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mindmeltonabun-blog · 3 years

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Doom At Your Service: Analysis & Theories for EPs 7-8

Welcome back to another edition of analyses and theories time with me! I’m going to try and keep this post as short and as simple as possible. In case I don’t, I apologize in advance! Also, sorry if this post is filled with grammar mistakes and confusing syntax...I'm writing/editing this late at night and my ADHD meds have lost their effectiveness.

Anyways Eps 7-8 was pretty awesome and I’m glad that a bunch of my previous theories had come true! For those who wonder how I come up with some of these theories, I just look at everything whether it be big or small. I also try to look for connections and patterns. At the same time, I try to understand the motivations of characters and what is the big picture the writer is trying to paint. Once you're able to do all of that then you can predict where the story is going. This is how for the most part I was able to predict the events and endings of shows like TOTNT and TKEM. Anyhow, let’s get down to analyzing and theorizing! Turn on those thinking caps!

What the Rock Balancing Structure Represents

Rock balancing is a form of art that involves a person placing a combination of rocks in an arrangement. To achieve balance of the rocks, one must be very patient and compassionate. In its completion, the structure represents that while things may appear impossible, they are actually possible. So what seems impossible, but can actually be possible? Hmmm probably Myul Mang learning what it means to be human and ending up becoming human. Notice that both the rock art is next to the plant and the story of Pinocchio? It's saying saying that the impossible can be possible. It's possible for Myul Mang to be able to learn what it means to be a human so that the impossible can happen...he can "grow" up to becoming a real human.

The whole rock balancing structure could also signify that in order to grow, one must overcome one's deepest fears. I don't know about you all, but stacking rocks is a scary thing especially since at any moment the whole thing could fall over. Anyways, if you remembered, Myul Mang had been searching everywhere for Dong Kyung and feeling like one of his worst fears (Dong Kyung not existing) had came true. It's only when he goes to Dora's hospital room and sees both the Pinocchio book and rock structure that he got Dora's lesson. And that's why afterwards you didn't see Myul Mang going on another search for Dong Kyung somewhere else.

A brief digression. I’ve seen multiple people theorizing that the plant and the butterfly represent Dong Kyung and Myul Mang respectively. To them I say, did you just completely miss the part where Dora says the plant is Myul Mang? Myul Mang is both the butterfly and the plant. For those who still don’t see that, let me break it down.

First, what do butterflies symbolize? They symbolize metamorphosis, death, and rebirth. Myul Mang is not a literal butterfly, but he will eventually be one in a metaphorical sense. If anything, Myul Mang right now is like a caterpillar on the verge of entering the cocoon stage that is followed by a reemergence as a butterfly aka human. You can also look at it this way, Pinocchio is a butterfly too. Why? Well, look at what happens to Pinocchio. He is reborn as a real boy after having gone through metamorphosis (puppet -> real boy).

Now let’s examine the plant symbolism. What do plants represent in DAYS? They represent humans. What is Dora growing? A human Myul Mang..DUH!! Sorry, but I didn’t think it was that hard of a concept to grasp especially since Dora has already explicitly said what she is growing in that one scene. For Myul Mang to grow up to become a "good" human, he needs to learn to think about others, forgive himself, be compassionate (not only towards himself, but others as well), love others, etc. Other things Myul Mang would probably need to learn is how to love his fate or amor fati (loving your fate means loving it all, not just the good parts, but the bad parts too; loving it so much so that you would never want to change anything about it and would gladly relive your life the way it was over and over again for all of eternity).

I don’t think the "plant" will fully "blossom" until Myul Mang sacrifices himself to save Dong Kyung for the sole reason that he loves her (in contrast to sacrificing himself for his own personal gain). Therefore, that's probably the final lesson -- how to be completely selfless.

Dora just wants her son to grow up to be a "good" plant (human) so she doesn't have to end up pulling him out aka end him before he even becomes human! Okay???

Sorry if what I've just said was confusing. What I meant to say is that Myul Mang's personal growth is reflective in the plant's growth. The more he learns of what it means to be a "good" human, the more the plant will grow until it blossoms into a beautiful flower (a real human).

If we want to connect the idea of personal growth to the story of Pinocchio, we see that Pinocchio's growth occurs only after he experiences pain (physical and emotional) and love. From these experiences, he learns what it means to be a "good" boy and is rewarded by the Fairy transforming him into a real boy.

One Wish or Wishes?

In my previous post, I had briefly touched upon how I think Dong Kyung is going to wish for brain cancer to be cured. Though I still think this, I nevertheless want to explore some of the other possibilities of what her wish could be.

Potential Wishes:

1) Myul Mang to Become Human

2) More Wishes

3) Contract to be Voided

4) No One Remembering Her After She Dies

For #1, Dong Kyung wishes Myul Mang to become human, but then she still dies from her untreated brain cancer…so nope. For #2 and #3, are these wishes even allowed? I would like to point out some flaws of the writer. Maybe it’s not so much a flaw, but an annoyance I have with the writer of DAYS. What one can or cannot wish for is not explicitly stated. Due to this, it is somewhat difficult for me to accurately predict what Dong Kyung will wish for. It’s like trying to detect a substance without being given its upper and lower limits or range of detection (sorry for the science related analogy) ! For #4, I guess this one could be probable, but there is just too much evidence pointing to Myul Mang's death. After exploring each of the possibilities, I'm still left thinking that Dong Kyung's one wish will be to cure her cancer.

Anyways, even if Dong Kyung wishes for her brain cancer to be cured, it’s not really a happy ending since Myul Mang still dies. Is there any other way for Dong Kyung to make another wish so that she can save Myul Mang? I think there is and it comes in the form of the “gift” that Dora gave Dong Kyung. In my previous post, I had theorized that the marble may have a larger purpose than just being a symbol of how the fate of the world is Dong Kyung hands. I believe now that the marble’s larger purpose is that it is a type of wish fulfilling stone. Why? Because we know fantasy dramas typically make references to mythology. In this case, the writer of DAYS is probably referencing Hindu mythology.

In Hindu mythology there are 3 main gods:

1) Brahma: The Creator

2) Vishnu: The Preserver

3) Shiva: The Destroyer (Sounds like Myul Mang right? Also, the love story between Shiva and Parvati is somewhat similar to that of Myul Mang and Dong Kyung’s love story.)

Dora is the equivalent to the god Vishnu in Hindu mythology. Vishnu is often depicted wearing a “Cintamani”, a type of wish fulling stone analogous to the Philosopher’s Stone (hint hint…transforms something from one form into another…immortal -> human) in Western mythology. Given this, the marble/Cintamani in Dong Kyung's possession could be the key to Myul Mang’s rebirth.

Some might ask, “Well why can’t Dora just use it to wish for her son to be reborn as a human?”. Well, remember that both Dora and Myul Mang are slaves to the wishes of humans. They themselves cannot fulfil their own wishes or desires. Meaning, even though Dora and Myul Mang can wish for something to happen, they cannot carry it out unless humans wish it too. Also, as I mentioned previously, deities in kdramas never just give humans gift because they’re being nice. Rather, they give gifts to humans so that humans can help them accomplish their overall goals/wishes.

So putting it all together, do you see where I’m going with this? Dora has the same wish as Dong Kyung which is for Myul Mang to live, but Dora is unable to execute her goals/wishes unless Dong Kyung wishes it too. Dora knows that Dong Kyung will probably use her one wish to cure her brain cancer. At the same time, this leaves her son, Myul Mang, to die. Therefore, Dora gives Dong Kyung the wish fulfilling marble with the intention that Dong Kyung will use it to wish for her son, Myul Mang, to be reborn as a human. With Dora/Dong Kyung’s wish, Myul Mang will be free from his cursed life as an immortal and be reborn to be able to live happily with Dong Kyung.

Side note, the rebirth of Myul Mang into a human can either be dependent on Myul Mang's personal growth or it can be dependent on this wish fulfilling stone or both! I'm leaning more towards his personal growth as being the catalyst for his rebirth, but who knows! It very well could be that the marble has a role to play in his rebirth.

Is Dong Kyung Going To Be An Immortal?

No…no…and NO!!

Some might ask why don’t I think this? Well, for a bunch of reasons. I’ll admit I used to think that it would be very romantic for a human to become immortal so that they can be with their immortal lover forever. However, the more I thought about it, I came to the realization the notion of forever is not romantic nor beautiful. At its core, the concept of eternity is quite terrifying and ugly. And if you haven’t realized already, the writer of DAYS has been making multiple arguments against immortality. For anything to have meaning, it must have an end. In this sense, the end is beautiful.

To get my point across, I want you to try and think about some things. What keeps life meaningful? Experiences? People? Well, imagine doing something you love for a year. Now imagine doing it for trillions or zillions of years. Experiences no matter how good they are at first will eventually become tedious if you do it for long enough. For example, eating your favorite dish may be good for a while, but not for zillions of years. At one point or another, you ultimately lose your desire to want to eat it or eat entirely for that matter.

Now surely getting to know people and loving them can keep your life meaningful right? Well, how many times do you think you could handle knowing and loving people who eventually disappear? Eventually, you grow tired of crying and mourning over dead loved ones that you become numb. Now imagine being Dong Kyung. She would have to witness her family, their family, and so forth dying over and over again for all of eternity. Doesn’t that seem tortuous? Sure, one could argue that at least she has Myul Mang with her, but do you really think her love for him could sustain her forever? The relationship between Myul Mang and his mother, Dora, is a prime example of how a loving relationship could turn sour over a great deal of time. The gift of immorality Dora bestowed on Myul Mang became a curse instead of a blessing. So why would Myul Mang want to give Dong Kyung something that was basically a curse for him? As for Dora, she probably wouldn’t want to give Dong Kyung the same gift after seeing what it did to her son.

If you continue to think that Dong Kyung will become an immortal being, did you really smell what the writer of DAYS was cooking or did you just smell what you were cooking?

The Bad Case of the Riddles

From what I have been reading on multiple platforms now, it would seem that a lot of people are rather confused about a lot of things. It’s understandable! Throughout the show, the writer has presented some complex philosophical concepts that may be difficult for some viewers to grasp. To further add to the confusion, the characters at times do speak in what appears to be riddles. This I believe may be one of the major flaws of the writer. She has to consider that her audience are probably people who have never read any philosophical works before. Most viewers aren’t here to decipher cryptic messages or see how they’re connected to some major philosophical concepts such as eternal recurrence, existentialism, nihilism, amor fati, etc. Most are here to shut off their tired brain and enjoy some good fantasy romance! I know I’m totally one of those people!

Needless to say, I did find myself in a debate of whether I should discuss some philosophical concepts referenced in the show as to help you all gain a better sense of understanding. However, I concluded that it would take too much of my time to do so. Additionally, despite my best efforts to use the simplest of words, I found that whatever I had already written may have still been confusing to the everyday reader. Anyways, if there are any particular scenes or dialogue you all want to me go over, please feel free to use the ask button and I’ll do my best to try and answer them!

Whats Going to Happen Next?

Probably more filler type stuff aka more bs. It's common in kdramas for characters to go back and forth on their initial decision of whatever. Dong Kyung is going to break up with Myul Mang because she loves him and doesn't want him to die. And before the breakup, she's going to give him some good memories to remember her by. Following this, she's going to try and love herself so that she's the one that ends up dying and her wish is going to be for everyone to forget her? Okay......Zzzzzzz!! Idk... Dora is probably going to intervene somehow to get Dong Kyung and Myul Mang back together again.

Other Random Thoughts

What I think would be interesting to learn about is the connection between Dong Kyung's parents death and Dora past self's death. It wasn't just all a coincidence that they both died on the same day. Who knows... maybe Dong Kyung was meant to be in the car that day with her parents, but Dora's past self sacrificed herself to change Dong Kyung's fate.

Also, I still don't think Dong Kyung is going to die, I mean you got her brother praying to the deities that she lives!

Okay, I'm done. I wrote this in Microsoft Word and it was 5 pages long. My brain is dead. There's probably something I should've gone over or elaborated more about, but oh well. Thanks for reading this disjointed post!

#doom at your service #doomatyourservice #myulmang #myul mang #tak dong kyung #takdongkyung #park bo young #parkboyoung #seo in guk #seoinguk #pinocchio #DAYS #theories #my brain is melting

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skullchicken · 3 years

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But what is a chair?

"You shut up", an aquaintance of mine would say when someone threw the question into the room. Apparently she once got into an endless discussion with some friends about this, only cut short by their mutual exhaustion.

"A chair is something you can sit on. Is a rock a chair, then?" or "If you go into an art museum and there are chairs without seating surfaces, are they still chairs?", the questions would go round and round.

"I think I can answer that", I'd said, but she told me "Nope. Nope - nope, I'm not doing that again." and I've been sitting (hah) on my reply ever since. Until now.

(Am I procrastinating with this on something I should actually be doing? You bet I am!)

1. Categorization and You

This may be "duh"-territory, but humans don't just use one method of classification. By that I mean, they don't just use "Yes tomato/No tomato" on everything, but that their systems of classification have different kinds of logic and rules.

So, first question to find out what a chair is: Which system of categorization are we even using?

2. Necessary and Sufficient Requirements

Now, at first you might be tempted to just describe what a chair is:

"A chair is a... structure with four legs, a seating surface and a backrest..."

What about three-legged chairs? What about chairs with armrests?

"A chair is a usually four-legged structure with a seating surface which may or may not come with armrests."

Now we're getting closer! We have understood that some traits are necessary while others aren't. This type of categorization is often used in science. Does this species have a spine? It's a Vertebrate. Does it have scales? It might be a lizard, but not necessarily.

The system of sufficient and necessary categorization rests on the assumption that things can even be neatly categorized into boxes, into either/or, into yes/no. It is also strictly logical.

For the chair, however, this approach spells your doom. Because you cannot escape the necessity to just keep stacking on traits and exceptions to define what a chair truly is:

"A chair is a structure with usually four legs and a backrest, sometimes with armrests and its that has to be high enough for an adult human of... average height(?) to sit on (except if it's a chair for children), or except if it's not, for example as an art piece or a piece of advertisement..."

... but is this a chair, then?

And then you get into discussion into what a chair is made of and you do not want to do that, trust me.

So this approach, generally, doesn't work for things where you can have opinions. And even if it did, it would result in a definition that's way too wordy and just not elegant. But we are onto something with that "average height for a human to sit on"...

3. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis

What really helps us out here is that a chair is an artefact, by which I mean, it has been made by humans for humans. Thus, is has a function which defines it.

"A chair is a piece of furniture made for a single person to sit on."

- and then you can get into traits and how they support or do not support this function. Armrests or no armrests? Amount of legs? Style? Material? All that probably depends on where and how that chair is supposed to be used in variations of its original function.

And you can use neighboring categories to compare and contrast: "The chair, in contrast to an armchair, is not primarily designed to be relaxed in. The chair, in contrast to the bench, is meant to be used by one person..."

This type of categorization gets to the point quickly and elegantly, while it can still be expanded on. But then why are there still some paragraphs left over on this post?

... (tell me, Will) is this a chair?

What human is supposed to even get on that? And even then, there would obviously more space on it than for just one person. Obviously, this is not a piece of furniture made for sitting on. Yet, ask any person on the street and they would name it "a chair". What gives?

4. Protoype-categorization

Now before we go on, I gotta give a quick shout-out to my man René Magritte, who coined the problem quite nicely with "The treachery of images" - because you could just say that the above is not truly a chair, but a sculpture of a chair.

...buuut, in everyday-life no-one really thinks that way. You don't take a rubber-sword and think "verily, this is not a sword, but a caoutchouc replica!", you think "heehoohoo sord, gotta bonk".

And that's the key-word here: Everyday categorization!

On a day-to-day basis, we generally use prototype-categorization to get around. In contrast to the neat and logical categorization of necessary and sufficient requirements and the elegant but function-focused conceptual analysis, prototype-theory is fast... and superficial.

Protoypes have a kind of wibbly-wobbly field of traits with a nucleus and a soft border, where the traits closer to the nucleus are considered to be more important, traits closer to the border less so:

The (nucleid) typical traits of a chair are: Backrest, four legs, seating surface, you can sit on it. The chair-iest of chairs have these traits. It is the gold-standard for chairs in your mind. The more you deviate from this look, the more un-chairy your chair becomes. Something like "made of wood" is often part of your mental image, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that important. This categorization neither puts nature/status nor function front and center, but appearance.

If it walks, swims, quacks and looks like a duck, it's a duck, even if it's actually a terminator-style replica of a duck.

This is also how you can explain fun concepts like people calling seals "sea doggo" - it's recognizing that seals do superficially resemble dogs (= share many traits we associate with dog-ness, the nucleus of the protoype-category) while being very aware that from a science perspective, dogs and seals are very far apart.

Every type of categorization has its advantages and disadvantages and it is up to you to recognize which one is the right one for the situation. And sometimes it's just fun to spot where the subconscious switch from one to the other produces confusion :)

5. In conlusion

what is a chair? heck if I know.

(Sources under the cut)

Text:

Kleiber, Georges: Prototypensemantik: Eine Einführung, Tübingen, 1993.

Wierzbicka, Anna: Lexicography and conceptual analysis, Ann Arbor, 1985.

Pictures:

glassdiningfurniture.co.uk/montrose-chesterfield-grey-fabric-two-seater-sofa.php

ostsee-zeitung.de/Vorpommern/Stralsund/XXXLutz-in-Stralsund-Wie-die-Hansestadt-vermoebelt-wird

slideshare.net/kimveale/metaphor-processing-tutorial

#long post #academia #categorization #furniture #linguistics #rene magritte

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lofi-tophat · 3 years

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Let’s talk about the 70s punk scene and HWS England

I sometimes feel that the fandom doesn’t give England’s love for punk/rock music much justice. Some authors usually write about this human AU in which Arthur wants to be a rockstar and some others plainly avoid the topic whatsoever. Which is a pity because I actually believe the whole character has a deep punk reference, specially regarding appearence (might expand on this in another post but basically, for me, England seems like some random bushy browed anime 70s punk guy who suddenly has to put on a suit and attend world meetings, which is both fascinating and hilarious).

So I thought maybe we could dive a bit into very general punk history and then I’d like to share with you some hc regarding England’s involvement with punk culture in general (if you just want to read the hcs just scroll down to the last paragraph with the bullet ponts).

My experience in punk stuff is actually that I’m kind of a metalhead lol. Metalheads and punks had and probably still have a deeply-rooted rivalry. However, punk influenced metal a lot, and metal also influenced punk. So I stumbled upon many punk facts while browsing about my favorite metal bands.

Take this as historical hetalia... but counterculture historical hetalia :D (which is something we need more in the fandom, btw, I know military history is cool but its also cool how humans expressed themselves through art, fashion and music when they felt the pressure of authority and the frustration of society).

Historical context

Let’s return a bit in time and remember the 60s. The 60s were this blessed time in which people tried to defeat the establishment with peace and love. The hippie movement is from this decade and it influenced a lot on how people thought and behaved. In terms of counterculture, I must say this is a fascinating time in history (I recently discovered psychodelic science and its so incredible what was being talked back then).

Anyways, although a lot of young people were into this discourse of love and peace, some weren’t really that happy about it. In Europe, the post-war situation was sad and a lot of young people either were jobless or had the shittiest jobs you could imagine. Politics were also depressing. This was the origin not only for punk but also for other genres of heavy music, such as metal: People who didn’t want to be all happy and peaceful and had the need to express their frustration and anger, shouting about how society was fucked up. They needed an outlet.

Origins of punk

The origins of punk music are actually not quite clear. In fact, the US and the UK both claim that punk music was born in their country. Funnily enough, my country also claims to be the origin of punk (I’ll leave this mini-doc for you. Sadly, I don’t think this is a correct claim, mainly because their music was in spanish and I doubt that major punk bands took them as reference. Its a cool band tho).

I have to side with americans on this: The arguments for the american origins of punk are quite solid. The Ramones were the first actual punk band out there. They were active since 1974. Their music had all the elements of punk and, chronologically, they were the first ones performing this type of sound.

However, they didn’t have the aesthetic. That actually was a british invention. American punk had still leather jackets, jeans and sneakers. British punk? Well, remember all those ripped pants and shirts you commonly associate with punk? Yes, those were the Sex Pistols all along. They were the ones introducing the attitude and the style. The Pistols had some insane performances and a huge shock-value that can’t be found in early american punk. So you can safely say that your image of what a punk is is based mainly on the Pistols (also, for singing anti-authoritarian lyrics, they actually were managed by some dude who had a fashion shop. So yeah...).

Punk attitude or philosophy or whatever

The reason why I addressed the rockstar thing at the start of the post is because I find it curious. Punk is characterized by the whole Do It Yourself attitude and breaking with the establishment. Anarchism in punk is scandalizing people since there is no authority whatsoever. There wasn’t really any deep philosophy behind all of this, nor any political movement. Punk has nothing to do with a formal anarchist philosophy (which actually exists and has nothing to do with disorder). However, punk is characterized by the anti-establihsment lyrics. Remember, this is all about scandalizing people (which sometimes took great lengths). Presentations from british punk bands were also quite wild those days. They involved a lot of insults, spitting and, of course, pogo.

So, it is obvious that there is this deep concern about turning into a sellout, a pretty common fear in any underground scene. Authenticity was encouraged. Aspiring rockstars really didn’t have much mercy in the community so to speak, at least in this specific period.

I would also like to add how punk had other aspects beside the music. For example, fanzines were pretty popular in the punk scene in the 70s and a great way to engage with what was going on with bands and music. I remember also this interview of this band in which they remembered how a very high guy decided to recite his poem while the band was playing. So, yeah, literature, illustration, fashion and other stuff were involved in the punk scene too.

British punk was also characterized by a very nihilistic attitude and a total disregard for previous influences. 1977, a song by The Clash, stated:

No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones!

Now, for the important stuff: The music. Punk music is all about being simple. Punk musicians aren’t really known for their virtuosity in their instruments, something that actually inspired musicians from a lot of heavy bands later. In fact, the famous Sid Vicious from the Sex Pistols never could learn how to play the bass. So the band disconnected his instrument from the amplifier and he only had to pretend to play. The guy actually tried to learn how to play bass but music wasn’t exactly his talent. He had tons of punk attitude though, and that was the reason why his band didn’t kick him out.

Vocals are usually shouted, the rythm is fast and the riffs are quite simple. In fact, there is this famous publication on a 1976 british fanzine that stated:

This is a chord

This is another

This is a third

Now form a band

HWS England and the 70s punk scene and onwards

Thanks to his immortality, it is obvious that England had to experience the 70s in all their glory (what a lucky bastard). Was he there? Hell yes. As I explained before in some of my hc posts, nations represent the population more than their Government, so I really believe that England felt the frustration from that post-wwii decade and he probably also felt pissed about this. Working for the Government must have felt really frustrating during those years.

In the past, he probably would have tried to take his ship and sail the seas or whatever, but that was not possible in the modern era. I guess that’s how he discovered punk.

Now, rock existed in England before punk. I mean, the Beatles, duh. So Arthur wouldn’t have been completely ignorant about rock music in general. Contrary to popular belief I don’t imagine him being that much of a beatlemaniac though. Sure he likes them, but the music didn’t resonated with him as much. But boy, that first time he heard the Pink Fairies in 1971 (Yes, this was an actual band, a proto-punk band)? Yeah, he could relate more to that.

More detailed stuff here:

Pubs were crucial for the development of punk music. They were these spaces in which bands could play, a venue to discover new music. Yes, Arthur must have been a regular in a lot of these pubs.

Fanzines probably fascinated Arthur as an outlet for his own writings and silly drawings. He probably created a cringey pseudonym and collaborated with a lot of them.

Its canon that England likes to critic american movies, and, taking from there, I think he’s the type of guy that has an opinion for everything. So I can imagine him also writing about what bands he enjoyed and what bands sucked.

Yeah, I can also see him being drunk and just reciting a poem while some rock band played behind.

With some ability, and a lil bit of tricks, Arthur could escape normal Government activities and perform with punk bands at nights. People were so into the music that he had no problem passing by.

Some cover art in CDs show Enlgland with a guitar and a bass (yes, not many people remember the bass cover art). So he probably plays both guitar and bass. He also probably plays the drums. Of course, he’s no virtuoso and he only knows the most basic stuff in those three instruments. I can see him being into songwriting tho.

Music equipment:

Guitar: Definetely a Telecaster

Bass: Fender P-bass and I can also see him having a Rickenbacker 4001

All these instruments are full with stickers. Punk instruments look really cool btw. (I wish my bass could look like those I see in certain punk bands)

England’s probably the kind of guy that doesn’t cut his strings at the head of his guitar.

He can actually play guitar/bass and sing at the same time.

England plays bass with a pick (what an asshole, we bassists know picks are not allowed)

Contrary to popular belief, I can see England appreciating good rock music from other countries and supporting them. He probably insists that punk music was born in the UK though.

1977: The Queen was going to celebrate her silver jubilee. And England had no problem with this. He really had none... but he HAD to be in that boat trip with the Sex Pistols. There’s no way he was going to miss that. He later had to explain his abscence that day to his Government officials (Btw, my hc for England’s relationship with his monarchy is “It’s complicated”. I can explain this later. Just remember that he was really pissed those days)

I can see Arthur in general being really involved with the scene. A lot of the stuff they were making actually matches with his canon interests and even personality. So he probably enjoyed those days and felt quite at home. I can even say that, for a long time, he hadn’t felt that kind of connection with his own people.

Although I can see England being attracted by the nihilism in the scene, I think his romanticism protects him from embracing it fully.

England had to live a double-life during this era. Not that it was new for him.

Arthur was pierced several times by some random, drunk teenagers. He doesn’t remember who tho. He was also drunk. Obviously his piercings close really fast, unless he has a permanent jewel in there.

I can actually see England expanding his music taste. Although punk is in his heart, it wouldn’t be strange for me that he’s overall a rock nerd and enjoys other genres, specially those with fast drum beats and heavy riffs. So I can see him having some metal favorites too, having a certain taste for prog rock and even digging into hardcore.

I’m still unsure if England would have been a massive Pistols fan as fanfics usually portray him. I mean, maybe? I would say he is definetely into acts such as the Pink Fairies (I mean, c’mon, its perfect). The Clash and the Damned probably also have a place in his heart.

After the punk scene dried out (the 80s weren’t that great for punk music although it was the birth of even heavier forms of music based on punk), England also was eager about the new genres flourishing during these times based on punk. Acts like folk punk might have had an appeal for him. He’s also fond of the punk-ish bands from the 90s like Green Day.

“Punk will never die!” shouted England while stage diving in some random small concert. He likes to support new bands these days.

The most fascinating thing, maybe in a more poetic sense, is that England’s immortality probably also helps him to keep up a punk spirit as much as his nationhood allows him, instead of aging poorly and angry like a lot of punk musicians... I mean, he aged poorly, but for other reasons lmao.

#hetalia #hws england #lofi-tophat: really long hc #in the next issue: America is a swiftie WITH EVIDENCE #I do enjoy some american metal bands but I don't see America being that much into heavy music #he probably doesn't even care if punk was born in the us or not so england maybe won that one #guys i could ramble forever with my music hcs but ill just leave you with Moldovas extensive pop collection #finland's passion for folk metal acts like korpiklaani #and cuba shouting AZZUUUUUCAAARRR in karaokes #btw pirate metal exists kind of as a subgenre but it exists and england is into it

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pedros-mustache-main · 3 years

Note

mutuals as historical buildings??

now that’s what i’m talking about!!!!

@archaicmusings: the acropolis of athens, athens, greece.

i mean? duh? did you expect anything different? of course cal with her interest in classics history would be one of the most recognizable buildings of the classics age! now, don’t ask me what the heck this building was for because i don’t know. that is not my side of history, friends, and i’m smart enough to admit that.

anyways, can’t you just see cal leading a tour around the building?! she would absolutely be wearing socks and sandals and that makes me love her more.

@almightygwil: little red schoolhouse, farmington, maine.

this is more of a concept of buildings than a specific building, but the one pictured above (built in 1852) is pretty spot on in terms of the building(s) i would choose for ellie.

when i think of ellie, i think of little house on prairie. i think of one room schoolhouses and lots of kids under the tutelage of one teacher. essentially, when i think of ellie, i think of the historical life i would kill to live in the mid-to-late nineteenth century (if things didn’t suck for so many people back then). ellie is warm and absolutely gives great hugs (even if i’ve need received one from her) and i would love to be her student in one of these schools.

@im-an-adult-ish: wrigley field, chicago, illinois.

do i know anything about baseball? barely. do i know about the significance of wrigley field? again, not really.

what i do know is baseball is really important to meredith and so is wrigley field. i mean, her dog is named after it so that’s some indication of its importance. i do think that something about wrigley field screams “all american” and meredith is a very all-american girl (in the best possible way).

@ineloqueent: yerkes observatory, williams bay, wisconsin.

according to the internet, the yerkes observatory was “the birthplace of modern astrophysics” in 1892 when it was founded. i don’t know if that holds water, but i do know that tina loves stars and space and looking at stars in space. of all the other observatories i was looking at, i liked this one the most because, while it serves a specific function, it also is architecturally beautiful. it’s really european in feel (especially for being in wisconsin of all places) and we love our european tina!!! anyway, the combined natures of science meeting european architecture was what made me say, “yeah tina would be this building.”

@dancingdiscofloof: palacio de cristal, madrid, spain.

the first place on our list that i’ve been to irl!

i had absolutely no idea where we were going when we started the trek from madrid’s palace to this crystal palace. really, i was just walking and trying not to cry ‘cause i’d only eaten bread and cheese for a week. but then! out of the blue! this beautiful crystal palace in the middle of a park. also ducks!

this building reminds me of rove for two reasons: it’s classic, and rove is classic. it’s also modern, and rove is also modern. from what i can gather, the crystal palace operates slightly like a museum. different art exhibits have been housed in the building from time to time. (when i was there, the sculptures inside were these weird, like, sandstone naked people?? idk what that was about)

anyway, rove kinda reminds me of a museum or at least a very classy museum tour-guide.

@gwiilymslee: le mont saint michel, normandy, france.

look at that! it’s like freaking tangled! america could never!!!

all freaking out aside, audrey is absolutely a princess who deserves not only her own castle, but her own castle on an island. i think mont-saint-michel truly has this otherworldly feel to it, like something out of a novel or a movie. audrey gives me those same vibes.

@joemazzmatazz: san bernadino alle ossa, milan, italy.

another place on our list i’ve been to irl! i was in italy (among other countries) last year, and i randomly found this chapel nearby the milan cathedral. there are bones and skeletons of (supposed) plague victims decorating the very cramped room, and let me tell you, it was one of the weirder experiences of my life sitting in that room.

i chose this for regan because, while i could have gone for the quintessential 80s punk scene and that would have fit just fine, i also think regan is a blend of the macabre and the aesthetic if that makes sense? like she’s one of those people who can really pull off the edgy, grunge vibe while also maintaining class and sophistication. that’s the general feeling i got from this chapel when i was there, so i thought it fit.

@deacyblues: the flatiron building, new york, new york.

pearl will never not scream early 20th century to me. the flatiron building was built in 1902 and is typically seen as a landmark of the rapid growth of new york city, as well as the development of architecture in the united states.

anyway, to me the flatiron building is iconic of the early 1920s, and so is pearl. the building has some european feel to it, too, with the way the faces of each side are carved, and pearl often speaks with this blend of american/british vernacular. really, i think what i’m trying to say is pearl reminds me of transatlantic movie-stars, and so does the flatiron building.

@six-bloodyminutes: the guggenheim, new york, new york.

there are two sides to mo. when i first met her, i was like, “huh, this girl is pretty put together. she seems like she knows what’s going on.” then i got to know her more and i thought, “oh wait. she, in fact, does not know what’s going on.”

the geggenheim reminds me of mo because, from the exterior, it’s sleek and classic, but also unique. it makes you want to take a closer look. on the inside, it’s full of modern art that makes zero sense whatsoever. mo is much the same: put together on the outside, but on the inside, she’s full of surprises, absolutely delightful in her exuberance, and a joy to get to know better. also: i feel like if she were a staircase, she’d be the staircase inside of the guggenheim as well.

@hijackmy-heart: casa mila, barcalona, spain.

nat is fun. like she makes me laugh a lot and she’s witty (in two languages!!) and she absolutely knows how to have a good time. much like this really strange looking building. there’s a certain whimsy to nat that i feel like this building evokes, too. all in all, 10/10 building, 10/10 person.

@kiwi-hardy: bishop’s castle, rye, colorado.

the last place on the list that i’ve been too irl! the story of bishop’s castle is strange: essentially this man named jim bishop bought land in c.o. for $450 in the 60′s, and he has been handcrafting this massive stone castle ever since. there have been legal battles (over the stones used themselves and over road signs and who controls the castle in the event of jim’s death) but let me tell you one thing: that castle is not built to code whatsoever. i was afraid for my life.

i feel like nothing captures the chaos of leah as much as the house with a fire-breathing dragon on one side, a gift shop on another, and spray painted signs all over the property that say many things but particularly “enter at your own risk”

#mutuals as tag #okay enough distraction #back to writing

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gild-and-fire · 4 years

Text

ggweek 2020: All About Rio

Tagged by the wonderful @inyoursheets and absurd @sothischickshe

Tagging (but no pressure!!) @fairhairedkings @missmaxime @briosgina @mrslackles

Questions from here and I think I added a read more?

Why do I personally like or dislike Rio? (I added this one for fun)

A few different elements of Good Girls drew me in (humor, acting, UST, etc) and I have been hyperfixated hooked since! And not to get too real on the main--jk imma bare it all out here on the internet--I found Good Girls in a time when I didn’t really have much independence or agency in my life. So, obviously, beth being a boss bitch and rio being straight-up unhinged definitely satiated me.

Specifically, other than the fact that he is very very handsome and i would give him my life savings if he just said the word “muhney”, I love that he takes calculated risks (ie any risk he takes on beth), has fun being a prick (“what’s up, you miss me?”, “it’s too good, ma”, “need another bathroom break?”, “we’re consolidating”), has amazing outfits (no further comment), uses his charisma to cajole and charm people into compliance (rip Gil & Lucy), and yeah i just think he’s neat

What are your headcanons about Rio’s and Mick’s relationship? Did they meet through crime? Are they lifelong friends?

OH definitely best buds for LIFE who met during crime and then like just trusted each other’s judgement. I think Demon follows orders without a second thought (which Rio loves), Rio laughs manically whenever Demon says something sassy or rude (which Demon loves), and they neither one takes life too seriously, ya know? They’re both just having a good time and appreciate that the other is on the same wavelength.

Now that’s what is probable. What isn’t probable BUT I want dearly??

Mick barbeques every other month and Rio brings Marcus everytime

Rio and Mick have matching tattoos on their ankles from a very fun night in Canada

They play basketball together and the winner rubs the victory in the other’s face for the rest of the week. Rio always dunks on Mick, but Mick is surprisingly agile and good at stealing (bc he’s not wearing a tiny leather jacket duh)

Mick has tried to set Rio up with his many cousins by bringing them to the bar “coincidentally” at the same time Rio is there

They text each other pictures of their food and share restaurant/food truck suggestions

What are Rio’s hobbies outside of work and Marcus? What do you think he’d get up to on a day with absolutely no responsibilities?

ART! ART! ART! I will not accept any answers except for boxing/basketball and art. That man’s apartment was wayyy to gorgeous, and have you seen his hands?? I can only imagine the things he can do with a paintbrush

What do you think Rio’s goals for the future are?

Total mayhem and destruction (at the Boland residence)

What do you think Rio is bad at (cooking, dancing, singing, etc.)? How come?

There’s NO way he’s good at singing, but i would bet everything i have that he is a good dancer. I mean,, I could stare at the way he walks allllll day.

Why do you think Rio is drawn to Beth? + Why do you think Rio didn’t kill Beth?

Before I joined the fandom, I really questioned why either one was attracted to the other, and oftentimes, I was convinced that they simply were using each other for selfish reasons and for the sake of manipulating the other. Now, I still believe that they use each for selfish business reasons, but that genuine feelings and interests have also developed since around 1.06 and it has been challenging for both ever since business and personal have mixed.

I think the fact that they are two sides of the same coin makes their attraction so delicious for a viewer, but I think that they are both distrustful individuals and thus are destined to always second guess the other’s motivation even if they are being genuine. It kinda reminds me of Epifanio and Camila’s marriage in Queen of the South: they love each other, but the clash of their individual ambitions make it difficult to trust each other.

But, back to the question lol. I think Rio is drawn to Beth and hasn’t killed her because he understands her, sees himself in her, and enjoys how she challenges him. Specifically, they are both motivated by the desire to provide for their kid(s) and their love for crime. Beth hustles hard, leverages her unfortunate situations into advantageous ones, and only trusts herself--I think the same can be said for Rio and that he admires these parts of Beth.

What are your headcanons about Rio’s family? Siblings? Parents? Lifestyle growing up?

This is a tough one bc I absolutely love the different OCs created for Rio’s family and I think it’s so fun to see his older sisters clown him on the daily. However, I’m inclined to think he has one older sister because he drinks his respect women juice and has STRONG younger sibling vibes (re: constantly causing trouble but always acquitted). In my limited experience, I think older siblings have to be more responsible, and Rio plays it a little more fast and loose.

I would also venture a guess that if he had a “stable”/”traditional” childhood, he likely wouldn’t have fallen into crime? I have a hard time placing what his parents and upbringing was like, because I only have my frame of reference and like who thinks that’s sound judgement lol. But I suppose that Manny’s own backstory would be a good starting point: he grew up in a rough area, has traditional grandparents (who likely supervised Rio when his parents were working/not home), and is hustling to move up in the world. I also think that he is someone who has come to discover and define his own style over time, but wasn’t able to when he was younger.

Do you think Rio’s been arrested before Beth got him arrested in 1.10? When, and what for?

MY bby? My “too smart for his own good”, “two-steps-ahead” bby??? ABSOLUTEL Y NOT i think the shutdown episode is such a good example of why not, and i think we know that beth is a BIG, glaring exception in his normal business dealings, so getting arrested doesn’t happen often, if ever

If Rio weren’t a crime boss, what jobs do you think he’d be good at? Why?

OK so I went back and forth on this one. Let me explain my thoughts

I think he is well-suited for being a PM in tech because it requires “disruption” and Rio definitely loves to disrupt things lol, and he is a natural leader who can motivate a team to follow his lead.

I DO not think that working at a consulting firm or law firm or something businessy like that would be up his alley bc its way too stuffy and too many rules (ethics & compliance training, what the fuck?) But Rio is also good at being a snake

Maybe a math teacher? Before you laugh, hear me out. He’s good with kids, he’s good at math, and we know he likes to give lessons!! (does he do it well? Idk but obviously beth was ready to shoot boomer in S2 and then taught Max in s3, so there’s that lol)

But yeah, I think an entrepreneur in tech is perf bc is requires a certain degree of rule-breaking, a certain degree of charisma, and strong math/science skills.

#ggweek2020 #rio #i love one (1) disastrous man #still monday over here!!#mine

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bigskydreaming · 3 years

Text

For @broimbi because their continued interest in By Lost Ways keeps me engaged, and prompted this slight detour into the notes of Roy on the trick behind crafting magical arrows. Not totally one hundred percent sure I’m ‘canonizing’ this as officially part of the story’s backstory, but it is all set before the start of it, and mostly just a humorous exploration of the magic. You don’t really need prior knowledge of DC to follow along, or even the story itself, as the important stuff all gets recovered in his own words anyway.

The notes of one Roy Harper on the magic-science of feathercrafting and fletching:

Herein lies everything I’ve uncovered, experimented and surmised on the subject of using magical feathercraftings in pursuit of archery. For posterity, see. So that future generations can bask in the brilliance of me.

Hey, that rhymed.

Now of course, people have been used feathercrafting to make arrows with special properties for centuries. But I always felt, from a very young age, that there was so much more to the artform than had been discovered so far, and so many more secrets within the Deck, specific to archery, just waiting to be unlocked. And thus began my own lifelong quest to seek out and uncover those mysteries, and leave my own mark upon the art of feathercrafting arrows.

It had nothing to do with me being bored, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar who should be ignored. Especially if their name is West.

To start off, a lot of feathercrafting is self-explanatory, when it comes to making arrows....sure, everyone knows that most feathers have more than a couple different properties, but arrows themselves tend to be a lot more finite in function, and thus there’s only so many ways - and so many reasons - for which people would modify them with feathercraftings. Thus any time you use feathers of all the same kind when crafting an arrow - say, much like you would if you were making a non-magical arrow - you’re pretty much only going to get one magical effect.....though that’s usually all you’re looking for.

So whether you use three or four feathers, it makes no difference if they’re all of the same type. Any arrow made with seagull feathers, for example, is made with distance in mind....to channel the magical properties of the Regent of Distance, and thus magically extend an arrow’s flight. Arrows made with sparrow feathers, its opposing Regent force, are looking to reduce distance, with such arrows often being utilized over the centuries by so-called snipers....the magic of their sparrow feathers ‘eating up’ the distance they cross at a much greater rate than they would non-magically, with gains made here to accuracy, impact, etc. But I’ll get back to that.

But similarly, tanager feathers are pretty much all you need for an incendiary arrow, something you just want to ignite upon impact, while canary feathers have long been used to make the kind of arrows West calls screamers, which is reason number five hundred and ten why he’s never allowed near my workshop. And also shouldn’t be allowed to speak, ever. Or at least not in civilized company. No, I had it right the first time, ever. Gotta trust my instincts.

So, that’s all pretty much a given. And when you use three different feathercraftings of all different kinds in your arrow, you suddenly get a lot going on all at once, unlocking a lot of interesting combinations, but its still fairly straightforward. All three feathercraftings lend their magic simultaneously, working in concert either in flight or upon impact, or at least not at odds directly. Unless two of those feathercraftings are of opposing Regents, at which point their magic will just cancel each other out, but why would you even do that, that’s stupid and wasteful, what’s the point. Opposing regents act in opposition to each other. They’re opposites. Everyone knows that, duh.

Unless....hang on, just had a thought.

Okay so technically, because its not like opposing Regents cancel each other out completely, or completely negate each other and the forces they embody, and in fact according to legend and acts of ridiculousness as witnessed by me, watching my best friend the Robin Regent be ridiculous, like when you consider that in a lot of ways and times and places the Regents and their respective forces are meant to act as limiting agents upon each other, not negating ones......okay, so theoretically, there could be purpose to combining, say, sparrow and seagull craftings to the same arrow, if you were able to in some way quantify how much their magic acts upon each other, and thus calculate say.....how to combine sparrow and sea gull feathers in such a way as to get a precise distance as an end result, with the sea gull feathers magically increasing the length of the arrow’s flight, but the sparrow feathercrafting being precise enough in....diluting the sea gull feathercraftings, for lack of a better word, that it ensures the arrow doesn’t overshoot its mark but rather while enhanced in distance, still is limited in how enhanced it is and thus can still strike a far off target with precision. Obviously, there wouldn’t have been much point to this line of thought in ages past because the greater issue here is there’s not much point to an arrow that flies significantly further than you can aim anyway, but with advances in telescopics and magnifying lens, that’s no longer the given that it once was, which means.....

Hang on notes, and by notes I mean self, and also future audiences of fans legion in number.....I’m about to go revolutionize the entire art of feathercrafting arrows!

****

Okay, after a looooot of experimentation, and I do mean a lot, I have concluded that yes, my idea here has merit, and no, I’m probably not the first to think of it. But rather, the reason its not a known thing practiced the world over is because getting the mitigating effects of one Regent’s feather upon another in arrow-making, like, requires precise calculations that are dependent on a math and units of measurement that I don’t think have been invented yet? Like, to do what I’m trying to do, or make it happen reliably rather than sporadically, one first has to have some system of measuring the magical forces embodied and contained within each feathercrafting, and so manipulate and cultivate the feathercraftings via their size, shape and combination, in such a way as to result in the precise magical output without getting in the way of the fletchings enabling the arrow’s flight in the first place, rather than hindering it. Its that last part that’s really the sticking point....obviously, people combining feathercraftings and manipulating their magical output via the shaping of the feathers themselves...this is something that’s been done in all sorts of ways in all parts of society throughout civilization....but usually its considered to be more of an art than a science. Something without hard and fast rules, something most feathercrafters say is more a matter of feel and intuition rather than looking to engineer - and replicate - precise results with each and every crafting. But archery doesn’t allow for that kind of thing.....it’s physics, its momentum and force and angle and lift and drag and all kinds of things that require knowing exactly what you’re working with when you notch each arrow to your string, otherwise, might as well shoot yourself in the foot. Its just not something that’ll work, at least not in any worthwhile way, without having that science for reliably combining feathercrafted fletchings in known ways, to act as a known quantity on the magical output.

So, guess I’ll have to admit defeat.

Orrrrrrrr, I’ll just have to invent that myself!

Ding ding ding, the roar of the crowds have it, the decision has been made, option two is the clear winner!

*****

Endless months, feathers, arrows and “you look so dumb right now, haha I love it”s from West later.....the secret to this still eludes me.

Whatever. I’m not bitter about it. I’m not.

I’ve figured a lot else out in the meanwhile, anyway, and I’m getting the hang of tricks no other archer I know of has even imagined. That I mean, I know of, anyway. Maybe they exist. Who cares, I’m still at the cutting edge of my field here is the point.

So, the mixing and matching of feathercraftings from two different Regents who aren’t in opposition, and thus whose magic can only add to each others.....

Turns out, there’s a lot more to even just that, than I ever imagined.

Looking back through the notes that were definitely a good idea to keep even if they’d probably be a more useful idea if I learned to remember to add to them more often, I see at one point I was about to expand upon what happens when you have three feathercraftings of all different types combined in one arrow. Well, as I said then, that’s not really a new idea either, so most everyone already knows how that works. As long as none of the three are from opposing Regents, they each by default seem to exert the same magical influence on the arrow, whether in flight or upon impact depending on the nature of each feather and their magic.

Say you take a dove feathercrafting, and an owl, and a seagull.....the seagull’s magic is naturally predisposed to arrow flight, being that of the regent of distance - unless there’s some way to tweak or delay the activation of its magic to ensure it doesn’t release until impact, and thus ensures it’s magic will actually be spent in some way upon its target, though not sure what you’d be looking to do to a target with distance magic, still, food for thought maybe, hmmm -

Where was I? Oh right. So the seagull feathercrafting is by default inclined to exert itself on an object in motion - such as the arrow in flight - and enhance the distance it travels. The dove feathercrafting, by contrast, is inclined to exert itself upon impact, with most dove-crafted arrows being termed things like ‘shockers’ by morons such as West, who are way too responsible for way too many of our colloquialisms in society, something really should be done about that, but delivering electrical shocks upon impact, channeling electricity in some way....or as people in past centuries often termed it, channeling lightning.

But I mean, you never know.....more than one place has a legend or story of arrows that ‘call the lightning’ and while a lot of people just tend to assume that was their ‘uneducated’ way of describing the electricity-generating properties of a dove-crafted arrow shocking someone it struck....given what we know these days about so-called electromagnetism, and the relationship between electricity - even in the form of lightning - and magnetism, specifically magnetic metals and alloys.....what if those stories weren’t just talking about your basic ‘shocker’ arrows at all? Imagine a battle that was say, taking place during a storm, and a dove-crafted arrow that upon impact didn’t just release an electric jolt of its own into its target....but rather acted as a kind of superconductor that was basically like a magical lightning rod, calling the next lightning bolt to zero in on it specifically? Now that’s what I would call ‘calling the lightning.’

Note to self: experiment with this immediately. Enlist West’s help, but do not tell him why. Need to know information only.

Y’know, Donna’s always saying that us humans of this world - as opposed to wherever the hell it is Themyscirans and Atlanteans come from - have forgotten more than we know. I really should remember to ask her what exactly she means by that one of these days, instead of just staring at her without blinking cuz she’s doing things like talking and gesturing and I mean....have you seen her? The way she just....talks and gestures....look you would get distracted too, notes, is all I’m saying, and don’t say I don’t know that cuz I do know that because you’re me.

Aaaaand I’m officially talking to myself. Great. Awesome.

Getting back to my point, heroically, and with effort that should be applauded, take heed legions of future fans......so as stated, the sea gull crafting is predisposed to exert itself upon an arrow’s flight, while the dove crafting defaults to exerting itself upon impact. The owl crafting, as most already know, is similarly predisposed to exert itself upon flight. With most owl-crafted arrows being termed ‘silencers’ and used to strike a target without warning, as the sound of the arrow’s flight is nullified by the silencing magic of owl feathers.

But does that have to be the case? What if - I can’t help but circle back to that idea of shaping a feathercrafting to almost time-release its magic - just saying, imagine if you could design an arrow with owl feathercraftings that don’t just silence the arrow in flight....but also create a silencing bubble upon impact, with their magic ensuring that the target makes no noise when your arrow hits home, even if you weren’t aiming for a kill-shot to the throat, say, but rather an immobilizing shot to a limb or appendage that wouldn’t in and of itself stop them from screaming or shouting?

Ugh, there’s got to be a way to do that, a trick to it somehow. There just has to be because....okay, yes, I know, its magic, I suppose it doesn’t have to do anything but just exist, but....I’m telling you, me, posterity, whatever.....there’s something to this, this is a question of how that just needs an answer, and the answer is me, that’s who, fuckers!

Look, obviously I meant to say this is a question of who’s going to be the one to figure out the secret, don’t be such a self-deprecating pedant, self. Nobody likes those.

Anyway, so the combination of sea gull, owl and dove fletchings is such that you’ll get an arrow that’s silent in flight, covers a magically extended amount of ground, and delivers an electrical shock upon impact.

Unless there’s a way to change whether crafted fletchings of certain types must always expended their magic in flight versus be delayed and only released upon impact.

Great, now I have to figure that one all out for myself too, since no one else seems to want to do the hard work. I better have the kind of genius that’s actually appreciated during my own time rather than post-humously, is all I’m saying.

Oh yeah, and also, so the ummm, thing about what happens when you combined just two different feather-craftings in specific, in an arrow with three fletchings. Ie that thing I never got around to detailing before and was thus what I was going to detail now this time but that I obviously did not do this and oh look, Garth is calling us all for supper and I have to go before Wally poisons mine, you understand. Next time. I’ll get to it for sure next time. Which will be uh....later this week, probably.

*****

So that was a whole fucking year ago, huh? Don’t hate me, future fans, I was busy saving the world with my friends, Dick lost his Robin regency and moped about it even though he was the Owl Regent then almost immediately and just didn’t fucking tell anyone for two months which what even is that about, I would like to know, except then it turned out well no, I wouldn’t like to know as actually that was mostly just him angsting about some deep dark family history of his with this secret society of Owl Regent worshippers or whatever in Gotham and like, can I just say, with emphasis, fuck Gotham and everything to ever come out of that place except for Dinah, who is amazing obviously, and thus too good for Ollie, also obviously, even if he’s not actually being the worst currently and we actually had a decent(ish) conversation the other day, and oh yeah. The Cult of Owl-Worshippers or whatever, so right, those are a thing, and they suck, and we had to team up with Dick’s replacement Robin Regent, who I of course was inclined to hate on principle, except he’s actually an adorable little shit that I gotta say will probably make a damn good Robin. Anyway, so that was a whole thing that took forever and a day, and then cheering Dick up and helping him adjust to his new station or whatever also took time, but was definitely worth it for reasons that are many and complicated and have nothing to do with me being like “in love with him or whatever” so just shut up, you have no idea what you’re talking about and you sound just like West.

Anyway. Moving on.

Right, so back to the whole thing about what if you have an arrow with three feathers and feathercraftings of two different types - hah! So turns out, its a good fucking thing I waited to tackle this topic, as I accidentally unearthed a whole shitload of new insights and approaches here over this past year, so. Y’know. Yeah. I definitely took my time getting back to that with reasons. That were deliberate, and well thought out, and also totally real things that exist.

So.

Imagine you have one arrow. Its got three fletchings. Two of them are feather-craftings of one type, with the third being of a different type. Now conventional wisdom previously would have you believe that the end result of this combination would prioritize one Regent’s magic over the other, but it being completely random which magic would be the one emphasized and either modified or amplified by the other....and with it making no difference whatsoever what feathers were used, which one was used as the stabilizer fletching, etc. The arrow that resulted from the combination of two different magics would be a combination of those two magics, certainly, but beyond that, its just down to the whims of Mother Sky.

Except, I have discovered, through thorough experimentation and keen insights and intuition and also intellect, hi, yes, I have all three, who is so sexy, yes that is me....

That this is not true.

Or at least, I don’t think it is.

I’m pretty sure, anyway.

Look, the takeaway is that far be it from me to pretend to know the mind of a goddess, I mean, I’m not trying to sound egotistical or anything, but I’m starting to be of the suspicion that Mother Sky is a lot less whimsical than the stories would have us believe. And that there is actually a pretty precise method to her madness, and it just lies in having a better understanding of the Deck than we actually do. But the answers are there! They just need. Insights. Delivered by the likes of yours truly.

So. Let’s get insightful.

The one constant with this two-to-one combination type of arrow, is that either the one feather will modify the magic of the other two, or the two feathers will amplify the magic of the one feather. But which results is not actually random at all, I don’t think, but rather, has to do with where the feathers and their corresponding Regents fall within the Deck.

As legends tell it, there is a definite order to the Deck, though different cultures and civilizations have had differing ideas over the millennia as to what that precise order is. But the idea is always the same: in the beginning, there was Mother Sky, who existed in a place that was not a place, as it was before places existed because she’d yet to invent them, basically. But then from nothing, she created her companions, the birds that embodied or contained within them or just inspired the various pieces of creation and fundamental forces, depending on which version of the story you go with. And when she was done, she created people, and then before she left to create elsewhere, she turned her companions into people as well, the first Regents, to watch over her creation in her stead, via the pieces of her own power she entrusted them with.

But the point being, she built the Deck - and creation - piece by piece, rather than all at once. And everything either built upon what came before it - acting as a modifier, you might say, if you were brilliant, and/or me - or else it amplified what came after it. Because creation got more and more complex the further she went with it, and so the ways the previous pieces existed and interacted with each other and later additions, got more and more intricate and complex.

See where I’m going with this?

Its okay. I’ll elaborate. I don’t mind.

So everyone agrees that the Sparrow is the first card in the Deck, that’s a given. No one disputes the order of the first full talon, the set of four complete Regents that make a whole. First there was nothing, and then Mother Sky called into being the first sparrow, and with it came space, so that the first thing that was not her had somewhere to exist. Like, she may not have needed existence in order to exist, but she was a goddess, they can do that I guess. Everything else? Existence required. So in order for her to have her first companion, that necessitated also creating at the same time the first piece of existence, so that something could exist outside of just her. And then from there, she created the seagull and more space, so it could exist too, and then she sent it forth to go as far and wide as it wanted to and thus created more space everywhere it went. And that’s why the sparrow and the seagull are less space and more space, the reduction and propagation side of the same thing, but you’re gonna want to pay attention in a second because I have an insight here that you won’t find most anywhere else, and it is stunning if I do say so myself.

But first, let’s continue. So after space, Mother Sky next created time. Calling first into being the hummingbird, the eventual Regent of joy and vitality, the encapsulation of time in an instant, existing with no need for anything beyond just that....and then to create more of it anyway, she created the crane, the eventual Regent of permanence and longevity.

And then, most agree, she created the magpie and with it, things, and then the kingfisher and with it, more things. The regents or forces embodying quantity. And then came entropy, or “things change.” First with the robin, and then things change more, with the vulture.

Now, let’s get insightful. As I was saying, conventional wisdom, that conniving old coot, would have you believe that the opposing Regents act as negating influences on each other. That they cancel each other out. Why? Different theories. Most popular ones being that it was to keep each other in check, so that none would get too powerful and thus imbalance all of creation, or try to usurp it and rule it in her stead.

I have come to believe, however, that this is hogwash. Perhaps even complete balderdash. Why would she need to? We also all agree that the reason Regents come and go is because periodically and at her whim, she takes back her power from one and gives it to someone else. So....who needs proxies to act to keep other proxies in check....when she herself can simply just....take back that power at any time, if she’s for any reason displeased at how a Regent is wielding it?

So I suspect the truth is not so complex, or rather, that there’s no complexity here at all. Its exactly as stated in every version of our creation myth.....these opposing Regents, while they may be in opposition, are not actually meant to cancel each other out or negate each other....something none of them actually do. No, they’re just the dual forces of each aspect of creation. The opposite sides of a spectrum that simply represent that each exist along a spectrum.

Granted, most theologians don’t have Dick Grayson for a best friend, so let’s not be too hard on them. But having witnessed him up close and in action since pretty much his first day as the Robin Regent, I can assure everyone: he has always been just as much a force of entropy as any Vulture Regent. And that’s why similarly, the Magpie Regent exists as one of the two regents of quantity, even though its magic makes less of things, it takes things away.

But the one thing it never does, is make no things.

Think about it. Unless I’m missing some legend somewhere, nowhere in history has a Magpie Regent or its magic ever resulted in something being just...completely nonexistent. Same with the Sparrow. It reduces distance, space, consumes it magically, eats it up, whatever...but it doesn’t ever result in the complete non-existence of space.

We refer to there being a reduction and a propagation side to each Regent and their corresponding force....but reduction simply means to reduce. Nowhere does it say “all the way to zero.” Instead, I believe, the point of the various reduction regents and forces is that they push creation back along the spectrum more towards their side of things.....where they exist as the only unit of that particular force or aspect....but they still very much do exist. The Magpie might reset things back to one, emblematic of when it and what it represented was the only ‘thing’ that existed other than the goddess and her other Regents, the first unit of quantity rather than a time/space continuum full of possibility but nothing more finite or existant than that. But it’ll never - can never - push things past just that unit of one. It can’t negate something out of existence entirely. That’s a power only Mother Sky has, and that she’s never delegated to anyone else.

And that, I believe, is why whether feathercraftings act upon one another to modify or amplify each other, is not random at all, but just has to do with where they fall in the Deck, in relation to each other. When you view the Deck as being about opposing forces contained within spectrums, rather than negating forces existing outside of spectrums, it makes sense - just like the creation myths all talk of her building upon creation and adding to it, widening it, making more....of course magic isn’t going to be about undoing all of her hard work, but rather just more of the same.

And thus, lower-Deck cards will always exert themselves upon higher-Deck cards, and not the other way around....because all of creation is geared towards making the most of its upper reaches as it builds and builds upon itself.

Creation reaches upwards, as if to the sky, is what I’m saying. This just is sometimes more obvious than at other times.

So take a sparrow-crafting and two hummingbird-craftings, as an example.

Its not actually random, or about which you use two feathers of and which only one: the sparrowcrafting or craftings will always act upon the hummingbird, and never the other way around. Additionally, you’ll see what appears to be the same result either way, but this is because of the close connection between time and space. They’re part of the same talon, the same hand of four. They exist upon the same continuum. Either way, you result in an arrow that seems to cross a short amount of distance much more rapidly than it otherwise would.

And what actually results is the sparrow’s magic acts upon the hummingbird’s magic....so that how much space is consumed in relationship to the hummingbird’s rapid-rate of time....that’s what goes up.

So what the extra feather decides, really, is which magic gets two parts magic for the one part magic brought to the equation by the other feather. It just really makes no particular difference in this specific instance, due to them all still being on the same specific continuum. If you have two sparrow feathers for one hummingbird feather.....you’re essentially requisitioning two times a magical rate of distance to be consumed in correlation to the speed-up effect brought on by the hummingbird crafting. Ergo....an arrow that crosses a short amount of distance far more quickly than otherwise possible. Now reverse that, and use one sparrow crafting accompanying two hummingbirdcraftings....what you’ve done here is requisitioned two times a magical rate of time to be consumed in correlation with the space-consuming distance magic of the sparrow crafting....thus resulting in....an arrow that crosses a short amount of distance far more quickly than otherwise possible. Not just different perspectives of the same phenomenon....but the same phenomenon resulting from different manipulations of the same forces....and all those forces being closely linked enough to make the precise nature of what’s happening seem less distinct than it actually is.

Now let’s progress to combining two craftings from different hands, to make the differences more distinct.

Take here, for instance, a combination of swan and crane. Now you might be surprised, legions of future fans, as swan-craftings are rarely used as fletchings. Due to there being little use for arrows that make things float upon impact. But this is only true of people who don’t have housemates who frequently yell at you for experimenting with arrows that do things other than just make something float harmlessly. And there’s not much harm that can result in using pillows for target practice even if the pillows then just float aimlessly for various periods of time afterward.

Who knew annoying housemates could have such a beneficial impact upon science? Yes, even a West may have a purpose. Its true. What a strange and wonderful world we live in.

Anyway.

So after much experimentation, and even more experimentation to replicate the results reliably....I can safely confirm that regardless of how you combine the craftings, the swan magic will always be prioritized, with the lower-Deck magic, that of the crane, acting as the modifier upon it. Meaning one way or another, what results is the effects of the swan’s levitation magic being extended by the crane’s longevity magic.

The only thing that changes, results from whether its two crane feathers used, or two swan feathers. Here’s where two parts magic for one part....other magic, I guess....comes into play:

If its two cranecraftings per one swancrafting, the cranecrafting will still modify the swan, and what will actually be amplified, the magic you get more of, is that the rate of the cranecrafting’s modification of the swancrafting. Basically, the result you’ll see is the target floating due to the swan magic, but for longer than would normally happen, as the crane crafting extends the duration of the swan magic’s effects.....and with the second crane crafting essentially doubling the time-extending effects.

In comparison, if you go with two parts swan for one part crane, the cranecrafting again modifies the swan, but for a shorter period of time, as what’s actually amplified here is the swan magic. The amount the arrow can levitate upon impact, the weight of the target struck, that’s what’s doubled, with the overall effect simply magically extended by one unit of magical time modification.

Now this opens up a ton of possibilities all on its own, but it did seem to sound the death knell for my time release magic arrow idea.....or so I thought....until insight once again struck like divine inspiration. Which seems to masquerade as sleep deprivation an awful lot. But as I said, who am I to understand the ways of a goddess? Ah well.

So, its no surprise this didn’t occur to me earlier, as the archer in me balks at the very thought....but what about combining hummingbird and cranecraftings with a third? Hummingbirdcraftings have been used for centuries as crossbow bolts, if you’re working with a small enough one, and its been proven possible that while not advisable from a purely physics-prioritizing standpoint to shorn the feathers of much larger birds to small enough sizes that they can be utilized as fletchings on the very same, very small crossbow bolts.....but the combination of magics that unleashes has proven worth it on some occasions. Still, I don’t think anyone has ever tried utilizing both a crane and a hummingbird-crafting on the same crossbow bolt...but that’s largely because nobody sees much point in calling upon the magic of two Regents thought to cancel each other out.

But if its not actually in their nature to cancel each other out entirely, but rather at most to be mitigating factors or influences.....and if my theory about feathers always modifying the magic of higher Deck cards, never lower, is correct, as it clearly is for I am brilliant and also sexy, don’t forget that last part, its critical.....

Then cranecraftings, as low in the Deck as they stem from, still can be modified by three specific craftings themselves: those of sparrows and sea gulls....and also hummingbirds.

Which means, it might be possible to create a crossbow bolt with a combination of one cranecrafting, one hummingbird, and one other.....where the hummingbird acts as a mitigating agent upon the cranecrafting, before the latter acts upon the third. Basically, if I can crack the secret to definitively quantifying or measuring the magic of each crafting, down to a decimal point, and thus deal in fractions of a whole crafting rather than just units of one.....then I could mix and match hummingbird-craftings with cranecraftings that are measured to have more magic than the former. Which if my theory is right, would mean that the hummingbird and cranecraftings would essentially ‘cancel each other out’ but only until the hummingbird’s magic was fully consumed.....but the cranecrafting still having some magic left in it that only then at that point, once no longer held in check, would act upon a third feather. And thus resulting in the time release phenomenon I’m aiming for.

Look, its possible, and I will figure out how to make it happen, or my name isn’t Roy “Look how awesome my butt is” Harper.

Will look into this and report back.

****

Still have not cracked that secret. Still not allowed to use West for target practice. Still not saying these two things are in any way linked, just putting that out there.

I keep telling the rest of them its for science, but do they care? Noooo. Ugh. Barbarians. If this was ten thousand years ago and it were up to them, we would never master the tool that is fire, all because they’d never let me set the tool that is Wally on fire to demonstrate how useful fire can be.

Why do they hate progress? I just wanna know.

****

Still working on that time release magic thing. Still being thwarted. Revolutionizing archery by way of magic is hard. Why did nobody warn me that was a thing?

But you know what else is a thing? Physics! Its a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Obviously I already knew about physics, hello, but I didn’t know so much about physics until Dick wandered home with a new best friend named Victor Stone. He does that an awful lot. He swears its not a Regent thing, but I think its definitely a Regent thing. None of the rest of us seem to manifest magical friend-summoning fields that call weirdly attractive and also nice and also knowledgeable friends to flock to them like they’re some kind of magnetic north. Which is a physics thing, that my new friend Victor Stone taught me.

I’m just saying, I go out to get dinner for the bunch of us, all I come home with is dinner. Dick goes out to do the same, and he comes home with first an Atlantean, then a Themysciran, and then a Wally, and still no dinner. And even West, for all his.....West-ness, is descended from a hummingbird Regent and thus possessed of innate magic coloring his personal association with time, so he’s not totally useless even if he does a great impersonation of useless ninety percent of the time. And thus doesn’t exactly disprove what I’m getting at here.

One of these days, he’s gonna wander in like “hey everyone, come meet my new best friend, she seems completely normal and boring but that just means she’s probably Mother Sky herself in disguise for some absurd reason. Nothing about this has anything to do with me or how sexy my stupid face is.”

And shut up, that still doesn’t mean I’m in love with him, I just have eyes and I use them, that’s it.

Anyway, this time Dick brought home my new best friend who is Vic and thus I shall magnanimously let it go and not make a big deal out of it, for reasons that as you can see, have nothing to do with anyone’s face, no matter how stupidly sexy it might be.

So! Physics!

Most of it seems to be just unnecessarily complicated ways of saying things everybody already knows, so, basically what I always claimed it was despite baselessly having no real way of knowing this. Hah! Validation to me.

But some of it happens to be ways of saying things that might already be known, but are here put forth in ways they aren’t usually spoken of or pictured as, and thus spark new thoughts and ideas. And thus there does appear to be some merit to some of it, which is not validating in and of itself, but is inspiring, so I’m calling it a lateral move and counting it as still being a point for me.

(Look I may not know how or why or when, but one day, these points will come in handy and mean something, I just know it.)

Anyway, so there I was with my new friend Vic discussing abstracts theories of physics like the learned intellectuals that we are, just us, nobody else, shut up Garth, go eat a fish, nobody asked you.....

When Vic says something about force equaling velocity times mass. And I sat up and said wait, what was that thing you were saying a minute ago about velocity equaling.....and Vic says velocity equals distance over time? And I snap my fingers and go that’s it, that’s the very one. Vic, you beautiful balding genius, you’ve done it again!

Wait, what have I done again, Vic asks, and also how, we’ve literally only known each other twelve hours, and I explain to him all about my uncanny intuition and valid predictions of the future meaning that this is obviously just the first of many fruitful collaborations and thus totally counts, all while I busily make sketches and do math.

Because its occurred to me, see, that for centuries archers have used distance magics to shorten or extend the amount of space an arrow covers in flight, for a variety of purposes that still ultimately just revolve around accuracy or distance simply as an obstacle to be overcome.....but what if distance is treated not as the focal point for which an arrow is feathercrafted, but rather simply a means to an end that otherwise has aims other than just crossing distance?

Basically, as I explained while setting up a target of considerable durability and a small crossbow bolt fletched just with sparrow-craftings....what if distance magic is utilized not for the distance, but solely to magnify the force that results from how much - or how little - a distance it crosses over time?

And then from thirty paces away, I smashed a tiny crossbow bolt through the target with as much force as if I had fired that same bolt from a mere two paces away. The boom was quite satisfying. Also the validation. Again, that’s always just nice.

And then I modified another crossbow bolt with a mix of sparrow and hummingbird to increase that rate of velocity even further, and I did it again, to an even bigger boom.

Which means, notes and future fans alike, I may not have quite cracked the code of fractional but reliable increments of magical implementation just yet, but I now have more material to work with....because as I already suspected due to my awareness of their link via continuum, but hadn’t quite yet put a specific named connection to myself, distance over time equaling not just velocity but the key to time-lapsed magical effects means its not just hummingbird and crane feathers that could make all the difference there, but also sea gull and sparrow.

Force multipliers, Vic named our breakthrough. Or said was already the name for them. Hard to say, my ears were still ringing, but I err on the side of whichever gives us credit.

Either way, its a great name.

******

Vic and I have been experimenting with triple-compounding the effects of three different feathercrafted fletchings per arrow. Or tri-parting as I’ve been calling it. Try-harding, Dick calls that. I kicked him out of the workshop after that. I will not be disrespected within my own personal space like that, not even by his stupid sexy face. Besides, I can still see it well enough from through the window, so its fine.

Anyway, the triple threat combinations. At the base of it all lies a lot of trial and error with different manipulations of time and space, ie our force multipliers. So first, we started working with just those, to see what else we might be missing or overlooking in regards to these base-layer feathers that have had all kinds of other uses just lurking right under peoples’ noses for millennia.

Its not like they aren’t used for plenty already, of course. Take hummingbird-fletched crossbow bolts for starters. Plenty of archers throughout civilization have utilized them in conjunction with bolts tipped in different sedatives or poisons. Shoot a bolt at someone from close enough away that its magic isn’t consumed entirely in flight, and the temporal acceleration effects of the hummingbird magic then exert themselves upon the next nearest thing....the poison or sedative coating the bolt, which from there spread through the bloodstream of the person it impacts....now at a magically expedited rate of time. Similarly, plenty of assassins have used bolts or arrows coated in poison and fletched with crane.....to extend the effects of poison and whatnot upon the person shot with one.

Same thing with combinations of two types of craftings, both of which are known to default to exerting themselves on the same thing: arrow’s flight or arrow’s impact. Obviously we’re not reinventing the wheel with something like combining crane and canary, with both magics working in conjunction on the same things at the same time.....thus extending both the flight and the magical effect in-flight of a canary crafting’s ear-splitting shriek.

So its not as though we were expecting to uncover a lot more along the way to what we were really looking to explore, just us doing our due diligence until that point. And in no way were we delaying our experimentation out of nervousness that this wasn’t the long-sought next step in my lifelong pursuit of Science-Magic: The Roy Harper Way, and worrying that this theory like so many others would simply fizzle into failure. No. Don’t be dumb. That absolutely wasn’t a thing here.

So was the real hold-up all along just us stalling and killing time until Donna left on mysterious Themysciran missions because the night before she’d looked at us theorizing excitedly and decided to douse that flame by sighing and saying, ‘you’re going to blow up the house’? To which we naturally replied ‘don’t be daft, we’re not going to blow up the house.’ And to which she replied ‘oh yeah, you’re totally going to blow up the house’? Were we basically just tarrying and occupying ourselves with lesser experiments of no real value until she was gone like the ill omen she insists on being and that we simply refuse to see proven right? At least not when she’s around to witness it?

Right, so...yes. It was definitely that last one. That was literally the entire reason.

Look, if you’d ever had Donna sighing and despairingly shaking her head while listing totally understandable reasons why you shouldn’t do the thing that you were still going to do regardless because well, duh, you had to, obviously.......you’d understand.

The point being, the second she was out the door we quit wasting time with that load of crap, and brought out the real toys. Or....test subject....thingies ...prototypes! That’s it, that’s the word.

So first off, we started with the combination hummingbird plus sparrow plus shrike feather craftings. Shrikes, of course, being the magic of bindings and battles, and with the Shrike Regent being Boone, some sort of love-hate friend-nemesis of Dick’s past that he refused to ever elaborate on, no matter how much ranting he did on the subject of the man when he came up even tangentially. This of course, was our first real mistake. This was about the time when I kicked Dick out of the workshop, the timing here being a total coincidence, even if I did happen to mutter in passing that if he love-hates the guy so much he should just marry him already. Or kill him. Whichever. Preferably the killing thing though.

Unfortunately, adding insult to injury, or potentially injury to West if he interrupted us one more time, the shrike combos were getting us nowhere. Like the true friend he is, and sensing my dwindling mood and also its corresponding effects on West’s future, Vic suggested we switch gears and try combining just time-craftings with dove and something else.

Which is what brought us to the hummingbird-dove-kingfisher combo, and our first real success.

You see, as I’ve mentioned before, tanager-fletched arrows aren’t anything new....they’ve been used as incendiaries for thousands of years....but the why of it, with Vic’s additional physics insight, brought up some interesting theories. Same with the way dove-fletched arrows had been used for their electrifying properties for ages.

The reason dove-fletched arrows carry the properties they do, as he explained it, is that by channeling the electromagnetic force embodied by the Dove Regent - specifically, the propagation or amplifying side of that spectrum - its like the arrowhead becomes a magnet drawing electrical impulses to it out of the air it passes through. The whole atmosphere contains what he calls ionized particles, which is not apparently, the same thing as baby lightning. Even if its really just the potential for lightning, and thus totally fits in my opinion. But what our eyes perceive as simply an arrow slicing through empty air, in terms both scientific and magical, in another sense the arrow is swimming through a sea of ionized potential, collecting some of that to itself along the way, and delivering the totality of that through its arrowhead upon point of impact.

What tanager-fletched arrows do is apparently not hugely different in theory, even if it does tap into different physical properties. Essentially, tanager feathers, embodying the amplifying side of the thermodynamics spectrum, act upon the combustibility of oxygen, which is all around us in the air we breathe. Oh, also, the air is just fire waiting for a big enough match, apparently. That was good to know. So again, two different forces, two different kinds of particles which are not the same thing as molecules except when they are, and actually, what happens when dove arrows do what they do is only a little bit like what happens when tanager arrows do what they do, but still mostly not at all the same, even if they do happen to sound totally the same but whatever Victor....anyway, the point is physics is great and useful but also at the same time totally confusing and annoying, but what happens when you combine all this information with my contribution that is the keen scientific observation that the lower in the Deck will always act upon the higher in the Deck?

Something actually useful, not that I’m trying to rub it in or anything.

But the way I understood it, if the combustibility of a tanager arrow comes from how much and how combustible the oxygen it draws to it is, upon striking a target and delivering the additional magical spark of a tanager-crafting....and if the electrical impact that results from a dove arrow comes from the nature of a dove arrow to draw enough particles to it in abundance, with the combination of tanager and dove meaning its the latter that will exert itself on the former....the end result is you’re going to get a super-combustible arrow, instead of merely a combustible one.

And the drawback of an incendiary arrow, as any archer knows, is that it can only do so much. Firing an arrow that will burst into flame upon impact is all well and good....but if the place of impact is largely wet and incombustible, that first flicker is still going to die out before ever becoming more. But if that first burst is more than just a mere flicker....and if its immediately fanned and fed and magically fueled by say, the existence of a third crafted fletching, that of a kingfisher, whose magic by nature creates more.....

Well, apparently muddy beaches go up quite nicely when lit by an arrow of this variety. Particularly if you then follow it up by a swift volley of kingfisher arrows aimed purely at magnifying the resulting fire itself.

I might have gotten a bit carried away with the fire-lit cackling with which I celebrated our success, but on the other hand, I made West wet his pants, so. Worth it.

*******

Bit of a rough-weather atmosphere in our house this past week, as apparently the rocks I set on fire with our little tanager-fletching experiments happened to be Garth’s favorite rocks, and he’s a bit perturbed with me as a result. Nobody seems to care, no matter how often I point it out, that its just weird to have favorite rocks, and who even does that, because Garth that’s who and I guess I was supposed to somehow just....know this?

Anyway, it was ‘advised’ emphasis on my skeptical assessment of that last word there, that I avoid fire in my experiments for the time being. Which is fine by me.

On to....magical ice arrows!

Now ice isn’t a force, its not a thing that you can make more of like fire, as I explained to Dick and Wally earlier. Its the reduction side of thermodynamics, the less than....essentially, you don’t so much make ice as you do...remove heat. Thus a tern-fletched arrow isn’t really a frost arrow, its more accurately, a heat sink.

They didn’t need to know that it was basically Vic that explained it all that way to me about an hour or so earlier. Besides, the heat sink bit was all my addition, and that was the really important part, clearly.

What was mostly of interest to me here, was its prospects in magically replicating what happens when you get metal cold enough, fast enough. Which brought me to the hummingbird-tern feather crossbow bolt combo, two parts tern feathers and only one hummingbird feather as a modifier. What I was after was double the heat-sink properties of tern magic, sped up by a hummingbird-crafting.

It mostly worked.

The tern feathers drew in heat well enough, and the hummingbird-crafting sped up the process enough that more cracks would have spread through the metal the bolt was embedded in....if the bolt had.....actually embedded itself into the metal. I’m pretty sure, anyway.

It was the damn force side of the equation that was still getting in my way. Even when I did get a bolt to sink home in something that was already brittle enough to lodge into even if it couldn’t penetrate all the way through on its own, the force still was lacking without magical amplification. But there was no fletching I could add to magically modify the force of the bolt itself that wouldn’t also exert itself elsewhere, even upon just the hummingbird feather. I even tried adding a sea-gull feather and then firing the bolt from merely a foot away, trying to maximize the force without using up the distance modifier during actual flight time, and that was the biggest find of the day and it was a total accident as I realized two seconds after firing it that I was supposed to be trying to amplify the force by reducing the distance, and thus I meant to use a sparrow fletching, not a sea gull!

But then what actually happened is my crossbow bolt embedded itself and ended up magically making enough more space for me to follow up with two more bolts, and then the combination of multiple bolts all drawing heat from around them at a magically enhanced rate led to the whole thing growing brittle with cracks all the way through it, which.....was not at all what I was going for but was still useful to know, so, I’m calling it a win. It counts.

Look, it just does, okay? You’re my notes, I’m not supposed to feel judged by you. You’re doing this all wrong.

******

Dick brought home a new friend today, named Kory. She seemed like a perfectly, nice ordinary girl at first glance. Then she took off an illusion-casting crow mask and revealed she’s actually a seven foot tall, golden skinned, ‘battle priestess of X’Hal,’ whatever that means, but the rest of all that sounds about normal.

Oh and also, what that means apparently is she’s from a whole other world and she voyaged here in a ship that apparently travels between stars which is a thing that can happen, and also she has green-glowing eyes but that’s just because she can make magic green fire that can burn through anything, no big deal. Also, she can fly. Also, also, did I mention she’s a princess? Because duh, of course she’s a princess, why wouldn’t she be a princess, haha you sound so dumb right now.

Dick’s eyes glazed over and he stopped paying attention at “she can fly.” Not that I noticed. Or cared.

Anyway, apparently ships that can travel between stars being a thing that can happen is not actually the new information that I thought it was, as then Garth tried to insist that he’d totally mentioned that before which umm, lie. I definitely mentioned it before, he said, like a liar, and I think I would have remembered if you had, I said because hello, and then Donna said she and Garth had always been clear about Atlanteans and Themyscirans originally coming from worlds other than this one and okay fine but nobody ever said that involved ships that fly between stars I said. But of course its not like I had anyone to back me up on that because Dick was too busy trying to marry Kory with his eyes which will probably even work because obviously his eyes are very marriage material everyone knows that and West was busy being West so its not like he counts, and in conclusion, all my friends are either aliens and/or assholes. Except for Vic, who did say he’d run away with me and get married, but I’m pretty sure he was just humoring me. He wasn’t even drunk.

Whatever. The big takeaway here is that clearly I am like, this close to unraveling the mysteries of all magic everywhere and that’s why Mother Sky has decided to be mean to me, because she is threatened and also, like. Just mean.

*****

Turns out Kory’s actually a lovely person. So I guess I just can’t have anything, huh?

****

Also none of this still has anything to do with being in love with Dick, which I’m not, because obviously, and Wally’s still wrong about everything, because also obviously. And if he doesn’t shut up, I’m going to make a magical Wally-smiting arrow just for him. I don’t totally know what its going to do yet, but just see if I don’t!

*****

So over dinner last night, Kory was telling us all a bit about Tamaranean magic and how it works and what being a battle-priestess of X’Hal means.

So on her world, its told, their creator goddess X’Hal created everything out of herself, and so is herself in everything. With there being some kind of corresponding connection between the emotional or spiritual side of things, and the physical or material. And Tamaraneans have a periodic table that’s actually all about emotions rather than physical elements, and their magic is called spirit-alchemy and its about manipulating the elements or physical world by being in control of their corresponding emotions?

I don’t think I’m explaining it right. Okay, so basically, the way Kory described it is everything on their world was created by X’Hal, like, feeling a specific thing. From her passion, X’Hal created fire. From her hope, light. From her joy, weightlessness. And all the way up and down the material and elemental plane. So when she refers to the thousand names of X’Hal, its because of the whole “X’Hal” is in everything idea, and thus when speaking of each of those things, one’s also speaking of X’Hal.

But where the magic part of things comes in, is if like Kory, you train from a very young age to be what’s called a priest-adept. Or priestess. You get it. But the idea is all things are part of X’Hal and she’s in all things, and her people, the Tamaraneans, are all like X’Hal....enough so that they can manipulate parts of the world around them, wholly by manipulating the parts of themselves that are...spiritually resonant with those things, I guess.

So with Kory, the reason she can fly, and glow, and create soulfire which is what she calls the green glowing fire she makes that can blast through anything.....all of this derives from her spending most of her lifetime training to have a total mastery of three specific mental and emotional states. The ones that, in reflection of X’Hal, correspond with fire, light and weightlessness. By mastering her passions, broad sense of the word, she manifests soulfire which she creates much like X’Hal created...fire fire. Via her own mastery of and understanding of hope - not totally sure what that all entails, but that’s the connection - she similarly is able to manifest light, and her flight and weightlessness come from her control and knowledge of her own joy, for just...herself, life, everything. The battle-priestess bit is just her own kind of vocational calling rather than a specific group, but her magic only works because her own mastery of self is so extensive that she’s able to find even the joy in battle, the passion in fighting, the hope for victory, that let her still tap into the specific emotions that lend her this magic, even while in the midst of fighting for her life.

Obviously what she’s talking about is easier said than done, and the Tamaranean idea of self-control goes a fair bit deeper than get up and take a lap when someone, not naming names, says something particularly dumb.....but from the sounds of it she’s kind of a big deal back on her homeworld not even for the princess thing so much as for having mastery of three different states, no matter how connected. Like a lot of people spend their whole lives attempting to master just one, and she just happened to be adept level at three already.

I asked if anyone’s ever mastered all thousand, which apparently was a really funny joke, so looks like I’m hilarious in Tamaranean, but seems that’s not really a thing. “We’re like X’Hal,” was how Kory put it. “But only X’Hal can be X’Hal.”

Which does make sense, when you put it like that.

**************

Okay, so I was just picking Kory’s brain about spirit-alchemy a little more, specifically about her super-strength and where that comes from, since I thought joy, passion and hope were her three focuses. Except she didn’t know what I was talking about first, as she said that wasn’t one of her powers. Except I know for a fact that I saw her punch through a solid stone wall once, and said as much, and then she was just oh, that’s just part of my mastery of joy.

Which needed a little more clarification than that, because....what.

Basically though, it sounds like their emotional table is a lot like the spectrums between two opposing Regents throughout our Deck. Like a lot of what they work on mastery of is as much the absence of its opposite side as it is something in and of itself. Apathy is the opposite of passion, the negation of soulfire, but its not something someone seeks to master, so much as its an extension of their mastery of passion. After all, if one summons a form of passion within themselves in order to create soulfire, then by banishing the soulfire, even if just because they no longer have use for it, isn’t that and the emotional equilibrium that results in that....isn’t that effectively apathy? Same thing with hope....just because the goal of mastering that wasn’t to create an absence of light, that doesn’t mean that being able to put out the light she herself creates isn’t still connected to that emotional field and something requiring her awareness of it.

Which brings us to weightlessness. Her flight is a manifestation of joy, even when using it in battle, but utilizing it most effectively, as in changing elevations rapidly and with precision, often requires the inverse just as much as creating weightlessness for herself in the first place. So her control of self has to be so absolute that she can be a thousand feet in the air and then just let herself plummet, carrying with her all the force that entails, and only at a hundred feet in the air summoning her inner joy and using spirit-alchemy to instantly transmute that into the weightlessness that once again keeps her aloft but now at that new, lower elevation.

But the point being.....up until that last split second when she comes out of a dive and re-engages her magical weightlessness.....she and any strike she’s delivering, contain the full force its opposite.

Not at all unlike how you could describe swan and ostrich craftings.

So that’s when Vic and I just looked at each other and yelled: Force multipliers!

Forget time and distance modifiers, its the mass! The key is the mass! The propagation side of gravity even if applied not to go up or down because the gravitational force is only being applied magically, to modify other forces, not the physical mass of the arrow itself! This is it! This is the key!

Our first attempt put a crossbow bolt through an inch of solid steel. Now just waiting on Vic to get back with all the hawk and dove and tern and tanager feathers we have, we’re so close I can taste it!

Ugh, if Dick doesn’t marry this beautiful alien warrior princess, I’ll marry her myself! Or both. I could just marry both of them I guess. I mean, its for science.

Okay, Vic’s here, will report on findings later!

******

So, we accidentally blew up the house. I don’t want to talk about it.

Still think I’m right though. Just needs fine-tuning.

Might wait a bit before I bring that up. No reason. Just seems the sort of thing that can wait until we find a new house.

#by lost ways

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lampd-intheface · 5 years

Text

vampire LAMP au

okay but like imagine a vampire au with polysanders except virgil is the only human???

roman got bitten by a vampire in italy just for kicks and then he was left to his own devices. he had to suffer through the shift alone with nobody to help him

for a little while, he was ravenous and accidentally killed a lot of people. in the end, tho, he snapped out of it and taught himself how to control his hunger

roman lived through the italian renaissance and moved between italy and spain (which is why he can speak really good spanish/italian) and even settled down a little in england for some time too

when roman settled down in england, he met patton who'd been a vampire for a while now

patton became a vampire becos he was hit with the plague and his mother was desperate to find a cure. this vampire they met ended up helping and then taking patton under his wing

roman and patton eventually find themselves in america (which was still a pretty new country at the time)

logan lived during the industrial era where everyone was just inventing things left and right and it was booming in terms of science and machinery

he was turned becos a vampire thought his genius was too valuable and death shouldn't put a stop to logan who had a lot of potential

the three then settled down in america

roman made some money writing fantasy books under pseudonyms. logan made money through patents or really any kind of intellectual work he could find. patton spent his time at home, just helping out and taking care of roman and logan

they had to move often, of course, becos people would be suspicious if they just stayed in the same place for too long. they couldn't get attached to people either becos getting attached to people meant people who would keep track of them

after all of their years being alive, patton and logan and roman have amassed enough money that they're just chilling and living comfortably

now, it's the modren era and, in this au, all of them either have online classes and/or night classes

virgil takes night classes and online classes because it limits his social interaction with other people and he's much more comfortable interacting with smaller groups of classmates (night classes)/not physically interacting with classmates at all (online classes)

the others because well duh they're vampires

it's not becos they dont like sunlight (they can be exposed to a little but too much gives them rashes). it's just that it's easier to keep a low profile if they interact with less people

logan is really the only one seriously taking classes and not for any other reason than because he loves learning. patton and roman will take classes here and there but only for their hobbies

insert virgil. i haven't thought this one through but logan probably meets him first because they share a class together.

anyway, LAMP have a meet cute or whatever

maybe like virgil is in an art history class and the prof says something wrong abt a certain part of history

logan is about to correct the prof but virgil beats him to it and logan is impressed with how accurate virgil was with his facts because logan lived that era and not a lot of people are so knowledgeable about it

that aside, their friendship takes time

logan has to introduce patton and roman separately and then the three of them have to keep attempting to get closer to virgil slowly and at virgil's pace

eventually, for their own reasons, they fall in love with virgil

logan falls in love with how much he relates to virgil. virgil is so smart and the two of them can talk and have debates and virgil just understands him so well

roman falls in love with how snarky virgil is becos he'll tease virgil and he knows virgil will serve it right back to him. virgil challenges him and its exhilarating and exciting

patton falls in love with how soft virgil is and how much he wants to protect virgil from all the bad things in the world. he loves how virgil has been through so much and yet virgil is still so strong

virgil is unaware of how smitten the three of them are tho and he falls in love with them too. he kind of just... plans to be with whoever asks him out first (if any of them ask him out at all)

because virgil struggles with his anxiety a lot, he can't really work at normal places. there's too many interactions, too many people.

he had thought that he'd eventually get used to it and then he'd be able go get a job but it's taking him a lot of time to get over his anxiety

precious time he can't really afford since he's putting himself through college

which is where his vamp boyfriends friends come in because hello, if they can't pay for their cute human crush's essential college classes, then what's the point of having all that money?

in any case, they find out abt virgil's financial problems and they're like omg... we're the solutions to his problem!!!

roman: i can finally actually slay what ails virgil!!!

logan: you won't be slaying anything--

roman: LET ME HAVE THIS ONE THING

before they establish that sort of relationship though, logan and roman and patton all agree that they want virgil to know the real them first so that virgil can decide whether or not he wants to be associated with them

the last thing they want to do is make virgil feel like he's obligated to stay with them even tho he fears them becos they're paying for his college and housing him and stuff

so, they plan get to know virgil more and then tell virgil they're kind of sort of creatures of the night

definitely easier said than done

when they tell virgil, he's like *phone error sound* ??? before realizing oh my God, they're serious

he then laughs about it a little and the other three are confused but he clarifies that the situation was very ironic

becos like omg, how hilarious is that??? the one goth guy who's super pale and avoids social contact and is practically the stereotypical vampire is actually the only one that's NOT a vampire??? that's irony at its finest

virgil then also assures them that the three of them being vampires doesn't bother him one bit

virgil, the epitome of tumblr humor: bold of you to assume i wouldn't f**k a supernatural being

jokes aside, he does reveal to them that he couldn't care less about what species they were, just that they loved him and he loved them

and damn did virgil love those three idiots

roman: woah there, you might pull a muscle from all the i love you's you're spouting

virgil, sweating up a storm after showing the most emotional vulnerability in his life: sh*t u rite

jokes aside, they do form a sort of weird relationship where the three of them happily provide for virgil because virgil doesnt have the means to do so

it takes virgil a while to really get used to it since he's not used to accepting things from other people without giving back

he struggles for a little while becos he keeps trying to find ways to repay them for what they do for him but there's only so much he can do

eventually they have a conversation abt it and they're like babe honey sweetie no

patton: you give us your love and that's the absolute most important and priceless thing in the world!!!

virgil, known pessimist who cringes away from romantic gestures out of habit: sounds fake but ok

but like eventually they work it out in like a slowly but surely kind of way.

virgil learns to see money the same way the other three do (replaceable and pretty much worthless to vampires who have a large abundance of it) and the other three learn to kind of tone it down on the expensive gifts

virgil: im so glad you guys dont buy me really expensive things now

roman, sweating profusely as he hides the golden apple he had commissioned to be made especially for virgil: oH YEAH OFC HAHAHA

(logan, when roman had suggested getting virgil the golden apple: first of all, no??? in what way is that even romantic--)

omg imagine if virgil does the thing where he coops himself up in his room??? and then someone tries to get him to get out by pulling the blinds open to let in light??? and virgil hisses???

patton, having just let sunlight in, looking absolutely offended: OKAY FIRST OF ALL, you're not a vampire so don't take that tone of hiss with me--

someone is like teasing or bullying virgil abt his aesthetic and virgil is obviously getting uncomfortable, esp when they call him twilight (in reference to the vampire romance novel)

so one of the boys, probably roman, steps up and he's like 'the person you should call twilight is me' and he scares the bullies by flashing his eyes red and showing them his fangs

omg!!! roman doesn't have a reflection so virgil helps him put on make up or smth!!!

maybe virgil in this au is an artist so he paints a picture of all three of them so they know what they look like becos they dont show up on pictures and reflections

patton, gazing down at the picture: this is what true love feels like

logan, also feeling the same way: really? how unpleasant

logan:

logan: give me more

omg also logan having only really kept up with the intellectual side of history so he doesn't know abt memes and like stuff like that so virgil teaches him and he has his Flashcards™

iDK MAN JUST VAMPIRE BOYS BEING SOFT FOR EACH OTHER AND FOR THIS SMALL LITTLE HUMAN THEYVE PULLED UNDER THEIR (bat) WINGS

#sanders sides #logan sanders #patton sanders #roman sanders #virgil sanders #analogical #prinxiety #moxiety #poly am sanders #polyamsanders #polyam sanders #lamp #alternate universe #lampire au #mine

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60b3r · 4 years

Text

Memes Kill Creativity?

Memes vs. Genes

In the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' to describe something with symbolic meaning that spreads by imitation from person to person within a culture. This idea is an analogue to the nature of selfish gene, described similarly as a piece of genetic material possessing information required to be able to replicate themselves inside a living. The only key difference in both terms is that the gene is natural, while memes are artificial. The rest of memes' operating schemes completely mimic the genes perfectly. In our current timeline, memes as we know today are taking many forms: as image macros, short videos, and rick-rollicking music. Memes in imageboards and forums have been pushing internet porn traffic into a stalemate and putting our power grid into unnecessary burden. Of course, memes are not to be regretted, but otherwise need to be taken seriously, since they are able to put our current understanding of media industry and economic system into shame.

As with every other thing that have existed, memes are not exempt in its dualistic nature. If you ever venture to the depths of dark web, you may know that memes also took part in the infamous mimetic Tumblr-4chan War. Not only that, some memes are reportedly causing harm towards some users, even though it is often disguised or said to be a dank joke or mere sarcasm. Memes have seen its share of use in online bullying, mass shootings, and hate crimes, cowering behind the freedom of expression tag. Regardless, memes are also an extremely effective form of information transmission. Like all living systems with no set moral standards, memes do evolve and are subject to natural selection. Memes, like genes, actually work like a mindless machine. Again, this is eerily like the performance of DNA in living systems. The last thing we want from this thing is virulence.

Every day, something went viral on Twitter. Hashtags are flaring into the top trends, some videos are being watched billions of times, and another cat vs. cucumber pic garnered thousands of likes. Viral properties of a virus (duh) is defined as the capability to multiply quickly in relatively short amount of time. The term saw a huge increase in usage during the dawn of the internet age and the rise of computer malwares spread through unsecured ports of network protocol. This term is being applied to memes, as it is like a virus (which is a pure embodiment of a selfish gene). Now, a lot of people are utilizing memes to create art, because it enables them to cater the short-attention spans of current internet users. They create shorts, illustrations, inside jokes, and small comic strips. Some of you might not agree with me on this one, but stay with me now and I will explain to you why I would like to treat memes and art as a single unit of interest in this argument.

The dawn of meme-technology

Viral memes and their popularity are now often considered important in defining a time period in the internet culture. Now every netizen can somewhat distinguish the approximate age, sex, and political views of other users from the usage of rage comics, meme songs, and meme platforms they use. Intuitively we can make a generalized difference between the userbase of Reddit, 4chan, 9gag, Vine, and now Tiktok. Others, by the share of relatability with sub-genres of different areas of interest (film memes and game memes). Some others, even, in the perspectives of different social and economic class system (first world problems and third world success memes). Meme preferences to us netizens are ironically giving away our anonymous identity. Identity which the media companies are vying to get their hands on. That's where I would like to come into my opening argument: both memes and genes which originally possesses no intrinsic value, suddenly become a subject of value with technology.

How do we draw the logic, I say? The ones and zeros inside electrical systems are value-free, so does DNA in living cells. As we meddle ourselves with biotechnology to manipulate genetic material for profit, we also simmer ourselves in the computer sciences and tweak physical computation to perform better. We give value in the inanimate object by manipulating them. In our world, we often heard these expressions: that communication is key, sometimes silence is golden, and those who control the information wields the power. What’s these three statements have in common? Yes, information and expression. Memes are the simplest form of both. This is the beginning of the logic: memes are no longer in and on itself independent of external values. The infusion of utilitarian properties in memes as artificial constructs are seemingly inevitable, and for the better or worse shapes our current society.

We might have heard that somewhere somehow, the so called ‘global elites’ with their power and wealth are constantly controlling biotech research and information technology—or, in the contrary, they control these knowledge and resources to keep shovelling money and consolidate their power. Memes are one of their tools to ‘steer’ the world according to their 'progressive agenda', seemingly driving the world ‘forward’ towards innovation and openness. Nah, I am just joking. But, stay with me now. It is actually not them (the so-called global elites) who you should be worried about. It is us—you and I, ourselves—and our own way of unwittingly enjoying memes that are both toxic and fuelling the age-old capitalism. Funny, isn't it? We blame society, but we are society. But how are be becoming the culprits yet also be the prey at the same time?

Middle-class artists are hurt

Now, aggressive marketing tactics using memes are soaring. Media companies are no doubt cashing in the internet and viral memes to their own benefit. Streaming and cataloguing are putting up a good fight compared to their retail, classic ways of content delivery. This is quite true with the strategies of Spotify and YouTube, other media companies alike. They can secure rights to provide high-quality content from big time artists and filmmakers and target these works directly to the end consumer, effectively cutting the cost of distribution which usually goes to the several layers of distribution line like vinyl products, radio contracts, and Blu-ray DVDs. I believe this is good, since it is like an affirmative action for amateur artists to start a career in the art industry. Or is it? Does it really encourage small-time artists to begin? Yes. How about the middle-class artists? Not necessarily.

You might sometimes wonder, “how the hell did I get somewhere just by following the trending or hot section in the feed?”. This toxicity of memes often brings some bad things to our tables. Social media algorithms handle contents (like viral memes) by putting those with high views or likes to the front page, effectively ‘promoting’ the already popular post and creating a positive feedback cycle. By doing so, they could capitalize on ad profits on just few ‘quality’ contents over huge amounts of audience in a very short amount of time. The problem is most of the time, these ‘quality’ contents have no quality at all. They just happen to possess the correct formula to be viral, with the correct SEO keywords and click-bait titles with no real leverage in the art movement. This way, I often find both the talented and the lucky—of which the boundaries between them are always blurred—overshadow the aspiring ‘middle-class’ artists who work hard to perfect their craft.

If you are already a famous guitarist with large fanbase, lucky you, you are almost guaranteed to top the billboards. What, you have no skills? Post a video of you playing ‘air guitar’ and… affirmative actions to the rescue. Keep on riding the hype wave and suddenly you get to top trending with minimal effort, thanks to your weird haircut. Those haters will surely make a meme out of your silly haircut, not even your non-existent guitar skills. But still, hype is still a hype, and there’s no such thing as a bad publication. This also answers why simple account who reposts other people’s content could get much more followers than the hard-working creators. Not only being outperformed by the already famous artists taking social media by storm, now the ‘middle-class’ artists are also dealing with widespread content theft and repost accounts because of the unfair, bot grading system. It is unimaginable how many nobodies got the spotlight they don’t deserve just because they look or act stupid and the whole internet cheers around them. Remember, this is not always about the artist, but also the quality of the art itself. I believe a good art should be meaningful to the beholder.

Why capitalism kills creativity

The problem in current art industry is that we are feeling exhausted with the same, generic, and recycled stuff. We indeed already see there’s less discourse about art now. Sure, the problem lies not in the artist or medium, but is in the viewers—the consumer of the art form—and how the capitalist system reacts to it. The hyper efficient capitalist system doesn’t want to waste any more time and money trying to figure out what’s new or what’s next for you. What we love to see, what is familiar to us, the market delivers them. The rise of viral memes phenomenon in the social media pushes the market system to the point where they demand artists to create the same, redundant, easy art form. Listen to some of The Chainsmokers’ work and we'll see what music have become: the identical 4-chord progression, the same drop, the predictable riser, and the absence of meaningful lyrics. We sat down and watch over the same superhero movies trying hard to be the next Marvel blockbuster. The production companies are also happy not to pay writers extra to come up with new ideas and instead settle with borrowed old scripts from decades old TV drama. Disney's The Lion King and its heavy use of the earlier Japanese Kimba The White Lion storyline is one guilty example.

Despite it initially being an economic system and not a political ideology, it is untrue that many Marxist philosophers usher the suppression of art. While it is ironic that Stalinist policy intends to curb ‘counter-revolutionaries’—in this case his enemies—by limiting freedom of press and media; American propaganda added further so that it seems that the ideology is also limiting art and kill creativity. We all know the Red Scare in the U.S. during the Cold War saw a popular narrative of communism and socialism that is devoid of freedom of expression. This state propaganda then further become ‘dehumanization’ and make freedom of expression invalid under the guise of equality. Marx argue that total equality is not possible, and the uniqueness is being celebrated by having them doing what they do best and provide the best for their community. Thus, an individual's interests should be indistinguishable from the society's interest. Freedom is granted when the whole society is likely to benefit from an action. According to Mao in his Little Red Book, freedom of expression in art and literature, after all, is what initially drive the class consciousness. It is capitalism, not communism, that kills creativity.

If left unchecked, the threat of this feedback loop is going to cause a lack of diversity, resulting in stale content, less art critique, and overall decline in our artistic senses. Artists’ creativity that are supposedly protected by the free internet are destroyed within itself through the sheer overuse of viral memes. Capitalism has successfully turned the supposedly open, free-for-all, value-free platform that is the internet against the people into a media in which they are undeniably shaping new values on its own: the art culture that's not geared towards aesthetics and appreciation, but towards more views and personalized clicks. How social media and media industry caters to the demands of the consumer are, in Marx's own words, “digging its own grave”.

Spare nothing, not even the nostalgia

Well, people romanticize the oldies. The good old days, when everything is seen as better and easier. Look at the new art installations that uses the aesthetics of naughty 90s graphic design to become new, the posters released in this decade but with an art deco of the egregious 80s pop artist Andy Warhol, or the special agent-spy movies set frozen in the Nifty Fifties. Nostalgia offers us a way to escape from the hectic choices of our contemporary: different genres of music, dozens of movies to watch, and different fashion to consider. We choose to settle with our old habits, that we know just works. Remember how do we throw our money on sequels and reboots and remakes of old movies we used to watch during our younger days? We don’t even care about new releases at the cinema! Did you remember how Transformers 2 and their subsequent sequels perform at the box office at their opening week?

The huge sales of figurines and toys of Star Wars franchise—if we could scrutinize them enough—came from the old loyal fanbase of the late Lucasfilm series, not primarily from new viewers. Then suddenly, surprise-surprise. Our love for an old franchise deemed dead enough to be remembered and treasure soon must be destroyed to pave way for three new outrageous sequels (the ones with Kylo Ren and Snoke) by the grace of our beloved capitalism. Sadly, nothing is left untouched by the capitalism’s unforgiving corruption. Nostalgia has become a gimmick that makes people like some art more than they should, because it’s familiar. It is another way of squeezing your pocket dry.

Not that it is bad to make derivatives like covers or remixes, but the trade-offs are far too high. Consequentially, the number of original arts is now very little, because artists don’t bother making new stuff if they just aim for a quick buck. Most of the young adult novels are essentially the same lazy story progression with only different time setting and different character names. Most of them even have the same ending! No more a beautiful journey like the thrillers of Dan Brown or the epic adventures of Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, which defines their respective times. Do we seriously want to consider Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey as a unique work? Isn’t the Hunger Games and the Maze Runner essentially the same?

If you play video games, you must have known that the trend always starts over. Game developers are making gazillions of sequels, and only a few of them that are actually good. Most are outright trash. Oh, wait, old video games like Homeworld are also getting remasters to cater the demand of nostalgic consumers. No new Command and Conquer release from EA Games? Re-release the 25 years old Red Alert because people will re-buy it! Profit!

15 June 2020 8.03 PM

#essay #writing #exposition #meme #art #capitalism

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frankensteindotpdf · 5 years

Note

69-💯 ask meme GO

oh god here we go. under the cut

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

ambivert tbh...i usually spend a lot of time being alone or being with people and after too long i crave the opposite.

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

nope. almost once but my mom said it was too expensive

71. What makes you nervous?

every single thing ever. legit just...everything. Being in a car. Talking to people. Not hearing from people. Eating. Not eating. Watching my nephews. Letting their parents watch them instead. Wearing clothes that make me look good. Wearing clothes that make me feel comfortable. Ghosts. The concept of just stopping existing instead. Like...name a thing that exists or doesnt and im nervous about it.

72. Are you scared of the dark?

yeah, sometimes. depends on my mood. Outside? All the time if im alone. Inside? a lot of he time if im alone lmao ok so usually yeah but not if im with someone else

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

depends on the mistake and the person? but most of the time i do, yeah

74. Are you ticklish?

yes extremely so but if anyone tries it ill fuckin kill you

75. Have you ever started a rumor?

not that i know of. i try to stay out of drama. It’s exhausting.

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

just like...babysitting. Or I guess cadets (like military club for kids in Canada) counts but im terrible at it. I cant give orders

77. Have you ever drank underage?

hehe yeah

78. Have you ever done drugs?

not yet ;) nah real talk i wanna try edibles or smth but i also am worried about psychosis so im gonna wait till my brains a lil more developed (even tho weed is legal now yee yee)

79. Who was your first real crush?

oh god probably this kid in my class in SK...i had a crush on him for like 10 years it was nuts (unless you count fictional characters because lbr probably madeline or hermione)

80. How many piercings do you have?

just the classic earlobes, but im seriously considering getting a helix

81. Can you roll your Rs?

yep and my brother cant so i mock him all the time hehe

82. How fast can you type?

average for a person who has to look at the keys i suppose

83. How fast can you run?

not very fast at all. ive always hated running. im more of an endurance type of guy. ill walk for hours but i can only run for like...30 seconds

84. What color is your hair?

Supposed to be teal, faded to a minty green. (naturally brown)

85. What color is your eyes?

Hazel, leaning more towards green (though my mom would beg to differ) but my three year old nephew says they’re green and he’s v confident in his knowledge of colours so duh mom clearly they are green

86. What are you allergic to?

GOD i have seasonal allergies and on top of that im allergic to cats, apples, cherries, some scents and detergents, peanuts and tree nuts, maybe carrots?? and maybe this one brand of toothpaste??? i need to get tested again (THIRD time) i hate it. I still eat everything im not supposed to eat tho (aside from the raw fruits..those ones make my mouth hella itchy)

87. Do you keep a journal?

always wanted to, never had the commitment necessary

88. What do your parents do?

Mom’s a nurse, dad’s a business clerk at a hospital

89. Do you like your age?

yes. Im having a Great Time. I wanted to diiiieeee in high school but university is such a good time (im like a week away from my bday so like...not yet but in a week ill be having a Good Time cuz ill be able to buy alcohollll)

90. What makes you angry?

People judging other people, especially when you dont know em and also stubborn people??? like GOD nothing makes me more angry than a person who just refuses to do or try smth for no reason i dont know why other than that i dont really get angry too often (mostly just frustrated lmao)

91. Do you like your own name?

I DONT KNOW im having such a problem with it i just dont know its pretty femme and spelled weird and i cant decide if i like having a femme name or not cuz i dont like being percieved as feminine most of the time but i dont hate hate hate my name???? for now ill just say i dont like the spelling and idk if i like the name

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

Nope. Im not carrying kids so i dont need to unless i end up with a partner that wants to (and the like....science and money to do so). I also like the idea of adopting, so if i do have kids they’ll already come with names lmao

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

gender....is not important*

*obvs except when dysphoria is involved but like...it dont matter to me a kid’s a kid (also who says they wont be nb) (yes most sjw answer ik but i seriously could not give less fucks)

94. What are you strengths?

im pretty nice and good at art (in different forms)

95. What are your weaknesses?

im bad at admitting my strengths lmao and im a big ole hypocrite and i could keep making this list forever

96. How did you get your name?

My parents wanted to name me after my grandmas but their first names were a lil odd so they went with middle names, but then they didnt want alliteration so they changed a c to a k and then they also didnt like the way one name was pronounced so they tweaked it and now i have a name that seems obvious but is apparently both very difficult and very difficult to spell and say, considering no one ever gets it first try (Karaline, pronounced “Kara-line”)

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

Not that im aware of

98. Do you have any scars?

yeah, just little ones from scratching mosquito bites too much or random childhood injuries nothing too interesting Except for one/two on my arm from a staple sticking out of a chair it hurt so bad lmao and now ive got a scar that (tw) looks like self harm and i was so mad cuz like...i never did and now im stuck with this mark that looks like i did and PEOPLE HAVE COMMENTED ON IT i want to die everytime

99. Color of your bedspread?

grey and black cuz im EMO but also i have one that looks like a galaxy and i love

100. Color of your room?

purple and white

in conclusion f u lola but also this was kinda fun so maybe..not

#god that took forever #knicodiangelo

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ogygia · 6 years

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What the fuck is the LBRP?: A guide

Your Reddit occultist friends have mentioned it, it’s popping up on all these Tumblr posts about banishing and stuff, but you still haven’t the foggiest clue: what the fuck is the LBRP?

Fret not: here’s a handy guide. Warning: long post ahead!

Disclaimer: This guide represents the sum total of roughly thirteen years of on-and-off experience with the ritual and my own study and understanding of the Kabbalah and the Golden Dawn system, but emphasis is on the words my own. There will be points that I’m sure other occultists will disagree on, but I’m of the conviction that the principles underlying my understanding of the ritual are unlikely to be controversial among most ceremonial magicians.

So:

What the fuck is the LBRP?

‘LBRP’ stands for the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and is a classic ritual that almost every occultist will come across at some point after they have grown out of their early Silver RavenWolf years. 80s and 90s kids are likely to have first encountered it in that seminal classic Modern Magick, probably in the earlier blue edition that had that ridiculous illustration of a fantastically-robed man drawing a massive blue pentagram before him.

What the fuck is a pentagram?

It’s a five-pointed star as it would look if you drew it with five straight lines (rather than going around the edges and leaving the insides empty).

It’s a symbol commonly associated with modern witchcraft, but it was already important in early Greek thought.

Most occultists are likely to have been introduced to the LBRP as a ‘banishing ritual’ (mainly because that is literally what it is called), or been told that it is the first thing they should learn if they want to learn magick. It is my opinion that this is completely bullshit.

So how the fuck do you do the LBRP?

I’m tempted to link you to Let Me Google That For You, but I’m feeling charitable so I’ll quote the ritual instructions in full from the First Knowledge Lecture, the secret (ooooh) material given to Neophytes in the Golden Dawn system—

Wait, the Golden Dawn?

Yes, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Late Victorian magical organisation based on the Freemasons, did fancy rituals and wore ridiculous Egyptian-inspired headgear and shit. Also a bunch of massive nerds who were obsessed with astrology, the Tarot and the Kabbalah and trying to find ways of corresponding all these different symbol systems with each other to create one gigantic, hopefully organised matrix of magical ideas and symbols that would allow them to explain – and magically manipulate – existence and the cosmos.

We’re not talking science here, of course: we’re talking spirituality. Not that they’re mutually exclusive.

Anyway, you interrupted me. Here’s the ritual, according to these folks:

The Qabalistic Cross And Lesser Ritual Of The Pentagram 1. Touching the forehead, say Ateh (Thou art) 2. Touching the breast, say Malkuth (The Kingdom) 4. Touching the right shoulder, say ve-Geburah. (And The Power) 5. Touching the left shoulder, say ve-Gedulah. (And the Glory) 6. Place the two palms of the hands together upon the breast, and say le-Olahm (Forever). 7. Fingers pointing up, say Amen. 8. Advance to the East, trace the Pentagram with the proper weapon (Wand to invoke, Dagger to banish). Say (i.e., vibrate) Yod He Vau He - imagining that your voice carried forward to the East of the Universe. 9. Turning to the South, the same, but say Adonai 10. Turning to the West, the same, but say Eheieh 11. Turning to the North, the same, but say Agla 12. Return to the East, completing the Circle, extend the arms in the form of a Cross, and say: 13. Before me Raphael; 14. Behind me Gabriel; 15. On my right hand, Michael; 16. On my left hand, Auriel; 17. Before me flames the Pentagram, 18. And in the Column shines the Six-rayed Star. 19-24. Repeat 1 through 6, the Qabalistic Cross.

What in the actual fuck—

Yeah. Riveting.

But this will help me banish stuff, right?

Uh, yes, and no.

The problem with the LBRP is that it’s become a victim of its own success. Before the LBRP there was no single ritual that had instructions as clearly given as this one (or so it appeared, anyway), or one that had such a clear, universal purpose as ‘banishing’. When Israel Regardie published this material it took off in a way that I’m not even sure the Golden Dawn themselves would’ve expected.

A number of things, I suspect, make the LBRP immediately appealing to many newcomers: the safety aspect, which targets the fear a lot of people coming to the occult bring with them; the Judeo-Christian names, which while putting a lot of people off, offers a way in for those who still fear that magick might be ‘Satanic’; and also its simplicity, in that it merely requires the memorising of words and gestures and no major preparation, either in the way of extensive fasts, elaborate tools or space that no one, especially not avocado-toting millennials like me, could possibly afford.

But this is where the problem lies: the dissemination of the LBRP beyond its Golden Dawn context means a lot of people are doing the ritual without realising they’re tapping into a specific current. When you employ a specific symbol set, you enter into the current – the wider symbol set – represented by that system. The LBRP is steeped in the Golden Dawn current, and it is the nexus of important Hermetic and Kabbalistic principles. To describe it merely as a ‘banishing’ ritual – and to use it as such – is like saying that flying to the moon on a rocket is just a form of transport. There’s a lot more going on here.

So what the fuck does the LBRP actually do?

It ‘banishes’, yes. But more specifically, it’s a ritual that tunes into your most fundamental level of existence, and then creates what is essentially a magical vacuum, a kind of ‘empty space’, within it. It also aligns you within a very specific tradition of thought known as Hermeticism, which finds its origins in late antique philosophy and a fusion of Greco-Egyptian thought.

Fundamental to Hermeticism is the notion of ‘As above, so below’ (you’ve probably heard of this). I’m not paid enough to teach you Neoplatonic philosophy here (you can Google that shit), but essentially this is the idea that there is a greater spiritual plane (the macrocosm) that ‘mirrors’ the lesser, more tangible realm of existence (microcosm), and vice versa. The LBRP, performed correctly, will situate you neatly at the point of interaction between the macrocosm and the microcosm.

This is why the LBRP isn’t just a banishing ritual. I quote Crowley:

Those who regard this ritual as a mere device to invoke or banish spirits, are unworthy to possess it. Properly understood, it is the Medicine of Metals and the Stone of the Wise.

How the hell does all that work?

Where am I getting all of this from? This is where analysing the ritual itself, especially in Golden Dawn terms, can help.

To begin with, you’ll notice that the Knowledge Lecture provides two options for how to draw the Pentagram (that’ll be a five-pointed star in case you’re wondering) in Step 8:

Invoking Pentagram

Banishing Pentagram

The commonly described LBRP utilises the second pentagram – because it is the banishing one, duh. But where do these pentagrams come from?

For that, we turn to Aleister Crowley, that shit-head every pearl-clutching witchblr person likes to hate. Don’t get me wrong, Aleister Crowley was a shit-head. But he was also well-travelled (he had a lot of money) and well-read (he probably read more widely than most occultists on this website ever will) and, as his diaries show, an incredibly hard-working magician (though I suppose you’ll have time to do that if Daddy’s paying for everything else).

In Liber O, his treatise on basic practical work for a Probationer of the A.’.A.’., his magical teaching order, Crowley outlines the instructions for performing the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, an advanced version of the Lesser ritual. Like Regardie, he gave no fucks about his oaths to secrecy, and republished a lot of material that was secret to the Golden Dawn. We see diagrams showing how the pentagrams are to be drawn in the GRP – and, aha, they’re drawn differently depending on which element you’re manipulating!

As you can see, the pentagrams used in the LBRP are the Earth pentagrams (ignore the Hebrew God name in this instance: that’s a can of worms I’m not opening right now).

In the Golden Dawn scheme of things the elements are hierarchically arranged from highest to lowest as follows: Fire, Air, Water and Earth. This isn’t necessarily a hierarchy of superiority or value; in fact, they don’t in a sense correspond literally to fire, air, water and earth. Instead, think of them as broad labels for levels of spiritual manifestation. Fire is spirit in its “purest” form (think of how fire flashes and shines but has no real ‘bodily’ presence); Air ‘exists’, but you can only vaguely feel its body; Water is tangible, but it flows and moves and fills; while Earth is the most solid of these. In the same sense, we exist across these levels, too, from our highest spiritual selves to our solid existence in the physical realm.

The Kabbalists call these four levels Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah and Assiah, but I’m guessing you’re not here for the fancy words.

Anyway, what the LBRP does is to tune into our most basic level of existence – the Earth level, where our body and our ego resides – and clear it of any extraneous influences. Traditionally, after the pentagram is traced in each quarter, you don’t just say the name; you project it through the pentagram using what is called the Sign of the Enterer, followed by what is called the Sign of Silence. The Knowledge Lecture itself recommends that

the Banishing Ritual can be used to get rid of obsessing or disturbing thoughts. Give a mental image to your obsession and imagine it formulated before you. Project it out of your aura with the Saluting Sign of a Neophyte, and when it is away about three feet prevent its return with the Sign of Silence.

Thus at each quarter you are essentially opening up a portal to an elemental realm, and then casting the sum total of that element’s influence in your life back into the infinite. The Sign of Silence seals off the process and ensures those influences don’t return.

After having completely cleared off every element’s influence at your fundamental level of existence, you invoke the archangels at each quarter not just to ‘protect’ the space you’ve cleared, but also to ensure that you don’t suffocate in the vacuum. Having got rid of everything, you now restore balance in your sphere by summoning the positive and pure elemental energies of the archangels.

Tangibly, this can manifest itself in many ways: a lot of occultists have found that performing the ritual regularly initiates some serious shifts in their everyday life. Unhealthy excesses begin to make their negative effects shown, imbalances dramatically correct themselves and magicians often find themselves forced to make decisions about key aspects of their lives. Remember: the ritual primarily functions at the most basic level of manifestation – and that includes your everyday life.

Following the invocation of the archangels, you then proclaim yourself at the point of interaction between the macrocosm and the microcosm. This is signified by Steps 17-18, when you say, ‘Before me flames the Pentagram, and in the Column shines the Six-rayed Star.’ The Pentagram signifies the microcosm, with its five points corresponding to the five basic elements (the four classical ones plus Spirit); the Hexagram signifies the macrocosm, with its six points corresponding to the planets apart from the Sun, which is at its centre (that’s another can of worms I’m not opening now).

This is magically significant, because it is a declaration of your spiritual independence and power, and positions you to receive and activate the higher energies of the cosmos.

That sounds pretty intense.

It is. But my point is that by performing this ritual, you superimpose the Hermetic / Golden Dawn view of the world onto yourself, which is why anyone who tells you the LBRP is just a banishing ritual is completely missing the point. And anyone who tells you that the LBRP is the first thing every magician should learn is ignoring the fact that you may not even be interested in Hermeticism (even if it is the foundation of modern Western occultism).

What I’m saying is, you do not need to waste your time with this ritual if you have no interest in the Golden Dawn system, or occultism as it is espoused by old dead white men. No point introducing its energies into your life if you want nothing to do with the rest of it.

On the other hand, if you’re keen on taking a splash into magick and don’t know where to start, and you’re willing to go where the magick takes you, the LBRP is, frankly speaking, not a bad place to begin.

Happy Pentagramming.

Wait, I’ve got some more questions—

I have a few other things I’d like to address re: the LBRP, but I’ll do that in an appendix to this post. This guide is long enough as it is, and God knows you Tumblr slobs have the attention span of a dead goldfish.

Before you @ me, I count myself among you lot. Why the hell do you think I’m still here?

#lbrp #lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram #rituals #guides #ceremonial magick #golden dawn #thelema

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pinesposts · 6 years

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Vote for Mabel!

hello! thank you to everyone who gave me feedback on my first fic. it really really means a lot.

this one is quite a bit longer, and is also NSFW, so beware of that if it that’s not your thang. i hope you enjoy, and as always, feedback is appreciated :) (also, excuse any minor grammatical errors. i’m pretty sure i caught most of them but they tend to slip through the cracks haha)

welcome to Vote for Mabel!

“Hi, my name is Mabel Pines, and I want to be your next student-body president.”

“That’s great, Mabes. Though it might be worth your while to try it on somebody who isn’t, you know, your brother.”

Mabel blows him a big fat raspberry. Okay, so maybe she’s been a little nervous to campaign to the people at school. So what? No matter how bubbly and friendly you are, this is a whole different ballpark. She needs to show everyone how great of a president she’d be in just a few short words, and dangit, that’s hard stuff!

“Ugh. I know.” She sighs, falling back onto her bed. Dipper follows suit, lying down next to her across her rainbow comforter. “I’m sure it’ll be easier once I get started, but right now my nerves are having a party in my stomach and they forgot to invite me.”

He snorts, rolling over to face her. “You’ll win them all over, you know it.”

“Well, duh.” She giggles. A comfortable silence washes over them as Mabel stares up at the ceiling, mentally going over her speech for the billionth time. As she nears the part about her idea for Pet Day, her eyes wander over to look at Dipper. He has been such a big help for this whole thing, hasn’t he? Despite his protests, he was never too busy to come and listen to her speech or suggest that maybe her posters don’t really need to be covered from top to bottom in glitter glue.

Too bad he’s not running for a position, she muses. They balance each other out perfectly. Whenever Dipper gets too focused on doing everything according to the book, she’s the one who helps him look at the creative side. And he’s the one who helps ground Mabel when she gets a little too crazy. Still, he never makes her feel weird for it. Though he’d never admit it, she secretly knows as well as he does that Dipper loves all her crazy weirdness. She loves his too, when cares to show it.

“So, what’s next on the agenda for President Pines?” Dipper asks. “World domination?”

“We’re getting there,” giggles Mabel, “but for now all the candidates have a meeting tomorrow. Just about speeches and stuff, you know the drill. No campaign managers, allowed, sorry.”

“Campaign manager, eh?” Dipper quips. “Got a nice ring to it.”

“I’m glad you approve. I mean, you’ve done a ton for this campaign. Though I still resent your stance on the glitter.”

“Please. You’ll be thanking me when the student body isn’t choking up sparkles during your speech.”

“Pffft. As if glitter could ever be used for evil.” Mabel scoffs, propping herself up onto her elbows.

“Ahem?” teases Dipper. “Don’t you recall a certain April Fools, circa three years ago? I was scrubbing glitter out of my hair for weeks afterwards.”

“Those were rhinestones, my dear bro. A completely different beast.”

“Ah, right. My apologies.” He smirks, pushing himself off of the bed. “Well, if there are no more election duties, calculus homework calls.”

“Aw, boo.” Mabel protests. She reaches out to grab his wrist, pulling him back onto the bed. Her angle is a little wonky, though, and she accidentally pulls down towards her. Giggling, she watches Dipper’s slender frame move closer and closer as he falls. Despite his best effort to stop himself, they land in a heap with Dipper pressed up a little too close to her face. She keeps laughing, hoping to dissuade any weird tension that might come from the slightly awkward position. She expects him to get up any second now and laugh it off. But instead of pulling back, he lingers there for a moment, awkwardly holding himself up above her.

Then, as quick as his weird freezing happened, it quickly unpauses and he’s standing up on his feet again. He gulps, his face unnaturally red even for him. “Uh, like I said. Calculus.” Before she can spit out a second protest, he’s gone from the room. Mabel giggles. She may be the weird one, but Dipper can sure be strange sometimes.

___

Mabel gets to the meeting just in time, sliding into a seat next to a particularly cute blonde-haired boy. She had gotten into a nasty game of tug-of-war with the vending machine but luckily had came out victorious. Now, settling into her seat with her fruit snacks in hand, she gazes around the room. There are a couple people here she recognizes from various classes but the rest are completely unknown to her. She gives a tiny wave at Lizzie from Art just as the teacher supervisor strides in.

“Hello, everyone!” greets the cheery red-haired teacher. “I’m Ms. Blais. It’s great to see so many candidates this year! That means the pressure’s on, though!”

Mabel smiles. She’s pretty sure that this Blais lady teaches science, which is why they’ve never met, but she seems cool enough.

“Have you had Blais before?” A voice whispers from beside her. Mabel shakes her head in the voice’s direction, realizing it’s none other than Cute Blonde Boy. “That sucks. She’s a riot. Mind you, her class is brutal, but she’s so cool it makes up for it.”

“If I ever lose my mind and decide to take a chemistry course, I’ll make sure she’s the unfortunate soul that gets to teach me.” Mabel giggles.

“Maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit, but I wouldn’t call it unfortunate to have you around.” The boy replies, his cheeks turning pink ever-so-slightly.

“D’awww.” Mabel replies, unable to contain her smile. “I’m Mabel.”

“Felix.” He replies, running a hand through those pretty yellow locks. “So, what are you-”

“Felix!” Ms. Blais cries out, shooting an overly-animated disapproving glare his way. “There’ll be plenty of time to chat up the girls after the meeting, ‘kay?”

Felix smirks back at her. “Sure thing, Ms. B.” The petite teacher clicks her tongue disapprovingly, but that doesn’t mask the smile stretching across her face. She continues making her way around the room, passing out identical white forms to every student.

“Now, I’ll keep this short. We’ve got speeches coming up at the end of the week, which means you all need to submit your final drafts by Wednesday. Not that I don’t trust you all to keep your speeches G-rated, but I don’t trust any of you. The next day will be speeches right after lunch, and then everyone will return to their classes to vote. We’ll announce the results Friday! Any questions?” Ms. Blais finishes her short speech, glancing around the room a couple times for raised hands. Upon finding none, she smiles and places the remaining forms into the crook of her arm. “Well, then. See you on the ice, kids.”

Felix and Mabel continue to chat as they exit the meeting. She finds out that he’s a total science nerd (but like, an adorkable one), he’s in three of Dipper’s classes, and he has a pet snake. How awesome is that! She also learns that he’s directly competing against her for president, but hey! Who doesn’t like some friendly competition now and again? Mabel leaves her lunch hour behind feeling totally smitten, and knows she has to tell Dipper as soon as freakin’ possible.

“Do you know a guy named Felix Ross?” she asks later on their car drive home. Dipper absentmindedly turns onto their street, his face contorted in thought.

“I think so. Kinda tall, blonde guy?” Dipper asks, and is promptly replied to with a nod. “Yeah, he’s in my Calculus class, I think. And maybe Physics? Not sure.” He pauses. “Why do you ask?”

“I met him at the campaign meeting during lunch. Gosh, and to think I could’ve gone my whole life without meeting a dreamboat like him. Running for prez sure has its perks, eh?” Mabel giggles. She notices Dipper’s grip grows slightly tighter on the steering wheel as he pulls into their driveway.

“I mean, he seems like kind of an ass to me.” Dipper says. And with that, he exits the car. Mabel huffs in her seat. Dip sure can be a party pooper sometimes.

Mabel spends the next day and a half falling head over heels for Felix. As soon as she gets home from school that day, she cracks open her phone and sent Felix a jokey message she hopes will make him laugh. Success is reached in the form of a laughing emoji reply, followed by him asking about her day went. He was so nice to her, but never in a way that felt forced or phony. It was just him being a genuinely nice guy. And she felt so comfortable talking to him! The only other guy she felt like that with was Dipper.

Who, speaking of which, has grown even more sure that Felix is a “total ass”. But how does he know? It’s not like he’s ever talked to the guy. As far as Mabel is concerned, Felix is as perfect as they come. And heck if she was going to pass that up!

Which is why she might have gotten a teensy-weensy bit carried away the following day after school, when Felix asks her to help him “Mabel-ify” his posters. It’s not her fault the guy doesn’t know which end of a glue gun is up! As far as Mabel’s concerned, this is a crafting emergency that desperately begs for her attention.

Still, she winces when she sees Dipper’s name come up on her phone. Shoot! She forgot to cancel.

“Hey, Dip. Listen…”

“Hey, where are you?” Dipper asks. He sounds concern, like he’s worried something must’ve happened to her. Aww. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine…” she trails off, dreading having to tell Dipper the truth. “Listen, I’m kinda sorta at Felix’s house right now. Do you think you could pick up the extra poster copies without me? Please?”

She hears Dipper sigh on the other end of the line. “What are you even doing at his house, Mabel?” he asks, his voice small and meek.

“I’m helping him with his posters is all. They are in desperate need of some Mabel TLC.”

That gets a half-hearted chuckle out of him, but she can tell he’s upset. Ugh, she feels so bad! Why does her dumb brain always get so caught up in the moment with boys? Now her brother is upset. But before she can apologize further, his voice stirs on the other end of the line.

“I’ll go get the posters, okay? Just…don’t stay out too late or anything.”

Mabel giggles. “Okay, Mom.” She quips, coaxing yet another chuckle out of him. Operation Dipper-Cheer Up has done the best possible job considering the circumstances. “I’ll be home nice and early so we can practice my speech, ‘mkay?”

“Sure, Mabes.” She hears him say, before giving her a quick goodbye and hanging up the phone. Aw, crud. Now she feels terrible. Still, she’d be lying if she said those feelings didn’t go away a little when Felix re-enters the room with two cans of pop for them.

“Dr. Pepper for you, Diet Coke for me.” Felix recites, passing her the can of soda. “Who was that on the phone?”

“Just Dipper.” She says, smiling up at him. “Now, let’s see those posters.”

It’s just after eight thirty when Mabel finally gets home, which is admittedly a bit later than she had intended to leave. Whatever, she got carried away! Plus, those posters seriously needed some work. She makes her way up to Dipper’s room, knocking lightly on the door.

“Come in.” His voice echoes through the door. She turns the handle, meekly walking into his room. He’s lying on the bed, idly drumming his fingers across the cover of a torn-up mystery book that his eyes have neglected in favour of wistfully gazing at the ceiling.

“Hey.” She says, giving her brother her best I’m really super sorry smile.

He gives her a weak smile in return. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry about running off. I just got kind of carried away, and Felix is soooo cute Dipper, seriously like I almost start drooling when I look at him for too long, it’s really…”

“Yeah, I get it, Mabel.” Dipper says harshly. He instantly looks regretful, and lets out a sigh as he runs his hand through his messy brown hair. “Sorry, I know you like him. It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”

Mabel knows that look. She knows it means that Dipper is holding something in, because she’s always the one that can see past it. Because she is the one that he lets everything out to. It’s a look that, when she’s on the receiving end, makes her heart break.

“Dip, come on. I know it’s not okay.” She says, plopping herself down at the foot of his bed. His legs curl into his chest and he tries very very hard not to look at her. Why is he being like this? Dipper has always been one to hold in his emotions to everyone else, but when it comes to his sister, he always lets them out.

“No, it is. You’re-you’re just…You’re having fun. And I’m glad that, uh, Felix is a cool guy after all.” He says, picking at his faded Legend of Zelda t-shirt.

Mabel frowns, thinking hard. She knows she majorly screwed up and all that, but would that really make Dipper this mopey? Something must be way seriously wrong. Ugh, she’s never been good with this sort of thing.

“Okay, just…” She hears herself say. “If you want to talk, y’know my door’s always open!” She ends this by shooting him finger guns, giving him her goofiest Mabel smile. Luckily, this gets a chuckle out of him.

“Okay, Dr. Mabel.” He says, picking up his book and burying himself back into it.

She sighs. That look is still there behind his eyes, but she doesn’t know if there’s anything she can do about it but wait.

The next day, Mabel spends extra-long at the mirror getting ready. This is for two reasons. One, because today’s Speech Day! And while of course she's going to wow them with all her fantastic ideas, it can’t hurt to be looking spiffy too. Reason number two is that she’s going out for lunch with rival candidate and all around cute dude Felix Ross right before the speeches.

Their lunch goes perfectly. Duh, why wouldn’t it? Felix is a total gentleman. He holds the door for her, makes her laugh like a gazillion times, and even pays for her meal at the end. She idly thinks over their date as they walk back to school, her arm in his. No matter what happens with the election, Mabel’s sure glad that she met Felix. This state of bliss doesn’t last long, unfortunately. Her current Felix mental fantasy is pierced by her twin’s voice calling her name. Ugh. Right now, Dipper? Really?

“Mabel?” He calls again, now standing in front of her and Felix.

Felix clears his throat, probably feeling more than a tad awkward. She may have let it slip to him that her brother isn’t the hugest Felix fan. “I’ll see you out there, okay, Mabel?” He says, giving her hand a squeeze. She smiles at him as he walks off, though that smile quickly fades to a look of annoyance that gets flashed Dipper’s direction.

“Seriously, Dip? I was kind of in the middle of something!” Mabel accuses, exasperated.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I stopped you.” Dipper replies, his face redder than usual.

“What?”

“Listen, Mabel, you can do whatever you want, but I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to be hanging out with your opponent right before the election, y’know?” He shrugs, idly picking at the fuzz on his forest green sweater.

Say what? Who does Dipper think he is? He can’t just barge into the middle of her Felix fantasy, interrupt their date and then yell at her for having a little fun. She won’t stand for it.

“What the heck?” She says, raising her voice despite the other people still standing around in the halls. “This is a high school election! This doesn’t mean anything! “My opponent”? Seriously, we aren’t running for Congress, you know. This is supposed to be for fun.”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just…” He says, his voice tinged with regret. “Listen, I’m your campaign manager, right? It’s just my advice, is all. I don’t trust that guy.”

“You don’t trust anyone, Dipper! And by the way, “campaign manager”, I only gave you that title because you were being nice and helping me out. Not because you were bossing me around. I’m not a little kid, Dipper, I can handle myself.”

“I’m trying to help, Mabel!” Dipper says, his voice raising to match hers. Not a good move.

“Well, quit it!” She yells, backing away from him. “I don’t need any help from you!” She can’t stand to look at him anymore; she’s practically seeing red. Where the heck is this all coming from, anyway?

Mabel feels a single tear trickle down her cheek. Oh boy, here come the waterworks. She ducks into the girl’s bathroom, quickly locking herself into a stall so she can let the tears fly. Why did he have to do this right now? Now she’s going to be all shaken up and sad for her speech! She’s supposed to be all fun and happy; that’s how she was planning to win the student body over. God, everything is so messed up now.

She curls her knees into her chest, pressing her back into the wall of the stall. Tears dance across the scrapes on her legs as she presses her palms into her eyeballs. C’mon, Mabel girl, pull yourself together.

What the heck is she going to do?

—

Mabel makes her way up to podium, still desperately trying to scrub the mascara off of her tear-stained cheeks. God, she must look like a total mess. Eventually she finds herself positioned above the microphone and opens her mouth, praying that her voice won’t be as shaky as the rest of her.

“H-hello, everyone!” Mabel starts off. Lovely. Her shaky voice decided to make an appearance after all. “I, uh, am so excited to be running for your president. And, I, um…” Her eyes scan the room desperately for Dipper. Why can’t she remember what she’s supposed to say next? Where is he even sitting? He didn't leave, right?

“I want to be your next president because I’m super organized, for one thing. I’ve, uh, been part of tons of clubs over the years too! Like, ah…” She had her whole speech memorized less than an hour ago. Then she had to go have a stupid fight with her brother and now she can’t remember anything! Finally, Mabel spots Dipper in the crowd. Despite their argument, it still hurts her heart to see that his face is just as red and splotchy as hers. He looks just as scared as she feels.

Eventually Mabel makes her way through the speech, stumbling over her words and just generally making a total fool of herself. She can’t believe this. All the campaigning in the world can’t save her now. Her posters, the ones she spent days making, might as well not even be up there on the walls. She totally effed everything up.

She finishes her speech on the verge of tears, and is met with a half-hearted applause from the audience. Pushing her way through the couple of people waiting to go on next, Felix included, Mabel finds herself inside an empty classroom. Immediately, she slumps down in a nearby chair and breaks down crying. She’s so mad at herself right now she could scream.

The classroom door gently creaks open as a lanky figure approaches Mabel. She instantly knows who it is, even though she doesn’t really want to face him right now. She feels Dipper’s arms wrap around her, silently rubbing circles on her back. Despite how angry she was at him, all she wants to do now is let herself melt into his warm, comforting frame. She lets her tear-stained face rest on his shoulder and wonders what in the heck to say to him.

“Dipper, I-”

“Listen, Mabel-”

They both speak at once, cutting each other off. The twins let out soft giggles, both secretly glad to have alleviated a fraction of the tension in the room. Mabel motions for Dipper to continue, infinitely grateful that he’s not making her take control of this scary conversation.

“I’m sorry, Mabel. I’m sorry I was such an asshole earlier, honestly, I had no right to say those things about Felix, or any of this. I know you like him and I just— I feel awful. This is all my fault and I never, ever, want to hurt you, okay? And you can hang out with whoever you want, obviously, I just missed you is all. But I know I didn't handle it right, like, at all, and I’m really sorry. God, I’m so sorry, Mabes.”

Mabel can’t help it, she starts to sob. She isn’t upset with Dipper anymore, at least not nearly as much as she was before. Now she’s just upset with herself for letting everyone down, most of all her brother.

“I just feel like I let you down.” She says in a small voice, avoiding all eye contact. “You worked so hard helping me, and I just blew it.”

Dipper grabs her chin, tilting it up gently to look at him. “Hey. That’s crazy talk. I’m so proud of all the work that you’ve done, okay? Seriously. I’ve been looking up at those crazy cool posters on the wall all week and every time all I can think is how lucky I am to be your brother.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Mabel, you’re the coolest, funniest, most amazing girl I know. I’m sorry I made you feel like you weren’t.”

Mabel smiles, finally meeting his eyes. But when she does, she notices something there that’s never existed in his eyes before. There’s this intensely passionate look lingering on his features, like he’s looking at her as if he can’t believe she’s really there. She’s been on the receiving end of similar looks from boys a handful of times before, but nothing this intense and definitely nothing like this from her brother.

Behind all that is something else. It’s almost hidden, but Mabel knows him better than anyone and picks up on it. Behind the adoration is fear, she realizes. He’s deeply afraid. She gulps, watching him gaze at her in a way he hasn’t ever looked at her before. A look of admiration, of passion, of fear of what it all must mean.

A montage plays in Mabel’s head of the past few days and she realizes something earth-shattering. This isn’t the first time Dipper’s looked at her like this; not by a long shot. He’s been looking at her like this for a while now. But there’s always been some distraction; the campaign, an upcoming test, a new cute boy. Right now, though, it’s just the two Pines twins, staring deeply into each other’s eyes. And for the first time, she’s finally noticing just how Dipper looks at her. It’s anything but platonic.

She watches him get closer and closer to her face. This can’t be real. Dipper Pines, her brother, is inching his way towards her lips. There’s no way he’s really doing this, right? He’s just… he’s just… Her mind goes blank.

He’s kissing her.

It’s extremely soft; so gentle that if she wasn’t holding her breath and remaining as still as a statue she might not even have noticed it. She can’t bring herself to push him off of her; she’s in shock. Dipper takes this as a green light, and continues to gently press kisses upon her lips. His thumb caresses her cheek, in a way that (gulp) might have actually made her shudder a little.

So this is really happening, then. Her brother, her best friend for life is kissing her. Why isn’t she pushing him away? Why is she kind of sort of maybe—

“What the fuck.” A deep male voice whispers from behind them. Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.

The twins instantly break apart. All the colour has drained from Dipper’s face. He’s terrified. Still, he inches his way in front of Mabel to shield her from the person in front of them.

“Felix, let’s not make any rash decisions, okay?” Dipper speaks, his voice quivering and breaking in ways she hasn’t heard since middle school. Mabel, meanwhile, can’t even manage to look up at Felix’s face. She’s frozen in place.

She hears Felix slam the door, presumably running off to go tell everyone what he saw. Mabel sinks to her knees, her face once again buried in her hands as she sobs. This time, though, she isn’t sobbing for some stupid presidential campaign. She’s crying for her, and her brother, and oh god, she’s going to have to move schools, and her parents will find out, and they’ll separate her and Dipper, even though neither of them know what they’re doing. They’re just stupid kids, for God’s sake. They’re just kids.

“Mabel.” Dipper finally breaks the silence, his voice shaking ever so slightly.

“I-I don’t want to talk to you right now.” She heaves through tears.

“I’ll make this right, Mabel, okay? I’ll fix everything. You don’t need to worry. Just pretend this never happened. Please.” The pleading in his voice is so desperate it makes her heart break. But she can’t seem to move from her position. She can’t go comfort him right now. She can’t do anything but cry.

By the time she looks up, he’s gone.

—

Mabel wants to scream. Instead, she settles for roughly throwing her phone down against her mattress. She’s called Felix a grand total of six times, and every single time she’s gone straight through to voicemail.

Truthfully, she doesn’t even really know what she’d say to him if he picked up. Beg him to take her back? Definitely not. They’re way beyond that. Probably just plead with him not to think she’s a freak, to keep quiet about what he saw. To yell, to apologize. Maybe she’d just cry. Who knows?

Usually she’d ask Dipper for guidance about these kinds of situations. She’d curl up next to him under his covers and have a good cry. Then, once she was all cried out, she’d watch as he sat down at his desk and sketched out a thirty-something part plan to fix everything.

This time, though, there’s no long-winded plan to guide her. In fact, Mabel hasn’t even seen Dipper since that super awful moment in the empty classroom. When she had finally gotten home, she gave his bedroom door a soft knock that was met with no answer. She knew he was in there; she could hear him softly crying. The sound felt close, as if he was right on the other side of the door. She slumped down against his doorframe, her chest heaving as she silently cried into her knees.

Now, she’s lying down on her bed, still heaving the same tears but desperately trying to think of absolutely anything else.

How on Earth are they going to fix this?

The next day is almost as tough, though at least the tears have died down. Dipper had left extremely early in the morning, leaving her to sullenly pick at her breakfast for fifteen minutes until her mom told her to just leave it.

Dipper left her the car, but she’s never liked driving. She spends the entire lonely walk to school chewing on the inside of cheek as she tries to resist the urge to cry. How can she face everyone at school, when they probably know the whole sucky thing? How can she possibly face Felix? Her mind has long forgotten the fact that today is Election Day. Now, she’s just trying to survive. To Mabel’s surprise, no one mentions the incident to her all day. In fact, everyone treats her as normally as ever. It’s as if Felix kept the secret to himself. Mabel is completely baffled.

When the results are announced in last period, it’s no surprise to Mabel that she lost to Felix. Frankly, he deserves it a lot more than her. She’s a freak, a stupid, brother-kissing freak. All she cares about now is fixing things. Luckily, she manages to catch a glimpse of Felix right as he’s exiting the school. She speeds up instantly, racing through the halls to catch up with him.

“Felix!” Mabel cries, making everyone in the halls turn to look at her. Oops. “I need to talk to you.”

Felix gives her a blank look. Silently, he follows her around the corner and into an empty classroom. Without a word he sits down on top of one of the desks and crosses his arms. Okay, Mabel girl. This is what counts.

“Felix, I don’t really know how much you saw yesterday, or anything, honestly I’m not even sure what it was that you saw, but…” She trails off. Blargh, she’s no good at this. God, she wants Dipper here. He’d be able to reason with Felix. Even more, he’d be able to put his arms around her and pull her close. He’d be able to make her feel okay again.

“It’s okay, Mabel. I’m not going to tell anyone about what I saw, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Say whaaaa?

“You’re not?” She asks tentatively.

“I’m not that much of a dick.” Felix says, his eyes very pointedly avoiding her. “Besides, your, uh, your brother came to talk to me last night. He showed up at my door and begged me not to tell anyone. I’m not saying I’m not weirded out by what I saw, but, well, he assured me it wasn’t what it looked like. Even if it was, that’s your business to deal with.”

Mabel can’t help it. She runs at Felix, enveloping him in a bear hug. Thank God. He really was a good guy all along, huh? Dipper must realize that now too. Felix gives her back a couple of awkward pats before clearing his throat. Oh, right. Despite everything he’s said, he’s probably not exactly thrilled about being around her.

“That being said, I don’t really think we should be spending anymore time together.” Felix continues, drumming his fingers along the side of the desk. “You clearly have some stuff to work out and I don’t really think you need the added confusion.”

“You’re right, you’re so totally right.” Mabel says, breaking away from their hug. Still, she can’t help but conceal the smile on her face. She’s so freaking relieved, it doesn’t bother her that Felix is ending their barely-a-relationship. There are plenty of blonde-haired dreamboats out there, after all.

“Right, so, uh… I’m gonna go.” Felix says, using his arms to push himself back off the desk. He gives her a slightly awkward smile before quickly ushering himself out of the room. Mabel wants to cry again, but for an entirely different reason. This time it’s out of relief, and most of all, gratefulness.

Thank God for Dipper Pines.

Mabel skips her way back home, a drastic change from the somber way she had trudged to school this morning. Now, she feels light as a feather. She and her brother are going to be okay. She just knows it.

In fact, it surprises her just how happy she feels. Even if Felix isn’t going to let their little secret slip, she should still be upset by the fact that her brother freaking kissed her. That’s wrong, right? Any normal person would think so.

But for some reason, Mabel doesn’t. It caught her off guard, alright. But after she had gotten over the initial shock that it was indeed her brother kissing her, she had been able to focus on the actual kiss. And okay, fine! It wasn’t horrible! In fact, it was kind of nice. She had never, ever, been kissed like that before. No one had ever made her feel so cared for, so safe. No one had ever made her shudder like that either.

What’s even more is that no kiss had ever felt so right to her. Having Dipper there, gently cupping her cheek and leading her through a minefield of emotions in one kiss felt strangely perfect to her. As if it was meant to be that way all along.

That’s not as big of a surprise, though. Everything with Dipper always felt so natural to her. He always made her feel like she could be herself with him, even (especially) at her weirdest. She knew that Dipper felt the same way too. Heck, she was the only person he was ever truly comfortable around. It made her feel good, knowing that she was the one person he trusted in that way.

Why Dipper has such a problem with being himself, she’ll never understand. Frankly, he’s the best person she’s ever known. From his weird-mystery solving antics to his torn-up collection of mystery books to the super cute way he looks at her when he’s just woken up—

Oh, fiddlesticks.

It hits her like a dang truck.

She loves him.

She really, truly is head over heels for her brother. Her best friend for life.

Mabel can’t believe it took her this long to see it. She’s always known on some level that they were different than your average siblings. She’s heard countless people tell her how nice it is that they’re so close, but even then, she knew it was something more. And in a way, the platonic love is still there. They tease each other relentlessly, and get into stupid arguments, and god knows how competitive they both get over Saturday morning video game marathons. But there’s always been that longing, that insatiable urging inside of her that they’ve got to be more than just “close”.

Dipper just seemed to realize it first, is all. That’s no surprise, though. He’s the one who loves mysteries. He thrives off of them, it seems. While Mabel is always content with stopping to smell the roses, Dipper constantly needs to know exactly what’s going on. She wonders how long he’s known for.

Her feet stop at the front door of her house. Oh. She’s home. Well, it’s now or never. Mabel slowly makes her way up to her brother’s door. She’s made the trip up these stairs thousands of times, and yet now it feels completely new. In a way, she’s a completely new Mabel.

Before she knows it, though, her knuckles are rapping against his door.

“Mabel?” A shaky voice calls out through the door.

“That’s my name.” Mabel replies softly. There’s no answer, so she gingerly reaches over to the doorknob and opens the way in. The sight she’s met with makes her heart break. Dipper is sitting on his bed, eyes puffy and red. His knees are tucked into his chest and he is quite deliberately avoiding eye contact with her.

“Dipper?” She whispers. Without looking up at her, his hand reaches up and gives her a gentle wave. Welp. This might be harder than she thought. Truthfully, Mabel had sort of pictured that she’d just run up here and fall into his arms and they’d figure everything out later. Turns out, this might require a tiny bit more tact.

After a long silence, Dipper finally looks up at her. “I know what you’re going to say, okay.”

Mabel almost giggles, but realizes he probably wouldn’t take that too well. “I really don’t think you do.”

Dipper looks confused for a second, but then shakes his head sternly. “I do, so just-just listen, okay? I know I’ve made things weird for you, and god, I know I totally fucked up. I should’ve never, y’know, kissed you, especially where anyone could’ve easily walked in. Sometimes I just don’t think, like, at all. I should’ve been thinking that day because I’m the one who’s supposed to protect us. But for whatever reason, I wasn’t. Still, you don’t have to worry. I fixed it all. I talked to Felix and he promised not to tell anyone. Honestly, Mabel, he really does seem like a good guy. I was prepared to threaten him or to pay him off but he just promised not to tell right away. I’m sorry I was such an ass about him.”

“Dipper-”

“Hold on, I’m not done.” He says, clearly working himself up over this. Mabel crosses over to put her hands on his shoulders but he quickly scoots away. “Sorry, just… Well, I think you know why. Anyway, I’m really sorry about the whole kiss situation and I’ve already started working on it. I’m gonna work out all these fucked up feelings for you, I’ll even see a therapist if I have to. I promise, Mabel, whatever it takes. I’ll fix everything I’ll stop— whatever this is.”

With that, Dipper gets up and runs a hand through his hair, beginning to walk towards his bedroom door.

“Wait.” Mabel’s voice calls out. Is that her voice? She can barely recall. “You don’t, uh… I don’t want you to stop.”

Dipper stops in his tracks, turning around slowly to look at her. His eyes are staring at her more intensely than they ever have before, searching every line and shape of her face for some sort of sign. She watches him, turning words over in his head as he tries to figure out what to say back. She knows him best, after all. She knows exactly what’s going on in his head.

So she takes a deep breath in, closing her eyes as she sits waiting on Dipper’s bed. She can’t be the one to walk over, to close the gap, to put her lips on his. But she can sure make it easier on him.

Sure enough, the next thing she feels are Dipper’s chapped lips softly placing themselves in line with hers. He kisses her ever-so-softly, the warmth of his cheeks emanating off of him. Hesitancy lingers in his motions, but he doesn’t find that reason enough to stop. Slowly but surely, just as he had done after her speech, Mabel finds herself being kissed by her very own brother.

And she’s kissing him back.

The rational parts of her whispers to stop, that this is wrong. And yet something deep inside her never wants this to end. For whatever reason, that part deep down is the part that wins, and her hands float up to press softly against his chest. Dipper immediately reaches his hands up to her shoulders, and then her hair, and then the nape of her neck. His hands continue to run up and down her, as if they were dead set on touching every inch of her skin.

Their kiss quickly transitions into something more than the gentle, soft kiss that had originated this whole dang thing. No, this kiss was deep and passionate and god, throws Mabel for such a loop that she can barely even think straight. She clings onto Dipper, the only thing she’s sure of right now.

Oh, and look, now his tongue is —yup, Dipper’s tongue is definitely entering the equation. Wowzers. He is kissing her like his life depends on it, like if he doesn’t get it all done now there might never be another shot. Will there be? Could there be? Her thoughts are having quite the temper tantrum in her brain right now at this whole situation.

Dipper holds her closer than he ever has before, gently lying her down onto his bed. Their warm bodies line up almost perfectly (he’s got a good two inches on her) as he continues to kiss the freaking heck out of her. Her racing thoughts are quickly banished by Dipper’s lips placing soft open-mouth kisses along her jaw, and then along her neck. Jeepers, this feels like nothing she’s ever felt before and oh my gosh did she just moan?

Dipper evidently heard it too, looking up at her with that damn sheepish grin. Her insides start going wild, butterflies flapping in every direction. She knows she’s an oddball sometimes but that is most definitely not how you’re supposed to feel when you’re looking at your brother. Then again, you’re definitely not supposed to be in love with your brother either, but here they are.

Mabel registers that Dipper’s lips are hovering just over the space in between her breasts. That sheepish grin is asking her a deliberate question. Without thinking, she reaches down to the hem of her shirt and it quickly loses itself in the mound of dirty clothes lying on Dipper’s floor. It’s then she remembers that, oh right, she’s not actually wearing a bra. Oh well. Dipper looks her over like she’s nothing he’s ever seen before, like she’s a real life goddess lying there for him. It makes her tummy do another triple backflip because she’s had boys look every which way at her but never like that.

Finally, Dipper seems to remember where he is and presses a kiss in between her breasts. His hand floats up to softly cup her right breast, running a gentle thumb over her nipple. It instantly makes her shudder, but oh boy is it a good kind of shudder. His other hand quickly drifts up too, and his awe-driven fondling of her breasts makes her weaker and weaker. It makes realizes very quickly that she wants all the Dipper she can get.

Her hands tug on the bottom of his shirt, silently pleading with him to throw it away too. Luckily, he gets the message and before she knows it he’s practically ripped his shirt away. And yes, she’s seen him shirtless at the community pool and whatever but he’s never looked quite like this. Quite this…aw god, she’s gonna say it. Quite this hot.

Their bare chests press against one another as Dipper pulls her into another deeply passionate kiss. And she feels something hard push up against her leg. Is that…? To test out her theory, she holds him as close as she can and delicately rocks her hips up into his.

Yup, Dipper has definitely got a case of the sister-boners. But truthfully, she isn’t all that upset about it. Actually….

Maybe it’s out of curiosity, or maybe it’s out of pure lust, or maybe it just feels right in the moment. She doesn’t know. What she does know is she can feel her hand making its way down to Dipper’s bulge and gently grazes her fingers over it. Now it’s Dipper’s turn to let out a moan, and he buries his face in the crook of her neck. She decides she likes this very much, and continues to rub him through his pants. Now he’s the one clinging to her, cursing under his breath and shaking ever-so-slightly. It makes her feel good how easily she can work him up like this, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t want more.

So she allows herself to unbutton those pesky jeans for him, and feels Dipper quickly kicking them off the rest of the way. That’s more like it.

Dipper reaches around to cup Mabel’s butt, using that to pull himself back onto her. It riles her up beyond belief and without thinking she rocks herself ever-so-slightly into him again. And it feels insanely good, so she does it once more. Dipper lets out another curse under his breath before slowly rolling his hips back into hers.

And oh boy, does he hit the nail right on its friggin’ head.

Mabel squeaks, clinging to him as he continues to grind against her in a place that makes her legs turn to putty. She eagerly presses herself into him, but that’s all the work she can really do at this point. She’s overwhelmed in the best possible way and all she can think of is how she’s going to get her own pesky pants off.

Not wanting this to end, she reaches down and wiggles out of her sweatpants as fast as she possibly can. And while she’s there, she might as well get rid of the other pesky clothing down there, right? Soon, she’s lying completely naked on Dipper’s bed. She’s not quite sure how she got there, but she wants to be there; she needs to be there. She needs him.

That awe-filled, holy shit holy shit type of look returns to Dipper’s face as he takes in her naked body. She sees him lick his lips ever so slightly and dang she’s really freaking wet. His fingers trace their way down her ribcage all the way to her lower stomach, and then they halt delicately.

“Can I…?” He asks, drumming his fingers against her lower stomach. She nods frantically, eternally thankful that he just seems to know exactly what she needs.

His fingers maneuver their way through her slick folds, placing just the right amount of pressure against her. She’s always been rather sensitive down there, so it’s lucky that her bro has decided to be gentle. Her insides continue to flip-flop as he continues to rub her, making her want to squirm and thrash about because holy shit how is he so good at this? Dipper’s always been a man of his research, and clearly he’s researched a lot more than Gravity Falls anomalies.

She can’t stop herself anymore and starts to moan, trying as hard as she can to keep quiet so as to not wake up her parents. Still, it’s hard to think about your pesky ol’ parents two doors down when your brother has three fingers pressed up against your lady bits and is making you pant and squeak in ways you never thought you could.

Suddenly, he withdraws and reaches down to his underwear, quickly tugging himself out of it. Instantly her eyes go to his, ahem, junk. Mabel’s never actually seen a real-live penis up close before, so she takes her sweet time studying it. The head, the way it curves ever-so-slightly to the right, the curly wisps of black hair peeking out from underneath. He smiles shyly at her, his face growing even redder than before.

“So, are we… Are you okay with doing this?” Dipper asks, looking down at her. His face is creased with worry and hesitation.

“Heck yeah I am, Dippingsauce.” Mabel giggles, reaching up to graze her fingers along his inner thighs. He shivers ever-so-slightly at her touch. Yup, she could definitely get used to that.

He gulps, quickly sitting himself back down onto the bed. What’s going on? Is he having second thoughts? Oh boy, did she push it too far? She kind of does that sometimes… These thoughts circle around in Mabel’s brain, making her more and more nervous. That is, until she bothers to look at what Dipper’s actually doing.

Dipper Pines is currently hunched over, frantically trying to rip open a condom wrapper.

That’s when it really sets in for Mabel. They’re really going to do this, aren’t they? Less than an hour ago Mabel had been completely (well, not completely) unaware of her feelings for her brother and now here they are, about to go just about as far as two people can go together. She should be scared, right? At least a little worried?

But, well, she isn’t. Sure, the butterflies are still flapping around down there as strong as ever. But scared? Never. Not with Dipper by her side. He would never do anything, ever, to hurt her. In fact, she’s glad that she’s doing it with him and not some random clown from school. Dipper’s a guy she knows, a guy that she trusts. No matter what happens from here on out, she knows he’ll have her best interest at heart. The thought makes her smile.

Dipper finally looks back up at her, seeming to have come out victorious in his battle against the condom wrapper. He quickly rolls the condom on, looking almost upset to have paused their, uh, previous activities. Still, he is soon back and ready for action. He climbs on top of Mabel, looking at her so fondly that it makes her stomach do another round of backflips.

He’s nervous. She can read it in his face. To calm his nerves, she leans up ever so slightly and kisses him. Their lips connecting seem to spring him back to life as his hands instantly begin exploring her body once again. This time, they don’t hesitate in the slightest. Her whole body is free reign to him now. Suddenly, she feels him prop himself up on his hands, his body looming over her. Mabel looks up into his deep brown eyes, giving him a silent, yearning nod.

Dipper lines himself up at her entrance. And ever so slowly, he coaxes his way inside her. She’s way too wet for it to be painful, but it’s definitely a new sensation. She feels every inch of him pressing against her walls and oh god she feels so full. She watches his face contort and twitch ever-so-slightly as he rests himself inside her.

Once she’s gotten used to the sensation, Mabel gently rocks herself against him. Clearly, he’s not expecting that, as she hears a sharp moan emit from his mouth followed by a mumbled curse. She surprises herself too, letting out a quiet whine. Dipper picks up on it though, and gently begins swaying his hips. Holy jeepers, this is all so new and unreal and yet it feels so freaking good and right doing this with him. She can tell that Dipper feels it too, from the way that he’s cursing under his breath and letting out tiny moans into the crook of her neck.

And oh god, she can feel every single inch of him, twitching ever so slightly every once in a while as he keeps his steady rhythm. She looks up at him fondly, shooting him a shy smile that he returns with one of his own. Suddenly Dipper’s forehead is pressed up against hers and he’s locking lips with her once again, covering her frame with his own.

His hands start to wander along Mabel’s body, delicately grazing along her smooth stomach. But frankly, she’s growing a little impatient. Unable to wait any longer, Mabel grabs his right hand and places it atop her breast. Dipper certainly takes the bait, beginning fondling her in a way that’s certainly a little more, uh, rough. And hoo boy, does that work for her. His fingers catch along her nipples, giving them a tiny squeeze that sends shivers down her spine. She needs more.

“Faster, Dipper. Please.” Mabel whispers, trying not to sound too needy. Dipper looks like his eyes are going to bulge out of his head, causing Mabel to stifle a giggle. He certainly listens, though, and soon Mabel has a hand clamped over her mouth, trying desperately to suppress her moans.

Dipper begins planting kisses along her jaw, tickling her cheek slightly with his hint of peach fuzz. His path continues down her neck, placing wet, open mouth kisses all the way down to her collarbone. This, combined with Dipper’s never-faltering rhythm, make Mabel’s toes curl under and her hips buck up into him. It’s all so deliciously overwhelming and…

An idea strikes. She gently takes Dipper’s hand, placing it inches above her labia. He looks at her confused for just a second and then instantly gets to work. She keeps her hand atop his for a couple moments, guiding his fingers in circles around her clit that make her almost afraid she’ll scream. Once he’s making her good and squirmy, she lies back, eyes clamped shut and clinging to Dipper’s back for dear life.

Mabel feels lucky her brother is such a quick learner. He soon begins rocking three fingers across her, placing pressure all around her clit (but never directly on, she’s still sensitive!) and follows each tiny moan, each whine and gasp so he knows exactly what gets her going. Soon she’s panting even harder than before, coming completely undone for him. She reaches up to her breasts, squeezing and tweaking them in a way that Dipper can’t seem to take his eyes off of.

She can feel Dipper’s rhythm faltering ever so slightly, hinting to her that he’s probably closer than he cares to admit. Luckily, her back is arching and her hips keep involuntarily bucking up against his, so she knows she’s rather close too. One hand remains tightly wound around Dipper’s back, while the other slams into the mattress to grab a fistful of Dipper’s dark blue sheets.

“Dip, I-I…” She starts, barely able to string together a sentence at this point. He nods, instantly knowing what she means.

Mabel feels her orgasm wash over her, reaching from her curled toes to her flushed cheeks as she moans into Dipper’s shoulder as quietly as she can. No boy has ever made her feel this way, made her feel so unbelievably squirmy and heated as she feels right now. And he never lets up, keeps rubbing her as she begins to tense up and her thighs squeeze even tighter around him. She hopes she’s not hurting him but at this point she’s finding it hard not to give into her every impulse. Her breathing, while still ragged, begins to slow as she comes down from her high.

She looks up at Dipper’s face, watching her in awe as he clamps a hand over his own mouth. He’s not far behind her, slamming himself into her in quick, deep strokes. He buries his face into the crook of her neck once again, his cheeks warming her. She can feel little whinnies and moans being echoed into her skin as he finishes, his strokes beginning to progressively slow until he stops completely. For a moment he just lies atop her, desperately trying to catch his breath.

Eventually, he looks up at her.

Now Mabel has gotten plenty of smiles from her brother. “Happy Birthday I love you” smiles, “Oops I accidentally ate your last cookie” smiles, even sarcastic “oh aren’t you funny” smiles. Such is the nature of their relationship, after all. They are a smiley duo. But the smile she gets right then from him is unlike any she’s ever gotten before. It’s swimming with desire and with contentment, but most of all with adoration. It’s a smile she hopes she’ll get to see plenty more of.

—

Soon, Mabel is lying under Dipper’s comforter in his baggy old Mathletes t-shirt, his arms wrapped snugly around her. She can feel his rhythmic breathing on her shoulder, and her heart flutters happily.

Oh, boy, is there gonna be a big long talk between them tomorrow. Probably some tears shed, at least on her part. She’s no stranger to getting emotional, but Dipper has been known to grow a little teary-eyed when the time is right.

If this is going to be a regular thing, there’ll be even more to work out. They won’t be able to walk down the halls holding hands like a regular couple, and they’ll have to figure out a way to maneuver around her parents. Heck, they’ve already started that trend; Dipper has an alarm set for early in the morning so she can safely retreat back to her own room.

But no matter what happens, they’ll always have each other. That much, at least, she knows to be true.

#pinecest #pinescest #dipper x mabel #mabel x dipper #ppfics

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