Moral Orel hit me in a sweet spot. I think it’s beautiful seeing fans on different paths discussing how the show touched them. I’ve seen people who’ve left the church, agnostics, atheists, and Christians all say the show spoke deeply to them. Of course the show’s black humor on religion offended many, especially before its last season aired, but I think the show’s resulting legacy - connecting to people who’ve both left and who’ve stayed - demonstrates successful nuance to how Moral Orel was crafted.

The show’s creators have said it’s not against religion per se, it’s against hypocrites. Even with the first season, I felt that and found appreciation (frankly, joy) for what was satirized. Here was a show speaking up, exaggerating, and lampooning the facets of Protestant American Christian culture I’ve vented about in confidence to relevant friends and family - without, like many modern shows which tackle this subject do, mocking followers themselves, faith itself, and suggesting to viewers one way of life is better than another, one group of people is (ex: intellectually) superior to another.

Some people have stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me when I left church,” or outright, “This show taught me there is no god.” And that’s not an unfair way to interact with Moral Orel because it doesn’t preach what you “should” do there (a sign of mature writing, really). I stepped away from Moral Orel and said, “This show comforted me in the areas I get frustrated,” which assuages my feelings and makes me more confident in my faith and place within culture.

I feel awkward in contemporary culture because I was raised with minimal secular exposure - daughter of a worship pastor, student at a private Christian school until high school. Meanwhile, in adulthood, I didn't attended church functions for over a dozen years. My group of friends have largely been non-Christians who hold negative opinions about the religion and don’t live remotely similar lifestyles to what I was raised with. I love what I've learned from them. Unfortunately, this also means the cultural building blocks that make me who I am seem shared by no one I'm around, which, even though I'm in my 30s, remains disorienting.

On the flipside, I'm the weirdo with the third eye in Christian spaces, too. I’m an ever-thirsty knowledge-seeker who strives to comprehend forbidden topics from all angles. I spent my twenties researching, questioning, rebuilding knowledge, and critically analyzing everything about the Bible. Church attendees and services feel painfully artificial, with mental blockers to topics I feel are critical to understand.

In either community I partake in, I feel “off.”

I’m grateful to have been raised by parents who didn’t pussyfoot around issues, with a father who deep-dives research. Discussions, delving, and digging into the hard stuff has always been fostered. My family spoke to pastors when we disagreed with their theology. I grew up around people who practiced passive acceptance, but my family was not that.

In the last year, I’ve returned more strongly to my faith and have been reintegrating with the Christian community. In some areas, my faith has grown and, humbly, I’ve learned much from peers. Despite stereotypes, I want to note that, in certain fields, the church community has always been deep and meticulous! And there are so many beautiful and uplifting areas in the church. But likewise there are those areas that get assumed, aren’t questioned, and aren’t… responded to well by questioning spirits. There have always been areas in the church culture I find disingenuous, foolish, illogical, limited, oversimplified, denialistic, or susceptible to hypocrisy and immorality. I’m not better than any person on this planet, but I’m rubbing shoulders with a community that has different blinders than I do, who don’t even consider asking the types of questions or seeking out the information I find necessary for a solidified faith.

Moral Orel disparages the toxic elements of Protestant culture, the misinterpretations, the artificial facades, the mindless assumptions, the poorly-hidden underbelly, all the areas Christian community can and does go wrong. It makes me feel justified feeling awkward in two worlds: someone for whom Christianity is deeply important, but someone whose mindset doesn’t jive with the rest of the town. Someone who can find and wants to find the best lessons outside of Christianity. Someone who believes in questioning, rethinking constantly, raising her eyebrows at common notions within church culture, and striving for the actual love, sincerity, dedication, and goodness our faith should be based on.

smth smth about 'the thing that the character did that you thought was rly rly funny in the moment is actually linked to a terrible trauma that lies within said character.' or wahtever.

Lightning, water, and fire! Like forever before the plot starts. By the time the plot starts, the lightning and fire deities have been subjected to punishment by the two gods that picked them.

Oh (the fire deity) is first to be punished. They basically decide that since they're going to live for a long time, gotta set some long time goals! And they opt to be the wrath of the gods since most of the other deities are too 'soft' in their opinion. So Oh just. Smites humans. This isn't really a /good/ thing and in their defense mentally, they do it to help Ymber since he's the softest of them all. So their punishment by the gods is to be split in two, effectively halving the power of one into two. (Now they are in a male and a female body and use both male and female pronouns apart since they together make they but apart it feels weird to be they. But prior to the split they use they/them. Also the split bodies go by the names Ohiwe and Ohime.)

Fulj is the second to be punished. She falls in love with a mortal woman and that is a crime according to the gods. Mortals and immortals are not to be together and it will only bring suffering to both sides. So her punishment is her memories of the woman are stripped and her body basically broken to the point she can't remain physical all the time.

Ymber, unfortunately, is the one who blames himself for the discoveries and punishments. If he had only tried to restrain Oh more then maybe they would have chilled out and stopped before being punished. If he had only tried to persuade Fulj to not continue seeing the mortal woman so often perhaps she wouldn't have been punished. So he's just increasing the guilt on his shoulders every day that he remains unpunished since the elder gods have both laid down to rest. They can't enforce their laws anymore and none of the deities are keen on harming one another at this point. They just want to continue existing in peace.

youtube shorts is recommending me anti-trans accounts doing street interviews in portland like "omg omg ongggg kitkat look look look we made algyrythm so good. look look ❗️❗️❗️ you live here, yes?? 🥳 we know where you live?? 👉👈 you like local content?? 🥺 you like portland?? 👉👈 you want see portland???? 🥺🥺🥺 HERE PORTLAND POSTER!!! 😄" like. damn dude i actually feel kinda bad that you tried so hard. like you actually did pick up maybe one-half of a topic i like to watch videos about. it's like when a little kid tries to pick flowers for their mom and gives her an allergic reaction instead. i'm sitting here like wow. is this really what portland videos are?? is it seriously all just viral conservative clickbait and longform videos about fake meme polycules???

.....should i have a fucking youtube account where i post about being in an actual portland polycule????

I’m fairly new to the fandom, but I do have a question if you can answer it! Why do people ship Daigo with Aoki / Masato? I tried looking to see if they’ve interacted before, but couldn’t find anything! Sorry for asking I’m just </3 dumb AND I LOVE YOUR ART OF THEM!!! Nerd looking ahhhhhh

hi ! welcome to the community i hope you're having a lovely time so far and ty for enjoyin my stuff :) no need for apologies it's a very fair question to have :]

i cant speak for everyone (all. ten people into masadai anyway) but Personally To Me i just think the idea of them together is very funny. thats quite literally it im afraid..

Ok I'm back, finally got to watch the Ghosts finale & took some time to articulate my thoughts.

I totally understand why it was divisive, but honestly for me it was just the issue every sitcom finale has where they have the baggage of multiple seasons weighing on them and needing to be wrapped up in one episode. Any sitcom finale that wants to end-end has to decide whether to do a "very special episode" vibe where it's completely different in structure to a typical episode, or keep the structure of a typical episode and wrap up quickly in the way that every episode of a sitcom usually ends quickly. The Ghosts finale chose to do the latter, and given the 30 minute runtime, they just didn't have the time to really sit with everything that happened. A longer ep, or one that didn't follow their usual structure likely would have helped to make it all feel smoother / land better, but that would have required it to be something different than any other episode of Ghosts. What we got, then, was something with the structure of a typical episode but the emotional baggage of a finale, meaning things are inevitably just less funny and much higher stakes than usual because you don't have the expectation that everything will be back to normal next episode.

But I'm not at all disappointed by Alison and Mike leaving, and had basically expected it as the ending since I started watching the show-- I think the ghosts choosing to let them go (and especially to let Mike and Mia go, since Mike has never been able to see them and Mia won't very soon), was great and showed the growth they've all had over the last 5 seasons.

And while I was briefly worried about it, I think they'll have a great time in the hotel! The show has portrayed boredom as the biggest issue every ghost has had with their afterlife, and a difficulty with change as being the biggest point of growth for basically all of them. The hotel certainly solves the boredom issue, and the realization that this change could be good shows how much they've grown.

This finale for me was not at all a destruction of the found family they've cultivated. The ghosts are a family to each other now in a way they weren't emotionally able to be before Alison opened them up to it. And now Alison and Mike come back every year to be with them because they choose to, because they love them, not out of obligation. Because they're all still family, even if they don't literally live together anymore.

One of my favourite things about Ghosts is how it portrays the weird messy difficult parts of life as just as important to being human as the nice parts. And I think this finale did exactly that.

So all this to say, while I don't think the execution of it worked for me, I do think Alison and Mike taking the hotel deal at the ghosts' suggestion was the right ending for a beautiful five seasons of television. ❤️

I only just joined this fandom in November of this year but god I love this show and can't wait to keep obsessing over it. I hope you will all stick around and continue to write fic and make edits and play in the space for a long time :)

...

also since i've basically been live blogging watching this i'm going to offer up an unpopular opinion. so pls if you are my mutual and have seen this do not hate me if you haven't avoid this post but uh. Ballerina could have been better than it ended up being and i don't know how to feel about that

I think I might take a break from writing on here (quite possible a lie) </3

ok this is a long fucking shot but does anyone out here know anything about. Allergies but rather than having itchy runny-nose symptoms you just feel systemically like shit. Like fatigue, nausea, vague headache, moderate-to-severe excercise intolerance, that sort of thing. But correlated to like, pollen exposure. Or just air quality in general?

The best ballpark diagnosis I have is asthma, but I've never actually had An Asthma Attack so I don't know if that's.... right. And even if it is, I can't really find good research or resources on managing systematic effects of asthma at this like... non-acute, non life-threatening severity.

Sometimes with weird medical shit like this, there's information that exists if only you can find the right keyword to search.... maybe somebody's got something?

Or even just, it'd be nice to hear if anyone elae deals with this and I'm not, like, completely insane*

*for this. other insanity unspecified.

sorry for saying I was going to do things and even starting them and then disappearing from this website entirely for three days. It will happen again

i hung out w/ some acquaintances of mine yesterday and i think i mayhaps be more positive/bubbly than i thought i was

i think if i make my neocities site cool enough ill ditch my carrd for real actually

hats are pretty neat things. how many kinds of hats are there? some are Plops, some are Brimmed, some do not serve any Practical Function, some are not even Fashionable but they're Funny To Look At, some are Very Big! and some are So Small you have to pin them to your head! hats are neat :)

im am not the master kf putting two & 2 together

this assay is so fucking fake......