she wanders onward, never to arrive (or, why mark isn't in fe6)

Hello TOA,

I anticipate this getting long so I’m just going to put it on the dash instead of clogging the headcanons channel. This is the Red official headcanon for why Mark isn’t in FE6, besides the fact that avatars are an FE7 invention. Spoilers for FE7 follow. 

I’ll save the cliffhanger - I believe by the time FE6 begins, Mark is dead, or at the very least uncontactable. She’s not present in the story because she can’t be there, not because she doesn’t want to be. The how she gets there is the interesting part to me, not the end goal.

One of Mark’s few canon traits is that she’s a wanderer. She never settles in one place for long, and her time with Lyn, Eliwood, and Hector is the longest she’s ever devoted herself to anything when she had the choice to leave. She doesn’t run away, but she can’t stay idle. To her, there’s always more to learn, more to see, and in the back of her mind she’s afraid that Bern is still somehow looking for her. It’s said she goes to wander after Lyn’s adventure, and only crosses paths with Eliwood and Hector by chance. So, I think it makes sense after the events of FE7, she’d pack her things and leave Pherae. It’s said in the game that Eliwood ascends roughly a year after the final map ends, and I do think Mark would stay nearby while Eliwood prepares to take on this new role, but she leaves just after his ascension. I don’t think she ever stays in one place that long again. 

Mark’s path can best be described as a spiral - at first, she comes back to visit her friends every few months. She brings tales of far off adventure and research, endless new knowledge of tactics, wildlife, the very basics of anima magic. Then, the stretch of time is a year with no word. She says she was in Etruria, holed up in a library for far too long. She’s gone in the night, because she’s never gotten better at saying goodbye. Three years, with no word. She only stops to see Eliwood and Hector because she happened to be walking through their territories. Eventually, she just... stops showing up. It’s not out of resentment, or a want to isolate herself - it’s just that she cannot stay grounded, ever. Even when she spends a month with her friends, recovering after a particularly hard journey, her eyes are always on the horizon, her map is always wet with new ink.

And one day, word ends. Rumors of her appearance fade. Suddenly, it’s been longer than it’s ever been with no sign of her coming back. New rumors begin - bandits, magic gone wrong, another realm she fell into. Whatever happened, she’s not returning. By the time the epilogue scene happens 15 years after Eliwood’s ascension, Mark hasn’t been seen for years. By then, I think the rumors have resolved down to “Mark is gone.” 

It’s up to her castmates whether they searched for her at all, especially since she all but vanished after Eliwood’s ascension. Actually, please talk to me about how your muses felt about Mark’s disappearance. I’d love to talk about how she’s awful at this. 

I think something that complicates this is that Mark isn’t one to ride on her reputation. After leaving Pherae, she wants to lay low as a simple traveler, and that makes it a lot harder for anyone to track her down. It also, unfortunately, contributes to why she isn’t talked about at all in FE6. Her reputation after the war fell into legend, and when she stopped showing up, that’s all she was. A story, something to embellish the legends of Lyndis, Eliwood, and Hector. The shadow behind them, eyes turned skyward. Eventually, Mark’s name falls from the story, and her reputation gets even more stretched away from her. By the time the epilogue scene happens, Mark’s been all but dropped from the story, and if she’s spoken about at all, it’s either by people who knew her or as a separate legend of an unbeatable tactician. 

As for what specifically happened to her, I think she was ambushed by bandits and killed on the road. She never is a fighter herself, and I think she really has a bad time with anima magic. She’s able to learn basics by that time, but placing one low level mage with a fire tome in a ring of brigands is going to give you a reset. In TOAverse, she will eventually begin to learn reason magic, but I am not going to make it easy for her. For now, she’s on the authority grind! 

As always, I’d love to talk about this more with other Elibe muns. Also if there’s some amount of canon I missed, please ping me to yell at me and I’ll thank you forever. If you made it here, thanks for reading! 

Final wordcount - 828 words

damn we really don't think enough about the major world events that crowley and aziraphale have witnessed on both ends. all the horrible things like wars, discrimination, natural disasters, genocide, etc. yes but also all the good: liberation, major political reforms, the invention of new genres and materials and technology and fields of study.

like oh my god. they were there for all the centuries that women had no rights at all and then they got to witness the suffragettes, the women writers and royals and inventors and activists. they got to witness the overturning of anti-lgbtq and racial segregation laws and the celebration of human rights and identities. they were there to witness international tragedies but also the solidarity from everyone all over the world rallying for peace for people they don't even know. they got to see humans create new forms of art and fashion and the printing press and electricity and poetry and and and coloured television and music and they got to see humans constantly find new ways to find connection and love and fun and passion and their own forms of expression.

like imagine being there for everything. how could you not love the world after seeing the fall and rise of humanity over and over again in every way shape and form for six thousand years. holy shit

Also leaving this here since today is the Remembrance Day for victims of the Anfal genocide.

Where Saddam Hussein (with the help of the MEK) and his cronies slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Assyrians (and other minorities) in Iraq near the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

I posted about it earlier this year not too long ago.

Feel free to reblog.

you are pitting Jesus and Santa Claus against each other. I am acknowledging Santa as both a mythic symbol of Christ and a cultural legend based upon a real man whose faithfulness to Christ was used by God to grant common grace not just to the people of Myra but throughout the entire world. we are not the same.

There's something so insane to me about being able to create and recreate vintage or even ancient music, clothes, fabrics, building architecture, anything, really.

I watched this video about a lady who knit a WWII-era vest, and it was really unique, because the cable work would eat up yarn, when there were shortages of fibers. This pattern would have likely been used by people to send overseas to soldiers, and now it's being created in a time where this war has been over for generations. What were the people making this pattern thinking of? What about the people making the vest? Could they fathom a world where world wars didn't happen back to back? Could they imagine what peace felt like, or did it fade like a distant memory, a faint friend? All we have now are the remnants of their efforts, a "simple" vest that would warm the bodies of countless people the knitter would never have imagined were here on earth with them.

We're reaching across time to learn about other people - we're reaching our hands out just to grasp anything tangible. And when we've take hold of something, all we can do is say I love you I love you I love you

Jewish food 😂😂 more like stolen land and food

Girl (gn) I hope you've never eaten a bagel in your entire life, you wouldn't want those nasty Jewish cooties we garnish them all with 🥱

Princess Bubblegum, pouring over a dossier she's composed on Simon Petrikov: I must admit that, even with our previous conflicts, I find you a fascinating individual. Simon: Really? I always thought I was boringly normal. Bubblegum: Certainly not! There's so many things to consider. The question of how many of Ice King's personality characteristics were imposed on the crown, and what were exaggerated aspects of your own personality alone would make a very interesting investigation. Bubblegum: In fact, your fiance's work on the links between magic, sadness and madness have greatly suggested to me avenues on how magic works I never considered. As opposed to, y'know. It just working and no one thinks about it because its MAGIC. Bubblegum: I most sincerely want to put you under a microscope and dissect you. Simon: Oh, that's an interesting metaphor. I suppose I could stand to take an outside perspective at my mental state. Princess Bubblegum, in the middle of pulling out a ocmically oversized microscope: ... Bubblegum: Yes. Metaphor. That's what I meant. Simon: ...Hang on now, you don't need to put it away, I didn't say NO to the idea. Bubblegum: You DID hear me say 'dissect', yes? Simon: And I'm still saying I'm not entirely opposed to the idea provided there is anesthetic and I will of course survive the procedure? Bubblegum: Uh, YEAH! What kind of a hack do you take me for? Simon: 'Hack' on the context of being dissected is a bad choice of words but I apologize.

I've been thinking about the fact that it's been almost 20 years since OotP was released, and how traumatic that experience was for Wolfstar shippers. Only it wasn't Wolfstar back then; we called ourselves puppyshippers, or R/S shippers, or SBRL shippers (theirloveissocanon).

I remember a fic challenge in the wake of OotP's publication, which I believe was called "Through the Veil". The premise had Sirius using the Veil to jump between parallel realities, trying to find his way home, a la Quantum Leap. We were in a lot of denial about the nature of the Veil in those days, you understand. Much like Harry, we were unwilling to accept that Sirius might actually be dead. I can only remember two of the fics, both of which were deeply painful, because back then we enjoyed nothing more than to HURT one another.

One involved Sirius ending up in a reality without magic. He found Remus, who was all alone and dying of AIDS, and approached him as a dog, staying with him until he died, before jumping to the next timeline.

The other was called Without Moony. Sirius can't find Remus, but eventually finds himself at St Mungo's. It turns out in this timeline, Remus died as a teenager, as a direct result of the Prank (oh god do people even still use this parlance?). Out of guilt, Sirius never transformed into Padfoot again, and lost his mind in Azkaban. All he can do is repeat over and over, "There's no Padfoot without Moony".

I also remember things like fanvids of movie clips set to Evanescense songs, infinite animated livejournal icons, and long essays pointing to details in canon that PROVED Remus and Sirius were an item. (Of course we know now that what the author intended doesn't matter, but I would hate for the passion with which such things were written to be forgotten.)

I'm sure most of these things still exist somewhere out there, but a lot of the context has been lost. It's not really possible to convey what it was like to be there and to experience such things in real time. I guess this is just me pushing back a little against the sands of time, before these fragments of our history become lost forever.

May 14, 1724. 300 years exactly today!!

The best people in the world are the ones who are genuinely interested when you infodump at them.

Forever fucked up by the statue of nero's daughter claudia augusta who died at four months old that shows what she could have looked like if she had lived

every time i think about the aphobia and blatant erasure of aspec culture that’s been so rampant in online spaces i get SO sad. now aspec people don’t even know their own history!! aspec people are calling queerplatonic relationships “just friends”!! people are confusing asexuality with celibacy and aromanticism with asexuality!! aspec people think aspec identities are a 2000s fad!! this is so sad!!!!!

So.

Today marks 36 years since the beginning of the Anfal Genocide in Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered hundreds and thousands of Kurds, Yazidis, Assyrians, Mandaeans and Shabaks.

Around 100,000 people at the least would be killed.

It would last from February to September of 1988. During the late stages of the Iran-Iraq war.

Largely consisting of mass killings, chemical attacks and forced displacement.

Many in Iraq sadly continue to deny it to this day. Predictably. As do Saddam Hussein’s many idiot apologists on the internet.

I’ll leave some sources from this year and the last few years here for additional information.

Some sources also focus on the Assyrian victims too.

Above: A monument dedicated to the memory of the Assyrian victims of the Anfal genocide in the village of Gonda Kosa.

Just to remind any idiots who think Saddam and his cronies were kind to the Assyrians. They were certainly not!

Feel free to reblog.

Reblog the shit out of this!

top 10 characters i need to learn more about before i can form a solid opinion

anyways here's fading ink julius

obviously there are newspaper and online articles about julian and that brief article about pat but some of the other ghosts must also be remembered in books/articles, right? anyway i propose that thomas is exclusively remembered in the footnotes of academic papers and biographies about mary shelley and lord byron

"umm discourse is supposed to stay on twitter, not tumblr" you would not have survived this website 10 years ago, you have no idea how good we have it on tumblr now, twitter discourse is nothing LOL