.

Despite himself, Draal could not help but feel sorry for Jim’s mother. He had sworn to protect Barbara to his dying day, much as he swore devout allegiance to the Trollhunter for sparing Draal’s life. The spiked Troll treated this bodyguard duty as the most important job of his very long existence, and intended to keep it just that—a job. But after months of secretly living in their basement, Draal had overheard how much Jim and Barbara truly loved each other. Their special bond often made Draal think about his own mother, Ballustra, and how much he missed her.

Draal has a mother (meaning trolls can have two parents), her name is Ballustra. And she’s dead.

“I’d hazard we’re here circa the year 70 CE on your funny human calendar,” said Boraz. “Actually, I know for a fact it’s 70 CE because that’s when . . . well, you’ll see!”

Moonlight shined down through the Colosseum’s open-air arena. Jim noticed how it reflected off their armor and asked, “Boraz, are . . . are we actually here?”

“HA!” roared Boraz. “Only in spirit, small one. In these Void Visitations, we may observe what has transpired. But none may see, hear, or touch us.

Boraz the Bold held the mantle of Trollhunter from after Spar’s death during the Sumarian age to around 70CE. Lucky guy, he survived for a really long time. Also, the spirits in the void can show living Trollhunters what happened in the past.

“Not where, human Trollhunter, but when!” corrected Unkar, who then paused, appearing momentarily confused. “Actually, I guess it’s where and when. Because we traveled through time and space and—look, kid, we’re in the Yucatán Peninsula around 200 CE, okay?”

Unkar the Unfortunate was the Trollhunter in 200CE. Despite this being before the Migration, troll settlements did exist in South America. 

“Correct,” said Kanjigar. “Although Gunmar had been vanquished to the Darklands by this point, the Janus Order still contracted these misguided humans to find and incinerate Bodus’s Last Rites. This, I could not allow.” 

The spirit nodded his horns to the side, and Jim saw the living Kanjigar steal into the castle through a tunnel dug by his gyre. The soldiers opened fire on the Trollhunter with their machine guns, but he deflected the hail of bullets with the flat of his Sword of Daylight.

Strickler/The Janus Order contracted Nazis to get them to burn Bodus’ Last Rites. The Sword of Daylight (and presumably the armor) can deflect bullets. Also, go Kanjigar the brutally efficient Nazi slayer!

It featured an old drawing of Jim in his armor, fighting for his life in the middle of an epic Gumm-Gumm war. The date inked below it read 501 CE.

This is just a hook for the next book, but based on Age of the Amulet, we can figure out that the rise of Gunmar and the death of Orlagk was in 501 CE.

The Gumm-Gumm flexed his claw, forcing strands of opaque energy to rise and weave into the jagged shape of a sword. Once it had solidified, Orlagk trained his Decimaar Blade on Tellad-Urr and said, “This one has a point.”

The Decimaar Blade originally belonged to Orlagk before Gunmar.

“England?” Jim marveled. “Blink, how can you be sure?” 

“Blinky from here,” AAARRRGGHH!!! said as he appeared over the next hill, carrying Toby and Claire on his back. “Well, under it.”

Blinky is from the Glastonbury Tor Trollmarket and is a young whelp during 501 CE (the past section the team is transported to).

Also, Tellad-Ur got really fed up with being a Trollhunter and became the only (known) evil trollhunter. He took over Trollmarket, imprisioning everyone who wouldn’t fight with him. He provided Gunmar with the metal, raided from human villages, to arm Gunmar’s rebels. He was defeated by a time traveling Jim, although the credit was given to the next trollhunter, Gogun. There’s no one quote for that because that’s the plot of the book.

“And Rundle sadly passed before Deya delivered us to the New World,” said Bagdwella.

Rundle probably died between the Battle of Killahead and the Great Migration

“So be it,” announced Kilfred, accepting the junk staff. “I shall lead you, and, together, we shall restore Trollkind to its former glory!” 

The assembled Trolls roared so loudly in approval, Steve and Eli jumped. The sudden movement reminded Kilfred of their presence. He pointed his new staff at the two humans and said, “Now let’s start by eating those two!”

Kilfred was very pro-eating humans. 

Blinky had squinted his many eyes as he and his two friends were pressed through the blinding tunnel of light and rock. Once they reached the other side, Blinky’s vision returned, and he beheld the Trollmarket in which he had grown up. It now seemed much smaller to the adult Blinky, although he easily recognized the purple Heartstone growing upside down from the cavern ceiling. 

The orginal hearstone was a stalgtite and also stayed around long after Gunmar’s birth. Although, this could be a second heartstone or they just still keep it around.

Impressed by Blinky’s ingenuity, the freed Trolls all dropped to their knees and bowed to their savior. Surprised by the sudden genuflection, Blinky said, “Great Gronka Morka!” 

“Great Gronka Morka!” repeated the worshipping Trolls. “Great Gronka Morka!”

 Blinky, Toby, and AAARRRGGHH!!! all looked to each other in surprise before the six-eyed Troll said, “I-I thank you for your praise, but please stop. My name is actually Bl—” 

“Great Gronka Morka! Great Gronka Morka!” chanted the liberated Trolls. “No, no, no,” Blinky dismissed impatiently. “Great Gronka Morka was a legendary wise Troll. A scholar, much like myself, with six eyes, also much like myself, who appeared out of the blue one day to lead one of the most famous jailbreaks in Troll legend and—”

Blinky is Great Gronka Morka! And the origin of the phrase/name is a paradox. The reason Blinky says it a lot, is probably because that's the troll hero that saved a young Blinky and Dictatious from prison.

AAARRRGGHH!!!’s runes faded as he stared the young Krubera in front of him. It was like looking into a mirror. The young Troll’s horns were stubbier and his shoulders were barely covered in mossy green fur, yet AAARRRGGHH!!! recognized the face, for it was his own. 

“You look . . . like me,” said teen AAARRRGGHH!!! before he decked his grown-up self.

Aaarrrgghh was taken during the time when Orglark ruled the Gumm-Gumms. So the whole kidnapping troll whelps isn’t a Gunmar thing. Also he had to fight himself at one point.

“Ah, a trio of Impures in our midst,” said Kilfred from atop the highest bleacher, wearing deflated dodgeballs on his horns like ornamental jewelry. “Bind them with the sacred trusses!”

Kilfred knows what a changeling is, so that means that they also predate Gunmar’s rule.

As they were shooed back to the past, Kilfred—who had been left rather traumatized by his visit to Arcadia—decided two things: One, he was cutting humans from his diet and going full-on vegetarian forthwith. And two, he was retiring from advising Trolls on how to live their lives.

So this would be how leadership of the Trollmarket passed from Kilfred to Rundle. 

[thoughts-of-telle]

Film Review of "The Book Thief"

To be honest, I knew that it was Death speaking even at the start of the movie. I had a hitch-- all of the clues were there. Death is unescapable. Death is what awaits you. Death is present at all disasters and friend of all villains, including the notorious Hitler, whom himself is "death". I am a big fan of documentaries and history; most of which are based from the horrors of war.

The story revolves itself to a young girl named Liesel Meminger. We saw her life in a war setting. From how it started in her journey with her brother in the train--which ultimately led to his brother's untimely demise, to her last moments in which all of the important people in her lives were showcased in a series of picture frames.

If you're gonna ask me, it sure was painful. Like every true-to-life war context movies, it is devastating. It felt like someone's has life just passed right through your eyes and it was devastating and wonderful at the same time to see various events happen in someone's life and I would never know how it feels because I would never live in a time of war. It's crazy how it feels so distant yet we could be so empathetic to something we never felt. It feels really heavy even though I am well-aware it's just fiction. The fact that it mirrors real-life struggles, plight, and how people could go and leave your life brought by circumstances we could not control is something that made this realistic. Well, for a fact it's is based from World War II so it really is true. Someone's life would be unknown to us. A Jew or a German or whoever's a victim of war, their lives will be left unknown, unless they're some heroes like Anne Frank or some survivors getting interviewed in the present era. I think that's the reason why people are engrossed to historical films, aside from the emotion it entails. We wonder if this is how they live before. Of course, just like the protagonist who has her own set of problems, characteristics and situations, we would like to know how the world is in her perspective. A perspective of a child.

A little bit of true facts, when Nazis gained full authority of Germany, it was a national obligation by everyone to teach children at the earliest age that the enemies were Jews and should they devote their whole selves to Germany, whether boys or girls. Imagine a child were brainwashed into thinking that they are superior to this or that. Simple manipulation of children so that the would become assets of the country. That was why I became worried if Liesel could understand why they are keeping a Jew or if she's trustworthy enough to keep a secret because she is also a devotee of Hitler. She was taught by her teachers in school about this. She sang hymns glorifying Hitler and villainizing Jews. But I was relieved that she didn't tell a soul. I found hope that even if adults manipulate children, they still have their own minds. They could judge and make their own choices, they could know the difference between right and wrong. Nevertheless, it would still be a harsh journey for a child who is still building his/her own foundations of values.

The climax for me was when Death walked through the Heaven Street. I didn't realize why he was narrating the dreams of people. It struck me once the bomb landed on the houses, especially on their house. My mouth was left agape. A part of me hoped that it wasn't them or that they are still alive, at least Liesel. Yes, she was alive but it was heart-wrenching to see her finding her parent and ultimately finding them dead. More of my hope was crushed because Rudy died too, but before he did, he wasn't able to say his last words. I could imagine how desperate Liesel was to hear his last words because he would never bee heard again. I was rooting for the both of them (although it wasn't a romance movie). One can only realize that they love the other once they're out of touch anymore. It's heart breaking as I recalled that Rudy wanted to grow up. He didn't wanna die. He wasn't even able to get the kiss he so wanted from the girl he likes. After Max and Hans left for military, she said that Rudy was the only one she has. The person she could only trust, was gone. And now, none was left, she was all alone. Good for her to find the wife of Burgermeister to be close with her, at least she'll have an adult to take care of her. I thought that was the ending, to be honest, but ending it with revealing Max is alive kept the hope in me alive. Overall, I was really satisfied with the plot and the ending. It deserved the awards that it received because it's truly a masterpiece. Hans is really clever at that part. I believed that if there's a will, there's a way, even in the tightest of situations.

The scene I liked the most was when the Nazi police came to check the basement. It gave a lot of tension and I kept on pausing the movie because my nerves can't handle the nervousness. For my favorite character, it's Rudy, of course. He was really patient and kept on entertaining Liesel even when she first got into Heaven Street. He stuck with her until the end. He was a loyal friend. I think he even got in love at first sight with her so he approached her the next day, but nevertheless, he was there to defend her against bullies and even kept her secret even though he knows it could endanger himself and his own family. Regardless if he has romantic feelings for her, he is a trustworthy friend. He was treasured by Liesel in the later years. "He was the lemon boy", that was my last straw for him, I burst into tears. Every character felt like family and everyone really played their role very well because I wouldn't be bawling my eyes out right now if they did not.

This movie is similar to The Boy with Striped Pajamas. Very much similar. Both are tearjerkers, set in World War II between Germans and Jews, and both are viewed in a child's perspective.

From that I realized that, no matter how complex the world is, it is viewed differently and much more simple by a child. Adults are driven by greed and own interests, while children view it by plain sight. As Liesel said, "We are people, that's what we do as people", she expresses confusion and manifests simplicity yet matureness as Hans notions that she is "all grown up". It was so simple for a child yet it took the matureness of an adult for someone to understand the simple concept of humanity.

Surely, after this movie, I would read the book for comparison but it's really nice too have this as an academic requirement. I enjoyed it and I had lots of realizations.

[jairanissi]

SERVING OUR PURPOSE (03062021)

Sometimes, I am trying to understand why God created me. Do I serve a purpose? During many points in my life, I am thinking that If I were to die on a specific day, maybe today, would it make a difference? Would people remember me? Would My picture be hanging in some historic place to remind people that once, I lived a life worthy of telling? Maybe I wont.

Looking back on how I lived my life, I can recall events and how painful those were. Somehow, now that I can see clearly, it made me realize that if I didnt go through that process, I wont be the woman I am today. God created me for a specific purpose. He created me to be used by Him. He called me to tell His message. Previously, I was just Jonah-ing my way out. I was running away pretending I don’t know, but really, I do.

In the past, I have stories that I am not proud of telling and from where I have experienced pain of many kind. And what does it prove? It has proven me one thing: God makes everything better in time. Us, people must go through a process of undressing ourselves of the things that are of the world and start clothing ourselves with spiritual values — values that leads directly to salvation.

We are already here. We are here because God paid a price. We must at least challenge ourselves that since we’re already here, we must seize being here. We should already start practicing our calling and own the title of being here as His children because He paid for that. He already died, buried, and rose again because of that.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” 1 Corinthians‬ ‭13:11‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Let us all remember that we are on the last days and we have no time playing games anymore. We should be done drinking milk and start eating meat by now. We are adults who should be doing things that we are always destined to do ever since we are young. Times of playing have gone. Times of slacking have passed. We are in the season where we should be working diligently to strengthen our faith.

Why? Because living our lives in accordance to the will of God is better. We can do things in our own way but nothing is going to fulfill us better than God. Let us fix our eyes only on Him so we dont notice anything else. Aim to have eyes so focused on God that when earthly things come dangling in front of us, we wont be tempted anymore. Release everything that blinds you, so you can see what God has in store. After all that has happened in your life, you will realize like I did, that God can still take you back, He can still wipe your slate clean with great compassion and so you can find your way again — free, doubtless, strong, bold and sure that in everyway you can, you will find a way to tell His story no matter what.

[veneziahqs]

𝓋𝑒𝓃𝒾𝒸𝑒 𝓌𝒶𝒾𝓉𝓈 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓎𝑜𝓊 ,   ambrose de pinto  /  keanu reeves  !  welcome  to  𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐳𝐢𝐚𝐡𝐪𝐬 ,  kit (  @moondrcps  )   !   we’re  super  excited  to  have  you  here  .   you  have  𝒕𝒘𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒚 𝒇𝒐𝒖𝒓 (  24  ) 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒔  to  read  our 𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒  𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑎𝑔𝑒  ,   and  then  send  in  your  account  .   we  hope  you’re  excited  for  your  stay  in   venezia  ,   italia, rumor  has  it  it’s  gonna  be  a  wild  one  .  

out of character:

name/alias: kit age (17+ only): 21 timezone: mdt pronouns: them/they activity level: everyday or every other day i’ll manage to shoot out a few replies… pew pew.  will you have a mumu blog or separate character blogs?: (simon cowell vc) it’s a mumu from me.  coke or pepsi:  pepsi lads pasta or pizza: pizza and absolutely no self control

in character:

application: ｡.｡:+* 【 keanu reeves; cismale, he/him, & 51 / 3,801 】looks a hell lot like【 ambrose de pinto 】, dontcha think? with them being a 【 vampire 】, i wouldn’t suspect their favorite 【 book 】 to be 【 death of a naturalist by seamus heaney 】, but i’ve seen them checking it out on the water taxi to【 san marco 】district. they’re a【 vineyard owner 】and supposedly known as the【 historian 】of the town, so i’m personally keeping an eye out for them. 〔 kit 〕

extra things: tag && pinterest board.

affiliations: ambrose is the leader of the founding family de pinto. he is very protective over his family and is always looking out for their best interest. he is by no means an authoritarian leader, he allows and fully encourages each member to act as they wish to as long as they don’t break the core rules of the family. he wants to see them thrive and that’s why he’s working to create the serum– he hopes to take his family forward with it. 

brief writings: 

bio: 

Ambrose was a vineyard worker centuries before he owned one. He was raised in poverty and didn’t receive a higher education, instead, he went to work with his father as early as a thirteen-year-old. His family was of average size: three children, including himself, who was the oldest. He helped his parents make money so his two younger sisters could go to school and did everything to support them. From an early age, Ambrose was very protective of his family.

He worked at the vineyards for what would’ve been most of his life if he hadn’t been attacked. It happened on a late winter evening, the sun gone hours ago, as Ambrose finished a late shift. He was already in his fifties with a wife and two children. His wife had fallen ill during those cold weeks and was bedbound, which meant that all of the responsibility fell on him to keep the house running. Of course, his children were young adults now, so his need to worry wasn’t grand. Until the attack. Right, the attack that happened on that day.

He and his wife died, but his wife a few weeks later than him. Ambrose… not really, not fully. He was thought to be dead after being mauled to death by a wild animal but he regained health and rose from his grave, quite terrifying enough.

It was a vampire who attacked him and thought it would be pretty neat to let him live (this is me being inspired by What We Do In The Shadows). Ambrose found that out pretty early on by his standards. Unfortunately, his children were a witness to it all after their mother, his wife, passed away from her illness. Seeing as they had buried both of them in their backyard, Ambrose didn’t know what to do– he knew that as he was, he would outlive his children and that meant watching them die like he watched his beloved die. He couldn’t bear it, he wouldn’t, so with their consent, he turned them.

That is how the found family, De Pinto, began. He spent his early years of being a vampire figuring it out; deciding what he’d do now to support his kids, how he would teach them to drink human blood. He was always an empathetic man, someone who never wished harm upon others, however, he had no choice. So Ambrose shifted his morals and went for the criminals, for the wrongdoers, for the ones he thought wouldn’t be missed. Some would say he played God, killing the men and then bleeding them out so his children wouldn’t have to drink directly from the body.

It was only after a few decades that Ambrose pursued the education he never received in his human years. He learned to read and write and fell in love with the acts; a century later, he became a historian. He’s gone after many different names in his life, all of the historians who are known today for preserving some of the most important parts of history and historical figures– some of which he knew in person.

Along the way, his family grew. The blood relation in the De Pinto family only spreads to his children, the rest were adopted, however, he treats each individual as he does his bloodline. He is not overly fond of turning others and is extremely careful with it, having strict family rules about it. He knows how difficult it is to live as a vampire; to suddenly have your morals changed, to learn what an immortal life feels like. He would rather let someone die than turn them into a vampire, but there have been exceptions made along the way (which will be plotted with the family!).

Ambrose has never gone too astray from the man he once was. He’s worked extremely hard to keep faithful to himself even though he has certainly felt bloodthirsty and acted upon it for a stage in his life– it happens, sometimes– sometimes, he still murders. Mostly, though, he has it so that the De Pinto’s drink from frozen blood bags, provided from local hospitals and clinics. He does not endorse murder in any way, shape, or form. He wants his family to be good even when others might say that it’s not in their nature to do so, just like they’ll say that it’s not in their nature to be out in the sun for longer than five hours.

The truth is, Ambrose misses the sun. He misses the way it would burn the back of his neck on the summer days spent working in the vineyards, he misses outdoor meals with his family in the spring, the few hours they would get in the winter. Five hours a day is not enough. He wants to spend longer in the vineyards. He wants to read for hours under the shade of a tree and then to stretch his legs with a stroll, collecting grapes, saying hello to the workers and staying for a conversation. Five hours is not nearly enough for everything he wants to do, for everything he wants his family to independently achieve.

His mansion has a vast library. Ambrose has been a lecturer in universities and independent seminars before. He knows that being in the public eye is not wise, for people will start to notice that he does not age which is why he only gives lectures every dozen decades that pass when there’s no chance of running into his previous students. He’s an extremely private person and it’s very difficult to get a seat in his talks since the room is usually small, all of which is done on purpose so that he limits the number of people who meet him. Outside of giving lectures in public halls and wandering in the vineyards, however, Ambrose doesn’t go out much. He likes being in the comfort of the De Pinto house above all.

for events: it planted a seed of panic in ambrose. he privately fussed over his family, making sure that they kept safe and free of harm. he mourns the destruction of peoples homes as well as the recent deaths that have him on high-alert. the flood caused some damage to his own business, the expansive vineyards, and he’s busy picking up what’s left, working it through with his clients and employees, though he’s much more concerned about what the big picture of it is. seeing the arrival of the demons and angels has him worrying about what the future holds for them and how they can avoid any more casualties and terror. 

inner thoughts: ambrose has always been a live and let live fellow, which is why he doesn’t particularly fancy the hunters. he knows that they can be helpful sometimes, like when beings go astray and murder innocent people, but he would much rather keep them at a distance. otherwise, he doesn’t have any ill feelings towards the other species. he believes in peaceful co-existance and has respect for every living being. he is particularly fond of regular humans for the most part, though.  

relationships: i’m extremely interested in developing the dynamics within the de pinto family! i also want to build connections between ambrose and the other founding family leaders, whether it be (most likely) positive or negative. since he gives lectures, i’d also be interested in having a few pupil connections that stem outside of his family. when it comes to specific ones, i’d like a deep connection with other beings that have been around as long or longer than he has– one or two others (outside of his family) who he has known for centuries that at this point their relationship goes beyond the regular dynamics. i find that it would also be hilarious if he had a FWB whomst he only hooked up with once every decade or so. oh! and of course, a researcher who is helping the family develop the sun serum. 

[thisisasupergoodidea]

alright, this took forever because i kept getting sidetracked, but here it is. the universe ive slowly been building up. it took so long to write. its so ridiculously lengthy. i almost want to apologize to you if you read it oh my god 
the main story in this universe is project four, in which four people meet Death and tag along on its quest to convince a space wyrm not to eat the world. the death figure, kymoyef, evades capture for nearly 1000 years following the event that takes place in the four cities, observing people and steadily learning about the world as it stores energy for the big confrontation. as an energy being in the form of an object, kymoyef struggles with applying the concept of personhood to itself, but the four people who insert themselves into its business help it understand who it wants to be
kymoyef’s companions love to ask questions and tell stories, one of which is an old folk tale about morality that they know as the four cities. in it, a godlike character asks kymoyef to visit four corrupt cities and raze them to the ground should their corruption be confirmed, so that the seeds of new civilization can be sown in their place. kymoyef goes to the first three places and, finding vanity, enmity, and apathy, destroys them without question. but upon reaching the fourth city and encountering suffering and hopelessness, kymoyef begins to question whether any of these people truly deserved erasure. it refuses to complete its task and instead goes into hiding to plot against the godlike character. kymoyef reveals that this tale is (generally) true 
then i began fussing over details and ended up developing a plot within Sorrowstone, the city of suffering and hopelessness, where i show up close just how depressing it is through the perspective of a newcomer named rin. he joins the camp (which has no name historically since no one remembers it really existed) to escape his past and soon realizes that his stay would be permanent. the endless labor, the bleak and isolated environment, the meager food and supplies, the rampant depression of every other person in the camp - all of this combined prevented anyone from being of sound mind enough to leave. rin sees one death and promptly decides he has a duty to write down everything he observed, whether anyone would ever see it or not. that is the sorrowstone account 
ok. back to the top. one of the four protagonists, caforleh, absolutely loves hearing stories and using them as inspiration for his own grand tales. i really wanted to feel justified in brainstorming for a completely separate project that had nothing to do with project four, so i clapped my hands together and declared that caforleh occasionally works on a piece of fiction that is my project inheritance, in which generation after generation of a particular lineage of siblings are all cursed to the same fate. in their lives, only and always two children will be born, quite often twins, and one will die by the actions of the other at some point. the most recent siblings are separated at a very young age after the murder of their mother, but years later one dies all too suddenly and the adults involved are sent into a panic trying to hide it from the other sibling. magic shit happens and basically you have the dead ones consciousness in the body of their sibling, not realizing theyre dead yet technically alive again, and the living ones consciousness is bound to a piece of paper in a wizard’s pocket. and everyone’s trying to run away from a cult faction that wants their leader back, but surprise, the living sibling was their leader. its a convoluted mess 
in the background of this mess i found a nice little home for the magic pendant, a story that is literally just my 11th grade spanish project. a guy has a cool magic pendant. some magic dude steals it. the guy and his friend get a magic knife from a magic squirrel and kick magic dudes ass. so magical. i took that and pumped in extra details that made me happy, and now its officially enough of a story to be included 
once more to the top. within the world of project four, one of the regions is plagued by a deep rift that scarred the land when scientist daiah’s experiment went horribly wrong. it swallowed several cities and poisoned the people and land around it. the survivors call that area daiah’s shame and send excommunicated criminals there to die as punishment. what they have yet to discover is that the rift is truthfully a tear upon their plane of existence, acting as an opening into an adjacent plane where pure energy resides. the land and people lost in the experiment fell into this other plane perfectly intact, but being that the two planes were never meant to interact in this way, were shortly infected with unknowable ailments. people slowly lost their sanity, their agency, anything that made them who they were. they either became husks or sought violence to distract themselves from their own pain. and the only freedom was to be killed, for time affected nothing in this plane. no one could grow old. the sky never moved. plants absorbed strange air and gnarled into bloated bastardizations 
this is the reality that the protagonists of project dark souls ripoff fell into. wayrain had been traveling with a known criminal through daiah’s shame in the hopes of reaching a region beyond it, and his friend cadmor was secretly a member of law enforcement tasked with making sure the criminal died there. when this was revealed, the three fought and all of them stumbled into the rift to be spat out in the desolate climate of the lost region. i was heavily inspired by dark souls in creating all of this, so honestly just imagine the opening scene of whichever dark souls game and you’ve got the idea of it. wayrain and cadmor have to navigate this sickly area that theyve hardly even heard stories of while also dealing with dangerous people, feeling betrayed by one another, and creeping afflictions. much like rin and caforleh, wayrain takes to learning as much as he possibly can about the surroundings and compiling it all into journals. he travels ceaselessly and does his best to uncover every last mystery, from lost libraries to unmarked graves. cadmor battles his imitation morality as he eases into another role of leadership. the two will clash several times but ultimately reconcile before kymoyef shows up to assess the condition of the rift 
and project fire girl is kinda out of place because it feels entirely standalone, but its actually the origin of most of this stuff, so im hoping i can find a way to squeeze it in somehow. its about a person who wakes up in a fire with no knowledge of how she got there and wanders around aimlessly dealing with the destructive repercussions of her mysterious fire powers, which she can barely control. i know. its sort of like frozen but with fire. but hey spoiler alert: she’s actually a wizard scientist (you can tell i really like my wizards and scientists) that, alongside her cousin, did awful experiments on people in the name of magic science, imbuing them with different forms of magic just to see what happens. and she gave herself fire powers because why the hell not. but the internal flame was so painful that the trauma of it elicited amnesia. she regains these memories in time by meeting the people plagued by the consequences of her actions. not knowing shes the one that did this to them, they work together with her and carry out a plan to expose the other wizard scientist. in the final confrontation, she admits that she regrets what shes done even if the academic community learned a lot from it, and allows herself to be imprisoned 
yeah. like i said, project fire girl was the first narrative in this universe, which came from a dream where she was taken in by an old couple and their adopted daughter and awoke in a bed of bright petals, only to realize that she accidentally set the house on fire in her sleep, killing the whole family. the imagery was so vivid that it stuck with me. project four originated from one of my old minecraft worlds that i unfortunately deleted by mistake and then tried to rebuild. but i couldnt remember what the old build was called so i called it arenos, and that became the first region. once i decided that fire girl was gonna be set in some mountains and that those mountains bordered arenos, i was officially on my way to creating what is now this world. and then more detail happened and kymoyef happened and the concept of the four cities being parallels to the four regions in the world sounded neat but i got carried away and wanted to try to recreate the four cities in minecraft, and only did sorrowstone, so i started to think of what depressing shit went on in that place and wrote a little bit about it 
the dark souls ripoff is, of course, a blatant ripoff of dark souls, but its also a combination of A) another neat dream i had that was just two people traveling on horseback through cold morning fog and being ambushed - one was killed and the other crawled to a nearby basement and hid for an eternity, until the landscape had entirely changed hundreds of years later - and B) a totally separate dream where two people were traveling on horseback through cold evening fog, trying to reach some uncertain destination after having to leave their entire lives behind because they were magic. i was like “i’ve just added two more regions to my world. what if this region has a big rift in it - oh, what if this person hid through the rift incident that sent them to an alternate plane - no wait, what if these other characters were traveling through the rift area and fell in?” 
project inheritance was first called dark souls ripoff 2 because it deals with souls being portable and consumable and the two siblings have to deal with increasing insatiability for souls to keep themselves alive after having their consciousnesses ripped from their bodies. but this story was originally gonna be a text adventure game with like seven hundred endings (im exaggerating a little) testing your ability to forgive and manage your bloodlust. i know. its like a bootleg undertale. i cant have an original thought even if that thought happened two years before the popular thing happened 
thats about it i guess. thats the beginners guide to my utterly incomplete creative endeavors. i have some other ideas that would be neat to pursue but they dont belong in this particular universe as of right now. i might find a way to make them fit. i might not