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incorrect-ikevamp-quotes · 3 years

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Hello, dear stranger i admire <3. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to make an ABC Prompt with the letters F, N, O, Q and T for Napoleon Bonaparte of IkeVamp :3, feel free to skip a letter if you think I exceeded jsjs. If you can do it then well and if you can't then it's also okay (English is not my main language so I apologize if I'm not understood somewhere) I send you a psychological hug as far as you are <3

!!!! Hello friend!! Please don't worry, I'll be answering all of these :D

And you're just fine, sweetums, you communicate yourself beautifully! muah muah, sending virtual hugs to you too!!! 💚💚💚💚

I do apologize for the long wait, but I hope you enjoy these!

Family – Does he want one?

Is that even a question, nunuche???

All jokes aside, the answer I think is yes, absolutely. He really does take to children very well, and lives to protect and teach them how to survive. He has a knack for inspiring confidence, a steadfast presence that makes people feel safe and loved and proud. He knows when to encourage and when to let people stand on their own two feet–and that’s a pretty crucial skill when it comes to parenting/mentoring.

That being said I think it will be a challenge for him to remember that not everybody is like him, sometimes. To be brave and fierce is admirable surely, but it’s important to remember that not everybody will share those qualities. If disagreements ever arise, I think it’ll be because he might need reminders that the solutions/approaches that worked for him might not always work for his child.

But he’s also aware of how much a person learns by doing things themselves and messing up a few times. With a bit of patience–and reassurance from MC–he’ll find the strength to take a step back. Children need to find their own answers, and so it must be, he’ll make his peace with that somehow.

(If there’s one thing he never hopes for his child, it’s the sight of war…)

As for when, I feel like it would be fairly soon in the relationship? I don’t think he would ever feel comfortable rushing his MC, but easily within the first few years together he’d be cool with it. He’s just kind of the ultimate caretaker energy, reliable but not a stick in the mud either :D

No MC this isn't because he wants to chase little kiddies around the house and make them giggle and shriek--

Nightmare – What is his worst fear?

Please, God, don’t make me kill again.

While Napoleon is very rarely a man ruled by fear, he can easily admit that his worst nightmare is always about losing his loved ones (namely MC). Or outliving MC, as he inevitably will. But I suppose that’s a bit of an obvious answer, yes? Let’s dig a little deeper (shoves trowel into his brain)

I sense a few great fears that plague him.

He’s a man grounded by his capability to protect that which he loves; if he loses the capacity to do that, he would be utterly devastated. I don’t think it’s that he doesn’t want others protecting him, or that he would grow bitter and resentful if he couldn’t. I think it’s more just the nature of his life and identity? He has devoted himself to the protection of innocents, and he lives to serve. He acts as a bodyguard/guard, helps children, seeks justice for the dispossessed. A man like that would wither under immense incapacity, and the thought unnerves him sometimes.

Expanding on that, I see him very wary of hurting MC via his bloodlust. While he has a great deal of control and rarely ever lapses, I think he is constantly aware of his loss of humanity. Even if MC loves and trusts him, there’s a part of him that will always fear being the reason MC comes to harm. It goes against everything he believes in, and against the vow he made.

And last, but certainly not least, is his general desire for peace to last. He doesn't want a world plagued by pain, the way he knew it. If there's anything he would move heaven and earth to accomplish, it would be to keep MC away from that level of violence and destruction.

Sometimes it keeps him up at night, sometimes he just has to take a deep breath and banish the possibility from his mind. On days where it feels impossible, he'll be clingier than usual--silently drawing her close in his embrace. After a short while MC will recognize what it means, protests at the suddenness dying in her throat as she strokes his hair gently. Let him linger a little, indulge him just this once won't you, nunuche? He doesn't have the heart to talk about it...

Oddity – What’s a quirk he has?

(I mean…of the like 500 we already know about? Man that’s a tall order)

Back during his soldat days, he actually got his pinkie finger more or less crushed while moving a cannon. It healed just fine, but because of the damage it doesn’t bend quite right anymore. Rather than the fluid stretch people recognize when they unfurl and clench their fists, his pinky only has two modes–rigidly straight or bent. It doesn’t bother him all that much but alas he will never live his lifelong dream of playing the flute (kidding, nunuche, what do I know about music).

Quality Time – How does he like to spend time with her?

Honestly, I feel like he’s the kind of man contented with just about any kind of time with her. Whether he’s just helping her with chores to stay close, they’re on a date, or just cuddling in bed. He will admit that time spent where her full attention is on him is preferable, if he had to choose.

He also loves the sight of her when they’re playing with/mentoring the kids. She gets such a warm, sweet look on her face when she indulges them–and even when she’s feeling out of her depth, she gets the cutest stymied look. While he tries not to intervene too much (he knows she can handle it) he often finds himself ruffling her hair and telling the kids to stop giving her such a hard time.

Time – How long did it take for them to get together?

Honestly? I’m ngl, Napoleon did always feel like a slow burn type of guy, largely because of the extent of the healing he needs to do in his life. He’s not really against the idea of a relationship, more just really burned himself out during his human life. The inevitable result of that is needing somebody who can help him understand that he is more than just his usefulness, that it’s okay to grieve no matter how pointless it may feel.

When a person has known so much horror and loss and loneliness, it’s only natural they would need time to accept the opposite. My best bet would probably be a few months, if not a year, before he betrays any indication of love. I also feel like it’s the result of his personality; he’s not the type of man for flings or half-hearted confessions, I think. He prefers a steady, devoted commitment to another person. And he has a sharp eye for who it is that he wants–now it’s just a matter of fighting that internalized denial of happiness.

#ikevamp #ikemen vampire #ikevamp napoleon #ikevamp fluff #ikevamp headcanons #ikevamp fluff headcanons #man there is a lot of love for napoleon amongst yall #and tbh? valid as hell he's a sweetheart #i salute yall o7 #hope you enjoyed this lovely! ty for your patience <33 #rambles #not incorrect quotes #fluff ABCs #i wish i had something witty for this but all i have is 'send post'

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Squid Game Ending Explained

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This SQUID GAME article contains MAJOR spoilers.

For a series with a relatively well-worn premise, Netflix’s Squid Game sure does manage to pack a lot of surprises into its conclusion. It does this in large part by recognizing that the series’ success hinges not so much on who wins the game, but on how they win it and what it all means. Like the show’s beginning, much of Squid Game‘s final hour is set outside the world of the arena—this time, a year following the events of the bulk of the show. Let’s break down what happens in the Squid Game ending…

Who Wins Squid Game?

While the meat of Squid Game‘s conclusion comes outside of the game, the final round—Round Six, the series’ original title—is effective. In a callback to the series’ opening scene, which shows kids playing the titular “squid game” as Gi-hun explains the rules, the final two contestants must face off in the children’s game. It’s especially fitting (and depressing) that the final two contestants are Gi-hun and Cho Sang-woo, as the two grew up in the same town and used to play squid game together as kids. More than that, Sang-woo has been deemed a success by society (well, up until that embezzlement part) and Gi-Hun, a failure. By pitting these two against one another in Squid Game’s final contest, and making it very clear who the more humane human is, the series is calling into question the metrics by which we measure status and worth in our world.

As Squid Game progresses, the competition has become more and more encouraging of inter-contestant violence. This is especially true for the final round, in which Gi-hun and Sang-woo are allowed to use force to beat the other person—even to their death. It’s about winning the squid game or making it so your opponent can’t win the squid game… or anything else. It’s barbaric and raw and, for a moment, it seems like Gi-hun may succumb to the kind of desperate brutality that has claimed so many in this game.

After an ugly fight, Gi-hun manages to beat Sang-woo to the ground and make his way to the circle drawn in the sand that, should he step inside, would mean his victory and Sang-woo’s death. He almost does it, too—he is so angry with Sang-woo whom, over the course of the game, he has realized is willing to kill in order to secure his victory—but, in the end, human life is worth more to Gi-hun than any sum of money. It’s what Kang Sae-byeok reminded him of right before she died (at Sang-woo’s hand). We all have the capacity to do both good and terrible things. Gi-hun may have a good heart, but, more impressively, he is able to act with it.

This is exactly what Gi-hun does, realizing that he doesn’t have to choose money over human life. One of the three rules in the game allows for the competition to be canceled should a majority agree to end it. The group enacted it after the first round before deciding to re-instate the game shortly after. To the surprise of the VIPs watching from their gilded booth, Gi-hun walks back over to Sang-woo and asks him to leave with him. To end the game. Sang-woo seems to consider it, reaching out for Gi-hun outstretched hand, before he instead takes the dagger buried in the ground next to him and plunges it into his own neck.

Why does Sang-woo do it? Perhaps he is too ashamed of what he has done, both in the arena and outside of it. Or maybe he can’t stand to face his mother and others without the money. Perhaps he does the math and realizes, at this point, the only way to get the money to his mother is to make sure Gi-hun wins it and helps out the woman he’s known since he was a kid. Maybe he’s just tired and traumatized. Probably, it’s all of the above. Whatever the reason, Sang-woo kills himself and Gi-hun wins the game. In the end, though, I think it’s clear that no one actually wins Squid Game.

Squid Game: What Could Season 2 Look Like?

By Kayti Burt

Squid Game Doesn’t Waste Its Brutal Premise

By Kayti Burt

Who Dies in Squid Game?

It might be easier to list who doesn’t die. None of the game’s 456 contestants make it out, save for protagonist Gi-hun and old man contestant Oh Il-nam (more on that later). Ali is tricked by Sang-woo into giving all of his marbles in Round Four, and is killed by the soldiers. Han Mi-ryeo succeeds in her promise to kill gangster Jang Deok-su when she grabs onto him and throws them both off of the glass bridge in Round Five. Kang Sae-byeok, the North Korean woman looking to get back to her brother, is killed by Sang-woo in the lead up to the final round.

Notable deaths in the series conclusion that take place outside the arena include Hwang Joon-ho, the police officer who infiltrates Squid Game pretty damn effectively, only to be killed by the Front Man, aka his own brother. And also Gi-hun’s mother, whom Gi-hun finds dead upon returning to his apartment after winning the game. Presumably, she died from complications to her diabetes, which is shown to be very serious in the second episode.

Joon-ho’s Brother: Who is In-ho?

In the eighth episode of the season, “Front Man,” Hwang Joon-ho makes it off of the arena’s island with evidence of the game. He is hunted down by the game’s Front Man and his goons. Joon-ho tries to call for back-up and to send he evidence he has gathered to his police chief, but is unable to due to cell phone poor service. He is cornered on a high, rocky cliff and asked to surrender by the Front Man, who reveals himself to be Joon-ho’s own brother, In-ho.

In Episode 5, “A Fair World,” Joon-ho discovers that his brother was a previous winner of Squid Game—in 2015, five years prior. Somehow, In-ho went from being a winner to being a main controlling force—probably in no small part because, as we see from how Gi-hun responds to winning, it is not easy to get past the extreme trauma of Squid Game. In-ho is so committed to his role as the Front Man that he shoots his own brother, when Joon-ho refuses to surrender to him. Joon-ho, who spent the entire season gathering evidence of Squid Game, falls to the water below, presumably to his death and presumably with all of the evidence he has gathered.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Who Runs Squid Game?

This is a complicated question because we don’t truly understand the scope of Squid Game. When Joon-ho infiltrates the records vault underneath the Front Man’s rooms, he finds evidence of years and years of games like the one we have been watching play out. Discussion amongst the VIPs also suggests that the game is being played in different locations around the world—this could mean that multiple games are happening simultaneously or that they happen throughout the year in different locations. We know from the labels on the (honestly very well organized) records that there are multiple games every year.

Logistically, the Front Man runs the game with the help of the workers, soldiers, and managers—aka the dudes in red coveralls. In the final episode, Oh Il-nam, aka Contestant 001, is revealed to be the Host of the game, and implied to be if not the person who runs the entire gambit, then one of the people who is in charge. He gives more of the game’s backstory from his deathbed…

Why Did Oh Il-nam Play Squid Game?

We find out in Squid Game‘s final episode that Oh Il-nam, the older man Gi-hun befriended in the arena and whom we all thought died in the marbles round, actually survived the Squid Game. This is because he is one of its creators. He chose to play the game after years of watching it because he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that caused him to reflect on his life. As he tells an understandably very angry Gi-hun from his death bed a year following their Squid Game, he wanted to feel like he did when he was a kid, playing with his friends and losing track of the hours.

Netflix Wants Its Own Korean Variety Show Hit

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The Best Korean Dramas on Netflix to Watch Right Now

By Kayti Burt

This is pretty fucked up. To Il-nam, the game truly was a game: something to pass the time and make him feel alive when regular life wasn’t doing it for him. Of course, Il-nam wasn’t like any other player. When he lost to Gi-hun, he wasn’t killed. The Front Man may espouse the equality of the game, but it isn’t a fair competition—it’s rigged for the uber elite, just like the outside world. Il-nam’s survival proved that, if it wasn’t already obvious. His desperation wasn’t like the other player’s because he knew exactly what was going on and had an out, not only from the game but from the kinds of desperate situations that the other contestants found themselves in outside the arena.

When Il-nam is dying on Christmas Eve in the corner of a mostly barren office-tower floor, he tells Gi-hun that the very poor and the very rich are the same in that living is no fun for either. Somehow, Gi-hun doesn’t strangle him then and there. He also doesn’t strangle him when Il-nam reveals how Squid Game started: basically, Il-nam and his rich friends were bored and joyless, and decided to create the games as a way to have some fun. This legacy continues with the Squid Games of today, as demonstrated by the VIPs, a group of (seemingly mostly American) rich men who sip whiskey and tell jokes as they watch desperate people die in the game they bet on. To them, human life has lost all meaning, and, because they have an exorbitant amount of wealth (which is to say power), these are the rules others must also play by.

Gi-hun is extraordinary because he refuses to play by those rules. Il-nam tells him that he deserves the money, because that is the logic he and his ilk have lived under—as if anyone deserves the kind of immense privilege that must always be built on others’ exploitation and suffering—but Gi-hun refuses to spend it. Il-nam tells him that no one will stop for the man passed out on the side of the frozen road, and Gi-hun takes that bet. And he wins. What sets Squid Game apart from so many of the stories in this genre is its ability to balance the ruthlessness and injustice inherent in the premise with a stolid belief in the capacity for goodness. The system is rigged for people like Il-nam, who suffers no consequences for his actions. but there will always be people, like Gi-hun and the person who went to get the cops to help the man on the street, who care and who act on that caring.

No doubt this plot twist will be a divisive part of Squid Game discourse. Personally, I could have done without it. Gi-hun’s relationship with Il-nam is one of the best dynamics in the entire show, and one that underscores the series’ central theme of how important it is to value humanity, even when the system you live in does not. Episode 6, “Gganbu,” is the best hour of the entire season in no small part because of how Il-nam and Gi-hun’s contest to the apparent death plays out. To backtrack on that for a final-episode plot twist that doesn’t add much thematically to the story feels like a mistake. That being said, there is enough that works about this scene and episode for Squid Game to remain an overall rewarding watch.

Gong Yoo’s Cameo: Why Does Gi-Hun Change His Mind?

Il-nam’s deathbed confession seems to kickstart Gi-hun’s life. He dyes his hair red like a K-pop idol. He finds Sae-byeok’s brother and leaves the boy (and half of his winnings) with Sang-woo’s mother. Though it seems like Gi-hun intends to return to them following a trip to visit his daughter, who has moved with her mother and stepfather to Los Angeles, this all changes when Gi-un sees something on the subway: the same man (played by Train to Busan‘s Gong Yoo) who recruited him for Squid Game is playing ddakji with a man. Gi-Hun abandons his luggage and dashes to the platform where Gong Yoo’s salesman character is working to recruit another desperate soul. Gong Yoo has already boarded a train by the time Gi-Hun makes it to him, smiling through the glass door. All Gi-hun can do is grab the Squid Game calling card from the latest recruit, and command him not to play the game.

Or is it all Gi-hun can do? When he is on the airbridge to board his plane to LA, he takes out the calling card and dials the number, telling the voice on the other side: “Listen carefully. I’m not a horse. I’m a person. That’s why I want to know who you people are, and how you can do these horrible things to people … It wasn’t a dream. I can’t forgive you for everything you’re doing.” Like the person who stopped to help the man on the street, Gi-hun refuses to accept the status quo, if there is anything at all he can do about it. He has wealth now and, rather than accepting complicity in a horrifying system as a condition of that power, he is risking it all. He is stopping for the man on the street.

The post Squid Game Ending Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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some-triangles · 6 years

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OH RIGHT

I enjoyed a lot of podcasts this year

1. The Bugle

The joy of the Bugle this year was discovering who did and didn’t work in the rotating cohost spot; happily I feel like the best of the new folks are significantly better at the job of managing/coping with a pun-based satirical podcast led by Your Wacky Dad than John Oliver was, and also happily made my podcast feed less straight, white, and male, which is sorely needed at this point. The stories Anuvab Pal brings in from India alone make him a strong MVP candidate. (I think he’s also the best pure comic they have.) In the end though I have to give the nod to Alice Fraser, who does what nobody else can: she’s capable of breaking Zaltzman’s momentum. It’s a thing of beauty that this invulnerably pointless man has met his match in an extremely rude Australian woman who will happily match him pun for pun.

2. Crime In Sports

This is a true crime podcast where two basic white dude comedians you’ve never heard of tell the life stories of professional athletes who end up in jail - stories which inevitably bring up issues of race, class and mental illness - and I will tell you that they do okay with that stuff, not perfect, but okay, and that exceeded my expectations to the point where I ended up listening to enough of it to start to care about these mooks and their in-jokes and their running gags, and again, I seem to have a soft spot for dumb guys who are doing their best, and I probably got more laughs out of this thing than any other podcast I listened to this year. Your mileage will probably vary.

3. Nancy

WNYC’s Gay Podcast, hosted by two Asian urban millennials who in their cohosting rapport demonstrate and embody WLW/MLM solidarity at all times. It’s exactingly correct about things and is what I listen to after Crime in Sports to detox. It’s also pretty good journalism, if you’re a fan of/can stomach the studiedly casual bespectacled “umm”-ing modern NPR vibe which has become de rigeur with this kind of thing. The episode where a younger butch woman finds the older butch woman who gave her her “ring of keys” moment and tells her what she meant to her will make your heart explode.

4. The Adam Buxton Podcast

OK, Zaltzman isn’t really your wacky dad - he’s more your weird uncle. Adam Buxton is absolutely 100% your wacky dad, and he’s trying his best. He’s the middle aged guy who asks dumb questions about race and gender because he genuinely wants to understand - the aging hipster who took being right on for granted and is gamely trying to keep up as the world shifts around him. He’s kind of like Marc Maron in that respect, and in a number of others; the podcast follows the same basic format as WTF, and Buxton is the same kind of insecure overcompensating former cool kid that Maron is, except replace the aggression and Jewish neurosis with the deeply repressed performative childishness of an English public schoolboy. Reading back I have failed entirely to make this seem enticing, so let me highlight the bit of this that works; Buxton starts every podcast with a walk through the countryside with his dog, who he talks to sometimes. Buxton is cozy. If you like the Maron idea but don’t like all the personal abrasiveness, this one may be for you.

5. Killing the Town with Storm and Cyrus

To explain this podcast I am going to have to tell you a story.

The first thing that you have to know is that Calgary is generally considered to be the capital of Canadian professional wrestling, because the Hart family is from there, and Bret Hart is the most famous Canadian wrestler of all time. But: earlier this year a tweet made its way around wrestling social media suggesting that Winnipeg should actually be considered the wrestling heart of Canada, because while Calgary might have given us Bret and Owen and Lance Storm, Winnipeg gave us Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega and Cyrus.

To which even hardcore wrestling fans might reply: who the hell is Cyrus?

It turns out that Don “Cyrus” Callis, AKA the Jackyl, was a) responsible for the tweet and b) a complete nobody who was on TV for a cup of coffee in the late 90s and hadn’t been seen since. The closest he came to mainstream success was as the manager of a justly-forgotten WWF heel faction called the Truth Commission, a group of pro-Apartheid afrikaaner militiamen. (1996 was a very, very bad year for professional wrestling.) He almost became the manager of a group called the Acolytes, who were at least kind of a big deal during the attitude era, but after his first TV appearance with them (in which he got on the mic and shouted “VIOLENCE TURNS ME ON”) he was fired. He bounced around ECW and TNA and that was it.

Cyrus had also just started a podcast with Lance Storm, on which he claimed to the best talker the business had ever seen, among other things. It became clear to listeners that while he may not ever have caught the brass ring, he was a wrestler to his core - i.e., a bullshit artist, a carny and a fraud - and that he had paid his dues working shit matches in the middle of nowhere Canada when he was a kid, and was now happy to spend a seedy retirement bullshitting with his friend Lance and pretending to be a forgotten legend.

Except things kept happening for Cyrus. Piggybacking on that tweet and the imaginary Calgary/Winnipeg feud, he became a public champion of Kenny Omega, the hottest name in pro wresting outside of WWE, and a man who didn’t have a lot of supporters among the old guard. Omega met up with Cyrus because of this (it turns out Cyrus’ old manager the Golden Shiek was Kenny’s uncle!), and put in a good word with his bosses at New Japan - and suddenly Cyrus became one half of NJPW’s English commentary team. (This improved their commentary immensely, to the point where the wrestlers complained when NJPW used Jim Ross for their American special.) Callis then used his position to broker the hottest wrestling angle of the latter half of 2017 - he approached Chris Jericho with the idea of wrestling Omega in Japan, Jericho’s first match outside of WWE in decades - and managed to get himself in the ring when the angle played out, getting laid out by Jericho as he tried to defend Omega, his friend and meal ticket.

It was then announced that Cyrus had been hired to be a new Vice President of TNA/Impact Wrestling (in its umpteenth rebranding and reshuffle of the year.) In this capacity he will be co-booker for the whole promotion. As of this writing he has yet to be forced out.

So: in a way this podcast itself is the wrestling story of the year. It’s also pretty entertaining, albeit absolutely saturated with ads, as one might expect from a pair of born grifters. Lance Storm is a smart dude with mostly good opinions and fun delivery and Cyrus is a lovable scumbag. They do their share of complaining about how young wrestlers these days don’t know how to throw a punch but because Cyrus is obligated to defend Omega at every turn they can’t drop too far into old coot territory, and because Storm trained several of the current new crop of wrestling women he is at pains to put over women’s wrestling whenever he can, even as Cyrus is a poop about it. They get people on to interview who you’ve never heard of but who were allegedly legendary to someone at some point in some territory or other and who all have insane stories, some of which might even be true. It’s a fine time, and if current trends continue Cyrus will be WWE head of developmental by this time next year, so stay tuned.

#long post #besto 2017 #the story of how don callis bullshitted his way back into relevancy

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encephalonfatigue · 6 years

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advent, power, and bodies that matter

an opening introduction to a series of Advent contemplations leading through Christmas, into Epiphany.

I have been thinking a lot about bodies this year. Bodies have been all over the headlines, so maybe you have been thinking a lot about bodies also. Maybe you have watched shaky phone footage of unarmed Black bodies being gunned down in the street. Maybe you have heard a lot about how powerful men have sexually assaulted bodies of women in their lives.

The human body is a site of great tension. Firstly, there is something sacred about human bodies. We frequently intuit that bodies are precious, deserving and requiring care, and it pains us so much to see bodies around us so disgracefully violated or brutalized. Secondly, however, there can be something really terrifying about bodies – bodies, which are capable of enacting this type of violent dominance over other bodies. Nuclear weapons are the result of human bodies as much as hospitals and schools are.

If one takes seriously the claims of rigorous science, then we can recognize that bodies were shaped by the time and space within which they evolved. The environment over thousands and millions of years have yielded human beings capable of great love and nurturing, but also human beings capable of great brutality and violence. The notion of ‘falleness’, to my mind, is an honest recognition of this human capacity for violence and cruelty, particularly in circumstances of highly unequal power.

Beyond the last million years of hominidal evolution, human bodies exist along an even larger timeline of cosmic processes, within an unimaginably enormous universe whose outer limits are accelerating farther and farther away beyond any distance we are likely to be capable of probing in the near future. The magnitude of time and space possibly gives us the impression that maybe there’s nothing much to fuss about when it comes to human bodies. Maybe we’ve just gotten carried away, and maybe our fixation on human bodies is a form of narcissism that simply has yet to be overcome.

But I think this is a failure to recognize that human bodies are a mysterious thread within an even more mysterious tapestry, which is biological life on this Earth. Sure we may speculate that biological life does likely exist elsewhere in this universe. But the fact that we have found it so difficult to encounter in the short time we’ve been exploring space as a species, does reveal that biological life is somewhat rare, in the sense that it composes a very tiny almost negligible proportion of the universe. Does its negligible size signify its negligible importance? Marilynne Robinson beautifully wrote:

“Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant, or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. Scarcity is said to create value, after all. Of course, value is a meaningful concept only where there is relationship, someone to do the valuing.”

The “puff of warm breath” is tongue in cheek reference to James 4:14: “Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” Yet even with the demise of the human species in sight, or biological life as we know it, it is beautiful to contemplate that the miracle of biological life (including the emergence of human bodies) ever happened at all. In contrast to Ray Brassier’s sort of nihilism that believes that because nothing will endure, nothing is worth our time, John Caputo’s ’nihilism of grace’ sees nihilism as a gift, the very precarity and fragility from which life derives its value. It’s important precisely because it is so finite and rare. This finite nature of life provoked me to contemplate death last Advent.

So maybe what is often cynically mislabelled as anthropocentric narcissism is in fact touching on something important. Beyond just biological life, maybe the temporality of our solar system, in whatever duration it lasts for, is beautiful nonetheless. In all its imperfections as a mere blip in the vastness of time, it still permitted something as tiny but precious as human love to flourish.

But its not all roses out here. There’s a lot of suffering too. And if human love, in its tiny negligible existence within the vastness of the universe is radically precious and dare I say important, so then human suffering may be thought of as immensely important also.

For some people of faith, the portion of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun we currently inhabit is recognized as Advent. It is a time of waiting. Waiting in anticipation. An anticipation that dares to commit an act of imagination, and to host a world other than the one that is before us. To believe that another world is possible. This is a time that some people of faith contemplate Incarnation. That is, the embodiment of God’s love, peace and justice, on Earth. Both in the past, and in the future.

Yet ‘incarnation’ can be a sensitive topic. It’s of course not the place of Christianity to set the agenda for seasonal spiritual contemplation, nor to translate its religious grammar into the language of other faiths, as a way of explaining other faiths. There’s always a risk of subsuming another faith’s distinctiveness into the supposedly ‘universal’ meta-narrative of Christianity. I do feel though that what Christianity refers to when it speaks of incarnation is deeply related to themes of other faiths, particularly Judaism. (I have yet to read John Hick’s “The Metaphor of God Incarnate”, though I intend to read it next Advent. But I hope to avoid the approach Hick is known for in interfaith dialogue.) Incarnation more generally is about this rather old idea of God dwelling with us, an ever present theme in the Tanakh. So too, the ‘coming of the Messiah’ is a central theme in traditional Jewish faith.

Elie Wiesel, in his memoir “All Rivers Run to the Sea”, recounted a joke told by Martin Buber (although there seems to be some agreement that it’s an interfaith moratorium formulated by Wiesel himself that he projected back onto Buber):

“My good friends, what is the difference between you and me? Both of us, all of us believe, because we are religious, in the coming of the Messiah. You believe that the Messiah came, went back, and that you are waiting for Him for the second coming. We Jews believe He hasn’t come yet, but He will come. In other words, we are waiting. You for the second coming, we for the first coming. Let’s wait together.” After a pause, he said, “And when He will come, we will ask Him, have you been here before?” Said Buber, “I hope I will be behind Him and I will whisper in His ear, please do not answer.”

I don’t mean to place this fanciful story here to downplay the coercive force other faith groups often feel during the so-called ‘holiday season’. Slapping a new label on the festivities of this time of year (’happy holidays / ‘holy days’), does little to address the fact that Christianity (at least in its shallowest form, as a dominant cultural force of empire) has been allied with coercive power for centuries, and that the global economy in many ways is still largely structured around the Western Christian calendar. Tomoko Masuzawa has even shown how the category of ‘world religion’ has its roots in the fairly racist philological work of Christian supremicists, and continues to shape academia today.

Hauerwas and Willimon, in their seminal book Resident Aliens, write about one of the notable shifts away from this government-mandated Christianized culture:

“Sometime between 1960 and 1980, an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began. We do not mean to be overly dramatic… When and how did we change? Although it may sound trivial, one of us is tempted to date the shift sometime on a Sunday evening in 1963. Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us—regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church—made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox… That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina—the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world—served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church… Before the Fox Theater opened on Sunday, we could convince ourselves that, with an adapted and domesticated gospel, we could fit American values into a loosely Christian framework, and we could thereby be culturally significant. This approach to the world began in 313 (Constantine’s Edict of Milan) and, by our reckoning, ended in 1963.”

Hauerwas has been a prominent opponent of Christianity allying itself with what he perceives to be all illegitimate power. This movie theatre opening on Sunday offered a new opportunity for the Christian faith to divorce itself from the power of civil religion. The practice of Sabbath must be an intentional task, not one mandated by a coercive force from above (i.e. the civil religion of government). December 24-26 as a ‘Public Holiday’ and consumer capitalist festival might better be left as ‘Happy Holidays’, than as a festival bearing the name of poor peasant refugee child from the Middle East who grew up to speak of flowers clothed more beautifully than Solomon and critiqued the power systems of his day. Many Christians are rightly embarrassed that this time of year (full of rampant consumerism) is associated with Jesus. Jesus is the reason for this season of holiday and Boxing Day shopping hours that keep minimum wage employees away from their loved ones and Western consumer habits burdening more of our planet’s ecosystems? I really hope not.

Christmas has been co-opted by the powers that be, both governments and MNCs. One of the things that initially attracted me to Hauerwas was that he was a theologian that engaged seriously with the work of Foucault. Foucault was profoundly life-changing for me, and his theory of power-knowledge dynamics gave me a framework for understanding my religious upbringing. It critiqued not only my faith’s regimes of truth, but also the regimes of truth of ‘scientific rationalism’ and ‘secular modernity’. Hauerwas, in engaging with Foucault, has immense sensitivity to power. He wrote:

“From Foucault's perspective, the Panopticon is no less a disciplining of the body than torture. In some ways torture is less cruel because at least when you are tortured you know who has power over you. In contrast, the Panopticon is a machine in which the one whose body is subject to such an unrelenting gaze becomes the agent of their own subjection. Accordingly, the body so subjected becomes disciplined to be what the gaze of those in power desire without their power ever being made explicit.”

Associating Jesus with what has become the holiday season is a deeply contradictory endeavour. Colossians 2:15 reads: “And having disarmed the powers and authorities, [Jesus] made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

This sensitivity to implicit power relations and disguised oppression is growing. There is an exciting level of consciousness emerging around us, and victims are gaining ground on publicly showing how their bodies were so unjustly violated and the disarming of oppressors is a continuing and arduous journey. The shift in political views I experienced in my own life is the result of many hardworking people who took the time to talk openly with me about these important problems of power.

The opening up of countless numbers of sexual-assault cases this year is a sign that there is an important growing awareness of the sacredness of our bodies. The feminist theologian Jane Schaberg, in her book The Illegitimacy of Jesus, made a carefully researched proposal that Mary was possibly raped by a Roman soldier, and Gospel writers like Matthew and Luke were aware of the so-called ‘illegitimacy’ of Jesus as they delicately put their texts together. As Jesus is often associated with Moses as leading a sort of Exodus from slavery, Schaberg’s speculation slightly resembles Freud’s theory that Moses’ father was Egyptian in “Moses and Monotheism”.

I have not read Schaberg’s book on this topic, but encountered a summary of it in the end-notes of a book by Peter Stevenson and Stephen L. Wright called “Preaching the Incarnation”. I want to be careful treading around an issue of such immense sensitivity, especially for my evangelical friends. Someone apparently lit Schaberg’s car on fire one night over her book, so this is obviously very controversial terrain.

Before even going into Schaberg’s argument, I want to point out that I believe, like many today, that historically Christian notions of ‘virginity’ are problematic in many ways, which I will not get into here. Contemplating the term virgin this week, I was thinking we would mind our language well and use the right words, to say: if Mary was raped, she did not have sex. She was raped. That is not sex, it is rape. Rape is not sex, it is violence.

In any case, it’s fairly well known that the original Hebrew word ‘almah’ in Isaiah just means ‘woman’ and not ‘virgin’, and the Septuagint translation brought in the ambiguous Greek term ‘parthenos’ which more often means ‘virgin’. Wright and Stevenson (in Preaching the Incarnation) point out that the citation of Isaiah 7:14′s “Behold a [parthenos/virgin/woman] shall conceive” should have an original meaning, even according to standards of Conservative theology, before it takes on its prophetic meaning as pointing to Jesus. So if one interprets the verse literally, in its original meaning, then Jesus’ ‘virgin’ birth could not be considered unique. Anyways, R.T. France (in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew) suggests there is no clear semantic distinction between ‘almah’ and ‘parthenos.’ For example, after Dinah is raped in Genesis 34:2-4, she is still referred to as a ‘parthenos’ in the Septuagint.

Anyways, Schaberg’s case begins with Celsus, a second-century anti-Christian Greek philosopher whose work survives through excerpts cited in Origen’s refutations against his work “The True Word”. Celsus claimed that some Jews identified Jesus’ father as a Roman solder named Pantera. Schaberg’s proposition is that maybe Celsus was right. But for Schaberg, it’s unlikely that Mary’s encounter with the soldier was an affair (as Celsus puts it), but rather, given the colonial power dynamics, Mary was likelier raped by that Roman soldier. Schaberg explores an allusion Matthew makes to Deuteronomy 22:23-27, a law concerning the rape of a betrothed virgin which would have required Joseph to either distance himself from Mary or stone her. Schaberg, however is not rejecting the account of the Gospel writers, but interprets Isaiah 7:14’s “Behold a virgin shall conceive” to mean that a woman who is currently a virgin, will eventually become pregnant by natural means, and then conceive a son.

For more of Schaberg’s observations (including the four ‘disreputable’ women mentioned in Mary’s genealogy - e.g. Bathsheba, the reference of Jesus as the “Son of Mary” in Mark’s gospel, the parallel language between the Magnificat and Deuteronomy 22, and the silence from Paul and John’s gospel concerning the virgin birth) this Slate article written by the Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer is worth checking out.

While I understand that the majority of historical scholars believe Schaberg’s speculations to lack substantial evidence to bear any significant weight, I do think her work still functions as a wonderfully creative site for Midrashic contemplation.

Celsus claimed that Mary was convicted of adultery. It may very well be possible to imagine a young Jewish woman garnering a reputation as ‘seductress’ after being raped by a Roman soldier, finding herself being victim-blamed like so many of today’s survivors of rape and sexual assault. Can you picture the media pundits of Nazareth saying: Mary was obviously seducing this Roman soldier by wearing her shawl in this particular way, or was irresponsible for walking around a certain part of town at a certain time of day, or she could have resisted if she wanted to, she could have just kept her knees together, or she deserves sympathy but there’s nothing we can do but face the fact that she is ‘less valuable’ a human being now and does not deserve to ruin the reputation of a respectable man like Joseph. Even if one takes the traditional interpretation of the virgin birth at face value, one cannot deny that the talk going around town would not have been as much concern over Mary as a possible victim of rape, but rather over her ‘chastity’.

Jesus was raised by a mother who may have faced a sort of victim-blaming stigma all her life with the suspicious conception of Jesus. There was a meme I saw floating around feminist social media communities that fits so well with this idea that Jesus would have learnt well to be suspicious of victim-blamers, being raised by a mother of disreputable status. The meme said something along the lines of: Jesus didn’t blame women for their objectification by telling them what they should or should not wear, but he told his disciples that if their eye causes them to sin, they should pluck it out.

Jesus must have eventually understood the fear and trembling that his mother Mary felt as she faced potential stoning while carrying a baby she believed to be the Messiah. Kierkegaard called Mary a knight of faith because she could not explain her situation to anyone. It would just come across as absurd in such a patriarchal society. Sound familiar? How many victims of rape and sexual assault have felt like a Kierkegaardian knight of faith, resigned to silence, unable to explain the terrible burden they carry because it is beyond the comprehension of a sexist patriarchal world around them, yet still believing that they could one day do something to help other women never have to face the trauma they were confronted with in their own life. The #MeToo campaign has opened up something very important, though there’s still so much pain and hurt out there and so much more that needs to be done.

Advent to me is a yearning and expectation that all oppression shall cease. In a series of posts this Advent, I wish to continue some theological contemplations on incarnation. What implications do Advent and Christmas have for the way we treat bodies? What does it mean for Jesus to be a victim of state-sanctioned violence, as the Maccabean martyrs were, whom Jews remember during Hanukkah? And how does the expectation of Resurrection by Jewish martyrs tie these two faiths together in such a way by which sites of solidarity can be fostered in faith communities resisting the ways of empire, which so often degrade marginalized bodies? In yearning for a future where all oppression shall cease (i.e. all the sins of the World will be taken away), what ways are Incarnation and Atonement deeply entangled? What do the anthropomorphic sketches of God in the Tanakh have to do with incarnational ideas hanging around first-century Judaism?

I hope to explore some of these questions in the coming weeks, leading up to Epiphany. Please join me if you have a chance, and call me out on anything you feel is problematic. If anyone has read this far, I owe them a lot more than a fair hearing.

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