a very powerful fire demon

The Cost of Resistance, Aeden Romeyn (@lettucealone)

Renee Nicole Good was not the first and is already not the last. She was the latest in a long line of murders, she just happened to be a white citizen. If you've just started paying attention, ask yourself how much you're willing to lose before you act? The later you begin, the higher the cost of resistance.

But the fandom immediately did what fandoms all do and put on blorbo glasses where all is forgiven from the get-go and The Character never did anything wrong nor can he do wrong and every interesting jagged corner is planed down into the exact same cute soft shaped doll as every other completely indistinguishable Sad White Man© character. Fanon textual Funko POPS with the same dead eyes and vaguely painted over same features. Most people simply did not seriously engage with the gravity of Caleb's actual backstory.

But The Mighty Nein has made it very hard to not engage with it. Episode 5 is one of the most viscerally intense and disturbing pieces of animation I've ever seen. It didn't cut away from anything. It didn't tone anything down. It didn't try to remove Caleb's agency and his desire to do what he did, even while also showing how deeply he was manipulated down that path. We just have to sit with the shocking and very uncomfortable reality of what happened to him and what he did. And that he's not shrugging away from that violence now, he just wants to turn it against the people he views as the real traitors to the Dwendalian Empire: Trent Ikithon and his Volstruckers.

Incarcerating him in a mental institution for a decade clearly didn't quell that rage or desire to act. If anything it just concentrated his desire to retaliate. That was never an effective method of "justice" in the text anymore than it's effective in our world. Although a LOT of social media is very big on forever punishing evildoers as some kind of righteous praxis no matter what politics they claim to value. It's a very ingrained mindset. People really hate if you ask if that vengeance-driven policy has any evidence-based research that shows it actually reduces crime and violence (it doesn't).

THE RED KINGDOM (PART 2)

READ PART 1 HERE/BUY THE ZINE HERE

A dance that never ends

Archeologists: the sarcophagus lid of Pakal the Great depicts the moment of his transformation from a living lord to a sacred ancestor, literally poised between life and death along the axis of the World Tree as he descends into the underworld. It's a beautiful and stunning piece of art providing an unparalleled glimpse of Maya cosmology.

this is how i pictured niclays every time

Éowyn, disguised as Dernhelm, among the Riders of Rohan ⚔️