#tarot card organization supremacy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

illumalux · 1 month

Text

Life Series Victors as Tarot Cards

A presentation on why we’ve got it all wrong when it comes to grouping life series victors.

This post will continue on with the implication that ZombieCleo is a Victor, simply because she is. She won real life, therefore she's a victor. Argue with the wall.

Now, I see your celestial trio of the first three winners. This should never change. This feels the most apt, it centers perfectly, and each of the things it represents are present in multiple different categories. Obviously in space, as everyone has adapted to, but also in a Minecraft world, and what I see as more important: in a tarot deck.

Think about it this way.

The Watchers, in whatever form you think they (or we) take, are collecting these Victors. Each one means a different thing, survived a different landscape. While I understand the celestial motif of the first three Victors, and how it fits into their characters, I would argue that many others are far too grounded for that.

It’s a collection, remember? What is better for assembling a set than a deck of cards? Especially ones that meddle in Fate, something the Watchers seem to adore.

So here are the cards each Victor represents, with card meaning and my defense as well. This will go in chronological order of the seasons.

Before I continue, I just want to give a disclaimer. Every tarot deck has a slightly different explanation for what each card means. The definitions I use are a mix of three of my decks and the official Rider-Waite-Smith deck's explanation, so if there are inconsistencies with what your deck says or what you know, please don't come for me.

Grian, Third Life:

XIX. The Sun

Beyond the obvious desert motifs (a whole extra post in and of itself), the Sun is representative of not only Grian's gameplay, but also how the Watchers (those collecting this deck) feel about him. Grian is one of them, so he naturally starts out in their good graces, with a greater level of respect.

Rider-Waite-Smith defines the card as one of success. Of course the Watchers will gloat when their baby wins. Even if he wasn't meant to, it did inevitably mean that throughout his game, Grian was inarguably one of the largest sources of negative emotions, second only to the Red Army. Again. Extra post on its own. When he won, it saved anyone the satisfaction that might negate their negativity, alongside the delicious outpouring of grief that was the final duel of Third Life.

Reversed, the Sun is a card of depression. As I just touched on, one of the most defining moments of Grian's game was his final victory. When the ending came down to himself or his greatest ally, he went about it in the way that caused probably the most pain to both parties involved. It pushed him to the very brink, ending in him defining his own ending just moments after winning.

Scott, Last Life:

XVII. The Star

Even ignoring the starborne origins and headcanons, as well as the crown of stars included in his skin (Void below, these posts write themselves) this one looks like a super simple explanation, but actually requires me pointing out something that may not be obvious to some Watchers: Scott, in every game and Iteration has made it a point to rebel against the rules in whatever way he can. I could go into full detail, but thats a lot of words and I don't need anyoen to get bored. (Void, this series and side tangents that require other posts)

In third life, a game about death and destruction, and the originator of factions, Scott took a very different route: he got married and built a house in a flower field. When grief finally found him, he refused to give the Watchers any satisfaction, literally crystalizing his grief into a part of his character design (and one that would remain for two to three more seasons, depending on your thoughts on the coral pieces). In Last Life, he is the singular person in all five seasons (technically two, but shhh this is more dramatic) to withstand the Boogeyman curse, something the Watchers installed purposefully to make people kill allies. Double Life, obviously, as Scott rejecting the soulmate the Watchers gave him. Limited life, in which kills gave more time, Scott did not die a single time without giving life freely, either to an ally or a temporary ally.

That got long. Anyways. Scott's game has always been one of hope, spreading positivity and refusing to be pushed around by the Watchers. And that's exactly what the Star means. Upright, this is a card about hope and perseverence, pushing through challenges, which is exactly what Scott does. He refuses to let the Watchers' actions upset him and continues to play the game for his friends and for the future and nothing else.

Even reversed it still fits. Reversed, the Star means loss or abandonment. I've already used up too much time on Scott here, so I'll let you pick your favorite instance of that.

Pearl, Double Life:

XVIII. The Moon

This one is far and away the easiest. Like the previous two Victors, Pearl's story connected her with her symbol even before she won. But blood moons and wolf packs aside (as that's a whole different post for a whole different day) when you take a look at the definitions provided, it becomes even clearer.

The Moon is a card of transformation and change, as well as revealing one's inner self. Rider-Waite-Smith attributes hidden enemies, darkness, and terror with The Moon. While I'll happily analyze every single one of Pearl's actions as the Scarlet Pearl, I think this one is plenty self explanatory. After her rejection early on in the game, she immediately isolates herself and latches onto the night motifs, leaning in to what everyone expects her to be.

The reversed meanings also explain Pearl's arc in Double Life perfectly: confusion, mixed messages, and disbelief. This perfectly encapsulates Pearl's feelings at the very beginning of the game via her rejection by Scott and subsequent abandonment by Martyn in an attempt to get back into Cleo's good graces. Her instinctual reaction is one of shock, not understanding why Scott would choose to pick a soulmate when she was right in front of him.

Martyn, Limited Life:

XVI. The Tower

One of my favorite cards, the Tower is instantly recognizable. While most of my analyses aren't about how the card looks, I feel like it's important to share this time around. The most common image consists of a tower and one or both of two elements: lightning, and people falling. As a card, it represents sudden change, destruction, and chaos.

If anyone here is not yet convinced that I'm correct, please go rewatch Martyn's last LimLife episode, then come back and argue.

You're back? Great. We agree? No? Fine, I'll explain.

This fixates mainly on his winning game, but I'll touch on the rest of his games as well. LimLife ended with a huge betrayal on Martyn's part, one characterized by being so insanely sudden. (Of course it's the Watchers meddling. But the Tower isn't always about your own choices being your downfall.) He quite literally snapped as if hit by lightning (see description of the card), and this spells the beginning of the end for him.

Similarly, in all of his other games, Martyn finds himself with one pivotal moment that spells his downfall. The Red King, Betrayal at the Southlands (and honestly his worst move in DL was abandoning Pearl to try and beg for Cleo's forgiveness).

Funny enough, the reversed meaning of this card is almost a perfect match. I don't think this needs too much more explaining.

Scar, Secret Life:

X. The Wheel of Fortune

I adore Scar in these games. Every single season seems absolutely plagued by chaos. The worst season, obviously, was the one in which he gained his crown. Poor guy was just trying to make friends, and it seemed like every new secret was the exact opposite of what he wanted.

The Wheel is just what it sounds like: it's the card of luck, destiny, and fate. I won't add a new paragraph for the reversed meaning here either, as it means the exact same thing as upright, but with negative connotations in the form of bad luck and misfortune.

Scar is plagued by the whims of luck left and right. It seems like, more than any other player, Scar is unable (whether by others, fate, Watchers, what have you) to take full control of his own story and take actions that he wants to take, instead limited to where the current takes him.

But in the end, that chaos is what gives him his win. The lack of alliances and freedom that the game forced on him was what eventually lead him to be unmoored and able to volley his pain wherever he wanted, leading to a mostly painless win.

Cleo, Real Life:

XIII. Death

A little on the nose, I know, but which of these choices aren't? For a series entirely based on improv, there are a stupid amount of coincidences present.

Now, I know this is far and away the shortest series, so I'm going to analyse Cleo as a player across all of her seasons, not just her winning game. Sorry Real Life. You should have been longer.

While the meaning of the Death card may seem obvious, it's twofold in actuality. In some historical decks, even, the card is instead named Rebirth. I know how ironic that is that the zombie is the one who stands for death and rebirth, but again. Blame the stupid narrative, not the poor me trying to make sense of it.

In what my lovely mutual Honor called "phoenix behavior", I'm going to focus specifically on her deaths and rebirths, specifically BigB's betrayal in LastLife. Cleo takes her death hard, as anyone might. But her rebirth comes with change. The minute she respawns, it's with a different understanding of the world around her. She immediately embraces the change that has been given to her, burning down the Fairy Fort and ditching her alliance for a new one.

The reverse captures Cleo as a character over her seasons better than anyone on this list. While the upright meaning of the card is change, reversed it signifies stagnancy, obsession, and immobility. This can be seen almost perfectly with her thoughts on alliances. Scott remains forever in her good books, even over the course fo multiple seasons, simply because he has never wronged her. Even when they aren't direct allies,she still cooperates with him whenever, simply because she retains her previous feelings about him. The same can be said for BigB, but in the opposite direction. From the moment of the betrayal onwards, she refuses to trust him, going so far as to warn Pearl away from allying with him in LimLife.

Bonus: Jimmy Solidarity, the Canary

XII. The Hanged Man

But Moon! you shout, throwing your complimentary bucket of popcorn at me. Jimmy isn't a Victor! He's the exact opposite!

Yep.

That's why he's so soggy and why he goes on this list. You wanna argue that he doesn't have the same lore impact as a Victor? Too bad. Can't hear you. Jimmy gets his own card.

Initially, I was kinda sad that I already used the Tower, because that's the portent of doom and gloom or whatever, perfect for a canary. But then I spied an even better, even more Jimmy card.

The Hanged Man is the card of sacrifice. While I could go on a whole rant about the Fool's journey and how it is represented in the Life Series, that is Extra Tumblr Post Number IDK Anymore. Instead, today I'm going to stick to the basics. To specify sacrifice, the card doesn't just mean giving up. It signifies self sacrifice specifically. And what is Jimmy if not a semi-willing first sacrifice to get the chaos rolling?

How many times has he gone out to stop his friends from being the one who has to herald the change? The canary knows that he will sing the final notes, but so long as he can ensure the miners don't have to, he will descend once more.

Conclusion:

Now. Did I spend more time on this post than I ever did on an English Lit essay? Maybe. But as much as I love the space motifs this fandom has, I fundamentally disagree when we get to the latter winners. Come on, guys. Tarot decks are right here.

If I missed anything, or I misrepresented a player's game, please tell me. I can't be everywhere at once, and I'm always happy to learn more about some of the players I don't watch as regularly.

Anyways, this was way more fun to write than I expected. If anyone wants to see me give cards to the rest of the players who have yet to win, or an analysis of anything a mentioned in my tangents, please let me know.

Special thanks to @honorsongs who kept me company through this whole process and gave me many a suggestion when I lost my train of thought.

#moon rambles into the void #life smp winners #life series #traffic smp #trafficblr #scott smajor #zombiecleo #grian #inthelittlewood #goodtimeswithscar #jimmy solidarity #tarot card organization supremacy #why wouldn't the watchers want to collect them to keep in a box lets be real #what else are we doing by organizing them?#pearlescentmoon

138 notes · View notes

vinomagick · 11 months

Text

Emperor

Emperor Tarot Minor Arcana

UPRIGHT

Being a Leader

Showing your talents

REVERSED

Being more cautious

Developing flexibility

Sign

Aries

Tarot Major Arcana

The Major Arcana Tarot cards (also known as the trump cards) form the foundation of the Tarot deck and consists of twenty-one numbered cards and one unnumbered card (the Fool).

They represent a path to spiritual self-awareness and depict the various stages we encounter as we search for greater meaning and understanding. In this way, they hold deeply meaningful lessons.

The Major Arcana Tarot card meanings illustrate the structure of human consciousness and, as such, hold the keys to life lessons passed down through the ages. The imagery of the Major Arcana Tarot cards is filled with wisdom from multiple cultures and esoteric traditions

Emperor

“When stability becomes a habit, maturity and clarity follow..“

Emperor, the stern taskmaster, represents the fatherly figure in the tarot deck. If Empress is the mother, Emperor is the father, the ruler of structured & regulated world. Sitting on his throne decorated with rams' heads, holding an ankh in his right hand and a globe in his left hand shows his supremacy and dominance over his kingdom (the world). The rams' heads show his connection with Aries and planet Mars, and the ankh symbolizes life, passion, and energy. The barren mountains in the background symbolize determination and ambition to reach greater heights while displaying grit, strength, and force for the benefit of people.

The appearance of this card reflects that you are successfully adopting a fatherly role regardless of your gender to protect, love, and defend your loved ones. They trust you the most because you are not only their breadwinner but also the rock of stability and security in their life. The emperor card also represents leadership, respect, and authority, just like the Emperor, who wears his armor under royal robes to protect his people. Similarly, you are a fair and strong leader who feels comfortable directing and organizing others to manifest collective goals.

The Emperor is the teacher because it teaches us many lessons. The first and the most important one is that life is bound by rules & regulations and law & order. Be systematic, strategic, and calm to deal with the chaos and resolve your issues. Once you map out your plan, stick to it till the end. The draw of this card suggests that at this point of time in your life, you want support, success, achievement, and influence from the man of your life who strengthens your self-confidence and believes in you.

This card powerfully advises to maintain structure and rules in life else you will fall victim to anarchy. Representing the second leg of the mind-body-spirit triad, the Emperor signifies the power of the mind for shaping the world and becoming the master of your realm. Wisely use your authority. This positivity card allows you to benefit yourself with structure and logic instead of emotions and desires. Sometimes your heart might direct your orders because the situation demands this. You cannot escape reality. Sometimes you do not have any chance in life other than making hard choices to retain focus and concentration. The good thing is the energy of the Emperor empowers you to celebrate your authority and master your leadership skills, knowledge, and expertise.

Reversed Emperor Meaning :

Emperor Reversed tends to express the autocratic, self-righteous tyranny of a not-so-benevolent dictator. Or it can express its opposite- an unmanly coward. Usually it is somewhere in between, such as the father, boss, or leader who betrays your trust, abdicates their support, fails to protect you, or does not stand up for principles. Here we have the absent or ineffectual father, the failed leader. It can indicate false pride-the Emperor wears no clothes, and becomes a buffoon. With its reversal you could be abruptly humbled, your kingdom overthrown. You could vacillate, back away from a challenge, lose control, or use excessive force. Rather than establishing boundaries you may build walls and roadblocks. Rather than stiffening your resolve you may freeze into rigidity. On the other hand, you may have rejected certain masculine characteristics, or are breaking through traditional male stereotypes to define new possibilities of expression.

0 notes

racefortheironthrone · 5 years

Text

Thoughts on Powers of X #1

Well, I did this for the one, might as well do it for t’other...

Well, any thought that this mini-series might be less weird than its companion was completely blown away by the very first page, which revealed that Powers of X (pronounced Powers of Ten) is going to be taking place in four different times:

Year One (X^0)

Year Ten (X^1)

Year One Hundred (X^2)

Year One Thousand (X^3)

...with each segment increasing by a power of ten, because apparently Hickman has decided he’d like to drive us all mad with math puzzles. That first page is a doozy of design, I must say, laying out four key moments (and four or three key players) in the past and future of mutant-kind, with the layout suggesting a parallel between all of these characters (as well as a suggestion that the guy in the Cerebro mask shares Charles’ lower facial features exactly.

Year One

We then get an un-interrupted six page sequence which, on the surface, seems the most normal but is anything but. The first page shows Charles Xavier strolling through a fair and sitting down on a bench to enjoy the weather and his good mood, although the symbolic connection between the dwarf ringmaster and the strongman and Xavier’s dream of mutantkind is quite ominous. Then someone who looks a lot like Moira McTaggart sits down next to Xavier, and this is where x-fan’s expectations all of the sudden get flipped upside-down. On the face of it, Charles meeting Moira around the same time that he first has his Dream of mutant/human co-existence would be quite normal...except that Moira’s tarot cards are depicting people and places in the Year One Hundred (more on this in a bit), and Moira is talking to Charles very familiarly, but he hasn’t actually met her yet.

This is where a little alarum bell goes off in my mind shouting “TIME-TRAVEL SHENANIGANS!”

This much-hyped scene turns out to be Charles reading Moira’s mind, but it’s very clear from what we’ve just seen that this is not the Moira we know. And if this Moira is a clone from the future (I’ll get into that in a bit), the publicity tag-line would make sense: after all, time travel to avert a bad future goes way back in X-Men, and often that time travel has involved things happening to Charles Xavier before he could get his X-Men off the ground.

However, we’ve never see anyone go back just to tell Charles what happens in the future, even though that would profoundly change the timeline just by changing his mind. Is this what turns Charles Xavier into the be-helmeted man in Year Ten with the very different dream? Or would informing him of the future change or prevent the events of Year Ten?

Year Ten

Probably the most straightforward sequence - and the best argument for why HoX and PoX should be viewed as two halves of the same story - this sequence shows us exactly what happened to Mystique after she went through the Krakoa portal in Washington Square Park in HoX #1.

It turns out that, as much as even Magneto is feeling the “hope-y, change-y” vibes, he, Mystique, and Professor X all have their own agendas regarding the information - note the running theme of the issue - that she pulled out of Damage Control’s servers.

Further ominous notes: Charles Xavier has never been a telekinetic, and yet here he clearly uses telekinesis to grab Mystique’s thumb drive. That’s very ominous, especially given what we learn about cloned mutants have multiple, spliced-in mutant powers. Also, Professor X’s comment about “everyone who would live in...a better mutant world...owes something” echoes ominously with the interstitial material’s description of Omega class mutants as a natural resource for the state.

Year One Hundred

The most conventionally super-heroic segment, this section shows us an all-too familiar dystopian scenario, with cyborgized humans and cerberus-like sentinels working together to not merely kill mutants but violate their minds and bodies. Further signs of what they’ve been up to comes in the literally black-brained ex-Hound who was genetically designed for infiltration and subversion of her own people.

A sign that mutants have adapted to this conflict by abandoning moral principles as well comes in the fact that the dead mutant in question is not only programmed to mind-wipe on death, but is repeating Professor X’s speech from Year 10. In a parallel to that era, it turns out that the mutant group who’ve been interecepted were downloading information from the Nexus

We also meet our two main characters in this epoch - the red-skinned Nightcrawler lookalike Cardinal (whose Tarot card is the Devil, “the red god and the lost cardinal of the last religion” (no idea what that means)) and the metal-skinned Soulsword-slinging Rasputin (whose Tarot card is the Magician, “the metal metapmorph, the great sword, and the girl with one foot in two worlds” (no idea what that means)). As we will learn later, these are not names but clone-types, because war has its own way of getting us to dehumanize ourselves in the pursuit of victory.

Important Interstitial #1: The Sinister Line

It wouldn’t be a Hickman comic without infographics, and this one was a doozy: at some point after Year 10, a crisis rocked the mutant nation which caused “the almost universal death or disappearance of senior leaders.” This crisis apears to have been engineered by none other than Mister Sinister in order to motivate the remaining mutant leadership into approving “breeding pits” located on Mars, where he could breed and clone mutants for “aggressive, militaristic traits,” to counter-balance the humans’ HOUND program. That’s a hell of a fall from grace.

We then learn that there were four generations of Sinister clones before the whole thing fell apart in a horrific calamity and yet further declension occurred:

First generation: straight-up clones of existing x-men, although the language of “divergent copies of a...pure, uncompromised X-gene” is as disturbing as you might expect from a Victorian eugenicist. (Are these the mass-produced units following from the prototypes we saw emerging from Krakoan cocoons in HoX #1?) Anyway, they all got turned into child soldiers to defend Krakoa until it eventually fell 30 years later. (Keep this date in mind.)

Second generation: combinations of only two x-genes, “mostly predictable.”

Third generation: combinations of up to five x-genes, apparently were wildly successful against the “Man-Machine Supremacy” and about to win the war, when...

Fourth generation: apparently were “produced with a corrupted hive-mind,” went rogue, destroyed 40% of all mutants, destroyed Krakoa, and then killed themselves taking out Mars and the Sinister pits therein.

And now we learn what our protagonists are: Rasputin is (seemingly) a fourth generation mutant with the combined powers of Quentin Quire, Piotr Rasputin, Unus the Untouchable, Kitty Pryde, and Laura Kinney, rather than Kitty and Colossus’ kid as some had feared. Notably, however, Rasputin doesn’t have the same gifts in the same strength as her progenitors: she’s half as strong a telepath as Quire, half as good as phasing as Kitty, half as good at healing as Laura, and about half as good at force-fields as Unus. The only places where she equals them is in turning into organic steel. BTW, if those powers seem somewhat redundant - why would you need to be intangible, made of organic steel, force-fielded, and self-healing all at the same time rather than focusing on just a few of those - well, clearly the intent was to create a tank and a half.

Meanwhile, Cardinal is a (seemingly third-generation) “outlier,” a failure in the breeding program that gradually got worse and worse. All Cardinals - and it’s not clear whether all Cardinals look like Nightcrawler - are pacifists and have “an obsession with creation myths,” and are extreme communitarians who reject individual identity. (Incidentally, Cardinal is where we get the religious through-line of the issue.) One question: if he’s a pacifist, why is he carrying a rapier? Genetic holdover from Kurt Wagner?

Which raises an important question...given that more than 60% of generation four were pacifists, how exactly did they carry out so thorough a massacre of their own people?

And finally we learn that all of this was Mister Sinister’s plan...which ended with his execution. I remain skeptical, because while I absolutely buy that Mister Sinister would arrange things so that he could run his eugenics programs, I don’t get why he’d self-sabotage in order to defect to such an unrelentingly hostile enemy.

Year One Hundred, Part 2

Here’s where we see the structure described as “the ower, the axis, the pillar of collapse and rebirth, the monolith of ascension.” (Keep your eye on that word.) Here we meet Nimrod the Lesser and Omega, and see the other side.

And what we find is a society where the machine is clearly beginning to become the dominant part of the Supremacy, despite a formal pretense at equality, a society where Nimrod makes polite noises at decency (”I am embarrassed and ashamed at what we did in the name of both expediency and annihiliation”), but then claps with childlike glee at the thought of getting to turn mutants into biological databanks.

(In a much less important interstitial, we learn that the HOUND program turned out to be a failure, with the scary ones being “ineffective hunters of their own kind,” and the majority of the black brains defecting en masse.)

Finally, we see an old man Wolverine, along with a green-suited Magneto, a very tree-like Black Tom Cassidy, and a Xorn, rendezvousing with the team to receive the data and bring them in touch with “the Old Man.” Which raises all kinds of questions as to when this happened vis-a-vis Mister Sinister’s betrayal.

Important Interstitial #2

In the wake of the fall of Krakoa, we learn that the once-burgeoning mutant population has been reduced to less than 10,000 refugees living in Shiar protected territory, with only 8 mutants left in the solar system...presumably the group we saw in part 2.

Year One Thousand

And now we find out what happened to our poor Hound, namely that she’s been stuck in a tube for 900 years, a crumbling historical manuscript beyond the ability of the Librarian to preserve.

As we move outside, we learn something critically important: that the “human-machine-mutant war” ended, with humans reduced to zoo animals kept in a nature preserve. Does this mean mutants won? Or did the machines do away with both their enemies and their allies?

#xmen #xmen meta #powers of x #spoilers #hoxpox

28 notes · View notes