#why do so many people deliberately misunderstand her character

[scoopsgf]

beedee!! i love your blog so very much!

i was watching s4 ep 12 of gg and i couldn’t help but see the parallels between rory and jess and her observing the breakdown of paris and jamie’s relationship. she sees jamie trying to communicate the way that she tried to communicate. she watches paris avoid him the way jess avoided her. she promises jamie “it will get better” in a way that sounds like she’s actually trying to convince herself. she’s an empathetic person who cares about others, why wouldn’t she feel for jamie, however it finally dawned on me that she probably sees a lot of herself in him, deeply in love with someone who, as far as she knows, has already moved on. and of course rory sees jess for the first time since he left, that weekend. she sees herself as jamie: naive, foolish, and utterly left behind. the subtext is heartbreaking 😭😭😭

oh my god oh my god i never noticed this but you’re so right?? analyzing s4 through the lens of rory’s depression and heartbreak over jess leaving is just… so revealing. her going back to dean was the culmination of a series of events: her mom telling her to date and rory automatically seeking out a bunch of guys that remind her of jess, rory seeing a mirror of what happened with her and jess through paris and jamie, jess coming back not once but twice and rory balking at his plea for her to run away with him—even though she missed him so much it ached, even though he told her he loved her and then walked away because all that mattered was that she knew, even though she spent the last year bottling up all of her feelings because lorelai wouldn’t understand and lane didn’t get it and she couldn’t talk to luke about it because he was just as bruised as she was. even though deep down she probably wanted to, but couldn’t risk being hurt again. hence dean: he was the “safe” and “reliable” guy who stuck around SH no matter what, who sought after rory even when he was married (which meant he was still interested, and a girl who’s left behind by a boy she loves is naturally gonna wonder if she’s worth loving, if she’s worth wanting). rory sleeping with dean isn’t her trying to sabotage a marriage, it’s not her “choosing” dean, it’s just… her being a sad, broken 19 year old girl, who’s lost and thinks she’s not worth sticking around for (which jess just compounded given chris has treated her life like a revolving door ever since she was a baby). it’s an expression of her desperation and her depression. FUCK.

[yamayuandadu]

Tenshō Daijin: the many guises of medieval Amaterasu (part 1)

I’ve been working on this article on and off since late 2021, and it’s the longest one I’ve published on my blog so far (some of my wikipedia contributions are bigger, but that’s a separate matter). In fact, it's so long I have to split it into two due to limitations of tumblr's post editor.

When most people speak of “Japanese mythology”, 99% of the time they effectively think just of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (with some night parade scrolls sprinkled in, maybe, even though that’s not really mythology, but Edo period popular entertainment). The goal of this article is to challenge this incorrect view, and to shed some light on the mythology of the Japanese “middle ages” -  roughly between the 11th and the 16th centuries. I decided to use Amaterasu as the main topic, as it’s hard to think of a better way to showcase how much mythology remains outside the general perception than using a figure who, at least at first glance, is well known as an example. From Brahma longing for a friend to Yang Guifei surviving own death, I’m sure everyone will find something new here. Myths obviously aren’t all that will be covered here, though. I’ll also discuss the theological doctrines which flourished in the middle ages, with a particular emphasis on honji suijaku, their social context, and more. You will be able to find out what rituals focused on Amaterasu had to do with Enma and Taizan Fukun, how economic woes of the Outer Shrine of Ise impacted Brahma’s role in Japan, why some secrets existed only to be deliberately revealed, and more.

Kami and Buddhism

In order to discuss the development of Amaterasu’s character and her associations with other figures through the middle ages, as well as the myths which developed as a result, I’ll first need to summarize the nature of interactions between kami and Buddhism through the Nara, Heian and medieval periods. I’m specifically saying kami, as opposed to Shinto, for reasons which will become clear later. It seems that at first the relation was rather standard as far as early interactions between Buddhism and preexisting religious traditions in areas where it was introduced go. Mark Teeuwen singles out Tibet and various kingdoms corresponding to parts of present day Myanmar as examples particularly similar, though obviously not identical, to early Japan. The parallel developments concerned the Bön faith in the former and the beliefs pertaining to the nat in the latter. The early sources appear to indicate that kami were envisioned as beings who need to strive towards enlightenment themselves. Recitation of sutras was described as a way to bring them closer to that state. However, some rather quickly started to be viewed as active protectors of Buddhism. As early as 741 Hachiman was already regarded as such, for instance. Additionally, combinative “shrine-temples” already existed in the same period too, attesting to a fusion of Buddhism and preexisting tradition.

A schematic representation of some examples of the honji suijaku from the Kasuga mandala (wikimedia commons)

A breakthrough occurred in the ninth century, with the development of honji suijaku (本地垂迹) - the theory on kami being “traces” or “emanations” (suijaku) of Buddhist figures, referred to as “original sources” (honji). Similar theories regarding Daoist figures were at times advanced by Chinese Buddhist scholars as early as in the fifth century, so it was hardly an unparalleled development, though its scope was fairly unique. By the end of the Heian period, honji suijaku became the default mode of understanding kami.

A common misunderstanding today is that honji suijaku meant exact correspondence between a single Buddha and a single kami. In reality, what it created is a “fluid pantheon”, to borrow the title of one of Bernard Faure’s books dealing with this phenomenon. Connections between specific kami and Buddhas (or bodhisattvas) certainly were often established. However, that was not all. 

Kami could be connected to other kami, and Buddhas to other Buddhas; and on top of that both groups belonged to an elaborate network which also included devas, wisdom kings, astral deities, legendary heroes and historical figures from various countries (for example Daoist immortals), and beings which defy classification altogether. In Keiran Shūyōshū (溪嵐拾葉集), the notion of honji suijaku is even extended to silkworms (their honji is Aśvaghoṣa). Multiple identifications could coexist, sometimes in the same sources. On top of that, individual figures could change classification depending on context.

The new theological ideas also lead to the formation of new myths, collectively referred to as chūsei shinwa (中世神話; “medieval mythology”). As summarized by Sujung Kim, this term encompasses both the myths which arose in the Japanese “middle ages”, the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1185-1600), and modern study of them. A closely related, though more narrow, term is chūsei nihongi (中世日本紀), which refers specifically to reinterpretations of preexisting classical myths, for example Nihon Shoki, from the same times.

One of the primary goals of the new myths was to create a metaphorical bridge between Japan and the lands described in Buddhist literature transmitted from China, Korea and beyond. Sutras and other literature were often set in fabulous distant kingdoms or in supernatural realms. At the same time, the material reality of Buddhism tied it to local institutions and landscape. As a result, the local was imbued with a new, universal meaning.

As Mark Teeuwen put it in his article The Buddhist Roots of Japanese Nativism, medieval literature “allowed a local warlord to pose as a golden cakravartin, a local mountain to take on the guise of the cosmic Mt. Sumeru, a local deity to embody an aspect of the World Buddha, and a local rite to aspire to the universal aim of bringing salvation to all sentient beings.” At the same time, the universal gained a local dimension, making it easier to grasp and more approachable.

However, that was hardly the end, more like the beginning  - yet another prominent change which occurred over the course of the 12th and 13th centuries resulted in the formation of a new belief: select kami were in fact not emanations of secondary importance of Buddhist figures, but direct representations of enlightenment. These developments eventually culminated in what is sometimes described as “reverse honji suijaku”: Buddhas and bodhisattvas were merely manifestations of primordial kami, not the other way around.

The motivations behind the development of these ideas are not clear. While especially in the past it was commonly assumed that they represented the beginning of a “pristinely Japanese” spirituality reasserting itself against “foreign” Buddhism, most of the theologians involved were Buddhists themselves, or at least enthusiastically drew inspiration from Buddhist sources. Mark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli suggest they might have been motivated by a desire to take Buddhist theology to logical extremes in order to investigate the nature of reality before the emergence of the first Buddha and the current kalpa.

Furthermore, in addition to lofty theological speculation material motivations might have been at play. Many of the advocates of reverse honji suijaku might have been so-called “shrine monks”, tasked with maintaining the shrine parts of religious complexes. Possibly their need for broader recognition and greater authority made them keen on such theological reversals. This is ultimately speculative, though.

Curiously, reverse honji suijaku arguably might have led to the creation of Shinto in the modern sense. While the phrase 神道 has a long history, and it is applied to intellectual and religious movements active in the middle ages in modern literature (for example, the treatises of a certain priestly family I’ll discuss are often called “Watarai Shinto”), there is no strong evidence that it was commonly understood as shintō in the modern sense - a distinct religious tradition - predating an explicit statement in a treatise from 1419 written by the Tendai monk Rysōhen dealing with these topics. In the earliest sources the default reading was jindō, referring not exactly to a distinct system of beliefs, but rather to a “realm”of kami ultimately existing in Buddhist context. While Shinto did eventually develop into the tradition which came to define the kami, through the middle ages and the Edo period which followed, honji suijaku was the dominant paradigm, and permeated all spheres of society.

The early history of Amaterasu: sun, textiles and longing for companionship

An Edo period painting of Amaterasu emerging from the cave, by Kunisada Utagawa (wikimedia commons)

While the explanation of the basic nomenclature and a crash course in interactions between Buddhism and kami is now out of the way, before I’ll be able to move on to the impact of the medieval ideas on Amaterasu I need to briefly summarize her earlier history.

Through the article I will simply use the name Amaterasu consistently. However, it should be noted that the standard form of the name, 天照大神, in the middle ages and in the Edo period was often read not as Amaterasu Ōkami, but rather as Tenshō Daijin, in accordance with on’yomi or “Sino-Japanese” sign values. Therefore, don’t be surprised that this is the version used in titles of historical works mentioned. As a curiosity it is worth mentioning that this is actually the reading used fairly consistently in the first western source with reasonably reliable information about Amaterasu (unless I missed something even earlier), Engelbert Kaempfer's History of Japan from 1727. 

On a similar note, I generally stick to describing Amaterasu as female. However, it needs to be pointed out that through the middle ages and in the Edo period male Amaterasu is also attested, depending on the source either replacing the female version or coexisting with her. Some modern authors go as far as speculating if Amaterasu wasn’t originally seen as male prior to being redefined as female, but this is not really fully provable. The existence of a tradition according to which Amaterasu manifested in male form is already mentioned by the Tendai monk Jien (1155-1225). There are also sources providing ambiguous information about Amaterasu’s gender. In at least some cases such phenomena were a result of identification with figures either regarded as male or portrayed as androgynous in art, as I outlined in a recent article discussing the case of Amaterasu and Uho Dōji (who won’t be brought up here in any meaningful capacity, since I'm not going to focus on the Edo period). It’s not really possible to make a blanket statement on this matter, though.

Additionally it’s important to bear in mind that identification between two figures could transcend the gender of the parties involved. As you’ll see later, there were even cases of Amaterasu’s identification with a male figure actually resulting in traditions particularly strongly emphasizing her typical gender.

The Inner Shrine at Ise in 2008 (wikimedia commons)

Throughout her entire history Amaterasu has been associated with Ise and its Grand Shrine. According to the Nihon Shoki, that’s where she originally descended from heaven to earth, and where she later returned in order to be enshrined. The term “Ise Grand Shrine” actually refers to a complex centered on two major shrines, though, and only one of them, the Inner Shrine (内宮, naikū), is dedicated to Amaterasu. The kami of the Outer Shrine (外宮, gekū) is instead Toyouke.

The earliest history of Amaterasu is effectively unknowable due to lack of available sources. While she does appear both in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki in a central role, both of these works only date to the eighth century, and their historicity is often at best dubious. When exactly was her shrine originally established is a matter of debate: supporters of treating Nihon Shoki literally argue for 4 BCE (during the reign of the legendary emperor Suinin), but historians and archeologists favor more vague dating to either the fourth, fifth or seventh century. The earliest detailed records of specific religious ceremonies at Ise can only be found in an administrative protocol compiled in 804.

Historically it was quite popular among researchers to essentially assume being a personification of the sun is all there ever was to Amaterasu’s character, and that she derives her importance entirely from her solar role. Today this view is no longer accepted quite as firmly, and it is even sometimes questioned if this was necessarily her original function, though this is ultimately neither entirely provable nor fully relevant here. 

Obviously, the classical Amaterasu also served as a royal deity presented as an ancestor of Japan’s imperial lineage. She was also treated as a symbolic source of its authority by extension of her role as a heavenly ruler commanding the kami. This is an example of the well documented phenomenon of clan kami (氏神, ujigami). However, based on archeological data Ise was not particularly important early on in Japanese history, and the area around it was sparsely populated as late as in the seventh century On top of that it would appear that, if the early texts are to be believed, emperors actually had an ambivalent relationship with her. It has been suggested that her classical position was only established during the reign of emperor Tenmu in the late seventh century, perhaps due to his personal connection to clans from the Ise area.

It’s important to stress here that on multiple occasions in history, in particular recent history, the connection between Amaterasu and emperors was channeled to nationalist and imperialist purposes. For instance, the Japanese colonial government in Korea funded the construction of a complex enshrining Amaterasu and emperor Meiji in the 1920s, and subsequently legally obliged students (among others) to attend ceremonies held there to foster loyalty. 

The Outer Shrine in 2015 (wikimedia commons)

A key moment in the early history of Amaterasu was the introduction of the kami Toyouke (豊宇; literally “abundant food”) to Ise. A legend about her arrival is preserved in the aforementioned administrative protocol from 804. According to it, Amaterasu appeared to emperor Yūryaku (second half of the fifth century, if his historicity is to be accepted) in a dream to let him know that she is distressed and lonely, and on top of that can’t receive offerings of food according to proper protocol. She explained that the only way to solve all of these problems is to bring her a kami responsible for divine food (御饌津神, miketsu kami), Toyouke, who is to be found in Hiji no Manai in the Tanba Province. Thanks to this precise guidance, the emperor was able to instantly solve the problem, and Toyouke was moved to Ise, where she symbolically took the responsibility for food offered to Amaterasu. 

Presumably, the legend contains at least a kernel of truth, and Toyouke was initially enshrined in a facility meant to fulfill a specific ritual role for the Inner Shrine, which in time grew to rival it in size and importance. Save for these details, much about the early history of Toyouke is even more unclear than in the case of Amaterasu, though. She is only mentioned in passing in the Kojiki under the name Toyoukehime no Kami (豊受姫神) in the account of the birth of Wakumusubi no Kami (和久産巣日神), one of the many kami who came into being as a result of Izanami’s death. However, this passage does not provide any information about her character, it merely states that she is Wakumusubi’s child. This tradition was of limited, if any, interest to the Outer Shrine clergy through the middle ages, as I’ll later demonstrate.

While Wakumusubi also appears in the Nihon Shoki, though with a slightly different genealogy, Toyouke is entirely absent from this work. You can find a claim on the contrary in Michael Como’s Weaving and Binding. Immigrant Gods and Female Immortals in Ancient Japan, but he essentially treats Ukemochi as identical with Toyouke and asserts the myth about Tsukuyomi killing the former is effectively about the latter. It doesn’t seem like any subsequent publications picked up this idea.

The final early source of information about Toyouke is the Tango no Kuni Fudoki (丹後国風土記; “Records of the Tango Province”). It presents her as one of eight “heavenly women” (天津乙女, amatsuotome) who at some point arrived at a spring near Mount Hiji to bathe. An old couple stole the clothes of one of them, rendering her unable to return to heaven. They subsequently ask her to become their daughter, since they have no children. She agrees, and for ten years lives with them, brewing sake which could magically heal “ten thousand ills”. The old man and woman prosper thanks to her. However, they eventually decide to tell her that she is not really their child, and should go back to heaven. She tells them that she has lived among humans for so long this is not an option for her anymore, and leaves in anger. She only calms down after reaching a different village, Nagu, where she is eventually enshrined under the variant name Toyoukanome no Mikoto (豊宇賀能売命). Due to involving a heavenly being having to stay on earth due to her clothes being stolen, this myth has been compared to the better known Hagoromo. Michael Como also argues that it might reflect the perception of Toyouke as a Daoist immortal (hence her ability to bew something akin to the fabled Daoist alchemical elixirs meant to prolong life), similarly to how the legend of Urashima Taro does. While I found his Nihon Shoki argument somewhat dubious as I said, I think this is an interesting point which warrants further study. Similar possibility about Toyouke’s character has been suggested by Bernard Faure too.

It’s also worth noting a possible reference to the Tango no Kuni Fudoki myth has been identified in a painting of the two shrines of Ise from the collection of Shōryakuji, a Buddhist temple located in Nara (seen above; screencapped from Talia J. Andrei's Mapping Sacred Spaces: Representations of Pleasure and Worship in Sankei Mandara, for educational purposes only). It depicts eight female figures standing on a cloud around a container used to make sake in the proximity of the Outer Shrine.

Amaterasu and Buddhism: the ambivalent beginnings

Early sources pertaining to Ise discussed in the previous section are invaluable when it comes to Amaterasu’s position and her connection with Toyouke, but they don’t really shed any light on the development of associations between her and Buddhist figures. Quite the opposite - they indicate that around the year 800, even basic Buddhist terms like “pagoda”, “monk” or “sutra” were considered taboo (忌み, imi) by priests of the Inner Shrine, much like these pertaining to conventional sources of religious impurity like violence, death or illness. However, Mark Teeuwen notes at the same time these very priests most likely took part in Buddhist ceremonies themselves, and there is even some evidence that in the eighth century a Buddhist temple existed in Ise.

The reasons behind the implementation of the taboo were likely largely political, rather than strictly religious. For context: in the second half of the eighth century, empress Shōtoku famously appointed Buddhist monks to various prestigious positions in the royal court. Dōkyō from the Hossō school was even temporarily elevated basically to the rank of her equal (though he eventually fell from grace). This was generally poorly received by other officials, who might have viewed it as an attempt at establishing Buddhist theocracy in place of hereditary monarchy. This in turn likely led to tensions and fueled various succession controversies in subsequent decades. Further problems, like untimely deaths or exile of various members of the imperial family, kept accumulating, and by 804 the prestige of the court was severely damaged. Furthermore, there is evidence that there were various economic conflicts of interest between the Ise clergy and local Buddhist monks.

A sixteenth century painting of emperor Kanmu (wikimedia commons)

Since the oldest source to mention the taboo is an administrative, rather than religious, text, it is not impossible that it was intended by emperor Kanmu as a way to diffuse all these social and political tensions. Mark Teeuwen suggests his goal might have been a way to restore the prestige of his family and create a center of symbolic ancestral cult which would offer him additional legitimacy independent from the Buddhist establishment residing in Nara, which was crucial for many of the previous emperors. As a lifelong student of Confucian philosophy, he likely found many models to draw from in Chinese texts. His vision of Ise was presumably that of an ancestral mausoleum.

Regardless of Kanmu’s decisions, in the long run Buddhism retained its influence in royal affairs. In fact, it was arguably this emperor himself who indirectly caused its revitalization. In 804, he sent two young monks, Saichō and Kūkai, to China. They returned with something previously largely unknown in Japan: esoteric Buddhism. The new schools they established, Tendai and Shingon, captivated the imagination of virtually all strata of society in the nascent middle ages. 

Amaterasu, too, came under esoteric Buddhist influence, and gained new roles, often completely detached from her earlier character - or at the very least from the part of it firmly tied just to the ruling family. Mark Teeuwen partially jokingly refers to this chapter in her history as an “escape” from Ise and notes that for a time she has “shaken off the imperial shackles”. There was a material aspect to these processes in addition to the purely theological considerations. In the Kamakura period, the role of warrior classes grew and the imperial court weakened. As a result, the Ise clergy - the Arakida clan of the Inner Shrine and the Watarai clan of the Outer Shrine - gained greater autonomy. The emperors weren’t able to enforce a symbolic monopoly on Ise, which therefore no longer served just as a center of ancestral cult. The downside was the loss of most of the imperial funding, which necessitated innovation to secure other sources of patronage.

The Ise taboos established earlier were not exactly abandoned, but the clergy found ways around them in order to enable Amaterasu to thrive in this new environment. A summary of the theological solution they developed is provided in Nakatomi Harae Kunge (中臣祓訓解; “Reading and Explanation of the Nakatomi Purification Formula) from the late twelfth century: “although on the surface performing ceremonies which are different from the Buddhist teachings, [Amaterasu] in essence protects the Buddhist laws.” Additionally, a myth reinterpreting one of the most famous episodes from the entire Buddhist canon, but with Amaterasu as a new protagonist, was developed to justify the taboo’s existence. I’ll discuss it in a separate section later on.

The reinvention was evidently successful. There is little evidence for widespread worship of Amaterasu in earlier periods. She was effectively little more than a royal deity. Even courtiers had limited, if any, knowledge of her. Only in the middle ages did she come to be widely recognized as a major figure in the Japanese religious landscape among all strata of society. Paradoxically it was the partial detachment from the imperial family that let Amaterasu claim a uniquely elevated position in the pantheon.

One of the best sources of evidence of Amaterasu’s newfound popularity are standardized oath formulas (起請文, kishōmon). In the Kamakura period, she came to appear in them quite frequently. She was invoked either simply as the foremost kami, or alternatively as the “lord of the land” (ie. Japan; 国主, kokushu). Either way, her purpose, much like those of other of the invoked figures, was to guarantee the oath will be upheld, and to punish those who will break it. 

The spread of Amaterasu to new audiences resulted in the rise of numerous new interpretations. That’s where the already briefly discussed idea of honji suijaku came into play.

A twelfth century painting of the Buddha Dainichi (wikimedia commons)

As I said earlier, despite the popular understanding of this term honji suijaku did not necessarily just signify correspondences between kami and buddhas. However, in Amaterasu’s case the earliest example actually does match this model. She came to be associated with the Buddha Dainichi (大日, literally “great sun”; from Sanskrit Vairocana). 

Some authors, like Bernard Faure, argue that the establishment of a link between Amaterasu and Dainichi was effectively the core of the early honji suijaku as a whole. Purportedly the belief that a connection existed between them went all the way back to the teachings of the famous monk Gyōki, active in the first half of the eighth century. The historicity of this claim is uncertain, but it was understood as historical truth in the discussed time periods, at the very least. Anna Andreeva, relying on earlier studies by Satoshi Itō, notes that it would appear Seizon’s (成尊; 1012–1074) Shingon Fuhō San'yōshō (眞言付法纂要抄; “An Abbreviated Compendium of the Transmission of Shingon Buddhism) from 1060 has a strong claim to being the oldest attested example which can be properly dated. 

While other Buddhas, such as the historical Buddha, Amida (Amitābha), Miroku (Maitreya) or Yakushi (Bhaiṣajyaguru), are obviously also present in Japanese Buddhism, historically, especially prior to the rise of Amida-centrist schools, Dainichi was by far the most important one. This is especially pronounced in Shingon, where he is recognized as the “first Buddha” (Ādi-Buddha). Dainichi’s importance coupled with his solar associations made him a suitable match for Amaterasu in the eyes of theologians. Amaterasu’s solar role is pretty widely acknowledged in Buddhist sources, and she could be labeled as a “solar deity”, nisshin (日神). She was also identified with Nittenshi (日天子), the Buddhist version of the Hindu sun god Surya. However, Nittenshi could also function as a distinct figure and had his own iconography.

A twelfth century hanging scroll showing Nittenshi in the company of attendants (Kyoto National Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

The development of a connection between Amaterasu and Dainichi brought a number of changes to Ise. As an extension of it, the Inner Shrine and Outer Shrine at Ise came to be identified with the Womb Realm mandala and the Diamond Realm mandala, closely associated with him.

The Ise clergy additionally argued that the taboo observed as the shrines does not impact Amaterasu’s connection to Dainichi - rather she (and by extension Toyouke as well) represents not a mere trace of this Buddha, but “original enlightenment” (hongaku). A new systematization of kami was built around the idea: at Ise, only Amaterasu and Toyouke were regarded as belonging to the category of “kami of original enlightenment”, with other divided into “kami of inception of enlightenment” (those who had to actively embrace Buddhism) and “kami of delusion” (those who opposed it). Similar categories were employed in different areas too, though, with the head local kami, for example Suwa Daimyōjin or Sannō (山王), taking the same role as Amaterasu at Ise. While Dainichi can be considered Amaterasu’s essential honji suijaku pair, I already pointed out, it was hardly unusual for a specific figure to develop multiple connections within the honji suijaku framework, though, and this holds true for her too. 

Amaterasu, Enma and other functionaries of the underworld

Enmaten (wikimedia commons)

Next to Dainichi, Amaterasu’s best attested Buddhist “counterpart” is not a Buddha, but rather a deva, specifically Enma, the judge of the dead. While many other devas present in Japanese Buddhism largely languish in obscurity today, at least in popular perception, he is probably the most recognizable one next to the Four Heavenly Kings, so I do not think much of an introduction is needed. Even if you are not particularly interested in the history of religions, chances are you’ve seen him in one piece of media or another. 

Technically there are two distinct forms of Enma in Japanese tradition - Enmaten (焔摩天), who is more of a “classical” Hindu-style deva fairly similar in appearance to the original Yama, and the more popular Enma-ō (閻魔王; “king Enma”), styled after the bureaucratic Chinese underworld deities - but this distinction is not very important here. His rise to prominence in Japan started in the early ninth century at the latest, and by the ten century he was also joined by Taizan Fukun (東岳大帝; originally Taishan Fujun), a similar deity incorporated into Buddhism from Daoism. The latter was essentially the model for all of the other judges of the underworld: from the Buddhist kings of hell, to various local gods who took this role in the popular religion of Qing China. He might have even influenced the development of Matarajin in medieval Japan, but that’s a topic for another time.

It seems that a link between Amaterasu and Enma was initially established through an intermediary, specifically Seoritsuhime (瀬織津姫). She is identified with the king of hell in the Nakatomi Harae Kunge. While much about this text remains a mystery, in this case the logic behind the equation is quite clear - both of them were invoked during ritual purification. The means were not quite the same: Enma throws the sources of impurity into the deepest hells, while Seoritsuhime casts them into the ocean. Still, the level of similarity was sufficient to warrant establishing a connection. 

Seoritsuhime is described both as a servant of Amaterasu, and as her aramitama (荒魂), literally “rough spirit”. This term designates the wrathful, or at least impulsive, aspect of a given kami. In Nakatomi Harae Kunge Seoritsuhime as a manifestation of Amaterasu is also more specifically described as ara-tenshi (荒天子), “heavenly emperor manipulating the brutish force”.

An Edo period depiction of Taga Myōjin from the collection of Kyoto City University of Arts (via Bernard Faure's Fluid Pantheon; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Tenshō Daijin Kuketsu (天照大神口決; “Oral Transmission Pertaining to Tenshō Daijin”), a fourteenth century theological treatise, also embraces the equation between Enma and Amaterasu. It explains that he corresponds to the form of Amaterasu associated with the Taga shrine, Taga Myōjin (多賀明神). She has a distinct iconography, and fairly consistently appears as a horsewoman on either a black or white steed (always shown frontally), with a sword in one hand and a box with a sutra in the other. The same source also equates Amaterasu with Godō Daishin (五道大神; originally Wudao Dashen), the “god of the five paths”, another king of hell. In the Nakatomi Harae Kunge, it is instead a purifying kami, Haya-Akitsuhime (速秋津比売神), “the beloved of the dragon king Nanda”, who corresponds to him, though. The passage establishing this also mentions a similar link between yet another purifying kami, Ibukidonushi, and Taizan Fukun (curiously, the explanatory line states that the river where Izanagi purified himself after fleeing from Izanami is identical with Mt. Tai, the residence of Taizan Fukun). However, the latter is also said to be the aramitama of Toyouke.

A Japanese statue of Baozhi (Kyoto National Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

Tenshō Daijin Giki (天照大神儀軌; “A ritual manual [for the worship] of Tenshō Daijin”) states that Amaterasu as a judge of the dead commands eleven messengers referred to as “princes”. It’s not easy to date this text precisely, though it’s clear it was already in circulation by 1164. It claims to contain knowledge originally revealed to the legendary Chinese monk Baozhi (寶誌; 418-524), best known from a legend commonly referenced in art in which he tears his face apart to reveal the visage of bodhisattva. The text effectively redefines Ise itself as a place where the underworld officials gather, imbuing the temple complex with new meaning, detached from its older role as a center of royal ancestor cult. 

The eleven messengers listed are Zuikō Tenshi (a manifestation of Enma), Ryūgū Tenshi (dragon king Nanda), Suijin Tenshi (dragon king Batsunanda), Tenkan (“magistrate of heaven”), Chikan (“magistrate of earth”), Shimei (an underworld official), Inin Tenshi (equated with Izanagi and with Shiroku, an underworld official paired with Shimei in other sources), Kōzan Tenshi (Taizan Fukun), Godō Daishin, Kazenagashi no Kami and Okitama (a water deity equated with Suikan, “magistrate of water”). They correspond to various auxiliary shrines at Ise. Each of them is said to command a retinue of “four thousand trillion spirits”. While abstractly big entourages are quite common in medieval sources, from Michizane’s 105000 thunder god subordinates to Tenkeisei’s 84000 shikigami, even by these standards the number is unusually high.

The Enmaten mandala, with Taizan Fukun (middle of the top row) and Shimei, Godo Daishin and Shiroku (bottom row) shown among his attendants (wikimedia commons)

The lists of underworld officials serving Amaterasu show a considerable degree of overlap with these present in ritual texts Enmaten Ku (閻魔天供) and Taizan Fukun no Sai (泰山府君祭; you may know it from the story of Tamamo no Mae). Notably, Tenkan, Chikan, Suikan, Shimei and Shiroku are all members of Enma’s entourage in origin. The last two are scribes responsible for keeping track of human lifespans, but the role of the former three is not well understood. 

Another deity present both in these rituals and in Amaterasu’s entourage, Godo Daishin, is a king of hell in his own right. His origin is unclear, though the oldest sources which mention him are Chinese apocryphal episodes from hagiographies of the historical Buddha. As the “god of the five paths”, he is responsible for assigning the dead to one of the five realms of rebirth: these of gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts or hell. Notably missing is the asura realm, which didn’t particularly catch on in East Asian Buddhism. In the oldest sources, he is portrayed as somewhat inept and after meeting the Buddha implores him to teach him how to fulfill his role better. Enmaten Ku and Taizan Fukun no Sai attained a considerable degree of popularity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries due to the spread of the bureaucratic image of hell, and many laymen sought Buddhist monks (in the case of the former ritual) and onmyōji (in the case of the latter) who could perform them. They were supposed to heal illnesses, prolong life, secure an easy birth or simply to guarantee good fortune. It’s not impossible that furnishing Amaterasu with a similar role to their central deities was meant to let her clergy from Ise capitalize on the popularity of such rituals too. The spread of the new image of Amaterasu as a judge of the dead was also likely tied to her judiciary role in the already discussed oath formulas, where she essentially acts as a supernatural enforcer of legal claims.

Hokusai's drawing of three dragon kings, including Nanda and Batsunanda (British Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

The final matter that needs to be addressed here is the presence of dragon kings Nanda (難陀) and Batsunanda (跋難陀; Sanskrit Upananda) in Amaterasu’s underworld entourage. In contrast with their peers, they do not have anything to do with Enma. In Buddhist cosmology, they support the cosmic mountain Sumeru, on which the highest devas like Indra and Brahma reside.  More context on their connection to Ise is provided in the treatise Bikisho (鼻帰書), which cites the Outer Shrine priest Tsuneyoshi Watarai (度会常昌; 1263-1339) as its source. It actually states that all eight of the dragon kings are protectors of Ise, though also that only two, one blue and one white (with no names provided), can be used to represent respectively the Inner Shrine and the Outer Shrine. The connection is said to depend on their role as protectors of the Womb Realm and Diamond Realm mandalas. Multiple sources from Ise indicate they were believed to dwell under the central pillars of the Inner Shrine and the Outer Shrine, in this context additionally identified with the cosmic abode of the gods, Mount Sumeru.

Amaterasu, Toyouke and Brahma (times two)

Bonten, the Japanese version of Brahma (wikimedia commons)

While Dainichi made a natural match for Amaterasu, and the reasons behind her association with Enma, while less obvious, aren’t hard to understand either, the third Buddhist figure most commonly associated with her, Bonten, is quite surprising. This deity, the Japanese Buddhist guise of Brahma, has limited presence in popular understanding of Buddhism, but generally much like his Hindu forerunner he is portrayed as a distant deity with limited interest in everyday human affairs. And yet, in medieval Japan Brahma was identified with a figure both commonly worshiped and understood as quite active.

This tradition is documented in Tenshō Daijin Giki. It reaffirms that Amaterasu - seemingly treated as a male figure in this case - is the Japanese guise of Dainichi. However, in the “Realm of Form” - a Buddhist term referring to the world inhabited by humans and deities - he takes the guise of Bonten, and acts as the deva king of Japan. His life will last a total of 105000 years, and he will defend exactly 1000 rulers over the course of this period, before ascending to the Realm of Form to hear the preaching of Miroku. He will also help the faithful reach it.

The already discussed Tenshō Daijin Kuketsu also recognizes the equivalence between Amaterasu with Bonten, though it also furnishes her with a similar connection to the other ruler of the devas, Taishakuten (Indra), and states that both of these equations depend on the doctrine of Abhidharmakośa. Perhaps more unexpectedly, the same work also equates Amaterasu with Shōten (聖天, literally “noble god”; a Japanese form of Ganesha), specifying that this reflects a Shingon view. However, the thirteenth century scholar Ieyuki Watarai (詳細表示; 1256-1356) in his Jingi Hishō (神祇秘抄; “Secret Comments about the Deities”) mentions a different tradition in which this god’s connection with Amaterasu is less direct. He is said to be identical with a nameless “heavenly fox” (天狐, tenko) who acts as her acolyte. 

Yet another text already brought up in the previous section, Nakatomi Harae Kunge, does not equate Amaterasu with Brahma outright, but it does redefine terms from classical mythology around him. The High Plain of Heaven (高天原 Takamagahara) is said to be identical with the “First Meditation Heaven of the Realm of Form, ruled by Bonten”. Furthermore, the collective label Yaoyorozu no Kami (八百万の神; literally “eight myriad kami”) is said to encompass “Bonnō, Taishaku, the innumerable devas, the four Great Heavenly Kings, the innumerable devas of Bonnō, and eighty four thousand kami.”

The newfound interest in Brahma in the middle ages reflected an intellectual development arguably unparalleled in earlier Japanese religious tradition - a preoccupation with cosmology. 

Kojiki and Nihon Shoki obviously do deal with this topic, but the relevant sections are incredibly brief. This new discourse about cosmology was, at its core, Buddhist, but a major issue was that Japanese Buddhism was not very concerned with cosmology either. The two main sources of inspiration were, therefore, not contemporary Buddhist literature, but Chinese (mainly Daoist) texts on one hand, and accounts of Hindu cosmology, especially the Puranas, preserved in Buddhist sources on the other. Figures such as Pangu, the Three Pure Ones, Shiva or Brahma as a result attained considerable renown among Japanese theologians, who reinterpreted myths about them to suit local context, creating new narratives in the process.

A contemporary statue of Kuni no Tokotachi (wikimedia commons)

In some cases the poorly defined primeval kami from classical mythology could be incorporated into the new visions of cosmology created in the middle ages. Ame no Minakanushi from the Kojiki and Kuni no Tokotachi present both in this work and the Nihon Shoki are both well attested in that context, though references to Ame Yuzuru Hi Ame no Sagiri Kuni Yuzuru Hi Kuni no Sagiri from the Sendai Kuji Hongi can be found too. They were effectively treated as almost interchangeable, or as stages of emanation of the same entity, as documented for example in the writings of the Tendai monk Jihen (慈遍). 

Two strains of cosmological speculation, these focused on Brahma and primordial kami, were in particular enthusiastically embraced by the Outer Shrine clergy at Ise, who utilized both of them to improve the standing of Toyouke. As I mentioned before, her role, while seemingly initially relatively minor, grew with time. In many regards, she came to be presented as Amaterasu’s equal. She was furnished with an association with the moon to match Amaterasu’s solar character, for example. The first attempts at elevating Toyouke through theological speculation weren’t necessarily grand in scale. She was simply identified with other kami of similar characters every now and then, for example with Uka no Mitama. An isolated source, a letter from the early Kamakura period, appears to present her identical with Ninigi, Amaterasu’s grandson, instead, but this evidently did not stick. 

A breakthrough occurred in the late thirteenth century. The outer shrine clergy developed a view that Toyouke didn’t originate as a servant brought in to deal with Amaterasu’s loneliness and other needs, but rather a primordial kami, identical with Ame no Minakanushi or Kuni no Tokotachi. Toyouke in this guise was the foremost kami of heaven, and Amaterasu “merely” the foremost kami of earth. However, as I already pointed out, the new cosmologies which influenced this reinterpretation of Toyouke depended not only on classical mythology. Therefore, the Outer Shrine’s kami could also be identified with Brahma, or credited with controlling the proper flow of qi and thus yin and yang, following a Daoist model. Much of this theological speculation might have originated in the works of a single priest, Yukitada Watarai (度会行忠; 1236-1305), though he was far from the only contributor.

It’s worth pointing out that there was a practical material component to the theological speculation about the identity of Toyouke. Regardless of the relation of their respective kami, Inner and Outer Shrine were ultimately rivals competing for patronage. To present Toyouke as equally, if not more, important as Amaterasu was also a way to make potential donors, from shoguns to commoner pilgrims, more inclined to support the Outer Shrine. While prior to the Kamakura period Ise could securely depend on imperial funding alone, that changed with the weakening of the court. Therefore, securing new supporters was vital for their continuous activity. This remained the case through the Edo period as well, but this topic obviously goes beyond the scope of this article.

Identification of both Toyouke and Amaterasu as Brahma was not necessarily contradictory thanks to the existence of sources in which more than one Brahma appears. Nobumi Iyanaga points out that two Brahmas, Mahābrahmā Śikhin (ie. Brahma as the king of the gods) and Mahābrahmā Jyotiṣprabha (“Great Brahma of Brilliant Light”), appear in the Yamato Katsuragi Hōzanki (大和葛城宝山記), with one reflecting traditional portrayals of Brahma and the other representing a reinterpretation of an account of Vishnu as a creator figure. Both of the titles used appear in the enumeration of deities listening to the Buddha’s teachings in the Lotus Sutra. Two Brahmas also appear in the Bikisho, where “king Brahma” descends from heaven, but instantly starts longing for a friend. In response, a deity named Harama, an alternate transliteration of Brahma into Japanese, appears to him. The notion of Toyouke and Amaterasu being two Brahmas might have developed in the thirteenth century at Senkūin, a Buddhist temple closely affiliated with the Ise shrines. A text from this location dated to between 1240 and 1275 states that Toyouke, addressed as identical with Ame no Minakanushi, corresponds to Shiki Daibontennō (尸棄大梵天王; “emperor Mahābrahmā Śikhin”) and Amaterasu to Kōmyō Daibontennō (光明大梵天王; “emperor Mahābrahmā Jyotiṣprabha”). It also specifies Toyouke is male and Amaterasu female, which reflects splitting Brahma into a male-female cosmogonic pair. Nobumi Iyanaga points out the theological treatise Tenchi Reikiki (天地麗気記) goes a step further: the two deities are said to partake in intercourse. He suggests this represents a development of the motif of Brahma longing for a friend in the Bikisho. Tenchi Reikiki also states the couple personifies the Womb Realm and Diamond Realm.

A Kamakura perioid painting of Kūkai holding a vajra (wikimedia commons)

As a digression it’s worth pointing out that while the Tenchi Reikiki was only written in the Kamakura period, it was actually attributed at the time to Kūkai, who lived centuries earlier. Obviously one reason was that there’s no better way to make a treatise seem more authoritative than to claim it was written by a celebrated historical figure. However, it’s also worth pointing out that at some point a connection between Kūkai and Amaterasu developed. A tradition known from a number of works, for example Monkan’s treatise Himitsu Gentei Kuketsu (秘密源底口決) presents him as a manifestation of her. 

The Watarai theories about the nature of Toyouke and Amaterasu have originally been written down in the Kamakura period in the so-called “secret books''. This term has been used to refer to them collectively since the Edo period, when they were standardized for a relatively brief time into a “canon” of sorts. While tradition has it that there were five of them, research revealed the existence of further texts in medieval tradition, with one rediscovered in 1955, for example.  At least in theory, the individual Watarai books present information contained within as a special sort of secret, designated by the Buddhist term shōgyō (聖教; literally “sacred teachings”). Originally it referred to the teachings of the historical Buddha, or to the Buddhist canon more broadly, but in medieval Japan the term came to refer to specific kinds of knowledge transmitted by monks and other religious specialists in general.

While sometimes referred to as “secrets” in English, shōgyō were not necessarily impossible to share. Through the entire middle ages, many temples and shrines all across Japan effectively actively built their identity around making it known that they possess religious secrets worth knowing and can transfer them. Sometimes, they were intentionally “leaked” to nobles, imperial courtiers or fellow clergymen to spark interest. They were also utilized in annual “debate rituals” (論義会, rongie) held by authorities for religious scholars, who treated them as a way to hone their rhetorical skills and gain new theological insights.

The divine and the vulpine at Ise: Amaterasu, Dakiniten and Sankoshin

The Dakiniten mandala (wikimedia commons)

The topic of shōgyō is fundamentally linked with ambivalent Buddhist figures which in medieval Japan came to be associated with the notions of non-duality combining enlightenment and ignorance, such as dakinis, which commonly figured in such “secrets”. While dakinis do not appear in the cosmological myths from the Watarai books, they nonetheless did play a role in the developments pertaining to medieval Amaterasu. A link between her and the dakini par excellence, Dakiniten, developed due to their shared connection with Dainichi. Under his original name Mahavairocana, Dainichi can be portrayed as a subduer of dakinis, taking the guise of Mahakala (Makaraten) in this context. The singular Dakiniten as a result of this association could be identified with Dainichi outright, as attested in the Rinnō Kanjō Kuden (輪王灌頂口傳), dated to the late Kamakura period. 

The link between Amaterasu and Dakiniten is chiefly known from the Shingon ritual sokui kanjō (即位灌頂), “enthronement initiation”, meant for emperors freshly ascended to the throne. It was first performed for emperor Fushimi in 1287, and remained a part of ascension ceremonies all the way up to 1846. In this context, Amaterasu outright appears in the guise of Dakiniten. A similar statement can be found in Tenshō Daijin Kuketsu, which calls Dakiniten the honji of Amaterasu (it also links Dakiniten with Fujiwara no Kamatari and the rise of the Fujiwara clan, but I’ll cover that elsewhere in the future).

Keiran Shūyōshū specifies that the shinko was an appropriate form for Amaterasu because it is the only animal capable of emitting light on its own. This ability in turn reflects the fact that its body was identical with the wish-fulfilling jewel, a frequent attribute of Buddhist figures; the name is self-explanatory. Alternatively, the animal could be described as possessing three tails, each ending in a wish-fulfilling jewel. By the fourteenth century, this object was firmly associated with Amaterasu as well. This led to the development of the view that Nyoirin Kannon (如意輪観音), a form of Kannon directly linked to the wish-fulfilling jewel, was Amaterasu’s honji. The shinko similarly could be identified with this bodhisattva. Granted, so were prince Shotoku, Ryōgen and numerous other figures, but that’s a separate topic not directly relevant to this article.

A different belief developed around the shinko at Ise. Here this supernatural animal came to be identified with Sankoshin (三狐神), literally “three fox deity” or “three fox deities”. Despite the triplicity implied by the name, sources such as Tamakisan Gongen Engi (玉置山権現縁起) clearly describe Sankoshin as a singular figure who acted as the “king of the heavenly foxes” (天狐王, tenko-ō). 

It is presumed that Sankoshin's name was in origin a derivative of Miketsu no Kami (御食津神), the kami of Miketsu, the granary of the Outer Shrine. The development of Sankoshin might have started as a misreading or wordplay, with Miketsu (御馔津) transformed into the homophone mi ketsu, “three foxes” (三狐). This phrase in turn can be alternatively read as sanko, as in the case of Sankoshin.

Miketsu no Kami is otherwise associated, or outright identified, with Uka no Mitama, who is obviously not a fox, let alone three foxes; or alternatively with Toyouke, who has even less to do with these animals; you might recall she is described as a miketsu kami in the legend of her arrival in Ise. Older copies of Nakatomi Harae Kunge also affirm this equation, but later on the reference was substituted for a statement supporting the equivalence between Toyouke and Ame no Minakanushi favored by the Watarai priests.

Sankoshin in the middle ages appeared in rituals from Ise associated with the kora (originally 子良, later also 狐良). This term refers to a class of female shrine attendants associated with the Outer Shrine at Ise. Jingi Hishō asserts they were manifestations of Dakiniten, and on the basis of homophony links their name with 狐 (ko), “fox”.

Part of a hanging scroll depicting Dakiniten riding on a fox (wikimedia commons)

Elsewhere, shinko is treated as another name of Dakiniten, or alternatively of her fox mount (which lacks serpentine traits proposed by Teeuwen, but sometimes does have snakes coiling around its legs and neck). It’s also a part of her well attested epithet Shinko-ō Bosatsu (辰狐王菩薩), “Bodhisattva King of Astral Foxes”. This connection is also partially responsible for the development of another of her titles, Shindamani-ō (真陀摩尼王), “king of the wish-fulfilling jewel”. 

Being able to grant specific wishes immediately was commonly attributed to Dakiniten in the middle ages and beyond. However, due to her ambivalent perception and peripheral role between devas and demons in Buddhist theology it was commonly believed that the worldly benefits granted by her do not last and in the long run might lead to misfortune. With time, related rituals often came to be perceived negatively, often based on highly dubious reasons, as I discussed recently in another article. The ambivalent perception of Dakiniten ultimately was not unlike that of the animals she came to be associated with.

I plan to cover Dakiniten in more depth at some point, but I will only note here that her connection with foxes has a rather interesting history. Originally, dakinis were associated with jackals in India, due to their similarly unfavorable perception. When Buddhist texts dealing with this topic were transmitted to China, references to these animals posed a challenge to the translators, who were entirely unfamiliar with them. Based on context it was established that the name of a fox-like legendary animal, the yegan (野干), would make for a sensible translation. Since the yegan was described as fox-like, and since foxes in general had a major role in religion and literature of China at the time, eventually comparisons with foxes started to show up. Most notably, in the Tang period Śūraṅgama Sūtra the word dakini is provided with the gloss humei gui (狐魅鬼), something like “fox sorceress demon”. While unique, this term might have influenced the development of the image of dakinis in general, and Dakiniten in particular, in Japan.

A thirteenth century depiction of Benzaiten with entourage (wikimedia commons)

To go back to the core topic of this section, the development of a link between Amaterasu and Dakiniten had one more consequence: the establishment of a similar connection between Toyouke and closely related Benzaiten at Ise, to keep the theme of mirroring associations. This goddess is the Buddhist form of Saraswati. Today, she is best known as one of the Seven Gods of Luck, who emerged as a group in the Edo period, though her history goes further back and she enjoyed considerable popularity through the middle ages. 

Outside of Ise, it was commonly Amaterasu herself rather than Toyouke who came to be linked to Benzaiten. According to a legend which originated on Chikubu Island, Benzaiten first appeared in Japan during the reign of emperor Kinmei, and instantly announced she is a manifestation of Amaterasu. A less direct reference might be present in the already mentioned Taiheiki, where Yoshisada Nitta at one point says he heard Amaterasu at times manifests in the form of a “dragon god of the blue ocean”, which might be an allusion to a common symbol of Benzaiten. 

Benzaiten and Amaterasu could also be associated without being identified with each other. In a myth tied to the tradition of wandering blind singers (a group traditionally believed to be under her protections), she effectively replaces Ame no Uzume, and lures Amaterasu out of the cave by playing her biwa. In the Asamayama Engi (朝熊山縁起), she is addressed as Amaterasu’s mother instead, though she ultimately only plays a minor role in contrast with her daughter. The text largely revolves around Amaterasu (as noted by Anna Andreeva portrayed here as a “great conversationalist”) explaining theological matters to the monk Kūkai.

Amaterasu, Aizen and sericulture

The wisdom king Aizen (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In addition to her links to Buddhas and devas, Amaterasu also offers an example of identification between kami and wisdom kings. They enjoy an elevated position among Buddhist figures, almost on par with Buddhas and bodhisattvas. She could specifically be identified with arguably the second most important member of this category, Aizen Myōō. Since he is regarded as a wrathful manifestation of Dainichi, the reasons appear fairly straightforward. Linking him with Amaterasu goes back at least to Eison, a long-lived thirteenth century Shingon monk. The connection additionally reflects Amaterasu’s association with the wish-fulfilling jewel. Aizen was outright identified with this object, which is actually responsible for many of his own associations. Last but not least, Aizen and his fellow wisdom king Fudō were identified with the same two mandalas as the two shrines of Ise. On this basis it was not hard to link Aizen with Amaterasu.

However, once again, association does not necessarily equal conflation. Therefore, Aizen and Amaterasu could also appear as two distinct figures in the same sources. For example, both textual and iconographic instances of a triad consisting of both of them and another wisdom king, Fudō, are known. The occasional identification between Aizen and Amaterasu is not the reason behind his appearance here. Instead he and Fudō are present because they are an archetypal Buddhist dyad used to represent duality.

The triad is a medieval reinterpretation of the cave myth which played a role in an initiation rite (灌頂, kanjō) focused on Amaterasu. In this context both of the wisdom kings take the roles of “rock cave assistants”, with Fudō corresponding to Takuhatachijihime (the mother of Ninigi and younger sister of Omoikane) and Aizen to Tajikarao (who famously opens the cave in the classical version of the myth). The opening of the cave Amaterasu hid herself in was compared to the opening of the legendary Iron Stupa, said to exist somewhere in the south of India. This event, as Buddhist treatises record, led to the reveal of esoteric knowledge to the early Mahayana thinker Nagarjuna. In Tenshō Daijin Kuketsu, it is actually Amaterasu herself who was transmitted to him by the bodhisattva Kongōsatta (Vajrasattva).

To go back to the depictions of the Amaterasu triad, another thing worth pointing out is that a unique iconographic variant of her appears in them: seated on the back of a horse, with a solar disc and scales in her hands. While at a first glance this might sound similar to already discussed Taga Myōjin, there is actually a difference: the latter is always depicted frontally, not facing left, in contrast with the other mounted form of Amaterasu.

A depiction of Memyō from the fifteenth or sixteenth century (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

However, Bernard Faure notes these paintings resemble yet another figure she could be equated with, Memyō Bosatsu (馬鳴菩薩; “horse neigh bodhisattva”). This name originally referred to the Buddhist author Aśvaghoṣa, but in this context it instead designates a sericultural deity of Chinese origin first attested in the Tang period, for example in a short text attributed to Varjabodhi. However, while the Chinese original, Maming Pusa, is male, his Japanese counterpart is generally portrayed as a female figure, especially in texts stressing her connection to Amaterasu.

A Meiji period illustration of Susanoo throwing the carcass of Ame no Fuchikoma into Amaterasu's weaving hall (wikimedia commons)

Presumably the two initially came to be associated with each other because of their shared interest in sericulture and weaving. The classical myth portraying Amaterasu as a weaver, in which Susanoo throws the carcass of the horse Ame no Fuchikoma into the room where she is engaging in this craft, has been channeled to highlight why she would be identified with a deity portrayed on horseback.

While Memyō is arguably the highest profile Chinese figure Amaterasu was identified with (unless you want to make a case for Enma but that would be a bit of a reach), it’s worth noting that there’s another such case. However, it involved a historical figure rather than a deity. While presenting Buddhist patriarchs or rulers as manifestations of Buddhas or deities was par for the course, this one strikes me as quite unique.

Yang Guifei, as depicted by Shōen Uemura (wikimedia commons)

Jindai no Maki Hiketsu (神代卷祕決) records a tradition according to which Yang Guifei, a consort of emperor Xuanzong of Tang, was a manifestation Amaterasu. It depends partially on the preexisting belief that the former did not commit suicide, but instead escaped to Japan, and came to be enshrined in the Atsuta Shrine, which on the account of its picturesque location was sometimes identified with Penglai, the land of Daoist immortals. A related legend is recorded in the sixteenth century treatise Utaishō (謡抄), which relays that the Atsuta deity (here not identified with Amaterasu) manifested in China as Yang Guifei to seduce emperor Xuanzong to distract him with a plan of invading Japan. After accomplishing this goal, she returned to her shrine.

Emperor Xuanzong wasn't exactly the conventional nemesis of Amaterasu, whether in classical mythology or in the middle ages. I'll look into the figures such a title can be applied to in in the second half of this article; due to tumblr's limits I cannot publish both halves as a single post. The bibliography will also be included in part 2.

[cassowariess]

Thinking about Daenerys Targaryen again and how there's such a fundamental misunderstanding of the character from both the fans and haters of her.

To be clear, I still think the way the TV series ended her arc was sloppily done, and the reason so many people were blindsided by it was because there were several narrative beats that were skipped. Yes, she is ruthless and violent throughout the series, but going from "I have distorted morals yet still think I'm doing the right thing" to 'I'm going to burn innocent civilians that never did me any harm and I have had zero contact with up until this point" is still a leap. A leap that could have been avoided if we'd had more scenes with her unravelling in private and less barely visible battle scenes. But, I digress. This isn't wholly about the TV series ending. It's about the character and how I disagree with people who are determined to paint her as an angelic saviour or evil incarnate. Both of which do the character a massive disservice.

What Dany is, is a severely damaged trauma victim who comes into possession of the in world version of nukes. In the books, she is 13 years old when she is sold to Khal Drogo. In both the books and the TV series, she is raped by him. I don't care how people romanticise it. She is. The fact that she falls in love with her captor is a completely understandable trauma response from a girl who has been abused by her brother up until that point. Khal Drogo is a monster, but he's a monster that protects Dany from Viserys and gives her some semblence of power for the first time in her life. You could even say he is her first "dragon." A sign of things to come.

More behind the cut to spare your dashboard (because it's long)

She's fully on board with Drogo violently pillaging villages to get gold and goods so she can take back the Iron Throne until she realises women are being raped. Something she can have empathy with. This is the first sign of Dany's moral compass. She doesn't want people to suffer the way she did.

At the same time, she doesn't understand the nuance of everything that is happening around her. Yes, she saves the women's lives, but she also expects them to be 100% grateful, even though she is part of the culture that raped and pillaged their homes. I suspect this is because the same thing happened to her with Drogo, so in her damaged mind, she's trying to save Mirri Maz Dur while not understanding why Mirri Maz Dur would be mistrustful of her. In the books it is unclear whether Mirri deliberately kills Drogo, or if this is simply what Dany has percieved. Either way, she thinks Mirri murdered her son deliberately, so she has her killed.

A lot of people point to this as proof she was always evil and her burning down King's Landing was inevitable, but Mirri Maz Dur (to Dany, anyway) did something "wrong" and therefore is, to Dany, an enemy. She had zero contact with the people of King's Landing. It would have made more sense for her to burn The North if she perceived them as her enemies. This is where I feel the TV series failed. It needed to show some plot beats before King's Landing burning, and the best way to do this would have been to show Dany having a mental breakdown in private. Even something as simple as crying and pacing would have worked.

G.R.R. Martin has already laid the groundwork for this in the books. The last time we see Dany in A Dance with Dragons she's literally losing her mind in a field somewhere after she cannot cope with ruling Meereen:

 “I am the blood of the dragon,” she told the grass, aloud. Once, the grass whispered back, until you chained your dragons in the dark. “Drogon killed a little girl. Her name was … her name …” Dany could not recall the child’s name. That made her so sad that she would have cried if all her tears had not been burned away. “I will never have a little girl. I was the Mother of Dragons.” Aye, the grass said, but you turned against your children... ...No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words. “Fire and Blood,” Daenerys told the swaying grass.

TV show wise, in the timeline this would be season 5. Skipping this scene, where she hallucinates and decides she can't deal with the pressure and nuances of ruling, was a big mistake. They could have put this scene, or one like it, anywhere in the narrative leading up to King's Landing and it would have made things SO MUCH clearer.

Trauma is complex, and the idea that a 13 year old kid whose coping mechanism is big lizards that breathe fire would be a stable paragon of virtue doesn't line up.

I know a lot of people either want her to be a saviour queen that overcomes her trauma or an evil fascist who was always bad, but Martin doesn't write that way. If he ever finishes the books (which is probably never lol) I'm sure he'll write her in a way that makes sense. Her arc is a Shakespearian tragedy because she might have been a great ruler, if she hadn't had such a painful and fucked up life.

[royal-tea-blogs]

Lily Orchard Deserves Better

These thoughts have been rumbling around in my mind for a while now and considering what happened recently with her tumblr being taken down twice and the recent situations, I just wanted to give my two cents so my brain can stop bothering me about it. Heads up for typos and grammar since I wrote this on my phone.

The first Lily Orchard video I ever watched was Over Cooked, a video about Steven Universe’s handling of Amethysts character. Now even as a 12 year old at the time I still knew it was better for me to avoid the content I know would make me mad, and I was a huge fan of SU at the time. But curiosity got the better of me and I ended up watching it.

Then I watched more. Because she made sense. Then I wanted more of her videos. I vividly remember thinking to myself “wow that was harsh” every now and then, but beyond that there weren’t too many cases where I was actually mad at her (because I’m not a pathetic diaper baby who gets mad at opinions what who said that?)

I watched her from then on rip my previous favourite show to pieces, I watched her rip brony pedos and crybabies to pieces and I loved nearly all of it, even if I didn’t agree with some of it.

It took me a while, don’t get me wrong. She discussed it herself in a few videos: people on the internet are used to a lot of shield jokes and bootlicking by the creators (which is fine!). But once I built of more of a tolerance by listening to what she had to say, I found myself a lot more critical in the long run.

Now I still haven’t quite learned my lesson on my curiosity getting me to watch things that I know will make me mad, so I’ve seen a few Lily Orchard debunking videos. Near every single time it is blatantly obvious that they either didn’t understand what her actual point was, or are deliberately misunderstanding it. I just wanted to grab my monitor and shake it screaming “THATS LITERALLY NOT WHAT SHE MEANT” but alas.

The sheer amount of harassment that Lily has gone through for OVER A DECADE is ridiculous. Especially considering a huge amount is from whiny cartoon stans who have nothing going on in their lives.

As for the criminal allegations, if they have the proof they claim (and proof that has apparently convinced other friends so apparently despite Lily’s previous support of them) then take it to a courtroom. I’m personally done listening to those sorts of accusations until something is at least ATTEMPTED to be done about it in a meaningful manner.

As for Stockholm allegations: I’ve seen the clips. I saw one years ago and it broke my heart at the time. It does seem like Lily might have written Stockholm. But I haven’t done lots of searching into that. You know why?

Lily has made it abundantly clear, for the entire seven years I’ve been watching her (at least as long as I can remember) EXACTLY where she stands when it comes to pedophilic behavior, proshippers, abuse victims, and that type of content.

Did she write Stockholm? Her behavior and stance nowadays means that, to me at least, it doesn’t matter. The Lily of today (hell, even years ago) certainly wouldn’t support such a fic and would rake the writer over hot fiery coals, she’s made that blatantly obvious.

Would admitting if she did write it been the morally correct thing to do instead of denying it? Yes.

Do I blame her for a denying it (if she did write it)? After seeing even a tip of the harassment iceberg she’s had to endure for far pettier things? I don’t blame her a bit.

Either she never wrote Stockholm and she’s always held these beliefs and behaviors, or she saw the error of her previous behavior and CHANGED FOR THE BETTER. It’s not like it would have been the last time, I see she tries her best to correct her mistakes.

Honestly? That’s good enough for me. Harassing her over a fic from a decade ago that she has either never even written or blatantly disowned and now condemn the very behavior of is just nonsense. All of it is.

Anyways Lily, I love your content and I really hope you can keep doing what you’re doing and writing what you love ❤️

[mariacallous]

In the early weeks of 2023, as worry about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools was ratcheting up dramatically in the public conversation, a tweet passed through the many interlocking corners of Book Twitter. “Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging,” it read. “AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.”

The tweet’s author, Gaurav Munjal, cofounded Unacademy, which bills itself as “India’s largest learning platform”—and within the edtech context, where digitally animated books can be effective teaching tools, his suggestion might read a certain way. But to a broader audience, the sweeping proclamation that AI will make “every” book “10x more engaging” seemed absurd, a solution in search of a problem, and one predicated on the idea that people who choose to read narrative prose (instead of, say, watching a film or playing a game) were somehow bored or not engaged with their unanimated tomes. As those who shared the tweet observed, it seems like a lot of book industry “disruptors” just don’t like reading.

Munjal is one of many tech entrepreneurs to ping the book world’s radar—and raise its collective hackles—in recent months. Many were hawking AI “solutions” they promised would transform the act of writing, the most derided among them Sudowrite’s Story Engine (dubbed in a relatively ambivalent review by The Verge’s Adi Robertson as “the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates”). Story Engine raised frustrations by treating writers as an afterthought and, by its very existence, suggesting that the problems it was trying to bypass weren’t integral to the act of writing itself.

Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the structures around their creation and consumption. Some came from within the publishing industry, but like their counterparts “disrupting” other sectors, including film and TV, many more did not. And for the most part, despite tech’s sometimes drastic (and often negative) effects on other industries, book- and reading-related startups failed to alter much at all. People are still buying books—in fact, they’re buying more than ever. Pandemic lockdowns brought a perhaps unsurprising boom in sales, and even though numbers slipped as restrictions lifted, print sales were still nearly 12 percent higher in 2022 than they were in 2019, and sales of audio books continue to increase dramatically year over year.

One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

Take, for example, the long string of pitches for a “Netflix for books”—ideas that retrofitted Netflix’s original DVDs-by-mail model for a different medium under the presumption that readers would pay to borrow books when the public library was right there. Publisher’s Weekly keeps a database of book startups that now numbers more than 1,300; many of them are marked “Closed,” alongside a graveyard of broken URLs. There were plenty of practical ideas—targeting specific demographics or genres or pegged to more technical aspects, like metadata or production workflows. But many more proposed ways to alter books themselves—most of which made zero sense to people who actually enjoy reading.

“I don’t think they’re coming to that with a love of fiction or an understanding of why people read fiction,” Kreizman says. “If they were, they wouldn’t make these suggestions that nobody wants.”

The “10x more engaging” crowd has come in waves over the past two decades, washed ashore via broader tech trends, like social media, tablets, virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. These tech enthusiasts promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy that urged you to seize on the newest trend while it was hot—even as everyone could see that previous hyped ventures had not, in fact, utterly transformed the way people read. Interactive books could have sound effects or music that hits at certain story beats. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books, or to eschew—to borrow one particular framing—“static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world.

AI isn’t remotely a new player in the book world. Electronic literature artists and scholars have worked with various forms of virtual and artificial intelligence for decades, and National Novel Generation Month, a collaborative challenge modeled after NaNoWriMo, has been around since 2013. Even now, as much of the book world loudly rejects AI-powered writing tools, some authors are still experimenting, with a wide range of results. But these bespoke, usually one-off projects are a far cry from the tech industry’s proposals to revolutionize reading at scale—not least because the projects were never intended to replace traditional books.

“A lot of interactive storytelling has gone on for a very long time,” says Jeremy Douglass, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, citing everything from his early career work on hypertext fiction to the class he’ll teach next year on the long history of the pop-up book to centuries-old marginalia like the footnote and the concordance. “These fields are almost always very old, they’re almost always talked about as if they’re brand-new, and there haven’t really been a lot of moments of inventing a new modality.”

To VC claims that AI will totally alter books, Douglass takes what he calls a “yes, and” stance. “What people are actually doing is creating a new medium. They’re not actually replacing the novel; they created a new thing that was like the novel but different, and the old forms carried on. I’m still listening to the radio, despite the film and game industries’ efforts.”

Tech entrepreneurs rarely pitch “yes, and” ideas. In their view, new technologies will improve on—and eventually supplant—what exists now. For all of his interest in the many forms of interactive fiction, Douglass doubts that most books would benefit from an AI treatment.

“There are extremely pleasurable aesthetic systems that aren’t intentional,” he says. “But how often when I’m reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Joy of Cooking do I think, ‘If only a chatbot could augment this on the fly’? And it’s partly the fact that some communication is deeply intentional, and that’s part of the pleasure. It’s handcrafted, it’s specific, there’s a vision.”

That isn’t to say that Douglass thinks there’s zero appetite for AI in literature—but it’s “probably a very small slice of the pie. So when you say ‘all books’? Almost certainly not. For the same reason that we’re not reading 100 percent pop-up books, or watching all of our books on YouTube, or anything else you can imagine. People are doing that too, but it’s extra.”

The exact size of that small pie slice remains to be seen, as does the general public’s appetite for instant novels, or chatting with characters, or hitting a button that will animate any book in your digital library. But those desires will likely need to come from readers themselves—not from the top down. “If you just give the tools to everybody, which is happening in spite of venture capital, as well as because of it, people will figure out what they want it for—and it’s usually not what the inventors and the investors think,” Douglass says. “It’s not even in their top-10 list of guesses, most of the time. It’s incredibly specific to the person and genre.”

The recent history of publishing has plenty of examples in which digital tools let people create things we couldn’t have predicted in the analog days: the massive range of extremely niche self-published romance, for example, or the structural variation and formal innovation within the almost entirely online world of fanfiction.

But when the tech industry approaches readers with ways to “fix” what isn’t broken, their proposals will always ring hollow—and right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while. “That’s a good thing,” Kreizman says. And as AI true believers sweep through with promises that this technology will change everything, it helps to remember just how many disruptors have come and gone. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading.

[thebreakfastgenie]

1, 3, 8, 12, 13

And i may come back later to hand you an even bigger spoon with which to stir the pot

1. the character everyone gets wrong

Trapper John McIntyre is not a himbo. Yes he's bad at card games up to and including solitaire. But he's an extremely talented surgeon (there are more episodes that say "those two are the best" about Hawkeye and Trapper than Hawkeye and BJ) and episodes like the one where he writes his daughter or Ceasefire show him as a thoughtful, reflective person.

I'm giving this one a double because also, Henry Blake. When people say "how did they survive Henry being in command?" it upsets me. Henry's incompetence is deliberate and occasionally implied to be deliberate in-universe. It's an act of rebellion from a guy who doesn't belong in the army and doesn't want to be there. His laziness is the same. He's also not a bad leader. Henry is there for Hawkeye in both Sticky Wicket and Sometimes You Hear the Bullet. He admits that he's not comfortable with the kind of command decisions he's expected to make. And the thing is, most of the time he doesn't have to. The unit does a pretty good job of running itself, because everyone cares about doing the medical stuff right, Radar handles the paperwork, and no (except Frank and Margaret) cares about the military stuff anyway. The 4077th achieves its high efficiency rating under Henry Blake's command.

3. screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

There are so many contenders for this but honestly I think the worst take I've seen is the variations on the thing BJ loses in GFA being Hawkeye, or Hawkeye and BJ losing each other. The actual worst one was the one in a ten minute tiktok that said "the thing Hawkeye loses is the war" and then also said if you see him as a queer man, he's leaving a "safe space" (??????)? in "the middle of the lavender scare." But I've seen so many versions of it on tumblr, too.

It's so wildly against the point of GFA it makes me wonder if the people saying it watched the episode at all. I think fandom takes "everyone loses something" way too literally; I don't think it was ever intended as listing some tangible thing each of them lost, which is why no one from the show ever does that. Alan Alda also frequently describes it as "everyone is changed in some way" which is a lot less rigid and fits the story a lot better. 

Hawkeye and BJ only have each other because of the war and the idea that none of these relationships, including that one, can survive outside the war is also brought up. But the things everyone loses, the ways everyone is changed, are not things they only gained because of the war. If they were, it wouldn't work. The only exception is Potter and Sophie and I think there's a bit of symbolism there that makes it work when you consider Potter's backstory of getting into the army as an idealistic kid in the cavalry. Mulcahy's hearing, Charles's love of music, Margaret's unwavering faith in the army/her father (which are the same to her), Klinger's home, these are all things these characters came with. 

Hawkeye's loss, too, which Mike Farrell kindly summarized for us as Hawkeye loses his sanity." Hawkeye also arguably lost surgery, or at least his love for it. BJ's loss, of course, is the thing he spends the entire episode obsessing over: his daughter. There's a reason there is so much focus on her birthday. He left shortly after she was born; her second birthday means he's missed two full years of her life. Like Charles's music, Margaret's belief in the army, Hawkeye's love for his work, Mulcahy's hearing as a part of his work, Klinger's hometown... being a father is foundational to BJ. 

I don't care if a take is shippy or not, if it says Hawkeye and BJ's loss is each other, it fundamentally misunderstands GFA and it's not worth anything to me. 

8. common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

Basically everything as far as BJ Hunnicutt is concerned. He doesn't have layers. Every "layer" is just headcanon and headcanons are fine, but they're not layers that are in the show. BJ in the show is a straightforward family man who loves his wife and child and can't wait to go home to them. That's how he's written and that's how he's played. That's his character's one big thing to the point of him getting boring sometimes. The writers struggled with him; this is confirmed. He's also not a liar; there is no evidence of him telling lies the way fandom describes. He's not particularly manipulative, either. He has his day in the sun in practical joke episodes, as does nearly every character (Hawkeye and Trapper in A Smattering of Intelligence, Charles in a Eye for a Tooth, Potter in April Fools...). To suggest this is a BJ trait is incorrect. BJ is also not an unusually jealous person and he doesn't have any issues with Trapper. The idea that BJ is "putting up a front"... sorry, but that's just who he is. MASH isn't an especially subtle show; when a character is putting up a front (e.g. Frank talking a big game while being a dirty coward) this is made obvious to even the most casual viewer.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

I don't know if he's unpopular but Luther Rizzo has haters and I can't understand why! He's lazy and likes making the army pay him for sleeping on the clock. Iconic! He's also one of the most loving and dedicated family men we meet. We never see him with or even talking about another woman and he seems to genuinely love Zola and their son Billy Bubba. He never does anything offensive. I don't understand it! He's great and I want to read more backstory about him.

13. worst blorboficiation

Hawkeye for sure. I love to blorbofy Hawkeye, but it gets taken way too far. Hawkeye pre-war was a successful surgeon living on his own and I think people forget that. I think a lot of people project their own issues onto Hawkeye which is fine if you know that's what you're doing, but the line gets blurred a lot. Just look at his TVTropes page (don't). There is no canon evidence that Hawkeye has a lot of the issues that are popular to give him. I also think this ties in with the mischaracterization of him as a sad sack love martyr who waits around to be swept off his feet. That isn't Hawkeye. I also think people really like to project their own politics onto him. Hawkeye is progressive, yes, but he doesn't talk like a tumblr post. He doesn't agree with your exact politics.

[kyriolex]

I find it quite odd, how people think Himawari will be affected by Eida's Diablos Ex Machina and become Sasuke 2.0 and go on a revenge path to hunt and try to kill Boruto. What the heckie?

(Yes people believe that Himawari being affected by Eida's powers and going psycho killer mode)

Lmao First of all, we're talking about NARUTO and HINATA'S Daughter here. She's a perfect mix of the 2 characters who would NEVER go down a revenge path

We're talking about the Daughter of Uzumaki fucking NARUTO, the same guy who forgave Obito, the man responsible for the many deaths including his own Parents, and even called him "The Coolest Guy"

The Daughter of Hyuga fucking HINATA, who never hated Neji, even calling him her Brother, even when he was in the midst of trying to kill her.

What the hell would make them think Himawari would become anything like Sasuke let alone go down a cycle of hatred? 🤔

Also Himawari's name literally means "SUNFLOWER"!

Imagine a Blood Lusted, Revenge Thirsty character with the name Sunflower 🌻

The characters in the Naruto Franchise have been proven to have names that define the type of characters they are.

"Hinata" for example means "A Sunny Place". It was deliberately given to her to match her character. She tends to pop up when Naruto is in a Dark point of the story and it was also a subtle clue that she and Naruto were the endgame pairing since Naruto represents the Sun

Another example is "Itachi" who's name means "Weasel'. "Weasels" are often a name given to people known for being tricky and deceitful. Not only is Itachi a Genjutsu user but is also a Traitor to his own Clan

Why would a character named "Sunflower" go down a dark Sasuke route?

Even ignoring the fact that Kishimoto himself said that the idea of a girl with a "Sasuke-like personality" sounds terrifying to him. (It's the reason why Sarada takes more of Sakura's traits) it also sounds really OOC to me, for Himawari to suddenly go full Avenger just by going off of Kawaki's words without anything else to back it up, even if she is affected

We've seen how Himawari acts when secrets are being kept. She's not dumb.

In the first episode of Academy Arc she saw right through Kawaki lying to her about being on Mission and attempted to confront him about it

Later on she spied on him and Naruto conversating about the mission

Hima is the type of character who would ask questions first, look into things herself, and then take action

Her automatically deciding that Boruto needs to die doesn't sound like Hima at all.

I mean, even Shikamaru "smartest boy ever" Nara has fallen under Eida's jutsu, so I don't think intelligence or perceptiveness alone would prevent Himawari from resisting it. There's some mystery factor to the resistance, and it's unclear yet if she has it or not.

If Himawari falls under Eida's spell, I agree that she's unlikely to go into revenge mode immediately. But I could see her becoming a tracker-nin to find Boruto and attempt to talk-no-jutsu him the same way Naruto tried to do with his "brother" Sasuke. I don't know if Himawari would automatically believe Boruto's explanation, but she'd at least hear him out.

But knowing Kishimoto, there will be some contrived misunderstanding to push her into Byakugan Berserker mode anyway, solely so he can draw her and Boruto fighting. Then Toneri will show up on the sidelines, make some analogy to Hiashi and Hizashi Hyuuga, and monologue about the nature of fate.

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Elizabeth Minkel

In the early weeks of 2023, as worry about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools was ratcheting up dramatically in the public conversation, a tweet passed through the many interlocking corners of Book Twitter. “Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging,” it read. “AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.”

The tweet’s author, Gaurav Munjal, cofounded Unacademy, which bills itself as “India’s largest learning platform”—and within the edtech context, where digitally animated books can be effective teaching tools, his suggestion might read a certain way. But to a broader audience, the sweeping proclamation that AI will make “every” book “10x more engaging” seemed absurd, a solution in search of a problem, and one predicated on the idea that people who choose to read narrative prose (instead of, say, watching a film or playing a game) were somehow bored or not engaged with their unanimated tomes. As those who shared the tweet observed, it seems like a lot of book industry “disruptors” just don’t like reading.

Munjal is one of many tech entrepreneurs to ping the book world’s radar—and raise its collective hackles—in recent months. Many were hawking AI “solutions” they promised would transform the act of writing, the most derided among them Sudowrite’s Story Engine (dubbed in a relatively ambivalent review by The Verge’s Adi Robertson as “the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates”). Story Engine raised frustrations by treating writers as an afterthought and, by its very existence, suggesting that the problems it was trying to bypass weren’t integral to the act of writing itself.

Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the structures around their creation and consumption. Some came from within the publishing industry, but like their counterparts “disrupting” other sectors, including film and TV, many more did not. And for the most part, despite tech’s sometimes drastic (and often negative) effects on other industries, book- and reading-related startups failed to alter much at all. People are still buying books—in fact, they’re buying more than ever. Pandemic lockdowns brought a perhaps unsurprising boom in sales, and even though numbers slipped as restrictions lifted, print sales were still nearly 12 percent higher in 2022 than they were in 2019, and sales of audio books continue to increase dramatically year over year.

One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

Take, for example, the long string of pitches for a “Netflix for books”—ideas that retrofitted Netflix’s original DVDs-by-mail model for a different medium under the presumption that readers would pay to borrow books when the public library was right there. Publisher’s Weekly keeps a database of book startups that now numbers more than 1,300; many of them are marked “Closed,” alongside a graveyard of broken URLs. There were plenty of practical ideas—targeting specific demographics or genres or pegged to more technical aspects, like metadata or production workflows. But many more proposed ways to alter books themselves—most of which made zero sense to people who actually enjoy reading.

“I don’t think they’re coming to that with a love of fiction or an understanding of why people read fiction,” Kreizman says. “If they were, they wouldn’t make these suggestions that nobody wants.”

The “10x more engaging” crowd has come in waves over the past two decades, washed ashore via broader tech trends, like social media, tablets, virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. These tech enthusiasts promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy that urged you to seize on the newest trend while it was hot—even as everyone could see that previous hyped ventures had not, in fact, utterly transformed the way people read. Interactive books could have sound effects or music that hits at certain story beats. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books, or to eschew—to borrow one particular framing—“static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world.

AI isn’t remotely a new player in the book world. Electronic literature artists and scholars have worked with various forms of virtual and artificial intelligence for decades, and National Novel Generation Month, a collaborative challenge modeled after NaNoWriMo, has been around since 2013. Even now, as much of the book world loudly rejects AI-powered writing tools, some authors are still experimenting, with a wide range of results. But these bespoke, usually one-off projects are a far cry from the tech industry’s proposals to revolutionize reading at scale—not least because the projects were never intended to replace traditional books.

“A lot of interactive storytelling has gone on for a very long time,” says Jeremy Douglass, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, citing everything from his early career work on hypertext fiction to the class he’ll teach next year on the long history of the pop-up book to centuries-old marginalia like the footnote and the concordance. “These fields are almost always very old, they’re almost always talked about as if they’re brand-new, and there haven’t really been a lot of moments of inventing a new modality.”

To VC claims that AI will totally alter books, Douglass takes what he calls a “yes, and” stance. “What people are actually doing is creating a new medium. They’re not actually replacing the novel; they created a new thing that was like the novel but different, and the old forms carried on. I’m still listening to the radio, despite the film and game industries’ efforts.”

Tech entrepreneurs rarely pitch “yes, and” ideas. In their view, new technologies will improve on—and eventually supplant—what exists now. For all of his interest in the many forms of interactive fiction, Douglass doubts that most books would benefit from an AI treatment.

“There are extremely pleasurable aesthetic systems that aren’t intentional,” he says. “But how often when I’m reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Joy of Cooking do I think, ‘If only a chatbot could augment this on the fly’? And it’s partly the fact that some communication is deeply intentional, and that’s part of the pleasure. It’s handcrafted, it’s specific, there’s a vision.”

That isn’t to say that Douglass thinks there’s zero appetite for AI in literature—but it’s “probably a very small slice of the pie. So when you say ‘all books’? Almost certainly not. For the same reason that we’re not reading 100 percent pop-up books, or watching all of our books on YouTube, or anything else you can imagine. People are doing that too, but it’s extra.”

The exact size of that small pie slice remains to be seen, as does the general public’s appetite for instant novels, or chatting with characters, or hitting a button that will animate any book in your digital library. But those desires will likely need to come from readers themselves—not from the top down. “If you just give the tools to everybody, which is happening in spite of venture capital, as well as because of it, people will figure out what they want it for—and it’s usually not what the inventors and the investors think,” Douglass says. “It’s not even in their top-10 list of guesses, most of the time. It’s incredibly specific to the person and genre.”

The recent history of publishing has plenty of examples in which digital tools let people create things we couldn’t have predicted in the analog days: the massive range of extremely niche self-published romance, for example, or the structural variation and formal innovation within the almost entirely online world of fanfiction.

But when the tech industry approaches readers with ways to “fix” what isn’t broken, their proposals will always ring hollow—and right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while. “That’s a good thing,” Kreizman says. And as AI true believers sweep through with promises that this technology will change everything, it helps to remember just how many disruptors have come and gone. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading.

[quercus-queer]

hey, what’s up with tlou 2? I keep seeing comments mentioning how it’s related to zionism but I can’t find info on it

Im not someone who gets very interested in creators of the media I enjoy (idk what my fave band looks like or their names) and I was only a very casual watcher of tlou adaptation and gameplays. I only recently found out Neil Druckmann is a Zionist and that tlou2 was “inspired by the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

This is to say Im not the most informed and have no desire to watch the podcasts this Vice article gets quotes from, the article was more than enough information for me. There’s some reddit threads out there too but I digress.

Some excerpts that I think sum up the article, Druckmann’s bias, and explains the criticisms people have always had about tlou’s writing.

But "cycles of violence" are a poor way to understand a conflict in a meaningful way, especially if one is interested in finding a solution. The United States, for example, hasn't been at war in Afghanistan for almost 20 years because it's trapped in a "cycle of violence" with the Taliban. It is deliberately choosing to engage with a problem in a way that perpetuates a conflict. Just as the fantasy of escaping violence by simply walking away from it is one that only those with the means to do so can entertain, the myth of the "cycle of violence" is one that benefits the side that can survive the status quo

In The Last of Us Part II's Seattle, Scars and Wolves hurt each other terribly, and the same can be said about Israel and Palestine. The difference is that when flashes of violence abate and the smoke clears, one side continues to live freely and prosper, while the other goes back to a life of occupation and humiliation. One side continues to expand while the other continues to lose the land it needs to live. Imagining this process as some kind of symmetric cycle benefits one side more than the other, and allows it to continue.

As a result, The Last of Us Part II never quite justifies its fatalism.

…

This seems to be The Last of Us Part II's thesis: humans experience a kind of "intense hate that is universal," as Druckmann told The Post, which keep us trapped in these cycles.

But is intense hate really a universal feeling? It's certainly not one that I share. I, too, have seen the video of the 2000 mob killing of the Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, and it's horrific. Yet, my immediate response wasn't "Oh, man, if I could just push a button and kill all these people that committed this horrible act, I would make them feel the same pain that they inflicted on these people," as Druckmann said.

This is not a universal feeling as much as it's a learned way of seeing the world.

…

The trouble with [the story/writing/themes], and the reason that Ellie's journey ultimately feels nonsensical, is that it begins from a place that accepts "intense hate that is universal" as a fact of life, rather than examining where and why this behavior is learned.

Personally, I’ve come to understand that people who cling to the Cycle of Violence as human nature, especially concerning community/global conflict have an deep misunderstanding of humanity.

This post details an article that requires an account to access, but elaborates on a certain mentality about Landback movements:

Additionally, the casting for tlou2 adaptation has come out and it’s a shit show:

Dina (the only Jewish character in the series + her fam) will be played by a very skinny conventionally attractive Hispanic non-Jewish woman who is allegedly a Zionist

Abby will be played by a very skinny conventionally attractive 5’2” woman who is also allegedly a Zionist

Also worth noting since some redditors misunderstood: the author is NOT saying Palestinians are literally like the Scars, the entire point is that Neil created the Scars to parallel how HE (biased) sees the conflict.

[kammartinez]

By Elizabeth Minkel

In the early weeks of 2023, as worry about ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools was ratcheting up dramatically in the public conversation, a tweet passed through the many interlocking corners of Book Twitter. “Imagine if every Book is converted into an Animated Book and made 10x more engaging,” it read. “AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Kindle and Audible.”

The tweet’s author, Gaurav Munjal, cofounded Unacademy, which bills itself as “India’s largest learning platform”—and within the edtech context, where digitally animated books can be effective teaching tools, his suggestion might read a certain way. But to a broader audience, the sweeping proclamation that AI will make “every” book “10x more engaging” seemed absurd, a solution in search of a problem, and one predicated on the idea that people who choose to read narrative prose (instead of, say, watching a film or playing a game) were somehow bored or not engaged with their unanimated tomes. As those who shared the tweet observed, it seems like a lot of book industry “disruptors” just don’t like reading.

Munjal is one of many tech entrepreneurs to ping the book world’s radar—and raise its collective hackles—in recent months. Many were hawking AI “solutions” they promised would transform the act of writing, the most derided among them Sudowrite’s Story Engine (dubbed in a relatively ambivalent review by The Verge’s Adi Robertson as “the AI novel-writing tool everyone hates”). Story Engine raised frustrations by treating writers as an afterthought and, by its very existence, suggesting that the problems it was trying to bypass weren’t integral to the act of writing itself.

Last month, Justine Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, provided a sort of bookend to Munjal’s “AI-animated books” proposal. “The three largest fanfic sites—[Archive of Our Own], Fanfiction.net, and Wattpad—get 3 billion-plus annual visits in the US alone,” she wrote. “Imagine how much bigger this market could be if you could chat with characters vs. reading static stories?” The thread was likely a reference to Character.ai, a startup that lets users chat with fictional heroes and villains; Andreessen Horowitz led a $150 million funding round for the company in March. The comment also came after the revelation that large language models (LLMs) may have scraped fanfiction writers’ work—which is largely written and shared for free—causing an (understandable) uproar in many fan communities.

Setting aside the fact that fandom role-playing has been a popular practice for decades, Moore’s statements felt like a distillation of tech’s tortured relationship with narrative prose. There are many kinds of fanfiction—including an entire subgenre in which “you” are a character in the story. But those are still stories, sentences deliberately written and arranged in a way that lets you lose yourself in an authored narrative. “Imagine having such a fundamental misunderstanding of the appeal of reading fanfiction—let alone reading fiction more broadly,” I wrote in response to her thread. What’s so wrong with people enjoying reading plain old words on a page?

The tech world has long been convinced that it understands the desires of readers better than they do themselves. For years, VCs have promised to upend books and the structures around their creation and consumption. Some came from within the publishing industry, but like their counterparts “disrupting” other sectors, including film and TV, many more did not. And for the most part, despite tech’s sometimes drastic (and often negative) effects on other industries, book- and reading-related startups failed to alter much at all. People are still buying books—in fact, they’re buying more than ever. Pandemic lockdowns brought a perhaps unsurprising boom in sales, and even though numbers slipped as restrictions lifted, print sales were still nearly 12 percent higher in 2022 than they were in 2019, and sales of audio books continue to increase dramatically year over year.

One reason books haven’t been particularly disruptable might be that many of the people looking to “fix” things couldn’t actually articulate what was broken—whether through their failure to see the real problems facing the industry (namely, Amazon’s stranglehold), or their insistence that books are not particularly enjoyable as a medium. “It’s that arrogance, to come into a community you know nothing about, that you might have studied as you study for an MBA, and think that you can revolutionize anything,” says writer and longtime book-industry observer Maris Kreizman. “There were so many false problems that tech guys created that we didn’t actually have.”

Take, for example, the long string of pitches for a “Netflix for books”—ideas that retrofitted Netflix’s original DVDs-by-mail model for a different medium under the presumption that readers would pay to borrow books when the public library was right there. Publisher’s Weekly keeps a database of book startups that now numbers more than 1,300; many of them are marked “Closed,” alongside a graveyard of broken URLs. There were plenty of practical ideas—targeting specific demographics or genres or pegged to more technical aspects, like metadata or production workflows. But many more proposed ways to alter books themselves—most of which made zero sense to people who actually enjoy reading.

“I don’t think they’re coming to that with a love of fiction or an understanding of why people read fiction,” Kreizman says. “If they were, they wouldn’t make these suggestions that nobody wants.”

The “10x more engaging” crowd has come in waves over the past two decades, washed ashore via broader tech trends, like social media, tablets, virtual reality, NFTs, and AI. These tech enthusiasts promised a vast, untapped market full of people just waiting for technology to make books more “fun” and delivered pronouncements with a grifting sort of energy that urged you to seize on the newest trend while it was hot—even as everyone could see that previous hyped ventures had not, in fact, utterly transformed the way people read. Interactive books could have sound effects or music that hits at certain story beats. NFTs could let readers “own” a character. AI could allow readers to endlessly generate their own books, or to eschew—to borrow one particular framing—“static stories” entirely and put themselves directly into a fictional world.

AI isn’t remotely a new player in the book world. Electronic literature artists and scholars have worked with various forms of virtual and artificial intelligence for decades, and National Novel Generation Month, a collaborative challenge modeled after NaNoWriMo, has been around since 2013. Even now, as much of the book world loudly rejects AI-powered writing tools, some authors are still experimenting, with a wide range of results. But these bespoke, usually one-off projects are a far cry from the tech industry’s proposals to revolutionize reading at scale—not least because the projects were never intended to replace traditional books.

“A lot of interactive storytelling has gone on for a very long time,” says Jeremy Douglass, an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, citing everything from his early career work on hypertext fiction to the class he’ll teach next year on the long history of the pop-up book to centuries-old marginalia like the footnote and the concordance. “These fields are almost always very old, they’re almost always talked about as if they’re brand-new, and there haven’t really been a lot of moments of inventing a new modality.”

To VC claims that AI will totally alter books, Douglass takes what he calls a “yes, and” stance. “What people are actually doing is creating a new medium. They’re not actually replacing the novel; they created a new thing that was like the novel but different, and the old forms carried on. I’m still listening to the radio, despite the film and game industries’ efforts.”

Tech entrepreneurs rarely pitch “yes, and” ideas. In their view, new technologies will improve on—and eventually supplant—what exists now. For all of his interest in the many forms of interactive fiction, Douglass doubts that most books would benefit from an AI treatment.

“There are extremely pleasurable aesthetic systems that aren’t intentional,” he says. “But how often when I’m reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Joy of Cooking do I think, ‘If only a chatbot could augment this on the fly’? And it’s partly the fact that some communication is deeply intentional, and that’s part of the pleasure. It’s handcrafted, it’s specific, there’s a vision.”

That isn’t to say that Douglass thinks there’s zero appetite for AI in literature—but it’s “probably a very small slice of the pie. So when you say ‘all books’? Almost certainly not. For the same reason that we’re not reading 100 percent pop-up books, or watching all of our books on YouTube, or anything else you can imagine. People are doing that too, but it’s extra.”

The exact size of that small pie slice remains to be seen, as does the general public’s appetite for instant novels, or chatting with characters, or hitting a button that will animate any book in your digital library. But those desires will likely need to come from readers themselves—not from the top down. “If you just give the tools to everybody, which is happening in spite of venture capital, as well as because of it, people will figure out what they want it for—and it’s usually not what the inventors and the investors think,” Douglass says. “It’s not even in their top-10 list of guesses, most of the time. It’s incredibly specific to the person and genre.”

The recent history of publishing has plenty of examples in which digital tools let people create things we couldn’t have predicted in the analog days: the massive range of extremely niche self-published romance, for example, or the structural variation and formal innovation within the almost entirely online world of fanfiction.

But when the tech industry approaches readers with ways to “fix” what isn’t broken, their proposals will always ring hollow—and right now, plain old reading still works for huge numbers of people, many of whom pick up books because they want to escape and not be the main character for a while. “That’s a good thing,” Kreizman says. And as AI true believers sweep through with promises that this technology will change everything, it helps to remember just how many disruptors have come and gone. “In the meantime, tech bros will still find VCs to wine and dine and spend more money on bullshit,” Kreizman predicts. But for the rest of us? We’ll just keep on reading.

[rulesofdisorder]

the amount of Jonathan hate this season is crazy. and a lot of it i feel comes from a deliberate misunderstanding of his reasons and motivations that he has explicitly explained in the show both in this season and through his actions and overall character throughout the show

like of course he’s distancing himself! he has always been self conscious of his place both as Nancy’s friend and now her boyfriend

of course he doesn’t think he should go away to an expensive college! his family just moved across the country and they already don’t have much money

of course he’s hesitant about leaving his family! his brother was kidnapped to what’s basically a hell dimension and has been possessed by what’s basically a demon. his sister (step sister, yes. but his sister) used to have/has superpowers and is actively being hunted by people ((and, smaller issue but not to mention the bullying that both his siblings face at school. and even if he can’t do much to help at school he can be there in the aftermath which is much more important in my opinion (and ik we didn’t see Will getting bullied but is it that much of a leap to assume that he does?)))

of course he doesn’t want to tell Nancy any of this! he knows her and, like he said in the episode, knows that she would come to the less expensive school near him rather than her dream school because that’s just the kind of person that she is. the kind of person who would give up anything for someone she loves, just like Jonathan.

and so many of these issues can be solved by just being honest with one another and what they want. because truly i think that Jonathan wants to go away and be with Nancy. it���s just that he has had to step up and fill a very important role in his family’s lives that is hard to step away once that role is no longer needed.

so i don’t understand why people think that this is the be all end all for Nancy and Jonathan’s relationship or that Jonathan’s completely in character mindset ruins his character.

[loquaciousquark]

Talks Machina Highlights - Critical Role C2E116-119 (Dec. 15, 2020)

Hi! I missed the first three minutes or so and opened the stream to Brian giving an absolutely incoherent ...ad? for some jewel game? Six thousand jewels just for logging in? Some app in the app store and he’s literally been talking about this now for six minutes and I don’t know what he’s talking about. He finally wraps up, Laura brings the show to a close, and we’re all a little worse than we were before.

Ashley tries to get us back on track and Henry bays over her. Brian tries to ask the first question and breaks off into feigned sobs halfway through. This is chaos incarnate.

Tonight’s guests: Laura Bailey & Ashley Johnson.

How’s Yasha feeling right now about Molly? She and Jester both are desperately curious about whether there’s a spark of Molly left in Lucien that can be brought back. It’s not the same as when Yasha was controlled by Obann; this seems more like just the way this is now. They’d settle for even finding the good in him, like they did with Essek. Brian jokes that they can monitor his mental state if Matt’s Irish accent starts to slip a little bit.

Jester is a little wary about scrying on Lucien now since he’s able to see her back.  She’s interested to try again now that Fjord’s given her the necklace.

Ashley has to run and grab a replacement set of headphones from Brian after hers get “crunchy.” It’s pretty cute seeing them run around and smooch on another screen. Brian teases that he doesn’t have any more questions for Jester since Caduceus has been doing all the healing lately. Laura tells us indignantly that she had Heal prepared for Caduceus in that last big fight, but Fjord got to Cad first. Brian explains how this is the same as all the good jokes he always lines up for Talks but never tells. Ashley’s crunchiness continues and we go briefly to a technical difficulties screen while Brian hops up to fix it.

Dani pips in to get this show back on track. Save us, Dani!

Ashley hadn’t thought about the aspect of Lucien controlling his friends’ minds, but finds it really creepy. It’s a cool game dynamic, and it’s a little different because they’re there willingly, but it’s really weird.

Jester thinks that “the tarot cards know all. She wants to buy into it real hard.” If it doesn’t make sense now, it will later. Laura has an Idiot’s Guide to Tarot Reading.

They’re super interested in why Aeor is like it is. Were they more advanced than us? Did they evolve along a different line? Ashley loves sci-fi and is all about this, especially since she wasn’t there for Happy Fun Ball time & hasn’t been able to get caught up on some of the things she missed in between, so she’s using this as an erstwhile replacement. She can already tell there are some things from this campaign that will bother her the way the unopened box did from C1. She and Laura both seethe at the camera about having to leave the spider behind.

Cosplay of the Week! Harland3r on instagram with a gorgeous winged Pike with a shield & mace. It’s an incredible photo and the wings look great.

Travis distracts Laura by dancing like a Trex offscreen. That seems right for this episode.

Jester’s encouragement of Yasha pursuing Beau was important in a lot of ways, not least because Ashley considered herself as uninterested in D&D romance as Travis & was a little unsure of activating a romance among her friends. However, it felt really natural within the game and it was really helpful to have Jester’s in-game encouragement. Yasha’s grown a lot and is in a much more positive place and is ready to find out what’s possible. Laura: “Jester from the get-go has seen Yasha as this wonderful soul from the beginning, and has seen how sad Yasha’s been through everything, and to see the difference that she exhibits when talking about Beau is drastic and wonderful. Jester’s joy in life is helping others find joy.”

Ashley points out it’s also so fun to “yes-and” with Laura because you’re like a little kid being dragged along by the hand - you don’t know where it’s going, but you know it’s going to be fun along the way.

Ashley does have a sense of “thank goodness Marisha isn’t jumping right into this” so she can coax herself into it, but when she tried to figure out the poem she had a lot of drafts that didn’t survive. She intentionally crafted the letter to give Beau an out if she didn’t feel the same way. There’s a lot going on with Lucien right now and there’s constantly a running thought in the back of her head about “maybe Beau is not into this.” Even the last couple episodes with Jester & Fjord have had Ashley finally understand shipping.

Brian brings us to the moment “almost as romantic as the pre-season finale of the Bachelorette.” Jester was “goo” afterwards. Early on in the campaign, Jester was very forward with her flirtations with Fjord & he shut her down. And then he kissed her underwater and immediately went and slept with Avantika, and Jester automatically shut herself down, because she thought she was misunderstanding & would only be hurt by those emotions. She deliberately focused on just being there with her friends, making everyone healthy and happy. These last few episodes where Fjord was flirting back felt like “my teenage heart again, my first kiss, the boy I like actually likes me back!” and she was able to open back up.

Yasha definitely has some instrument plans for those bones. She doesn’t know if she’s going to add to her harp or create a new one.

Ashley and Laura cheer about Travis stepping out his comfort zone. Laura thinks it was really good that he was doing it with her, his real-life wife, to see if he likes that sort of stuff in his D&D campaign. “It was just so sweet. It was just so sweet.” Brian says he’s actually a really romantic dude & Dani is so glad he asked before the kiss. Brian: “It’s going to be so sad when he breaks your heart and goes back to the corpse of Avantika.” Laura: “It’s fine, Jester will be long dead by then anyway.”

Jester does believe the four-year time trade was worth it, but that the city leaves “a mark on your brain,” especially as in-depth as she saw it. “Jester’s always been reticent to talk about her age because she’s aware she’s perceived in a juvenile way by a lot of people, and she’s insecure about that. She grew up by herself without a lot of social interactions and is experienced in a lot of ways now and naive in others; she’s very aware of human emotion around her, but chooses to see it in a certain way.” Losing the time makes her wonder if she needs to grow up & become an adult about certain things now. Laura: “I think actually she’s closer to Fjord’s age now. Actually, I’m not sure about his age. I don’t know how old he is - I’ve never even asked Travis!” Brian: “I think he’s definitely fifteen.” Laura: “Travis, how old is Fjord?” Travis, off-screen: “Sixty-five,” but he’s had the Mask of Many Faces up this whole time. Later, he adds that he’s in his early 30s.

Ashley has really enjoyed digging into Yasha’s more humorous side lately. It’s how she gets comfortable as a player, making it fun and light in a way that this year needs. “It’s also really funny to think that Yasha doesn’t know how Message works.”

Brian congratulates Laura & Ashley both on their game awards nominations. Brian vamps trying to get himself in as the presenter, but incidentally refers to Laura as his sister in the conversation and it’s super cute. “I would like to be the one to give the award to either my fiancee, or my sister!”

Fanart of the Week: @ethanmaldridge with an illustrated page from the Katzenprinz book. It’s just beautiful.

Jester’s polymorph gambit was terrifying, but the stakes got even higher when everyone else got stunned. She does lament choosing a bunny at the start. “Frickin’ Fjord’s armor!”

Yasha loves being polymorphed lately. She thinks it’s kinda funny, especially given her rigid upbringing with such defined roles.

Laura feels like Jester and Vex are weirdly two halves of herself. Brian: “You see the very bargainy, I’m gonna use my wit & smarts to negotiate situations. But at the same time, you’re very open to what people are thinking & feeling and navigating that. What you end up putting out (though it comes across as innocent and naive) is something pure because she truly believes it.” Laura thinks Yasha and Pike are the same way for Ashley, though Ashley feels a little closer to Yasha right now. Sometimes you just feel really exposed. Laura compares how much idealism she put into Jester to her character from Fruits Basket.

Since Yasha didn’t belong to either side in the war, she’s not hugely concerned by the fallout; she more wants to make sure her found family are okay and safe. Jester is the same way, Laura tells us. Jester doesn’t have any greater vision of the Empire & Dynasty interacting; she cares about the people, and it hasn’t been until the vision with the city that she kind of woke up and realized they have to really stop this now. It feels bigger than the Dynasty/Empire. Ashley: “It seems more of a thing for Beau and Caleb to care about.”

Really, up to now Jester was mostly concerned about getting Molly back, but now the stakes seem much higher. “We have to do this. We have to complete this, to beat them, to keep them from doing this.” Yasha is just going with the flow for now. There’s a lot coming at them and they are ready to find out what’s next.

And that’s that for tonight! Brian thanks the crew especially for working incredibly hard on switching everything to home-based streaming. He then gets stuck halfway spinning around in his chair and the last thing we hear is him idly wondering “What’s Fjord taste like?” which seems pretty on brand for tonight’s show. Is it Thursday yet?

[captainshadowgirllostfan]

So there’s this guy whose comments always sort of bothers me even though I half agree with what he’s saying, and I couldn’t resist commenting but it turned into an essay and now I just want to share:

“I kinda disagree with your notion on "improved character"... frankly I don't think a good character has to be likable. He/she has to have flaws and bring something to the story. By that notion, I personally would've probably prefered a mean Billy because I prefer continuity. This idea that Sheldon has got his entire history wrong is discrediting one of the most popular and iconic characters in Big Bang into nothing more than an idiot. Never mind that Young Sheldon is deliberately not showing key events mentioned in the Big Bang show. Sheldon says that Billy put something deep into his nose. Maybe that was his mind, that whatever was put in his nose wasn't that deep and he just thinks that. That's fine. But the fact is that it must have happened. I saw an article the other day by screenrant (horrible publication like most papers about entertainment that just spat out drivel to appease the creators instead of what people are really thinking but then are people really thinking when they watch these shows?) that Missy apparently forgot her childhood and how she and Sheldon split rooms when they were older and how the easy bake oven story might happen in the future except why would a 12-year-old Missy play with an easy bake oven when easy bake ovens are mostly for elementary kids. This Missy seems keen to grow up. Anyway, I do agree that Billy has become developed. There are hints that he's going to grow troubled. They're making Billy more relevant and I do love complicated characters. So if they're going to do the same to Billy as they did with George Sr, show why Billy became mean to Sheldon (I'm sure there was a justifiable reason. Sheldon says previously that he wished he was more mindful of Billy's feelings about his father leaving him when he complained about how he'll never get back the data he lost in his computer and how Billy would never understand that) then I'm okay with that, just like I do like how they're showing a very understandable reason why George Sr is kind of distant to Mary and why he's having problems committing to his marriage (though he is trying...) and his family and that the guy made so many sacrifices for his family over his own happiness. George Sr, in my opinion, is the best character in the show. As is George Jr. (even though I would've preferred to see what was said in Big Bang. A drunk father who was too macho, manly, and domineering, and kind of an idiot...Georgie is the only one that fits continuity which is why I have the least problems with him but I've come to love George Sr honestly. I love his story arc and how much the character tries, honestly, he tries so hard with his family to be a good husband and father and everyone just puts him down. This man deserves better. He deserves a reward.) though I honestly do wonder if that "cheating" will even happen because well you know everything Sheldon says in Big Bang is just a misunderstanding and he's basically wrong about...everything... sighs. tbh that does seem to be what the writers are doing. 187 IQ genius, idiot about the things going on around him.”

I’m sorry Young Sheldon’s lack of continuity and it’s excuse of Sheldon just didn’t know, misunderstood the situation, and was just basically wrong about everything will always annoy me. Why you ask? Because the moments where he becomes fragile, where he breaks down and spouts out some childhood tidbits of his are so genuine and seemingly traumatic for him, that I’m like seriously? 

You’re just going to sidebrush the fact that this character seemed bothered that he could never relate to his father because his father wanted him to be into football, hunting, and archery when he would’ve preferred to do science. 

You’re going to sidebrush the arguments his parents had that he listened to but apparently “misunderstood” when his dad was shooting up his mother’s china or when his mother prayed for the will to not grind up glass in his father’s own meatloaf?

You’re going to sidebrush the fact that his mother said that his father once fought a bobcat for a stick of liquorice?

Or the fact that his father after getting angry at the Dolphin’s win, wanted to shot the television and actually did. (I hope this gets shown in Young Sheldon).

Or how Sheldon used to cry after hearing his parents argue and how his mother admonished his father to stop yelling because Shelly’s crying and George Sr answers “He’s upset because his name is Sheldon”.

Or how Missy mentions that Sheldon created a Death Ray against the neighborhood kids who used to pick on him but instead pissed off the neighbor’s dog (I believe this might’ve been off-handedly mentioned in Young Sheldon though when Georgie asks one of the neighbor’s to buy a snowglobe and again when Mary confronts Brenda and Herb about their dog and Brenda mentioned I think the Death Ray) 

Or how he messed with her Easy Bake oven and it fizzled out her eyebrows so that her mom had to scribble on eyebrows when she entered the second grade (the series happens a bit later when Sheldon is 9 years old so I guess this could be excused but god that screen rant article annoyed the hell out of me). 

Or how he created a CAT scanner and tried to use it on her hamster Snowball but ended up killing Snowball and suffering radiation burns. How about that saying that came about after that incident, “Not a Snowball’s chance in a CAT scanner”. That saying is NOT even mentioned in the entire series!!!

Or how he tried to bring free electricity in his own neighborhood only for the Feds to come and ruin his project... (though actually I think they did try to make an episode... an episode probably exist of this actually so there’s at least that)

Or how he messed with the staircase for an experiment and broke his father’s clavicle. 

And how he had to go to boarding school (which was never shown in Young Sheldon. It just shows him going to high school with his older brother). 

Or how their dog Lucky got run over by a truck.

Or how Sheldon asked for a centrifuge for his birthday and got a dirt bike instead and was so upset about it that he came to hate birthdays. They don’t even show him hating birthdays! Just that he didn’t want to attend a birthday party. What about his own birthday? His and Missy’s?

Am I missing anything else? Please be free to add more if anyone can think of anything.

The point is, Young Sheldon is a good show, but it sucks as a prequel in my opinion. It’s retconning so much. 

Exhibit 1, Sheldon’s family which is hinted to be poor IS NOT POOR. They are middle-class. 

Exhibit 2, young Sheldon for some strange reason is dressed up like he’s a young version of Bill Nye or Urkel instead of the superhero tees that’s shown throughout the series and we know how neurotic scientist does not like change. Why is he dressed up like a middle-schooler as an adult but like a grown up (a dorky grown up) as a child? 

Exhibit 3, George Sr is shown to drink a lot but no where does it indicate that his drinking is causing problems to the family aside from the fact that it’s eating their finances. It’s hinted that George Sr’s drinking has caused problems in his marriage with how much Mary wanted him to stop. In Young Sheldon, Mary barely tries to do anything about George Sr’s drinking. 

Exhibit 4, Mary in Big Bang seems exasperated by Sheldon’s neurotics, in Young Sheldon, she indulges them (though it is likely she changes her methods of dealing with Sheldon later on...)

And again like I mentioned, it doesn’t bother to show the scenes mentioned by Sheldon. Instead it deliberately tries to make it like he’s got his personal memories wrong. He. The guy with the eidetic memory who can remember Penny’s outfits and menstrual cycle and also when Howard and Leonard made a pact to never date Priya. Like wth is with this show. I’m sorry as a Big Bang fan...Idk how you can like Young Sheldon without ignoring the fact that it’s a prequel. Because it’s a great show, but it sucks as a prequel.

[princesssarisa]

I've been thinking lately about @faintingheroine' suggestion that many readers of Wuthering Heights want Heathcliff and Catherine's love story to be less of a conventional love story than it is. Of course it's not a conventional love story and it's unfortunate that adaptations and pop culture tend to reduce it to just that. But it's really the emotional content, the personalities of the characters, and the way it's written that make it unique. As far as its basic plot and structure are concerned (I'm only talking about the love story at this point, not the book as a whole), it's not too different from countless other love stories written both before and afterwards. Boy and girl fall in love/girl is courted by another, richer suitor/girl is caught in the middle of a good boy-bad boy, rich suitor-poor suitor love triangle/girl misguidedly chooses the rich one/boy is angry and jealous/the rivals fight/girl gets romantically sick and dies/boy romantically grieves. Personally I see no problem with this conventionality, because again, the unique characters and the writing (and the fact that it's only the first half of the novel) set it apart from other love stories.

But maybe in some of the more far-fetched interpretations of Heathcliff and Cathy's characters, there is an element of resisting the plot's conventional aspects. When people find "deeper" reasons for why Cathy chooses not to marry Heathcliff (e.g. that she doesn't really love him romantically, or that she can't marry him because they're "the same person," or that she loves Edgar just as much and can't choose between them), maybe they are resisting the idea that something as commonplace as Heathcliff's lack of money and status could separate them. And maybe they are reluctant to accept that a female character as convention-defying and emotionally powerful as Catherine Earnshaw meets the mundane, pathetic fate of dying for love of a man.

I don't personally mind either of those things. As @faintingheroine has repeatedly pointed out, the fact that Heathcliff loses Catherine because of his lack of money and status sets the entire rest of the plot in motion: he devotes the rest of his life to acquiring all the status and worldly possessions that once belonged to his rivals, which wouldn't make much sense if he had lost Catherine for any other reason than his lack thereof. And it's evident that Catherine's breakdown is as much about the loss of her childhood freedom as about the loss of Heathcliff (not that the two aren't inextricably intertwined).

That said, I do empathize in some other ways with feeling annoyed by the story's more seemingly conventional aspects. For example, this is why I favor the interpretation that Catherine's ghost is real, not just a figment of Heathcliff and Lockwood's imaginations, and that she actively influences what happens in the second half. Of course this is deliberately open to interpretation, but I do think it's disappointing to assume that a character as powerful as Catherine Earnshaw ultimately becomes just another of Romantic literature's "lost loves" for male characters to mourn for. And I slightly resist the thought that Heathcliff would have been "saved" if only he had heard Cathy say "...and so he'll never know how much I love him," instead of running off after hearing her say it would degrade her to marry him. The trope of "out-of-context eavesdropping" is so mundane; it does seem slightly ridiculous to think that the entire tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine is caused by the same kind of clichéd misunderstanding that almost broke up Shrek and Fiona! That's why I prefer to see like ambiguity (as in a thousand other aspects of this novel) about whether hearing Catherine's declaration of love would have made any real difference to Heathcliff or not. It wouldn't have changed her choice to marry Edgar, and when Heathcliff comes back three years later, he realizes quickly that she does love him after all, yet this doesn't stop his revenge. If anything, it makes it worse: the knowledge of her love for him seems to make him more bitter about having lost her to Edgar, not less.

Still, even if Heathcliff's villainous turn does hinge on the stock trope of overhearing an incomplete conversation, and even if Catherine is reduced in death to a standard Romantic lost love, the uniqueness of the book as a whole does transcend its more conventional aspects. Wishing it were even more original than it is might be understandable, but it doesn't really need to be any different.

[bixbythemartian]

okay so I’ve been thinking about it, and the ending to CR2 feels a lot more... open ended, and I think that’s what is bothering a lot of people about it?

like, there’s a lot of wiggle room in there, and I absolutely and 100% think that was a deliberate choice. even in the last bits of the show Matt was throwing out plot threads to be followed later, and all the epilogue endings left a lot of room for new things to happen.

Even the characters who retired didn’t really- Veth is doing her thing but said, send me a message I’ll be there, as did Caduceus.

They’re all kind of living their lives and doing their own thing, having the freedom to do so and knowing that their family is within easy reach. A spell away.

RE: Kingsley- listen. I love Mollymauk with my whole heart. I have missed him for years. I was so pumped he was back.

That was Mollymauk. That’s the jackass.

It was absolutely Molly, it was the same soul.

He’s changed by what he’s gone through, and he’s different now than he was when he died- but they all are. So he’s going by a new name now?

So what? So is Veth.

Like, I get that we wanted to explore that more, and I would like to see it explored, and I think it will get explored, at some point. Even with 7 hours, there just wasn’t a lot of time to do that any justice, not without just taking over the whole narrative for the whole run time.

RE: Shadowgast- I feel like the ambiguity that a lot of people are seeing out of that is that Liam and Matt were understanding what the other was saying and didn’t realize it would not be so explicitly clear to the audience. I really, honestly, truly believe that.

I personally felt it was pretty clear (though I understand why people might not), and I think we’ll likely see it in upcoming one shots or possibly comics or something.

Or a book- I’d read the shit out of that slow burn. How many tender, intimate touches can we fit into an adventure through Aeor? So many.

(Also, Essek, once again, dragging Caleb away from danger. Caleb, once again, kissing his drow friend, this time on the cheek, hugging him warmly and Essek not displaying discomfort as he did in the group hug- this is the way their relationship has been building the whole time, and it’s so sweet and soft and gentle and quiet and that’s why I love it, it’s so them.)

I understand feeling upset that it wasn’t explored more, but I also think that there’s just some simple miscommunication/misunderstanding going on here due to everyone being strung out, tired, and dealing with the grief of the show ending. Players and viewers alike.

It happened, it was real, and there’s nothing that Matt or Liam have done to make me believe otherwise.

This is not to say you are wrong for being upset that it was not explored more, or more explicitly stated. I wish that had been explored more too, and they left enough room in the story that they absolutely could at a later date. I trust that they will, but I understand that a lot of people might feel burned and not want to extend that trust.

I guess my point, in the long run, is that this didn’t feel like the end of the story, and I think that’s what’s making a lot of people feel dissatisfied.

Totally understandable. I felt that way myself for about an hour after it ended. But I had a shower and thought my thoughts, I slept, I’ve snacked and caffeinated, and I’ve come to this conclusion:

That was the point.

There are more stories to tell with these people, they want to tell more stories with these people, and left the room to do so. I think they kind of boxed VM in with their endings, and for this one they wanted to leave more room for maneuver.

Not just for post-epilogue one shots, but for post-epilogue comics, books, and potentially more.

If you notice, a lot of the Vox Machina stuff was pre-airing stuff, or before they all got together kind of stuff, even the animated series is going to be stuff that aired, and while I’m certain there’s going to be some of that for the Mighty Nein, there’s a lot more room to grow here, post-epilogue.

I think that was by design.

If that makes you unhappy, fair enough, I can understand that.

It makes me optimistic, is all.

[telaraneas]

(i change my mind, copypasting this to its own post cause it really got away from me. long post warning)

i guess what im thinkin is like, that light is the domain of “things that MUST happen, for Reasons”; mind is the domain of “things must/will happen, for REASONS”; void is the domain of, like, “things happen or don’t happen for no discernible reason, necessarily”.

thats not really a great description of it i guess but, for instance, a good example is that one time Rosesprite happened…. For No Reason. and for no reason, really i mean no narrative reason- it ended up setting off a chain of events that resolved the subplots of many minor characters, so it’s not like it’s USELESS, but there was kind of no way to predict that whole thing from a “narratively this is something that we are leading up to” standpoint, which is why roxy’s actions brought it about on accident, and why rose was so thoroughly perplexed by it the whole way through. void is probably closer to the way things happen in real life, but it is sort of the anthitesis to the way things happen in stories, where everything is deliberate and happens for A Narrative Reason… but homestuck was always largely written on the fly at least in the smaller scale things, so this sort of thing just Happens lol

incidentally im pretty sure a mind player like terezi could have technically predicted that, if she had for any reason at all been previously informed of all the moving parts of that whole thing and TRYING to predict what the fuck jaspersprite was gonna do, because it IS perfectly logical in hindsight, but like… that’s the whole thing, why the fuck WOULD you be trying to look into that or predict it????? there was seemingly no narrative reason for any of that to be relevant! and that’s kind of what void is about i think!

on a similar note i thing breath is more along the lines of just…. Things Happen. similarly to void, it’s not about trying to discern WHAT will happen or WHY, but unlike void, the things that DO happen under the influence of breath ARE kind of things that the narrative called for. breath seems to be kind of the aspect dominating narrative contrivance

people often confuse contrivance with plot holes, but from what i understand they’re very different. a plot hole is when something happens, and it makes no sense for it to happen to the degree it breaks with previously established known facts, and it’s just never explained.

a plot contrivance doesn’t really contradict anything, necessarily, it’s just… like… there’s no reason for it to NOT happen the way it does, but there’s also no reason for it TO happen the way it does, and overall the reason it’s considered bad writing is because it tends to come across as lazy. oh, the heroes JUST SO HAPPENED to find the one magic sword that can defeat the bad guy, just laying on the side of the road. how convenient!

…incidentally, john’s entire story arc seems to be built entirely around moments like these skfnkenfke

i think it was smart writing to codify this as 1. the influence of an actual cosmic force that DOES operate on those principles, and 2. make john have to figure out how to get a handle on things by himself, even if the tools and circumstances just happened to be aligned in his favor by everything else in the story. john still has to be the one to turn HIMSELF into a deus ex machina, on-screen, to fix everything. it gives the story a good narrative and emotionally resonant reason to just contrive the hell out of everything john does and goes through, while STILL delivering on his arc as a hero’s journey

(i also think it’s really funny that the ring, which gets LITERALLY deus ex machina’d into the story via the author himself, is CONVENIENTLY found by tavros, and john CONVENIENTLY ends up with it in the story itself sjfnskdn true breath shenanigans, and incredibly fitting that vriska rejected it and played no part in it because there was no previously known indication that the ring would be important in any way until the two breath players started playing hot potato with it)

i’m still not sure if i have a good grasp on what exactly time does, because we have seen very different attitudes taken towards it by various different players AND the official description, and it’s hard to tell what, in each regard, comes from time as an aspect, from the classes of the characters, or from the characters themselves/both things; but for now i think my best guess is that time is kind of “things already happened, this is inmutable, let’s just cut to the chase”, more or less. like, the way this differs from light is that light still thinks of things more or less linearly, even when they UNDERSTAND this is not the case, whereas time tends to just not even concieve of things has “something that is happening”

like, example, vriska vs aradia; they both kind of enabled Big Bad Things that they already knew would happen via timeline shenanigans- but from what i recall, i don’t think aradia ever PERSONALLY set any of those events in motion, she simply didn’t correct any misunderstandings and thus allowed the wheels of time to turn smoothly; whereas vriska went “bec noir Will Happen = someone will make it happen anyways = i’m gonna make it happen myself, cause someone has to, and it might as well be me!!!” because of her compulsion to be the master of her own fate

aradia didnt so much see her actions as her *doing* anything, evil or good; she was pretty much just making sure things ended up where they were already going to end up/had already ended up, devoid of motivation or reason. similar to dave in the first five acts, just opening and closing loops Because He’s Gotta until he eventually runs out of steam and loops to close, because he really never had any motivations for doing what he was doing other than Well, I Already Did Them, So Obviously I Have To Do Them So I Can Have Already Done Them. no intent or motivation inherent to the actions themselves for half the story

a more childish example is caliborn getting fed up with the story and the Interpersonal Problems of the players and being like “fuck this, just skip to the good parts, they’re Going to happen so why do we have to sit through all of this shit!”. obv contrast to calliope, who seems to illustrate the kind of reader who would rather explore the status quo forever and imagine all the character interactions possible, playing in the *space* of the work in between the big status quo shifts and dreading said shifts, where caliborn wants to skip right past the status quo and have a story composed of nothing BUT the big shifts, the start and end of things

(neither of these are a sustainable way to tell a story, which is why you need at least a space and a time player)