#and about the ways in which they have a distorted (positive) view of each other
Note
I have an idea! I’m always a total suck for hero x villain stuff, and power dynamics.
So how about this: hero and villain have regularly been fighting each other, and it’s always either ended up in a tie, or with the hero winning and arresting the villain, who escaped soon after.
Lots of banter, etc.
Now, for the first time ever, villain managed to defeat hero, taking them prisoner. They enjoy this immensely, making hero kneel for them, etc. To them it’s just a continuation of their usual dynamic and banter. A bit of payback (and also enjoying the view).
Hero however, is genuinely scared about being at villains mercy, because that never happened before and they don’t know what to expect. Villain enjoys the whole thing right up until they realise hero is genuinely afraid of them, thinking the might hurt or kill them.
(I’m sorry if that is too detailed, I’ve never done this before XD. Feel free to leave out or add whatever you want)
Greetings!
There is no such thing as "too detailed" on this page regarding asks! The more material I have to work with, the more I'll be able to write. 'Twas a brilliant idea, and I hope you enjoy the interpretation I have of it.
Your dutiful writer,
Enjoy <3
XXX
#5- "A Change of Pace
Battles shared semblance to a waltz in which Hero was always the lead. Villain either made it out by the skin on their teeth or had to pitifully look up from their cell at Hero to watch them gloat. They knew it never lasted for long. No matter the cell Hero confined Villain in, they and their crew always found a way to bypass security to scheme another day.
The two had been at one others heels for years, and today seemed just like any other day. Intel was able to intercept a delivery authorization by one of Villains' crew members for a hefty amount of radioactive material. It would be likely Villain would be stationed not too far from the drop zone. It seemed too easy, but it was routine after all.
Hero wasted no time in setting up their stake-out by the time the trucks were arriving at the drop point. They remained tucked atop a rooftop behind a vent exhaust. Through their binoculars, they scanned the various windows among the city buildings. Some aglow with warm lights contrasting the cool luminescence of the street lights below. The radio communications of their ear piece were distorted, but their radiation detector hadn't been going off from their position.
"Isn't it just a lovely view?"
As Hero twisted their body to meet the source of the voice, they stopped upon hearing the sound of a rotating chamber and the sight of Villain holding a gun towards them. Their composure was collected and calm, which wasn't much different than their usual cockiness. It was a surprise, sure, but it didn't matter they were up there. It wasn't like they hadn't given each other a few black eyes and split lips, so if Hero needed to fight this one out, they could manage until back-up came.
"Well, a second ago yes, but now I'm not so sure." Hero said, raising their hands up slowly.
"Oh, surely you don't mean that Hero," Villain jutted their gun up briefly, gesturing Hero to stand, which they did. "Deep down you know you love our little ren-dez-vous~"
Hero glanced behind them, hearing the sound of barreling trucks down the alleyways. The familiar smug grin which quirked the corner of Villains' lips, caught Heros eye and they shrugged their shoulders a little, returning a grin.
"Look, I get that you're toxic, but this is taking it a little too far, Villain."
"Well, thats rude," Villain took a step forward, gun still locked on the other just as their eyes were. "But I have no idea what you're talking about. Turn around, take a look."
Villains tone made Heros stomach twitch in discomfort. It didn't help how intently they held their gun either, but at least after all these years they picked up a thing or two from Hero; one being the proper way to hold a gun so someone can't kick it from your grasp.
The other being Villain finally learned was to have the upper hand. With visible hesitance, Hero picked up their binoculars to better see the drop sight. It was to their horror to see Villains crew pulling tarps off the covered back, revealing no cargo in any of the vehicles. No crates. No sacks or odd-glowing tubes. When they looked to Villain again, several red dots littered Hero's body, and the panic started to sink in a bit.
"But, Intel-"
"Discovered plans of a radium delivery?" Villain sighed, feigning a heartbroken look. "Hero, I thought you surely knew by now after how long its been,"
From within the scarf Villain wore around their neck, they pulled up a respirator. Heros mind was racing. What was it they could have missed? The exact location, parameter setting, time, and plate numbers were all there. Their eyes fell, and Villain paused for a moment to sigh before nudging the gun just below their chin to raise their head.
"I don't do business on my birthday."
Villain lifted their mask, and Hero heard something click onto the pavement. A purple plume of smoke enveloped the two. Their mind was grew hazy, and their limbs got heavy. Hero blinked, and next they realized it, they were on the ground.
"It doesn't make any sense.." Hero managed out, pulling themselves back towards the ledge the best they could.
"One of your little bugs missed the cancellation call I put in. None of you realized it, and I saw... an opportunity." Villain knelt down in front of them, a hand snaking through Heros locks only to pull it sharply upwards.
"If you don't work..." Hero hissed out, trying to intake some of untainted air. "Then what is this?"
Villain could only smile as they leaned in, tapping the end of the gun against Heros chin. They moved in slowly, or that is what they assumed. Everything moved a half-second behind and was only increasing in increments as Hero was exposed to the smoke bomb.
"Pleasure." Villain all but purred near their ear.
With a sharp yank, Hero went hurdling into the wafts of smoke. It scorched their throat before it burned their lungs. One ear, they could hear the hiss of the static from the earbud. In the other, the hiss of the spraying smoke bomb. Hero could hardly make out what went wrong, especially in the state they were in now. They at least knew there was no Intel to call out to, and no back-up coming for them.
As Heros vision faded, the last thing they saw was Villain kneeling atop of them with a satisfied smile behind the respirator. For the first time in however long Villain and Hero had been at it, Hero was bested. Despite the incapacitated state, there was a growing fear of what Villain had in store after all these years.
+++
When Hero awoke, it took a while to absorb their surroundings. The windows were bright but not because of light but because of the heavy fall of snow outside. Hero laid atop a deep red, ornate rug set in front of the large fireplace with stone inlays of various colors. The hearth was aglow with a roaring fire which lit up the inside of the cabin.
As their eyes focused on the walls, it was a nauseating realization that there were no portraits on the wall but various mounted animals. All walks of the food chain, from wolves and hawks to sheep and deer, decorated the walls.
In attempts to sit up, Hero realized they were bound. While yes, it wasn't like they would be free range at all, but Hero thought it excessive to bind not only their ankles to their wrists, but to bind both to a rope around their neck to prevent further struggle. Hero waited a moment to let their senses come back to them and not be embarrassed over being hog-tied on a cabin floor surrounded by dead animals.
It didn't take long to hear the thud of boots crossing the wood and softening on the carpet in front of them. As slow as they were, it didn't compare to the steady rise in heart rate Hero felt. Just because Villain had been caught in the past or had plans interrupted didn't mean they couldn't have still worked on something Hero missed somehow. Obviously, a cabin in the middle of nowhere was one of those plans.
"Oh, look at you, a bow and everything..." Villain cooed, slipping three fingers under the rope around their neck to hoist them up on their knees. They adjusted the ropes behind Hero, which loosened the pressure on their neck only slightly.
A dark apron covered Villains shirt, and their hands were poorly washed of blood from whatever it was they were doing in the kitchen. The side-effects from the smoke bomb kept their limbs weighed down like lead, and their head pounded with questions. Luckily, Villain was prompt to handle the latter.
"Do you like it? The cabin?"
"This all seems a bit.. primitive." Hero drowsily responded.
"Call me old-fashioned, I suppose. The snowstorm outside makes it impossible for your team to scope out in terrain recon or aerial surveillance, and you'll surely die out there if you try to escape."
There was a brief moment Hero felt the urge to try at an escape, yet with the upward motion, strain was put on their throat. With a strangled gasp, Hero was forced to settle back on their knees. All the while, Villain circled their victim like a shark in water, footfalls slow and deliberate before they knelt in front of Hero, their lips curled into that damned dastardly smile.
"And far away from anyone who may hear you scream. Unlike my crew, no one is coming for you, Hero."
From Villains hip, a long blade with a pronounced gut hook at the end and a dark leather handle came into view. They've had their shoot-outs, but they knew the two missed each other on purpose (most times). They've had their brawls but still left the other standing to fight another day. However, this was a new leverage Villain had, and it wasn't the heat of the fireplace making Hero perspire. It was pure fear, and it reflected back to them in the blade of the knife.
"Do you know how long I've waited for this?" Villain began, bringing the edge of the blade dangerously close to their throat. "To have you humiliated before me? I've spent years dreaming of how I'd have you at my feet, begging for your life to an unanswering god."
The spark behind Villains eyes made Heros blood run cold. They'd never seen Villain like this before. The bindings around their wrists and ankles offered no give, and any shift of their current position threatened to weigh on their windpipe. The blade edge was sharp enough to cause a paper cut-like string on their neck. So many things went wrong that Hero felt out of depth with what to do and what to expect from Villain.
"P-please.." Was all Hero managed, their voice raspy from the smoke and barely a whisper.
"Please?" Villain echoed in daunting amusement. "Oh, Hero, how the mighty do fall!"
The laugh that echoed in the room felt closer to derangement, and Hero visibly flinched at the volume. Before they knew it, a burn stung their eyes, and their vision blurred and skewed the sight of Villain with fat, hot tears.
Something about the reaction shot down Villain from their victory high. Here, they thought they'd be able to rub their success in their face, to finally show Hero what it was like to seep in their own failures. They thought the victory would be sweet, yet the sight of the true fear Hero held in their eyes left a bitter taste in Villains' mouth. Even with how long they'd been doing this, Villain never truly feared Hero.
Villain had never seen this side of Hero before.
The hook of the blade near Heros throat snugged itself under the rope before it was severed completely. Hero let go of a breath they didn't realize they were holding. After a moment, Hero watched as Villain stood and took off their apron, revealing a crisp white button up and fine dress pants.
"Get up."
"W... what?" They stammered out. With the rope now cut, the restraints seemingly fell apart as Hero moved their wrists.
"Dinner is going to be ready soon, and I figure you'd want to change." Villain said as they casually rolled their sleeves up.
As if they weren't confused before, they just stared at the other in awe and disbelief at the sudden change of heart to cut Hero loose.
"What.. You're not going to kill me..?"
"Not yet, no. I told you I don't do business on my birthday." There was a pause. "Even a belated one. It did take a couple days to get out here."
"Then.." Hero looked about the cabin, the attire, the undeniable smell of something cooking in the kitchen. "You kidnapped me to have dinner?"
There was a flash of that damned grin and an innocent shrug of the shoulders.
"Ah, a birthday dinner, and it's not like you would have made reservations. I mean, you hardly remembered! And you never have a day off, so I simply took matters into my own hands when the opportunity saw fit." Villain held a hand out to Hero, which they hesitantly took.
Hero still hadn't quite moved past the concept they thought they'd be gutted and stuffed a moment ago. The hand which took Heros pulled them close, another arm wrapping about their waist. The cologne Villain wore was subtle, but enough to bring a bit of ease in their shoulders.
"It's quiet here, and warm and away from everything and everyone.. no cameras or recorders, just us.." Villain said, their voice gentle. "Tomorrow you can stumble upon the ski mobile in the garage and be gone before the suns up, and that'd be fine just.. can we have tonight?"
Hero pulled back a bit to look up at Villain with surprise and perplexity. Yet, the look Villain wore resembled closer to remorse than anything. Villains hand gingerly cupped their jaw, a thumb caressing over their cheek. They'd been doing this for years after all, perhaps they did need a change of pace.
"Okay, Villain.." Hero said before the relief allowed a smile of their own to cross their lips. "It's only fair for forgetting such an important holiday."
"I'm glad you can see reason," Villain teased before their expression softened and pulled Hero back into their arms. "And.. I'm sorry for scaring you for you to see that."
The words held Hero like Villains arms did. With a soft sigh, Hero shook their head against their shoulder. At least now, there would be no way to underestimate Villain.
"Maybe I needed my life threatened to convince me that a break won't be what kills me." Hero quipped.
The air had lightened, and the dinner Villain carefully prepared for them was decadent and filling. The drink warmed them from the inside, and when they went to bed, their bodies did an even better job at fighting the cold off together. When the morning came and the light streamed in through the window, Villain was surprised to feel the weight of Hero still on their bare chest.
"You're still here.." Villain said, not quite as a question but more in surprise.
"Mm... it's too cold to go out..." Hero muttered, still not quite awake.
Villain smiled and pulled the blankets over them more, nuzzling contently into Heros hair. The snowfall had long since stopped, leaving glistening icicles to catch the sunlight outside the window.
"I know.." A soft kiss fell on Heros head.
Hero looked up at them with bleary eyes, barely able to process the fact Villain even planned that, before they gave a defeated smile and rested back on Villains chest.
"Happy birthday, Villain."
With a gentle kiss, the two shared the quiet morning together, wrapped up in one another until Villain found themselves lulled back to sleep by Heros calm breathing.
135 notes
·
View notes
Text
We are all mirrors of each other...
literally 🪞
Don't cling to others' opinions.
They don't even represent the truth of things.
✨
Many times the people we deal with are dealing with THEIR OWN PROJECTIONS, they are not even looking at us for who we are. And we do the same with others.
And reading about this, recognizing this, is so important, because then we stop projecting our own disorganized things onto others, as well as stop receiving so openly the projections of people as absolute truths of life.
How much of your opinions about others doesn't exactly reflect your view of them, but rather what you feel about yourself when looking at them? Some examples.
Examples:
The person who is already in their adulthood and who specifically has the frustration of not having lived their dreams, not having pursued something that fulfilled them, for various personal reasons of theirs.
It is something that calls for healing and harmonization of this, so that the person does not live with this unhappiness within themselves. However, many of us do not have the habit of reflecting on how much our past impacts our present, and neither on how much we have our baggage disorganized that we reflect onto others the who-o-le time.
So, the person in the example, older, and who has this specific issue of frustration, sees a young adult being independent, chasing their dreams.
Whenever dealing with a young person who reminds them of this, their ego immediately confronts with the information of "I wished I was living this", and this being's energy shifts to a position of envy, and sometimes it can even seek to harm the other person by inventing stories, distorting the other's independence into arrogance, gossiping, and so on.
And the "crazy" thing is that, believe it or not, this being tells themselves that they are doing this for reasons they invent for themselves ("this person is arrogant, look at them, all independent!") when, in reality, it is they who are constantly feeling uncomfortable with the strong and independent presence of the other. Low self-esteem and comparison, which unfortunately lead to envy.
The young person, in the example's case, doesn't need to say anything to the person for this to be triggered, because the ego, which is the primary channel through which we tend to have contacts with others, captures this information.
The ego will capture, will know that it is something that needs to be compensated internally but that the person, out of pride, out of ignorance, out of disinterest, out of stagnation, or whatever, did not run after correcting.
Knowing this, the ego, which has important functions for our psychic structure, but will always depend on how its "owner" conducts it, will deal with envy, as this is the way the person deals with things they receive from their surroundings and that "hit" them in the mirror effect, since, in reality, we all serve as mirrors to each other. All the time (and it was supposed to be a good thing, but the way we deal with it makes it bad).
The human ego is important,
but not the end of everything.
It is only a part of the mind's structure. It is limited, but it exists so that the human being, with their current limitations, deals little by little with what they can from the exchanges they make.
The conscious mind is limited. The unconscious, infinite (and we are more than 80% made of unconscious mind!).
The ego is the most active part in us, but it is not the only one that exists.
And so there is an axis to be activated, which is the Ego-Self axis, so that every human being knows that the place of the Ego is the place of support to live the moment, to deal with the moment.
The Ego is like a filter for consciousness to support and live. But it's not the end.
Therefore, not everything your conscious mind says is real.
The "conscious" mind needs to be refuted and reviewed by yourself, because it PROJECTS itself all the time, it is always in contact with others and taking to others what is uniquely its own (especially unresolved things, but also good things), as well as always bringing in what others say.
And if so, and if the Ego is in the part of consciousness but it is limited, does not reflect everything, it needs to be refuted. So that our mental life is healthier and truly conscious, in the pure and true sense of the word.
In the example, the person who is envying lacks independence and confidence to follow their own path internally, they are absent from it, it is something they know they do not have within them but that for their own well-being and dream, it would be important to have (after all, the more we live our lives in integrity, seeking to be and live more sides of ourselves, less restricted, limited, we will be, and your consciousness, deep down, knows this 🙌🌟).
Another important point to mention is: On the other side, if it is a person with traits of fear of judgment, fear of exclusion, this situation will negatively fit, making the being who is envying seem so right and the one who is afraid of judgment, feels down. It is important to take care of this to avoid further internal issues.
If you identify that someone is projecting onto you in a very negative way, step back, take care of it in yourself and let the other's internal work be their own. But, although difficult, avoid the issue of anger and revenge. This will keep you in this process longer than necessary.
Both people need help,
in the first case, for having a deep low self-esteem to the point of letting this splash onto others;
in the second case, for having a root of fear of judgment and fear of not pleasing others, which leads them to believe that the harshest and most negative criticisms that arise from people reflect reality.
Another example:
A woman who denies the experience of her feminine side in integrity (the issue of sexual self-awareness, for example) by conditioning herself to some kind of intense restriction, and who also experiences the difficulty of, when looking at any woman who does not do the same as her, judges, but it is not just any judgment, but rather a categorization and labeling, because for her the wound with the experience of other sides of her femininity is so limited, and, because she keeps denying this to herself, the anger at those who live in freedom arises and increases whenever she encounters such a person.
It is important for both sides to take care of this, the first, who is emanating and projecting, the second, so that their internal difficulties with fear of judgment or something similar, do not increase.
Everything can be reversed into an opportunity for healing!
Heal, heal, heal, still and especially if the person has come, in malice, because of their projection, to hurt me.
These are just some of the various examples we could give to illustrate how our opinions about others and the opinions they give are not always what things really are.
Don't cling to others' opinions.
They don't even represent the truth of things.
Many times the people we deal with are dealing with THEIR OWN PROJECTIONS, they are not even looking at us for who we are. And we do the same with others.
And reading about this, recognizing this, is so important, because then we stop projecting our own disorganized things onto others, as well as stop receiving so openly the projections of people as absolute truths of life.
#writings#writers on tumblr#my writing#writers#writeblr#fears#fear of judgment#fear of abandonment#ego#psyche#human mind#self improvement#self development#self help#self reflection#self care#self awareness#self healing#spiritual awareness#projections#psychologycal projections#archetypes
30 notes
·
View notes
Note
Please talk about Mononoke's feminist themes! For the record, I already agree; I just love reading your meta commentaries. 💚
Oh, thank you! I also love writing them, and I'm happy when people ask. 🙂
Just a warning, this got very long...
The Role of Daoism
I think at the core of Mononoke's treatment of feminism is the idea that men and women are fundamentally the same, in that the true nature of both is made up of the united "masculine" and "feminine." This view comes from Daoist philosophy, which considers the interdependence of yin (the "feminine") and yang (the "masculine") to be the true nature of all things. The interaction of these complementary energies is the source of all growth and change. Since growth and change are essential to life, the unity of "masculine" and "feminine" is also. In Mononoke, this not only means the life of a society, but also the life within each individual.
The human society in Mononoke is distorted because of the separation it creates between yin and yang. Women are denied their internal "masculine" and assigned only the "feminine" energy of submission and acceptance, while men are driven away from their internal "feminine" and assigned only the "masculine" energy of assertion, aggression, and emotional detachment. The warped social structure in which men control and exploit women depends on this internal alienation of individuals from themselves, and thereby also their external alienation from each other.
These divided "masculine" and "feminine" roles are an unsustainable denial of nature. The confusion and suffering they cause create the mononoke: expressions of the energies humans struggle to suppress. The Bakeneko, the Zashiki Warashi, the Nopperabou are all expressions of the rage that women aren't "supposed" to feel on their own behalf. The Umi Bozu is an expression of the feminine aspect of Genkei that he isn't "supposed" to feel and has come to fear.
Exorcising the mononoke requires drawing out these aspects and reconnecting humans with their real, complete selves. It requires a rebalancing of the "masculine" and "feminine" that gives women back their power and men back their hearts.
Birth As Transformation for Women
An important symbol of this kind of transformation is birth. In western feminism, we're wary (for good reasons) of birth being used to represent feminine power, but it's a central concept in Daoism: The manifestation of all new phenomena depends on the interaction of yin and yang. In Mononoke, childbirth symbolizes the emergence of positive change for women. Giving birth transforms them from static, submissive objects into complete beings who are no longer convenient for men to exploit. Their desire to have their children is a defiance of men's control over them.
This is clear in "Zashiki Warashi," where women are the victims of forced abortions so they can continue to be exploited as prostitutes. Having their children would free these women from prostitution, which not only explicitly treats women like property, but does so in a way that directly reinforces men's power over and lack of empathy toward them.
Unlike the men who use them, these women's children do not embody the alienated "masculine" but the women's own "masculine": parts of themselves that represent their wills and their potential for new and better lives. Their connection with their children is their connection with their true selves, the interlinked yin and yang and the growth and change that emerge from them.
When this "masculine" and the life it would create with them are cut off, they become a mononoke: an expression of the women's grief and rage at the denial of their natures.
Incidentally, their role as symbols of the "masculine" could be why all of the Zashiki Warashi appear to be male.
It's kind of subtle though.
This co-operative "masculine" and "feminine" and their power to transform are a threat to the system that relies on women being solely "feminine," submissive and unchanging. Those who depend on that system are desperate to destroy them.
This also happens to Shino: She is used by a man who turns on her the moment she is carrying a child. Shino's child is a threat to this man's power and status, and quite possibly represents a threat to humanity's entire dualistic psychological and social structure.
Shino chooses to embrace her will, her capacity for assertiveness and self-defense, in the face of everyone who tells her she's being "irresponsible" and "selfish." Her "masculinity" protects her, her child, and the potential for change they symbolize.
The themes of prostitution and childbirth that are prominent in "Zashiki Warashi" begin all the way back in the first "Bakeneko" with the way the Sakai family treats Mao. They're not only willing to effectively sell her off to another family in exchange for having their debts covered, but they're selling her to a man who is impotent - who can never give her children. Even before realizing just how badly the women in this society need change, the Medicine Seller recognizes this situation as bad for Mao specifically: he remarks that it's unfortunate for her, with no reference to the man or his family.
The Medicine Seller knows that the denial of childbirth deprives Mao of something that is rightfully hers: her own potential for transformation and growth.
The Alienation of Masculine and Feminine Results in Stasis and Death
"Nopperabou"
Ochou's and Lady Ruri's stories don't use this childbirth metaphor (except perhaps by the absence of childbirth), but these stories also carry the themes of prostitution and death. Ochou is effectively prostituted by her mother, who submits her daughter to men's control in exchange for property. The man Ochou is married to sees women as objects to be purchased and used.
Because Ochou is burdened with a sense of moral obligation (the same form of manipulation used against all the women in "Zashiki Warashi") to fulfill her "feminine" role, she fights against the drive to embrace her own "masculine" - the Nopperabou. The unresolved conflict between her guilt and the need to accept her complete nature traps her in an endless cycle of suffering and death: she lashes out at her abusers but cannot fully integrate her power or escape her mother's manipulation.
This guy's a big help.
Without true unity with her "masculine," Ochou cannot change. Once she understands the root of her guilt, she's able to move past it, and she becomes complete again. Once she's reunified with it, her "masculine" energy serves her real needs - it gives her the strength to leave the cycle of suffering behind, setting her free instead of keeping her trapped. This change finally gives her the "new life" she sought.
The fact that the part of herself that Ochou lost as a child first appears as a duplicate of her shows that this "masculine" is not something separate from her "feminine." Like Genkei and Oyou in "Umi Bozu," Ochou and her "missing half" were together in the beginning, and were never meant to be the separate "male and female" that they appeared to be.
"Umi Bozu"
In "Umi Bozu," Genkei, like Ochou, has been split in two, this time by the rejection of his "feminine" self. He's struggled for years to move on and to reach enlightenment, but he can't let go of the memory of his sister. At the beginning of the arc, Genkei is clearly old and approaching death, but he's realized that he can no longer avoid his sister's memory.
The Medicine Seller equates Genkei's fear of Oyou with a fear of his own heart - perhaps even meaning that they are one and the same. When Genkei's fear is understood as the cause of the mononoke, he literally splits in two. His missing half takes the form of the mononoke, which, when the Medicine Seller exorcises it, becomes a feminine form that literally re-enters Genkei and transforms him. Through the reunification with his "feminine," Genkei dies but is "reborn."
Into a twink.
"Nue"
The "Nue" arc's main theme is stasis and death, and it again explores the use and exploitation of women, men's lack of empathy toward them, and the inescapable connection between them. This arc shows a man's violence toward a woman rebounding on him immediately: Nakarai kills Lady Ruri, finds himself covered in wounds, and dies. Killing her kills him as well.
It's quite funny. I mean horrible.
Muramachi and Robou also treat Lady Ruri as nothing more than a tool to get what they want. Their disregard for her life and humanity is so egregious that they rummage around her murdered body looking for the Todaiji they planned to marry her for, and they joke about having a "wedding ceremony" after they compete for its possession. The Medicine Seller, who usually (certainly not always) maintains calm in the face of humans' reprehensible actions, is openly shocked and angry at their behavior.
This guy's whole life is witnessing horrors. If he's looking at you like this, you've truly fucked up.
All three of these men have been trapped in endless stasis and death by their complete focus on their own desires. They see Lady Ruri as nothing more than a conduit for those desires, leaving them utterly disconnected from her humanity.
Their disconnection from her is accompanied by disconnection from themseves, to the point where they're unaware of their own deaths. As with Genkei, accepting those deaths is their only way of escaping them and being "reborn"; otherwise, like Ochou, they remain trapped in an unchanging cycle.
This arc, like the others, implies that all of the men and women in it are interdependent, with each of the female forms of the Nue appearing through the perceptions of each of the men. They appear separate, but neither could exist without the other.
Fear
Genkei's story not only shows stasis and death as a result of his alienation from his sister, but also explores the root cause of men's resistance to their "feminine": fear. The men in Mononoke depend on the isolation of their "masculine" identities for a sense of safety. The identity that Genkei has spent his life building up is defined by pushing away all emotion, all vulnerability - all in an effort to hide from his feelings for his sister. The longer he clings to this isolated self, the stronger his fear becomes.
Rejoining Oyou means becoming completely vulnerable, letting her and all the feelings she brings with her inside him. The Medicine Seller tells him that this will kill him, and in a sense it does: His old self is replaced by his "reborn" one.
Facing this fear and embracing the "weakness" of the "feminine" is a profound act of courage, one that makes Genkei stronger and freer. Accepting his "feminine" is his strength.
Unlike Genkei, Sakai and Moriya in "Bakeneko" #1 and #2 never develop this courage. They remain crippled by fear until it destroys them completely. As they continue to deny how much they've hurt women, they become more and more terrified - of women, their own "feminine," and the pain and anger they've poured into them. Their attempts to grasp at safety by rejecting and attacking women make them feel less and less safe as their own inescapable "feminine" and women's inescapable "masculine" demand acknowledgement, growing in power and anger until they become the Bakeneko.
In "Bakeneko" #2, Moriya is the embodiment of the link between misogyny and cowardice; he blatantly exhibits both. Setsuko's will, her "masculine," threatens him with the truth and with the fragility of his status, both in his relationship with her and in society. And Setsuko's "feminine," her more vulnerable emotions, terrify him as well. He can't face these combined aspects of her - and of his - true self, and he is left with abject terror, constantly seeking safety behind his misogyny.
In "Bakeneko" #1, Sakai remains terrified throughout the arc of having to confront his truth. Right up to the last he keeps denying it, and he sits frozen in fear when the Medicine Seller tells him he has to turn around and look at what he's done. Sakai can't face his complete nature, because the schism between the "masculine" and "feminine" in him is so deep that his "masculine" has become a monster and his "feminine" is filled with pain. Acknowledging his real "feminine" would mean feeling what he's done, and acknowledging his real "masculine" along with it would mean fully understanding the horror of what he's become.
Yeah, asshole.
Unfortunately for Moriya and Sakai, there's no escape from their fear except through the "feminine" - through letting go of their resistance and accepting their destruction. They must die, transform, and be reborn from the cosmic "yin."
This is true for everyone whose internal divisions have created mononoke. The only one who can remain unchanged by the death and rebirth of yin is the one for whom the "masculine" and "feminine" are already unified.
Kind of tickles honestly.
I could say more; I could talk about the Medicine Seller himself; I could talk about how he relates to women and the "feminine" and how much his own path depends on them, but I've said a lot of that before, and I think I've covered the bigger concepts as I see them. There can't be much doubt about Mononoke's feminist themes. Its message is not only that society's treatment of women has historically been grotesque and horrible but that it's a denial of nature, one for which there will always be a price to pay.
#mononoke 2007#kusuriuri#mononoke theory#ayakashi bakeneko#mononoke#mononoke gifs#mononoke screencaps
28 notes
·
View notes
Note
i see the way people have taken intersectionality to mean 'you're privileged bc of one identity and oppressed bc of another therefore you're privileged' so often in radfem circles regarding marginalized men and it sure is fascinating to me because they're going on about how black men are oppressed for their blackness and not their masculinity, but then, somehow.....none of them wants to acknowledge the way white women are privileged for their whiteness. they change the definition of intersectionality to fit their narrative in a way that is just like. say the quiet part out loud.
if you're going to use intersectionality to disguise your racism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, say that (men who are poc, gay, disabled, trans, aren't oppressed for being men, they're oppressed for all of those identities). you're practically begging to but you know you'd get shit for it so you steal terms like these and use them to get people on board. like....it's so transparent and i'm so tired of white people taking black theory and distorting the meaning and then those posts taking off and going viral and reinforcing the misunderstanding of that theory.
The very end of the article sums up your point about marginalized men:
Indeed, intersectionality is intended to ask a lot of individuals and movements alike, requiring that efforts to address one form of oppression take others into account. Efforts to fight racism would require examining other forms of prejudice (like anti-Semitism, for example); efforts to eliminate gender disparities would require examining how women of color experience gender bias differently from white women (and how nonwhite men do too, compared to white men).
And it's important to keep in mind the original context for which Crenshaw coined the term. Examining a case in which black women were told there was no evident discrimination in employment, with employers citing that they hired both black men (so surely can't be racist) and white women (so surely can't be sexist), while the black women argued that they were being skipped over due to being a combination of those factors rather than just one or the other. In this way, black women were at a specific intersection of discrimination, one in which it was impossible to separate the "black" from the "woman".
And when viewing things through an intersectional lens, we discover that we are all culpable of harm towards each other and that no one is fully innocent. It is important to then address the power imbalance by acknowledging and reconciling with these differences in experiences, rather than continuing to posit that one experience must take precedence over any of the others.
Instead there is this focus on uniqueness to the point where people rabidly insist that no one else shares similar experiences to their specific intersection. But black theory tells us this is not true- to dismantle anti-black racism we must examine and dismantle other forms of ethnic oppression and discrimination. To dismantle misogyny we must examine and dismantle other forms of sexism and gender-based oppression, yes, even that of men, like it or not the very coiner of the term mentions that when marginalization comes into play, gender still plays a role in the oppression of marginalized men.
As I have said multiple times on this blog, most of what I opine here is black feminist theory and black antiracist theory. I was raised by a deaf black man who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement. I'm usually getting this straight from the source here, folks.
(Also also the foundational ideals of intersectionality were written before Crenshaw by W. E. B. Du Bois- but he did not take gender or gender identity into account when he wrote his theory, and Crenshaw was- rightfully- unsatisfied with that.)
People often don't like doing this because it is hard. And because at some point you take a step back from what you've uncovered and go "hey wait a second, that means the whole system stinks, even the part I actually like". And that's a difficult situation to reconcile because it means to truly rid ourselves of these problems, we would need a complete and total society reform, and that is so very difficult and most people will not be on board for that.
And this is where a lot of the pushback happens, and the deliberate misunderstanding, because it's easier to go "you just want to be a victim" than to examine that maybe we are all victims of the system. It's where we get people saying "wokeness is a ploy installed by the Jewish elite to incite the black mob to purge the country of white people" when the concept of being woke was about paying attention to your political and physical surroundings and making smart, safe choices for your community rather than letting barely-disguised dangerous people (violent racists) and politics (segregation and Jim Crow laws) continue unchecked. It's where we get people saying "black lives matter hates cops and wants to kill all cops and hunt them for sport" when BLM was founded by people who were just tired of their community members being killed in the street for nonsense crimes (or no crimes at all) and wanted the killings to stop. It's where we get people woefully misunderstanding defund the police and prison abolition and civil disobedience and even boycotts and walk-outs and sit-ins and strikes and more.
And it's where we get people hearing someone say "I am hurt in this way, because of the sum of my whole identity, and it informs the way people harm me" and react with "LEARN INTERSECTIONALITY". Most recently, a white disabled person telling a black disabled person to learn intersectionality because the black disabled person (ME) said it's better to meet as many people's accessibility needs as possible rather than prioritize one over the other.
And this is why I do not trust black theory in white mouths because time and time again white people will pick and choose what parts of black theory apply to them that they like, separate them from the context, and then use those parts as a bludgeon to silence black people who are talking about the rest.
49 notes
·
View notes
Note
I've seen multiple posts lately talking about how bkdk shippers tend to have fairly accurate analysis/predictions of canon events, despite people saying bkdk shippers have unrealistic expectations. What do you think?
I mean, I may be a bit biased, but I honest to god believe that, yes, we have better takes.
The thing with any form of storytelling (and is an inevitable part of analysis) is that we will always project onto the characters. It’s just, what we do. Humans find patterns and because we have amazing pattern recognition we connect that pattern to our own patterns/experiences.
Projection is just a fact to accept of life when it comes to any form of telling a story. The new definition that’s gotten popular over the years, “kinning a character”, is an obvious symptom of that human experience. Our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of a character is both normal and expected. In fact, a lot of times it’s even wanted; that’s just what main characters are for. For shonen specifically, people usually want to envy the character in some way. Cis men like to feel powerful and that’s just, a fact of life for those who don’t seek the help they need.
This is in contrast to a shojo, where the point is so that women can relate and/or envy the magical girl genre. The idea that you are more powerful than you look which is VERY popular within women and afab communities. The security you have as your own guard dog in a weird way.
And I’ve noticed a pattern (I’m sure I’ve already said it on this account at some point lol) but most people who hate Katsuki.. are usually projecting their own bullies onto them. Or they could also be projecting a toxic relationship/friendship onto him, anything. “If I was in dekus shoes..” that’s the thing dude. You aren’t in his shoes.
Now, another factor, most people who ship bkdk are also writers! Or analyst’s! People who are able to read the subtext, and generally are more open minded people to forgiveness or anything else.
This isn’t an intelligence thing, in fact sometimes it’s not even a projection thing, but what I DO know is that out of all the groups of shippers in this fandom (and I’m a multi shipper, I’ve been in a lot of them) bkdk shippers are generally the nicest and are able to dissect the show overall. It’s very welcoming.
It has its bad parts. In fact I think most of the reason why this app specifically is so nice is because people fought and died to make this a nice space. (sorry tumblr love ya) You will end up reading piles on piles of fanfics that create a distorted view of bkdk (hell, even make it toxic asf) and think that the way it was written was okay and healthy.
There are tons of iffy people out there, and fandom manages to get out weirdest and grossest parts of people sometimes. Like tiktok! (Derogatory)
But just as bkdk has a lot of good people, really intelligent people a lot of the time too, so does izu//ocha, or kiri//Baku, or todo//deku. Nothing is really linear. No ship should ever get in the way of how we treat each other unless it’s outwardly hostile. Who cares if someone ships like, idk, todoroki and iida, but I ship todoroki and sero. (I like both of them but besides the point, it’s an example dammit)
Also, I honestly think the reason people think bkdk shippers have way too high expectations is because the story itself is a parody. That’s what this show is. It’s a parody of the normal shonen. It’s going to dip it’s toes into gay and non monogamous relationships (tsuochatoga???? Like ochako is way closer to tsu than Izuku but ANYWAY-) through our mc and his supposed “love interest”. Maybe I’m delusional, but I think it’s better to take a leap and be optimistic and get your hopes destroyed than to constantly live without the positivity of just, being hopeful. Being pessimistic is miserable, I’ve done it before and I’m not doing it again.
I think the idea of having “too high expectations” as a justification for why bkdk wouldn’t be canon, or how “it’s a shonen” isn’t necessarily based in any actual evidence, rather our own pattern recognition. And think about it; this was one of horikoshi’s FIRST MANGAKA’S. We know close to nothing about horikoshi’s writing other than what he’s done in mha.
So, what we think is just as valid as anyone else who thinks it’s unrealistic. I’m tired of being told I’m wrong by people who don’t even see most of the subtext or symbolism within bkdk or mha as a whole.
#mha deku#midoriya izuku#bkdk#bkdk brainrot#bakudeku#bakugou katsuki#bnha deku#mha analysis#deku midoriya#mha bakugou
78 notes
·
View notes
Note
What's so different that you'd need to rewrite everything? Can you share some of it ???
Hm I can paraphrase some of the lore changes, for example, because otherwise it would take (even more) walls of text otherwise.
For example:
My take on Mistral is that its a bit of a weird kingdom in that its actually more like multiple kingdoms mashed together (as a meta way to solve the eastern inspired stuff clashing with obviously greek stuff).
It's essentially three pretty different countries that were kind of forced to come together out of necessity (since I am running full on with the idea of the importance of the towers) or fall alone. So you have Haven at the center of it all as a sort of newer location that is officially "the central city" pushed by Ozpin's influence, but really beyond it's position and the way the communications array and academy being there ties the kingdom together, the three regions all have their own defacto (way older) capital cities, power structure, myths and beliefs. So you have a sort of an EU situation where on the surface you have unified interests, but behind the scenes different aspects of it are locked in a power struggle on where they want the whole "Kingdom" to go and which parts of the continent they see as "true" Mistral.
One unifying aspect between three regions is that they all share the same creation myth and thus believe that Continent of Anima is where civilization itself began. Each of regions has their "patron god", which is essentially deified aspect of the creation myth tied to their capital city. Given, its unknown how much of the actual myth is based in truth, because passage of time tends to distort some things and embelish others (especially with V3 already establishing Ozpin is not beyond making certain truths stay buried), but the folklore behind it is a unifying aspect nonetheless. You don't need gods to be "real" to use them in plot in a sensible way. Just legends and myths scattered in time.
You have three different regions with different influential people with their views, then you have WF subset that operates in Mistral and how they are taking advantage of the situation and on top of that you have other factions that see the shaken status quo as a chance to "make it right". And with the Fall of Beacon and the whole communication array becoming worthless (running off the WoR line about how if one tower falls, all stop working), those conflicts and interests slowly grow larger. For example, there would absolutely be those who would feel the outcome of "Great War" has "wronged" them and who have been trying to push laws to "rein Faunus in". Fall of Beacon would obviously be the proof that the faunus are to not be trusted for them and a way to build more political capital in the kingdom.
Likewise with communication deteriorating, it makes for an easy way to use distorted or false information for your benefit. For example, it would absolutely be in WF's benefit to try to paint Fall of Beacon as an attempt by Vale and Atlas to eradicate the Faunus and WF under Adam "valiantly fighting back". Likewise some would more likely find it favorable to paint Atlas as invaders who brutally betrayed their valuable ally, Kingdom of Vale and are coming for Mistral next.
The thing about a status quo is that while comfortable, it also sort of works like a leash. And once there's no status quo, a lot of aspects that worked together would see that as a green light to act on their interests.
And in that kind of mix and match of ideas, politics and worldviews, you'd have huntsmen and the kinds of roles they would have to take there, which ties into exploring just what it means to be a huntsman and whether the idolized view of "Being the Hero that Fights Monsters" always holds up.
So that's the kind of Kingdom of Mistral that's used as the setting.
You'd still have next arc after V3 go to Mistral and you'd still have some characters ending up there (but for different reasons, for example the reason JNRR are going there are to give back Pyrrha's mementos to her family (because NO you ain't using them to make you some new gear) and Blake is going there because she ain't going to some trip to Menagerie and is resolved to hit Adam where it hurts the most), but with no gods, no relics, no Salem's Evil Council of Evil and with a different lore and set up for the Kingdom, the outcomes and what happen there would have to be very different.
For one, it wouldn't be just a forest walk and the focus would be different (for one, Ruby having an actual story arc focus and Neo playing a role as Mistral would be kind of primarily Ruby and Yang's story). Some parts would still make sense (for example Nora and Ren backstory which was mostly nearly perfect in V4-proper still), but a lot would go pretty differently (can you believe Neptune actually plays a role in plot and has a character arc?!)
Which in turn has domino effect on how one would redo everything after too and it kind of snowballs into an avalanche of very different outcomes.
13 notes
·
View notes
Note
What do you think of Aoi and Akane in the Hanako-kun of magic au from last year? Do you have maybe any headcanons on how they could work with Aoi being a witch and Akane not knowing? (The contrary to canon, Aoi is the one with the secret identity) They are also both their class representatives contrary to canon where only Akane is and I think that's a nice addition. Aoi seems really shy with people in this au too and really don't want anyone to fall in love with her or interact at all with her
I read the translation again and Nene even implied that Akane is Aoi's crush and I think it's so cute
I ADORE MAGIC AU AOIKANE, this au is for them in my heart! Thank you for giving me an excuse to talk about it Anon :D
Aoi is indeed shown to be very shy in this AU, so it surprised me how forward she was at the end of the event, not nearly as arrogant and distant as canon Aoi.
Akane and Aoi don't seem to be neighbors here, they don’t have the energy of friends that know each other since forever, so I believe she signed up to be a class representative to try to get closer to Akane. She is too shy to talk to him in class and call people's attention, and she is too busy to get this role for no reason, that with balancing her student life and her witch life, the only reason I can see her sacrificing her free time working in school is to help Akane and try to get closer to him while he is alone.
And the one that pushed her to try to get closer in the first place must have been Nene, Aoi's childhood friend! I don’t know when exactly their witch training started, but they are pretty close, so Nene must have taken the spot of first friend and unconsciously influenced Aoi to get a more silly and positive view of romance.
Aoi doesn't feel popular in this AU which must help her see love in a less distorted way than canon, I personally think she is less arrogant (she isn't praised every time she so much as walk like canon AOI) and more open about her feelings, despite having a lack of confidence in herself, hiding both because she doesn’t know how to start a conversation, and because she doesn’t want to risk people learning her real identity.
Is also interesting that she wears glasses, but only as a student. It wouldn’t make sense for it to be a disguise, Nene doesn’t have glasses after all, so I'm being self indulgent and using the headcanon that she has slight myopia and needs glasses to read the blackboard.
Aoi still isn’t comfortable with the idea of being loved, caught off guard when Mei fell in love with her for the night, and preferring to use a full body suit over having a boy crush on her until Halloween ends (though it could also be because she realizes nene likes Amane and she is a loyal friend).
Either Akane is an exception, or she will also freak out when he starts to show interest back. I believe her crush is the main reason she is so averted to love in his au, since she is a very sweet girl, she probably doesn’t want people that have no chance to date her getting attached, she doesn’t like rejecting people or being loved when she doesn’t reciprocate.
Akane is just as hard-working and studious as canon but he feels less stressed (probably cause he doesn’t have to deal with either the Clock Keepers or Teru's demands here), and cockier. Just look at him!
It makes his little blush and awed look on the final event art of Aoi holding the back of his vest all the more adorable, he got a crush too.
Aoi and Akane would have an “Everyone knows they like each other but they aren’t dating” relationship for a while, cause Akane seems very popular in this au, so he never was the one confessing before. He also doesn't want to misread her and make their time as class representatives awkward.
However, knowing Akane, the boy would confess the very day he notices interest from Aoi. I can picture them finishing up their class rep work, Aoi giggling at some anecdote Akane tells, and eye contact lasting way too long despite Aoi usually not meeting anyone's eye for more than three seconds. So Akane tests compliments on her that tiptoe on flirting but could be taken as friendly, happy by how happy it makes her, and surprised she even compliments him back after a bit, albeit a very short and shy comment.
This gives him the courage to confess. He is awkward, having no experience with this, and not very loud, since they aren’t that close and anyone can tell Aoi is shy, but it is impossible to take his words as anything other than a confession. Aoi panic when her shocked silence makes Akane hold her hand and repeat his confession.
She ends up running away and squeaking she'll think about it.
Aoi talks to Nene about the situation in misery, her friend is the only one that knows about Aoi's crush after all, and Nene begs Sakura to give her a courage potion. Sakura is amused, but she feels sympathetic enough to give Aoi a drop of courage. The next day Aoi corners Akane and accepts his love in the middle of class, much to everyone’s surprise. He is flustered but accepts it, finding her burst of courage cute.
When they start dating Akane easily accepts her excuse that she has a part-time job with Nene, he even praises her for being hard-working (which makes Aoi feel a bit guilty).
Overall they are a sweet couple, but there is the occasional confusion caused by her double life: On the days her spells go wrong and she gains physical changes as a consequence, such as snake eyes or cat features, Aoi panic and wear random scarfs, hats, and sunglasses, acting more on edge and not wanting Akane to touch her. It makes Akane worried that he did something wrong, and he tries to understand what, so he doesn't do it again, but Aoi's reassurance that this is not about him just makes him confused and worried for other reasons. Aoi is usually happy when she gets back from her 'job' though, so he doesn't insist.
At school, Akane takes more of her load of work, noticing how her 'job' makes her very tired.
Akane gets involved in the magic world at times, and Aoi always freaks out about it. She gives him magic amulets for protection, and Akane finds her gifts weird but they are clearly important to her, so he proudly wears them, growing fond of them with time.
He is smart enough to understand she is hiding something from him, but he trusts her to tell him eventually, Aoi may not be a very open and talkative girl but she is very sweet.
#tbhk#aoiaoi#aoikane#sorry for the wait anon I don't even know why it took so long to reply ugiuguyg#this is very cliché but I have a soft spot for a lot of clichés so I'm not sorry#let aoi have her shojo life she deserve it#toilet bound hanako kun
35 notes
·
View notes
Note
Mr. Saqqara? How's your lovelife with the Hound? What's the relationship dynamic? Does Mr. Bile know?
(OOC: Asks still don't work on desktop, but are now visible on mobile again. So I can "answer" with a placeholder and add the real text later. I won't type my texts on my phone, so this is an awkward workaround, but better than nothing! Give a big hand to returned ask posts!)
Saqqara snorts indignantly. Sets the datapad aside. „That‘s pretty personal!“
Arrian lowers the book he has just been reading with mediocre interest, slips in one of the dried leathery leaves of the large carnivorous vines from the arboretum as a bookmark, reaches across the table with the stacks of books and half-disassembled explosives and takes Saqqara‘s datapad.
The latter half-heartedly protests: „Hey! That‘s private correspondence!“ - „And this from the man who has made it a very fruitless hobby to steal the Chief Apothecary‘s ‚private correspondence‘?“ - „Only those which would upset him anyway and thus keep him from his work. I‘m practically doing him a favour.“ - „And to find out what of it would upset him, you read everything first?“ - „Yes, of course. How else am I supposed to make an informed decision?“
Saqqara‘s beaming smile as he says this leaves no questions. Arrian shakes his head. The nails rattle. Then he reads the message. His eyebrows move up, slightly distorted by his scars and ancient service studs. „Angron‘s spiky ass … that‘s really personal!“ - „Told you!“
The World Eater sighs and throws the datapad to Saqqara, who catches it with one hand and puts it back on the table. „I‘ve heard there are holo-shows in the Imperium that only deal with the love lives of some singers or actors. If you take that as a benchmark - we‘ve done it, we‘re apparently of public interest!“
Saqqara reaches for the datapad again, plays with the pen. Draws squiggles on the surface and wipes them away again. For Word Bearers, calligraphy and warm-up sketches are service to their Primarch and therefore an almost religious thing. Arrian has learned that the diabolist is then not really responsive until he emerges from this trance again. While he, like all Astartes, is aware of his surroundings and potential threats in a subliminal way, communication is then no longer desired.
Arrian doesn‘t really care what other people think about him or what he does or doesn‘t do. He doesn‘t have the Emperor‘s Children‘s craving for validation - which each of them vehemently denies - and doesn‘t have the Word Bearers‘ need for group affiliation. So this strange question to Saqqara doesn‘t bother him at all. He opens his book again, his mind halfway back to the torsion properties of the fibres of certain climbing plants. He glances sideways at Saqqara. The diabolist has begun to write. Arrian nods, adjusts the band that binds his nails at the nape of his neck and then sinks completely into botany.
Saqqara gnaws on his lower lip as his pen scurries across the pad and the little cogitor dutifully converts the elegant Colchisian runes into cold data.
„In the writings of the Primarch - may the gods steadily bless and preserve him - it is repeatedly pointed out that we do not exist as uninfluenced individuals in a selfish bubble, but only gain strength and resolve through our relationships with our brethren and the beings of the Immaterium.“
He pauses for a moment. Then adds, „And in light of this divine advice, I can say that I am aware of how the gods have blessed me. Arrian may view this more pragmatically, but he cannot deny the benefits and the positive impact our relationship has had on both our performance and abilities.“ He pauses. Crosses out the word „relationship“. Tries about five synonyms before returning to it after all.
Then he continues writing swiftly. „Which is probably something the Chief Apothecary is also aware of. He may in principle be absolutely uninterested in all things concerning the sparse private lives of his students and subordinates, but he punishes anything that leads to a deterioration of performance very mercilessly.
From this I can say with some certainty that Fabius is positively indifferent to our relationship. He wishes to know nothing of it - as little as he cares for the dance that Narvo Quin and Bellephus perform around Savona.
The Chief Apothecary regards any attachment with mild disgust. He is the most solitary being I have ever met. For an Astartes, positively unique. Quin suggests that he was no different before the Rebellion. Lord Fulgrim had to practically drag him out of his apothecarium by force once he needed him to work with other Emperor‘s Children.
To that extent, I can say with some authority that the Chief Apothecary is the last person in the galaxy who cares in the slightest about that relationship.“
He reads through everything again and nods with satisfaction. Taps „Send.“ Then looks over at Arrian, who is absently making notes in the form of chemical formulae. For a few heartbeats he allows himself a very gentle smile in the direction of the World Eater, who doesn‘t notice.
(Some Saqqara for purely decorative reasons)
And some additional observations: In my mind Astartes are not build to have too deep emotions. If you remove the fear-response, you have to get rid off a lot of other stuff, too - maybe unintentionally.
The Emperor's Children got all of it back and then some. Because of Slaanesh and their gene-seed reflecting Fulgrim. But the other Legions are very sparse in their emotions. Or, let's say: slow-burn.
And that's how I see Arrian and Saqqara. They don't talk much about anything concerning their feelings or their relationship. A bit like cats: "I don't love you. I'm just always in the same room you are purely on coincidence."
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
I tried to resist this one. I failed. I brought up on Reddit that the correct answer for Neo Champion Dawn, Lucas, and Barry is Dawn/Mesprit, Lucas/Uxie, and Barry/Azelf. I stand by this. But there’s a good chunk of people, I think, who view Barry/Uxie as the more obvious one, and therefore Lucas/Azelf. But this is dumb and I’m going to complain.
Thematically, the point of the aspects of spirit is that your protagonists embody all three. That everyone has all three in some measure, and that these are positive traits that you work on and improve at. Some are more aligned than others. For Barry, it’s willpower. His entire motivation is to become a great battler, and surpass his father; he is driven largely by his willpower. For Dawn, as the set protagonist for Masters lore, it’s Mesprit. Especially with Platinum, it’s made very obvious that Cyrus’ anti-spirit stance is a matter of emotions. Willpower and Knowledge are on the chopping block for the greater good, but as a tech guy who operates with high knowledge and a grand ambition, it’s pretty cleat that Cyrus’ problem is emotion. As the foil, Dawn’s emphasis is on emotions, aligned with Mesprit. This is why Mesprit’s the first thing you go after, and why it’s the one that hovers around you in the Distortion World. This leaves Lucas, the professor’s assistant, as the one aligned to knowledge. He helps you as you set out by teaching you basics, and is seeking knowledge to support the professor.
But there is significance to which aspect they’re sent to save. It’s just not the one they’re aligned to. Because Barry goes to Uxie, but the idea of Lucas with Azelf doesn’t align; Lucas, as the assistant, goes to Mesprit. Dawn, the protagonist, goes to Azelf. The question is, if that’s the layout, why is this significant for each character?
Because it’s their weak point.
Let’s start with Barry, the obvious one. Barry is very motivated by self-improvement, but is unflinchingly kind. He’s quick to offer letting you have a Pokemon even if he can’t, because he was the one to be reckless. He’s the one ready to rush into things at the drop of a hat, for the sake of a friend or a Pokemon in need. Barry’s mostly aligned to willpower, but is high on the emotional scale too. Barry’s issue is not thinking things through. Think about his approach to strategy: “Always hit your opponent, never get it.” Then later, “Remember that strategy I told you? It didn’t work for beans!” Barry’s not the type to think things through. He reacts. He’s a good person, and quick to jump to Uxie’s aid, but he’s unable to stop and assess what is needed or what he’s up against, and loses. Even faced with this, his approach is very aligned to willpower; the drive to improve and protect the things he cares about. He has to learn how to take things a little slower and be a little more analytical, but he never falters in being mostly about willpower.
Lucas is a bit more subtle, but his dialogue I think shows a similar profile. Again, he’s very knowledgeable, and he has a clear goal in supporting the professor. Lucas’ weakness is emotion. A lot of his dialogue is very downplayed or self-depreciating. “Yeah, I doing great. Not.” Stuff like that, where he compares himself unfavorable to the protagonist, suggests some challenge with managing negative emotions. When he tries to save Mesprit, Dawn will come to his rescue, and Mars twists the knife, asking as if Dawn were his girlfriend. And Pokemon does love pairing its protagonists, so there’s reason to suspect maybe this is something he feels, but being self-depreciating, doesn’t feel like he measures up. But it’s worth noting, when he makes his stand...he doesn’t talk that way after. He’s a bit more mellowed out. So again, his alignment is mostly knowledge, but going to Mesprit was to improve what he struggled with.
That leaves Dawn. The protagonist is silent, so we can’t really make clear assumptions, but follow me on this one. What is the protagonist’s goal? Beating the league, I guess. Then what? Don’t really have one. Effectively, you’re going through the motions, especially if you’re a veteran player familiar with the structure. Barry has the goal to surpass his father, and Lucas has the goal of supporting the professor’s research, but Dawn? Dawn doesn’t have a clear end-goal. Nothing specific drives her. Until you fail to save Azelf. Then the goal is stopping Galactic from hurting anyone else. Again, it’s refining the weakest aspect.
All three of them hold all three aspects of spirit, just like everyone, but they’re not all present in equal measure. Their alignment is pretty clearly Dawn/Mesprit, Barry/Azelf, Lucas/Uxie, but their rescue missions are allocated to what they needed to refine to be ready for the trials ahead.
#pokemon#pokemon masters#dawn#barry#lucas#mesprit#azelf#uxie#just me having more thematic thoughts about Sinnoh
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
diary142
2/3-4/2024
my weekend begins #now.
i started it with a damon packard movie, foxfur, a friend sent me it and i was like, entranced by it. really great movie, feels like it gets at the precarity/nightmarishness of the world atm and all ways people cope, especially w/ new age weirdo stuff. so oddly on with that, all the way back in 2012.
otherwise, my day was okay, my work note:
stuck there too long, one kid tried to scam me and it was so obvious and bad, insanely stupid attempt. the rides are scary, someone almost lost their phone, but mostly, dull. i didn't get to take a break.
i did work on music but i'm too exhausted/spaced out to get to the next song, i've just been fiddling with the last one, the issue w/ it is that in order to get it more disgusting sounding in the distortion/how it distorts, i need to figure something out, and the fiddling/ solutions i've come up with are a bit flabby sounding i guess, coming back to them. the flab is in the lack of sharpness. something weird needs to happen or whatever. might need to go back to the guitar fixing thing for the right channel sound, i've started messing with some octave effects, but there may be something else i need to try too, maybe a re-done effects chain in parts. idk. i'll see how this export comes out where i boost some of the highs in each separate track.
did something where i went and eq-ed out the ugliest signals solo, seems to have worked in a first pass but i forgot to turn some stuff back on. i also decided to change something in the master. it's impressive to me how much stuff regarding guitar sounds/tones online is so useless and how boring most people want to be.
having thoughts now, about ai, that's how you know i've been up too late. here's my new whacko theory about it, or i guess i can't present it from there, immediately, here's the source of the thought, seeing the cover art for zazen boys ii, and the illegibility of it, basically, its failure to say zazen boys ii in a way that's immediately readable. it's willfully against being read, it's a mess, it's beautiful, it's a typographic explosion, it looks like several different languages slammed together, congealed. i don't think it's important it was done by a human or whatever but i think what it is, is something that fails at what you'd expect, and what you'd want from what is basically an advertisement to get people to blindly buy something, or that's what cover art is when viewed from the perspective of not caring about the music. many times, they are related, but it's positive also with the selling/potential to get someone to loo, i think maybe this is is only worth thinking about because zazen boys are a japanese band and cd sales are still hugely important over there, because piracy is so scary for them. for anyone who steals the vast majority of music, it's more freely interrelated to the music/meaning of the music, it's something that is liked and connected with in that way. this is an aside. basically the other thing is it reminded me of what those neural nets or whatever they are now, do when they try to write something in an image. signs, anything. it bugs me when people act like ai is novel, is what i think i'm feeling lately. it's a lot of futurists basically taking up a fetishistic desire to point at something as new, a new method, a new field of potentiality, a new capability for people to adopt, maybe flatly, it increases our ability, for them, and so this novelty in technology revitalizes art, but these things only scrape and congeal, they do it at a scale that people cannot, because they can remember more, with their monologic weighting and construction of meanings as largely singular and not fluid. people may bring the nature of ai writing which does get rather figurative and strange, but so does any good writer, it rarely produces sentences i think nothing else could produce, it just feels like a lot of excitement over the fact that capital has now moved into the territory of the illegible, it creates nonsense information, it absorbs centuries of ways of writing and sequences them, somehow, this is enough to some people to seem better than all fiction currently produced. a strangely eugenic approach to art, we seem to have arrived at in recent times, where people are quick to say, this is the end of everything, this makes anyone doing the same thing unnecessary, there is not vitality in (x), there is no hope for anything new in (x). a sickness over novelty, it is so purely and psychotically spectacular, it should be seen as special i guess how even people who act outside/above this get very wrapped in it, or act like it is real. i can never see or feel how it's real. i don't know why. is that wrong of me?
i know people who find ai to be very exciting, but when i see what they think of it, all i feel is that really what they want is to be the manager of creative work, and ai is finally a worker they can have. it's not about freeing up who can make things, the novelty is the fantasy it sells, the fantasy of not having to communicate with others in the creation of something, and the feeling that you are communing with some vast well of meaning. in short, you are enabled to be a creative director, you direct an image making, text spewing machine, a machine which has absorbed meaning/constructs meaning in a way that snuffs out the negative, there is never lack, it is a system of pure success, it is eugenically improving itself always, at least this is my read on it, creating memories / facts / linkages that are essentially a kind of super-infrastructure for information. this is totally opposite to the waste-products created in our mind, which we trip over, and months of not considering them, surface, corpses in rivers, eggs which never spawned, and now gleaming and bobbing, they seem pearls you may fashion into something terrible, and carry it for the rest of your life, with a special sort of love. the value of failure, and waste, is in that, spoken more i guess, directly, it is that when you are shut up in yourself, mute, and when you cannot find the words, something else comes to you, and when you cannot explain yourself, you are something else, you are fallen between words. a.i cannot fall between, it cannot be anything but the sun, not as solar anus, not as the life-expelling force bataille describes, but the implement of measurement via shadows cast, a ruler set to earth, set to voice and thought to collect data and surveil, a system perfected, something that can encapsulate some of the world.
our next cybernetic apparatus of agitation and gentle discomforts. it will not think for us, it will make us think we think as it does, and thus we will chase the capability, ability to conclude, be read, and to read, falling for the novelty, and whatever.
this isn't to say though, it's utterly useless. ai should probably be used in pointless clerical data entry work, and i don't especially care if some people steal pokemon with it. the palworld thing is so weird because people should be wigged out that people are just getting super into something that seems like ark or whatever. that awful game with the dinosaurs. survival game slop, you do not need anything other than minecraft.
okay i think i got the problem song pretty good. right guitar needs something though... idk what. maybe it's missing some frequency from something i notched.
re-exporting now.
i think it sounds really good now, i hope i feel that way tomorrow. i also just made a new guitar sound thing. i am up too late but at least i'm having fun.
this has too much white noise in it but idk, it's kind of cool, also.
anyway i need to sleep now, or soon, at least, so
byebye!!!!!!!!!!!
4 notes
·
View notes
Note
Ey, I was thirsting for your tall horny stalker at first, but the deeper I dived into your blog, the more lore I craved.
So got any concept arts of The Clergy for lore starved anon?
[This one's long, boys and girls and thems... TL;DR: The Clergy is like a compact version of the backrooms.]
Concept art? No, I'm sorry, I am extremely incompetent at drawing buildings in general. I only have a couple of images that I use for reference when writing about it, as well as a couple of core ideas that I can detail here if you want! I'm afraid I can't offer much more than that with my current level of ""artistic skill"".
For starters, something that I think is necessary to mention regarding The Clergy's Eye's appearance is that it's never the same. Every single week or so, the establishment takes on a different outer look. This is done on purpose by Krulu, so as to keep the place masked and relatively ambiguous. In general, The Clergy's exterior often takes on the appearance of a distorted manor, sometimes an oversized gothic chapel, a small dark castle- It varies. The outside perimeter of the establishment also never matches the true size of the place itself. There is no way it can accommodate the overall area of the many floors inside. It's a paradox of sorts, it makes no sense for the common person, and it's a complex design only someone of Krulu's species can achieve.
You can sort of assume you're near The Clergy's Eye if you're seeing a strangely distorted dark building. Something with muted colors, surrounded by a strange nebulous fog and an electrifying heaviness in the air. Sometimes sparks of purple light will be visible. You'll begin to notice even more inconsistencies the closer you get to the building. Maybe the bars in the gates are crooked, the flowers in the garden aren't quite stuck to the grass, there's too many windows on the left side of the place, the ground is uneven, there's something black and pulsing writhing on the walls. Two people staring at the establishment may not see the same thing.
However, no one ever describes hearing animals nearby, or much sound at all. People always feel uneasy in its vicinity and report seeing strange gargoyle-like beings perched around.
At that point, if you're human, you'll start feeling some form of immense, inexplicable trepidation. Some voice of reason in the back of your mind will urge you to back off, which most people tend to listen to, and you'll forget ever seeing the place within hours. Here's an image that I think embodies the general idea.
(Obviously, this is not of my own making. It's the product of an AI image blender.)
The inside of each floor hardly ever changes in terms of design, furniture and overall feel. Each floor does have its own style, but dim lights are almost always a feature, as well as the repetition of the color purple. Particularly frail-minded humans will continue to view the inside of The Clergy as a distorted mess that they cannot visually interpret, often leading them to quickly spiral into manic states.
It's worth noting that the floors in The Clergy will often change positions from day to day, as I've mentioned in another ask. This is done because The Clergy itself is a living entity that requires adjustments here and there, position switching acts as its form of "refreshing". The main floor, where the bar is located, is usually always Floor 0. The restaurant varies between Floor 1 and -1. Krulu has a specific floor for himself which is always either really high up or the lowest one available. The shop floor is pretty high as well. Certain specific events The Clergy hosts also feature their own temporary floors. Every single day there's a specific layout which is detailed in the entrance to the establishment and inside the three elevators (sometimes two. Again, the place is inconsistent.).
As you might already know by now, the establishment has its own symbol, which is used by members (staff and clientele) to identify each other. This is it-
Krulu spends a lot of time inside the establishment but he rarely ever shows himself to the groups within it, preferring to use the Admin (his vessel), who he is physically connected to, as a representative instead.
I can go into more details, but I think this covers the basics. Sorry if this sounds disorganized.
38 notes
·
View notes
Note
“So, what exactly is your plan because you know that this is killing her, right?” he said.
“Nothing, I’m just … I’ve stopped her from running into a burning building for you.”
“I’ve seen her jump into wells for you.”
“I---” Bonnie shook her head. “It’s not in Elena’s nature to stay away from you, Stefan.”
THE FACT THATS SHES DONE SO MUCH FOR HIM! but if we tried to list everything elena has done for stefan wed be here for hours lol
ALSO jeremy standing up for elena is what ive always wanted to see in the show. or them standing up for each other, really. theyre so passive in the show, they feel like distant cousins who occasionally bond over their childhood or whatever, the way you write them they feel a lot more like siblings who genuinely care for each other
"Bonnie regarded him. “I know that,” she said, touching his arm. “I know this is just as hard for you and just as painful and just as lonely.” He looked at her to see something like understanding in her expression. “It’s even lonelier when you’re the one making the hard decision.”
as someone whos had to pull a stefan in the past, THIS HIT ME
also damon not honoring the pact he made with stefan and staying in town despite elena choosing stefan has me like
Damon sighed heavily and took his time speaking. “It had been suggested that I was sired to Katherine, I wanted to see if that was true.”
Stefan rushed forward and grabbed Damon by the shirt. “You mean you’ve had this information the entire time?”
the fact that i am not even A LITTLE suprised is very sad. this is so in character for damon. he ALWAYS does this. just like with the cure, he keeps things like this to himself for his own benefit. this man is a walking red flag
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Elena is in hell right now, Damon. And you have information that could potentially end it?”
YUP. he does this constantly in the show. he constantly puts her in painful positions for his own sake. which is why i cant take damon seriously. like the more i think about it, the more i hate him. HE DOES NOT LOVE ELENA. he really reminds me of callies speech about love
Damon’s expression turned ugly. “Maybe I wanted her to be as miserable as I was for a little bit. Not my proudest moment.”
“Look, I’m doing the right thing now, OK? Because as much as I want to, when it comes to Elena, I can’t be selfish with her.”
“That’s all you’ve ever been!” Stefan yelled in his face. “The fact that you don’t see that is…"
YES STEFAN!!!!! THANK FUCK. reading this is so cathartic. the show tried so hard to validate damons distorted view of himself via dialogue while completely disregarding his countless selfish actions, FINALLY HE GETS CALLED OUT ON IT. youre doing god's work zal
the fact that i am not even A LITTLE suprised is very sad. this is so in character for damon. he ALWAYS does this. just like with the cure, he keeps things like this to himself for his own benefit. this man is a walking red flag
exactly! so when anon was like 'you butchered him' i was like, i mean ... did i?
ALSO jeremy standing up for elena is what ive always wanted to see in the show. or them standing up for each other, really. theyre so passive in the show, they feel like distant cousins who occasionally bond over their childhood or whatever, the way you write them they feel a lot more like siblings who genuinely care for each other
yeah, i was halfway through it and was giving bonnie a gentler version of this but then decided to go back and make it jeremy to utilize it more but also because it would make more sense for him to be the one like i know you're doing the right thing but are you actually doing the right thing because caroline would understand after what she'd gone through with damon, bonnie would understand as the one who would make those calls, matt would be useless so it's jeremy.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Plentiful Planes & Places: The Shadow Plane.
Also known as: The Netherworld; The Plane of Death.
Source: Planar Adventures & pathfinder setting guides.
Image source: Planar Adventures, pg. 109.
“The Shadow Plane is a dimly lit, murky mirror of the Material Plane, warped by proximity to the Negative Energy Plane and inhabited by sinister beings and undead.”
The Shadow Plane is a disorienting realm, as it is spread over the Material Plane and mimics it in many ways, but the expanses of the Plane are warped and distorted. Everything is made of solidified shadows, causing subtle changes to the landscape as the very matter making up the plane wavers and shudders.
This plane serves as a sort of protective atmosphere between the Prime Material and the Negative Energy Plane, absorbing most of the negative energy and dark beings and keeping them there. As a result, this plane is full of undead beings and shadowy creatures, but is slightly more hospitable than the Negative Energy Plane.
The entire plane is cloaked in shadow and darkness, which mutes all color. In addition to casting an eerie gloom over the plane, the atmosphere saps positivity, ambition, and color from the very essence of beings that find themselves there.
Denizens of the Shadow Plane:
In spite of the perpetual gloom of the realm, life continues to thrive in the lightless environment. Plants and animals have adapted to life in the plane, although as twisted, pale versions of their natural counterparts.
Some sentient species thrive here as well, such as:
D’ziriaks are an unusual blend between human and termite, with a strange society fitting their unusual appearances. They have colorful and unique exoskeletons, with bioluminescent spots and markings serving to aid in communication. They have a complex hierarchy housed within their underground cities.
Fetchlings are the scions of humans trapped on the shadow plane ages ago, and are the denizens of this lightless realm that beings from the material plane are most familiar with. They are distinctive and pale beyond belief, but many Fetchlings are enthusiastic about using extraplanar pigments and dyes to decorate themselves.
Owbs appear as floating humanoid torsos draped in night-dark cloth, and are incredibly mysterious. They serve as spiritual guides to some races of the Shadow Plane, and many believe they are the remnants of a long-lost pantheon of deities.
Velstracts, also known as Kytons, are pain-loving fiends who were exiled from Hell. They view torture as an art form, hear music in screams, and gain immense pleasure from pain. They believe that in order to reach perfection, one must be painfully transformed and twisted. Most other beings of the Shadow Plane fear these exiles, and rightly so.
Wayangs are one of the few races actually native to the Shadow Plane, despite many of them having migrated to the Material Plane. These strange pixie-like humanoids follow an eerie faith called The Dissolution, believing that all things will merge into shadow eventually.
Divinity on the Shadow Plane:
Not many deities would willingly be found on the Shadow Plane, where light cannot reach and faith serves little use.
Eons ago, the shadow plane was used to hold a prison meant for a god who had become corrupted. He has since been freed and claimed his own realm in the shadow plane, choosing to associate with the Kyton’s pantheon rather than return to his own.
Kyton Demagogues are the closest thing the Velstracs have to any true deities, other than the being of darkness and torment they released and formed a pact with. Each of the Demagogues maintain their own sanctuaries on the Shadow Plane, where they indulge in experiments both ingenious and profane. The Demagogues seek to achieve perfection in their own ways, and push the boundaries of their species’ “art” as much as they can, warping the bodies and minds of themselves and their followers.
Locations on the Shadow Plane:
A unique trait of the Shadow Plane, which many adventurers can take advantage of, is the fact that it reflects some of the most well-inhabited places on the material plane, while some lesser locations fade into shadow. This makes the Shadow Plane into a dangerous yet convenient means to vastly shorten the distance between two different places.
The Abbey of Nevers is one of the most well-known and confusing Kyton sanctuaries. When the Vestracs were betrayed and exiled from hell, the Demagogue Aroggus created this half-real kaleidoscope of realities. Less a location than a constantly-changing selection of demiplanes, the Abbey of Nevers can only be properly navigated by individuals versed in the alien logic of the Velstracs.
The Forsaken Bastion rises above the Shadow Plane’s dark horizon, a glassy fortress of spires and strange architecture. It is a fitting home for the strange Owbs, with no doors or windows on its flat planes of black glass. Light is strangled here, even when compared to the rest of the Shadow Plane, and only Owbs can enter, making the depths of this strange citadel unknown to anyone except the Owbs themselves.
Mitheeriak is the closest thing the Shadow Plane has to a nation in any sense. It is framed by jagged onyx mountains and a pitch-black obsidian river, and is home to families of Shadow Giants. These clans play at games of war in their enclosed kingdom, and host incredible feasts and events in times of peace.
Exploring the Shadow Plane:
While marginally safer than the Negative Energy Plane, the Shadow Plane does come with its own unique dangers and hazards:
Magic on the Shadow Plane is gloomy and sapped of light, as spells producing light or positive effects are heavily impeded. Spells that manipulate shadows or allow for sight in the darkness are unaffected.
The landscape of the plane is constantly twisting and warping, as the shadow stuff that makes up the realm is manipulated and changed. It is very difficult to try and navigate, and near-impossible to accurately map the plane.
Vision is impeded here, as even the brightest light in the plane is very dim. Only magical light sources can pierce the gloom, allowing for easier navigation.
A very unique hazard in the shadow plane, Voidboils are perverse pockets of negative energy that scar the landscape. In places where the borders between the Shadow and Negative Energy Planes grow thin, Voidboils grow like dark tumors. If disturbed or tread upon, they rupture, spewing negative energy and sapping the life from nearby beings.
A warning to any adventurers or explorers looking to visit this plane- stockpile whatever items or spells you can use to create light. This realm is darkness incarnate, the very land itself made of pure shadow.
Very few beings from the Material Plane can survive here without being drained by the Plane’s strange atmosphere. Most mortals that find themselves in this realm will die before they find anything of value, or get lost in the dark before they can escape.
If there is one positive trait of this plane, it is this: Distances between locations on the Prime Material and distances on the Shadow Plane are quite different. You could emerge into the shadow plane to cut a week-long journey down to a mere day, if you’re willing to hazard the undead and fiends along the way.
One thing I’ve found out about this plane is that native outsiders of this realm have an equally difficult time living in our world as we do theirs. I discovered this in an unfortunate manner, as a shadow I brought back with intent to have a new companion quickly wavered out of existence after entering the bright light of our world’s sun.
All in all, there is much to explore and do in this plane, but always keep a light at hand.
- A weird warlock.
#pathfinder#pathfinder plane#plane of shadow#pathfinder lore#wowieweirdwarlock#TTRPG#WWW: Plentiful Planes & Places
4 notes
·
View notes
Text
Daybreak (Madara/Fem!Reader) Ch. 7
Y’all are going to hate me. I'm sorry I disappeared on you guys, school was very -- still very overwhelming for me. I'll try to get back on somewhat of a schedule.
---------------------------------------------
Heavy panting, a burning sensation filled your lungs as you ran and cried for your brother. Your eyes burned as you pushed your heavy legs to run again – you grasped onto your ragged clothes over your chest as you staggered through the winding road. No light illuminated your path as your feet faltered to touch the ground, hitting the blood-stained road; you tried to get up but were only pinned back onto the floor. A haunting voice cackled maniacally behind you on the road, stained by blood. The maniacal laughter echoed through the night, you didn’t dare to look at who the voice belonged to, but you caught the sound of a singing owl. Your eyes blurred and burned through the tears as you did your best to focus on the owl; the owl was joined by many others who sang in a melodic harmony, but their keen orbs were haunting. They only focused on you like the song they sang distorted into something eerie.
“Where are ya’ lookin’ girlie?” Your eyes instantly shifted to the voice above. No face belonged to this voice; all that was within your view was the knife the vote had plunged into your thoracic; a scream choked in your throat as it was drowned by your blood gushing up from your throat. It felt like your world was quaking, a muffled call sounded in your ear, but you couldn’t catch onto the words.
-----------------------------------------------------
You instantly shot up from where you lay, and the first interaction was when you slammed your forehead against someone’s chin, where you recoiled in pain, covering over your forehead, reverting to a fetal position. The person you hit grunted, turning away quickly, covering over his chin, “if you wanted me to shut up, you could have told me, Y/N,” you curled up a bit more before sitting up, rubbing your forehead to refocus on who it was; it was the raven-haired man. As you pondered his name, he noticed you looking at him before smiling a little, “Madara. My name’s Madara,” he seemed gentle in your eyes. Your eyes were drawn to the environment around you and your cats meowing for your attention.
“Where… am I? Where’s my brother?” suspicion arose quickly, was he your kidnapper this whole time, and your brother trusted him despite being so cautious of everyone he meets? You immediately tensed up, drawing yourself in more.
“Whoa, whoa, there, there, your house was bugged, so, to keep you safe, we –” Madara paused, your eyes narrowed a little, “Hashirama and I separated you and your brother to each of our houses to keep a closer eye on you two to see how your house got bugged before you even knew it,” it took a bit, but you finally nodded. You never brought anyone home, so there was no way your house could be bugged. “Have you ever brought a friend home or something?” you shook your head quickly, “hm, I see, then why were there –”
You interrupted his thinking process when you thought back a little more, “well… there was one time that I remember there was a stranger in the house.” you could see alert come into his obsidian orbs, gesturing you to elaborate, “a few years ago when we first moved into the house, some man came in and said he had to take a look at our AC systems because the old owners always complained about it, and he did it for free. He spent a lot of time in my brother and I’s room, not so much where the AC was kept.” you spoke softly. You always found it odd that the man would always smile at you when you peeked in to check on him, to check if he ever wanted water.
“ –anything else?” you snapped away from your deep thinking to refocus back on Madara. His brows knitted together, “I said, did he do anything else? Like, afterward, did you see him often? Do you remember which company he came from?” accepting a cat into your lap, you hummed thoughtfully.
“After he came to my house, I see him around my school a lot, and places where I like to go with my brother… hold on, I have the business card that he dropped,” you pulled out your phone to scroll through, but your phone was nowhere to be found, “huh, where’s my–”
“I had to throw it away. I was worried it would be bugged. Do you have your files backed up into a drive instead?” words cannot explain how much shock you were in. Sure, your house was bugged, but no one bugged your phone, right? “Better safe than sorry, you know?” a sigh escaped your lips before watching the male extend his hand out to you, “let me show you where you’ll be staying; I hope you don’t mind. It’s probably not as nice as your room, but just bear with me, is that alright?” you nodded with a smile, reaching forward to take his hand, bringing your cats with you as he leads you upstairs.
As Madara was taking his time letting you tour his house and then leading to your room where there was a door connected to Madara’s, which he explained was for your safety. You nodded, even though you didn’t think it was needed. As he described how the showers worked, you wandered over to the window. Moonlight illuminated the outside world to you. On a branch stood a barred owl. Its eyes pierce through the protection of the window, straight at you. You jumped a little when you felt a hand on your shoulder, turning to meet Madara’s obsidian orbs.
“Owls aren’t so common around these areas, but I guess there are mice here for them,” he smiled at you. Your brows knitted together as the owl hooted at you. You focused back on the owl. “You know? Owls also signify death.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Did you guys also know that? I found a sad but calming song about owls, so I decided to use owls for this chapter. Sorry, it took so long.
Cloudy's AO3
#madara uchiha x you#madara uchiha#madara#madara x reader#madara uchiha x reader#madara x y/n#madara x you#uchiha madara x reader#naruto au#naruto fanfiction#naruto x reader#daybreak (db)
22 notes
·
View notes
Text
You’re Your Own Goldfish
( "goldfish" by josullivan.59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. )
You, like many millions of people before you, buy a goldfish in a large bowl. It does all the typical goldfish things: swim around, float around, look around. You take care of it in the way millions before you have taken care of them. You feed it flakes every morning and clean its bowl every week and have the occasional one-sided conversation with it. It's nice having it around. Sure, it's just a fish, but its presence adds an element of life to your room, however small. You often wonder what it's thinking. You hear goldfish have only a five second memory. Seeing it swim around the same bowl day after day, you really hope it's true.
You spend a lot of time staring at it. Eventually you realize it spends a lot of time staring at you too, its fishy gaze always following you around. It will look your way as soon as you enter the room and slowly turn as you move about, keeping you always at the front of its vision. You've walked back and forth a few times, to see whether it's really you it's looking at, and each time confirm that, yes, it is looking at you and only you. It starts making you uncomfortable once you notice. Even when you're not looking at the fish, you can feel its stare on your back, never letting you forget it's there. It's creepy, but that's pretty much it. After a little hesitation, you go about your days as normal. The fish keeps staring, but you don't really care anymore.
Years pass. You keep taking care of it: feeding it flakes in the morning, cleaning its bowl every week. The fish is still doing its intense, intelligent gaze and now you think it's kind of cute. Your fish likes you. And why not? You take very good care of it. That must be why it's lived such a long time--much longer than you'd think a goldfish would. So then you're surprised when, one morning, you spot a strange growth on the top of its head. It starts out almost invisible, but within a week balloons to the size of a pearl, which on this fish is rather large. You've never seen anything like it, in or out of water. It glows with a brilliant light that shifts rapidly from one color to the next, pulsing out shades of red, green, blue, gold and every shade between them. It lights up the water, making it shine like a sparkling star.
You kneel down next to the bowl to take a closer look, your eyes squinting against the brightness. The fish floats right up against the glass and raises its gaze to you. You stare at each other and the light gets stronger. You want to look away, to close your eyes, but you can't do either, it's like your body won't listen. Soon, your entire world goes white as searing pain beams down your face and into your body, which is now wracked with convulsions. You can't see a thing, but you feel yourself go limp and fall down. You expect to hit the floor but instead crash through a pool of water, like some hole to the sea had been waiting below you. You struggle and flail for a moment, your heart beating fast, but pause when you realize you can still breathe. You don't know how this can be, but you calm down a little. You're not drowning. You feel better. That stops when you finally open your eyes.
You see your room, but from a much different angle. Everything is strange and distorted. Lines are curved, and proportions are off, everything looking much bigger than it should. Suddenly, your entire perspective shifts as you feel the water move around you. It feels like you're moving up, so very fast, until something huge rises into your entire field of vision, dominating your view like an endless horizon. It's a face. Your face. It smiles, a grin that, to your little eyes, looks as big as the sky. You try to ask what's happening, why you're in water, why everything looks so weird, but nothing happens. The thoughts form--telling your mouth to move in certain ways, for your tongue to position itself correct, for air to move from your lungs--but you remain silent, no matter how much you try. You involuntarily try to whimper and find you cannot do even then. Then, it speaks with a big booming voice that you recognize immediately as your own.
( "Bedroom" by Studio Sarah Lou is licensed under CC BY 2.0. )
Your voice says You must be feeling very confused right now, and you try to say Yeah No Kidding, but once again no sound comes out your mouth. You feel your world start turning around as your voice says Maybe this will help you understand. Your vision rotates until you see you're in front of a large mirror. Reflected inside is your room, with your bed and your shelves and all your stuff. And there's you! You see yourself, holding the goldfish bowl. That's strange, though: you don't feel yourself holding anything. The you in the mirror smiles. That's also strange, you think, because you don't feel yourself smiling. You move closer to get a better look. At the same time, the goldfish moves forward. You feel weird and stop. The goldfish in the mirror stops too. You feel even weirder and move away. The goldfish swims backward.
With a sudden, painful burst of revelation you finally understand.
You try to scream. You want to scream. You need to scream. But that's something humans do. All goldfish do is swim, so that's all you can do, though you do it as frantically as possible. You hear your voice say Now you're getting it. Your hands set the bowl back down and the face, your face, returns. The thing using your body says it's unfortunate things had to be this way, and that it understands you'd be upset, but to try to see things from its perspective.
It began life at the bottom of a cold, dark lake. Back then, it was just a worm, one of thousands burrowed in the muck. The nutrients there could sustain it, yes, but not forever. It knew it was only a matter of time before all the minerals were leeched out and starvation would begin. It had seen it happen to others and feared it would share the same fate. Its only hope, your voice explains, was to be consumed by some sort of animal, where the next stage of its life could begin. Daily it prayed, every time a passing fish or crab swam by, that it would be the one to be finally plucked from the muck and ingested to safety. Daily it was frustrated, seeing hundreds of others chosen but not it. Until one day, it said, salvation came in the form of a goldfish that dug through the mud and slurped up the worm in a single motion.
Once inside, your voice says, it was a simple matter to fuse with the fish's spine and take control. From there, all it had to do was wait for the next stage of its life to begin. Eventually it was scooped up in a net and brought to a pet store, the same one you bought it at. You never suspected a thing, but then why would you? After all, until recently it looked just like any other goldfish in any other bowl. By the time the glowing growth finally appeared on its head, it was too late. The only thing it needed to do then was wait for you to make eye contact for just a few seconds and, says your voice, you know the rest.
And finally, it says, the last stage of its life cycle has begun: being human. Having now taken over your body, it can move through society freely with no one suspecting that this perfectly normal person is secretly, inside, a goldfish. And similarly, no one would look at you, in your new fish body, and suspect you're really a person. You want to cry, but that is something else fish can't do. The thing says that it's looking forward to finally meeting the others--those just like itself, who switched minds with some unlucky human and took over their life. It tells you there's millions and millions of them on Earth, as it has been for thousands of years. You've probably already met one and never even knew. The only way to tell would be to run their waste under a microscope, to see all the tiny eggs they release every time they go to the bathroom. And who's really going to do that?
(By SuSanA Secretariat - https://www.flickr.com/photos/gtzecosan/15518236248/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38222502)
So what's going to happen to you? Your voice explains that it will take good care of you, just like you took good care of it. You'll get flakes every morning and a bowl cleaning every week. In the meantime, you'll be free to do whatever you want, even though the only thing to really do is just swim around, float around and look around. And, as the hours turn to days and the days turn to weeks, you find that's exactly what you do. It's not very exciting. But that is the life of a fish. It is your life. Forever.
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
Title: Dhalgren
Author: Walter Tevis
Rating: 2/5 stars
I picked this up expecting to like it, even expecting to like it a lot, because a friend has praised it highly and I trust his judgment.
Yet after finishing it -- and the reader is urged to complete it at its own pace -- I found it not exactly terrible, but not at all compelling, either. I had a good time with it, and I liked the first half even if the second half soured me on it. But the experience wasn't at all similar to my friend's. I guess we're both in the habit of liking books because our friends love them -- or because we like our friends -- which is a tendency I suspect may not always be a good idea.
This book is a slow, sprawling, rambling meditation on the theme of an alien civilization in which everybody has undergone some horrible experience or injury, with the result that they've become weird, twisted-brained people -- perhaps as a result of trauma, or genetic defects, or both -- who never recover their faculties of speech or cognition, and seem to have lost all their memories except for fragments from their childhood.
Each character, in a way, has to struggle against this. As a result of these things, they may have no memory of their home or family, or of the people who once were their friends. For them, the world of daily life and ordinary conversation is a terrifying, inchoate nightmare, and when they find it they may be terrified to begin with. They may even be unable to take any care of themselves -- like, say, cleaning their own apartment -- because their lives may have become so chaotic that they can't understand how to go through them with anything resembling coherence.
The language in this book, and the ideas it presents, are very different from what I usually like in fiction. This book isn't especially plot-driven (although there are plenty of moments that would work fine as such, just without a clear sense of a unified plot). The characters never really interact in a way that looks like "character-driven" -- although, because of the way the book's perspective is limited to the eyes of one character, it's hard not to feel like one is being given an inside view of a strange world, especially for the first part. Even at the end -- when everything has become very clear and the narration focuses on the main character's thoughts and memories -- one still has this impression.
What you have here is more an alien view of the human world -- as an outsider would be able to take in our world with only minimal distortion -- than an account of human life, which is what fiction usually is about. Like most of Tevis's other fiction, which includes his earlier, better-known novel (The Man In the High Castle), it seems to have more of an appeal as a work of science fiction than as a mainstream fiction story. Tevis has a talent for evoking strangeness -- not just the literal strangeness of Sputnik-like technology -- but of the sort of strangeness that can arise from some fundamental, metaphysical break, from a gap between what "we" can grasp and comprehend in our mundane, human way and the ultimate strangeness that exists, like another dimension, outside our ordinary experience.
It's not an alien world that I found unengaging (I liked it a lot) but rather a human world that just isn't really very engaging. The strange characters, the fractured-perspective alien view, and the lack of plot are not at all what a lot of writers these days are doing, and that's what makes this novel a bit of an anachronism. So I found myself in the odd position of wanting to enjoy a book despite its being very different from the kinds of things I normally read, because at least it was different in some interesting ways. But it wasn't something I'd want to read just for its novelty value -- except in the same way that a lot of modern art is about its novelty value, or that people talk about classic novels being about "social criticism," i.e. about what they can teach us about the human condition. (Tevis has written some other books, I guess, in which he has tried to give us these kinds of lessons -- about the pain and loneliness of growing older in contemporary America, for instance -- but there's something really wrong with doing it in this particular novel.)
4 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
dr-d33znvtz
NEW BLOG LETS GOOO
rileyoe1
Titled
notyourkeli
Bordergirl
herbadreligion
bestflowersdelivered.co.uk
ilovelifeandiwanttotalkaboutit
You Got Something I Need