one thing that is fascinating to me about merrill's arc is the way narrative manages to convince a big part of the fandom that she's immature and irresponsible and overall stupid. what we know about merrill and what we actually see on screen is that she successfully avoids possession for 6 years while working closely with a demon, almost every time she participates in some magic/spirit-related discourse she acts calm and confident and has some interesting input, she actively uses her knowledge of dalish lore and tradition to reason with her keeper, and that she actually did make progress with fixing and studying an ancient long forgotten artifact no one knows particularly anything about. but then an old woman who's never been shown to be an undeniably wise and reasonable figure, a guy who got willingly possessed with no awareness of possible consequences and whose whole mindset is still deeply andrastian and a bunch of people who know nothing about magic start judging and doubting her and everyone's like. yeah. she's so fucking dumb.

Maybe the problem with Christian fiction is that it's non-denominational. People are just "Christian", with no effort put into showing what practicing that religion looks like for them specifically. No indication that there are other Christians who could have different beliefs. No wrestling with differing ideas and the struggle of how one should live out their Christian faith. And that makes it unrealistic and unrelatable.

Sometimes, I'm sad about the hobbies I have abandoned or have been too intimidated to pick up. But... what good is it, to just beat myself up over that? My bass is sitting in the corner, patiently waiting, and so is everything else. My life isn't over, and I've got nothing to answer to. I'm wading through a sea of time, and I'll pick up the seashells that interest me, and it's okay to put one back in the sand. The current's waves will bring it back to me if that is to be destiny. I can not hate myself into productivity, so I must swim on.

I think the same can apply to anybody. It's okay if you have dropped something, such as a hobby or passion. Human beings are like that sometimes, it isn't reasonable for you to beat yourself into submission. You, too, can not hate yourself into being a well-rounded person. You must cultivate it like you would a garden - with patience, time, and care.

I already posted before about this (and with this account too..) but seriously, please stop reposting stuff from this blog without crediting the original Flickr uploader in some form. It’s not hard, you can do it in a variety of ways on twitter. I can’t do anything about it, it’s just shitty

Okay I'm a little afraid to post this because of how ridiculous the discourse is right now, but I figured I'd ask anyway.

I am NOT looking to discuss politics or current events on this post.

Can anyone recommend to me reputable, fact-based resources (ideally books, articles, or websites) that can help me learn more about Palestinian history and culture? Pretty much everything I have ever learned about the Palestinian people has been in the context of the conflict with Jews and with Israel, and I would really love to know what is unique to their culture and who they are separate and apart from the conflict. When I've gone looking for this myself I've found: (1) lots of materials that define them as one half of a conflict and only discussing them in those terms, (2) lots of materials that function as Zionist propaganda that erases their history, connection to the land, and unique culture, and (3) lots of materials that function as Anti-Zionist propaganda that demonize Israelis and/or totally erase Jewish history and delegitimize Jewish connections to the land.

I just want to know more about, idk, if they have a specific dialect of Arabic, or the history of their beautiful textile art, their naming culture, music trends, or their olive orchard cultivation. Idk, anything that doesn't involve explosives and bloodshed.

I refuse to accept a political narrative that erases the humanity of Palestinians or their neighbors, but I don't know enough about Palestinians as people and want to fix that.

Everything. I have given everything I've ever had.

forgive the brief jesus chris superstar rant but. there is a very important difference between the pharisees being villains and the pharisees being antagonists. they're technically antagonists because they're actively working against the interests of our protagonist, but i don't believe they should ever be played as villains. they're not evil or bad or wrong. they're terrified just like literally everyone else in the show is, and their actions are completely justified. to me that's the entire point of the musical. it's not about christianity; it's about the impact the roman empire's brutal and violent imperialism had on everyone on all levels. including jesus and judas, but also including the pharisees, and even herod and pilate. when a powerful coloniser forces their presence on innocent people they are the only winners. everyone else suffers, even the puppet kings and high priests who look like they're reaping some sort of benefit from it all. that's roman propaganda. the romans kept native rulers like herod and caiaphas in power to maintain the illusion of provincial autonomy, and keep populations appeased and therefore under control. everyone in the show is acting out of fear of the romans. the one roman character we do see (pilate) is acting out of fear of his own emperor. it makes no sense to cast the pharisees as two dimensional Bad Guys, especially when the same productions that do that usually offer a sympathetic portrayal of pilate. it would be so easy to stage and direct a production in a way that makes it obvious that the pharisees are doing what they're doing because they truly have no choice, and not because they're pure evil and want to kill jesus for the sake of it. it's not only an antisemitic trope but also undermines a really important theme of the musical. if you can see the humanity in the violent roman governor installed forcefully on conquered land then you can afford some humanity for the pharisees too. they are victims of pilate and victims of rome just like everyone else

I refuse to sell out my own people just because the conversation makes people upset and uncomfortable. I don't care if my opinions are palatable to non-Jews. I'm here for Jews and nobody else.

the imaginary carlos and charles beef that some fans are convinced is going on is giving Netflix DTS trying to convince us that charles and sebastian were mortal enemies that prayed on each other’s downfall nightly

About those new masks..

So i saw this take a few times already and i have some thoughts. Obviously it's paraphrasing but you'll see these a lot similar to this if you scroll in ST spaces since yesterday:

"These new masks have too much personality, they said the people behind the music is uniportant but they now have this new personalized look instead of the uniform sleek minimalist one and it is the direct opposite of what they are saying. These new looks do not fit Sleep Token"

Let me preface this: I'm not going to explore specific reasons why people might hate on the masks because... No i refuse to go there, but i will talk about the issues i have around this a bit.

No.

If you are hating on the new masks so much so as to cry about that "this is not what they supposed to be about" you are missing your own point. You are in fact shooting the opposite direction. You are no longer in it for "just the music" but you are very much caught upon the "everything else beside the music." You got distracted. You putting the blame on them instead on yourself for loosing your own point.

There is no moral highground in this whole ordeal. Please respect yourself enought to try not to look utterly stupid if you frothing about something you visibly misunderstood. Do not hide behind excuses. Do not put this on the artists. Own up to the fact that you simple don't like it.

Admit that it's your opinion purely; because ultimately the artist creating their own art will understand creative choices behind their creations more than you ever will. No matter how far you try to bend backwards.

The masks fit Sleep Token because it is Sleep Token who decided to have them. End of story. You can hate it all you want but it is still part of the shabang now. And don't try to mask your distaste over visuals with shouting about the artist not understanding their own ideology.

If you are so hung up on how they look like, more than what the music still is, than stop and think for a second please.. You have it backwards. If you really truly only care about the music, what it is about, what it gives you, than you are not going to give a shit what they are wearing on stage.

Maybe in a passing few sentences but otherwise you are not going to be worked up about it to the point you sent hatecomments to the artist who made them.. It is shameful.

Besides i hate to break it to people but they already had their personalities with their outfits just not this strongly. III had the random whacky shit. IV had the hint's of this comfy leisurly punk-ish techwear whatever going on besides the fancy stuff the past a months since the summer. II had a slightly sleeker but maybe sort of tech-ish look which is now reflected (in my opinion) much more strongly with this new look (which sorta reminds me of a stylized oni or something tbh and that is extremely in line with their older far-east inspired thematics visually, just saying).

They are not handing you the "we are unimportant" part anymore. They are not spoonfeeding it to you. Not in the way they had before at least. They presume you are mature and smart enough at this point to get it. To get to the conclusion that it is unimportant what they look like. And allow them to still have fun with it.

Or just they are being cheeky and went for something that would shake up the people. I don't know, i don't know them or anyone close to them. I don't have answers. But they are trying something new an it is perfectly fine.

Also which would have come off so much differently if Vessel is 100% btw. Be honest, if they would have been able to perform to their fullest abilities, far less people would be so loud over this.. This was just an unfortunate turn of events and when shit hits the fan it usually never just one dose. And my heart breaks for the boys for all this.

Besides, people were so loud about hating that "they looked the same" and "so hard to distinguish" and "easy to replace because of this" ... now they have personalized masks and looks and the same people cry about the exact opposite they did before..

Also it just occured to me that this is basically the same as the lightshow upgrade. It gives you something to look at at the rituals. The new looks are visually interesting, and with the lighting setup they have now they are gonna look like some seriously fun nightmare creatures btw. I love that already.

So all in all i don't know, i don't really have a point here i guess, but the boys are in such a no win situation right now and i hate the fact that people are shitting on them just because they don't fit their idea of "an anonymous collective" anymore. Which is reddiculous and sad because nothign has changed.

It never was about being a blank page. It was about being human. It flies over so many peoples head but the anonymity part isn't about not being a person under there. It is being about that person not having a name. It doesn't matter if the person has a personality or not. What matter there is that no name.

There is no definitiveness. It gives an open invitation for anyone to step into that person but first you need to recognise that there is a person there. And there is no doing that if there are no traces of personality. Or humanity if you will because personalities makes us humans. Don't make me hold a philosophy lecture here on what it means being human please.

It does not matter who that individual it is by tagging a name on them. But it is extremely important that there is a person there. Otherwise there is no connection point. If there is no person there is nothing to understand. But it does not matter how that person looks like. It does not matter what the person wears. Or what that person is called. What matters is that it is a human being. And as such you can understand it. Our at least you should be able to.

Regardless of the design of a mask.

i hope this doesn't sound like a silly or weird thing to send you, but i'm autistic and have long thought of nico and a handful of other riordanverse characters as autistic and i love your posts about why nico in particular seems intentionally autistic-coded. but i've been thinking, if rick did intend for any of his characters to be autistic, why wouldn't he say so outside of the text at least? i can't think of a good reason why not, when he goes out of his way to be explicit about so many other characters' various marginalized identities and has confirmed things like reyna being asexual outside of the original text. so it gives me this nagging sort of doubt that maybe rick just made nico come off as so extremely autistic coded by accident, somehow. if it wasn't an accident i do kind of wish he'd say so because there's next to zero explicitly stated autistic representation in, like, any media so it'd be nice to have here even if not strictly necessary. either way though, like i said, i love your posts and i agree with you 100% about autistic nico! some others i like to think are autistic are annabeth and leo.

(Most of this is gonna be kind of a tangential ramble to your point and i apologize in advance just bear with me)

This actually touches upon something I've been meaning to do a write-up on recently, which is: depending on the coding, that is our explicit statement. In most coding, actually, that's kind of the point. (Also something something Death of the Author.)

You may have noticed a recent trend across media of characters saying things directly rather than expressing them in a natural way, and often this includes incredibly stilted dialogue of characters explaining things in very politically correct, wikipedia-esque descriptions and terminology that make absolutely no sense for the characters' personalities or mannerisms. This is born out of the idea that if something is not stated in explicit terms, no amount of evidence below an outright direct exact statement will ever count - if two characters of the same gender have an explicit kiss and wedding on-screen, it doesn't matter because they never said the word "gay," etc etc.

In PJO, prior to more recent books, we get plenty of examples of characters explaining parts of their identities without direct statements. Percy never needs to say in outright terms that he has PTSD from Gabe - and it doesn't make sense that he would! He's 12! He's never been diagnosed for that. He probably doesn't even know what PTSD is really. But we, the audience, know without a doubt he has PTSD, because it is clearly expressed to us. That is coding. Tyson is coded as having down syndrome. Nico is coded as being autistic. It doesn't make sense for Nico to turn to the camera and explain that he's autistic and what that means, because he definitely never got diagnosed for it and probably doesn't know what that means cause the diagnosis literally did not exist when he was growing up - and heck, autism terminology was still kind of getting sorted out back in 2007 when TTC was published, so it's unlikely we could have feasibly gotten any exact terminology wink-wink-nudge-nudges short of something like how Percy outright mentions other students called Tyson the r-slur in Sea of Monsters. And in fact we see that same exact style of coding with Nico later on in the series. Nico never turns to the camera and says word-for-word "I am gay, I am mlm, here's me wearing my exact pride flags" (until TOA/TSATS, which... did the exact thing i mentioned about characters speaking like theyre trying to get a good grade in therapy, or giving a powerpoint presentation). But it is never unclear that HoO is telling us outright that Nico is gay. It's not just hinted at. It's there, in your face. But entirely because no one ever outright says "gay" specifically it's technically still only coding. We know he's gay, we know the characters have trauma/ptsd, etc etc. We don't need it spelled out - that's just kind of condescending. It's like if you said describing a character with "eyes like moss" means they were "green-eye coded."

Nico being autistic-coded isn't hidden. It's not a secret. It's very overt. If you know what autism looks like, well, yeah, there he is. Even if you only know very vague 2007 media presentation of autism, Nico in TTC is easily recognizable enough as autistic because that's the point. Tyson is easily recognizable as being coded as having down syndrome and it's very clearly very intentional! It's just never spoon-fed in exact terms to the reader because it's not necessary! You've already been told the information necessary to tell you what is up with this character, so just plainly going "oh they're [x] in exact terms" is very much telling-not-showing and feels redundant. And while there are places for that kind of thing, most of the time it's very unnecessary. Sometimes coding is subtle, sometimes it's obvious, and yeah there are times where writers code characters unintentionally, but the textual evidence is there, and that's the whole point.

And that's what Death of the Author is about - it doesn't matter what the author intended at the end of the day, because if it's in the text it's in the text. You can look at author intent to try and figure out what that text means, but the text is the text. A Separate Peace is a very classic example - author John Knowles denies there being homosexual subtext, and meanwhile one of the protagonists living in 1942 puts on a pink shirt while saying he doesn't mind of people think of him as gay. What the author says after the fact doesn't matter - if it's there, it's there. So Rick saying anything outside of the books is completely irrelevant. And Rick talks about this a lot - he actively tells people that his statements outside of the books are just his own thoughts, but what's in the books is what's in the books, and if the text supports it then that's all the evidence you need.

Nico specifically is a case where yeah, he's clearly autistic-coded. It's very obvious and very obviously intentional when he's younger, and as the books progress it remains a background trait of his but is still notable (except for when it gets forgotten in TOA/TSATS like everything else, including the adhd/dyslexia, but i digress). It's a clear pattern within the first few books that Rick is intentionally including. It doesn't make sense, especially for the year the book was published, for the reader to be directly told in explicit terminology that Nico is autistic, because the reader is already being told that Nico is autistic.

And yeah, Rick doesn't mention Nico being autistic-coded outside of the text, but he also doesn't mention Tyson being coded as having down syndrome. He also said one time that Percy doesn't have PTSD at all, which is very incorrect starting from book 1. Again, Death of the Author. Whatever Rick says outside of the books does not matter, because he already said it in the books. And there's plenty of other stuff in the books that Rick doesn't touch upon, particularly relating to character identity - did you know Leo is Native? Sammy mentions that the Valdez family is Native in Son of Neptune but we don't get any specifics and then it's like never brought up again anywhere. That happens all the time in the series - and outside of the series - Rick can't possibly address every single point to confirm/deny everything from the books. That's what analysis is for! And that's why my blog exists 👍

clones' independence from the Republic and the Empire would have stood on its own as a series, but the writers for YEARS have been hesitant to have any singular clone go "too far" because they either don't understand or don't want to go into the implications of having a member of a slave army call a spade a spade. then they'd have to admit that the CIS is shit but also the Republic is worse than previously presented. that's why they keep acting like the clones have as much and as equal a choice in what they do as any other character in star wars. Any decision they make is stifled by their upbringing and the violent consequences of going against the grain. this isn't to undermine characters that do make difficult choices, good or bad, but come on.

ive seen random people in this fandom make the most poignant and beautiful analyses and arguments about the clones, how they're written, how they should be written. never shying away from the moral dilemmas of the Jedi helping to run a slave army but also being the only option that wouldn't dehumanize them entirely. the moral dilemmas in honor, duty, pride, loyalty, but also individuality and inner peace and autonomy. not wanting to be used. not just following orders.

but what happens time and again when a clone is given the opportunity? they choose to fight. every single time. they say "this is what i was made for!" as they die in battle or rebellion. and i understand that choosing to fight for the rebellion is leagues different from choosing to fight for the republic, i understand that fighting for the rebellion is a noble cause regardless, but at the same time...the only clone who doesn't want a life of warfare is cut? and then before that, slick? who killed his brothers?

I know this is a very unoriginal observation (much like any other), but I'm finally reading The Great Gatsby, and even I wouldn't describe men the way Nick does.

Seeing some of those comments on the fairyloot edition of tog gives me the ick so bad. this fandom can be so disgusting sometimes.

Tumblr is way chiller than Twitter for sure but sometimes I see a post and I'm like. Y'all DO remember this is a block game, right? You're not gonna get legitimately pissy and passive-aggressive over characters doing things in a block game, RIGHT???

Hello fandom. I understand that very few of you will care about my personal opinion, and that's fine, but I find it important enough to how I run my blog to share anyway.

In the future, all of my posts will simply be avoiding any mention of Wilbur wherever possible. His character is a major part of Tallulah's story, but I will be keeping him away from my blog as much as I can.

Typically, I would go with a "death of the author" approach and keep mentions of the character and cc more separate. However, the cc's alleged quest for money and fame changes that entirely. I will not be contributing to that. That's just my personal choice, so there should be no shame to anyone who chooses to separate the two, obviously.

I watched Shubble's video and I saw his response. In my opinion, it was terrible. The way he centralized his own "growth," minimized the pain he caused, and left the actual apology on the second page is revealing. His statement reminds me of some of the past emotional abuse I've experienced, so his content will no longer be welcome on my blog. I believe in the merit of archiving, so I will not be deleting any past posts, but he will no longer have any place in my death family related tags.