Dear Professor Celestia

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

and the conclusion that the show comes to over and over is both that it is possible to become a better person, and because it’s possible we owe it to each other to keep trying to be better– for all eternity if we must. 

there’s no end to it, and (should I make a prediction) no real “good place” where you’ve gotten to the finish line and “won” at being a good person. it’s an eternal commitment to other people. 

The underlying theme of all of his shows is essentially chesed (חֶסֶד), which basically translates to loving-kindness. But not just like, loving kindness? But a DUTY to loving-kindness, a duty to tikkun olam, or repairing the world through acts of genuine chesed.

Tahani was committed to good works, but not out of a commitment to loving-kindness. Not for others and, tbh, not for herself, since she spent her whole life feeling “less” than Kamilah. To love others as yourself, you have to love yourself.

Similarly, Chidi was desperately unkind and unloving to himself, and thus denied the *whole world* loving-kindness. TGP shows this in the way Chidi’s thought- and behavior patterns that hurt him throughout his life were also inherently harming the people around him who loved him.

Eleanor purposely acted against loving-kindness, to the point where seeing others engaged in it made her angry.

Jason, honestly, had a very kind and loving soul, but his actions caused harm to others (whether that was his intention or not, and honestly it seems like he mostly just didn’t understand the impact of his choices a lot of the time… but harm is harm).

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” “learn to do good,” etc. I’m not saying that TGP ~is Jewish, because it’s not, but I AM saying that you can see Schur’s ethical framework in his art, and trying to look at any of his shows through a Christian lens is going to skew them.

Baroque: Dexterity

Classical: Intelligence

my favorite jewish answer is “idk i’m not dead.” 

But there is no universally agreed upon concept of an afterlife, as My Jewish Learning (.com) puts it:

Though some Jewish scholars have tried to clarify these ideas, it would be impossible to reconcile all the Jewish texts and sources that discuss the afterlife.

also please note no one needs to be jewish for this stuff to apply it’s like…universal in terms of good people are good people regardless of their jewishness. 

anyways there is Gehinnom which some people think of as “bad” and where you might be “punished”, and other people think of as…more like a necessary part of the process of the afterlife. The Chabad website likens it to a soul-washing machine. Their metaphor for explaining it is roughly: “if you were a sock, you might be worried about all that boiling water and soap and vigorous spinning around in a cycle, but the purpose is to clean it, not cause it eternal pain and suffering. Eventually you leave the washing machine, hit the dryer, and come out smelling nice and fresh. But instead of being a sock, you are a soul, and instead of a washing machine you have gehinnom and also you still rest on shabbat.”*** 

the timeline of being here is one year maximum. if you are a really bad egg and a year can’t cleanse your soul, you cease to exist probably. i mean i don’t know, but this is a theory. most people go to gehinnom because well, we all have grass stains and dirt nothing to be ashamed of, you just wanna get that scrubbed off before you hit the sock drawer. Sheol might be another word for this place, or it might be a word for like “oblivion” of the spirit or might just be a place of like…rest of the soul. 

*** side note: a good jewish story about gehinnom/gehenna says that if a jewish person was in the habit of visiting their rabbi for dinner on shabbat but is in gehenna and their rabbi is in Gan Eden already (the clean laundry, basically) your soul is allowed to continue to see your Rabbi for shabbat dinner, and most rabbis smuggle their congregants into Gan Eden and don’t give them back. they hide you after you come over for shabbat dinner. but this is a story i mean who knows. 

there is gan eden which is the “nice place” probably. This is closer to what you might think of as heaven, because it is wonderful and feels great and is like experiencing shabbat x 30985734985723089. presuming it is a real place, only the very righteous go there directly after death. 

then there is also olam haba, or “the world to come” which is maybe the same thing as gan eden, or maybe an era of the world that could in theory exist, here on earth, where everything is great and wonderful, and we are obligated to make it happen here on earth by being good people right now and fixing/repairing the world (tikkun olam). 

so ultimate the answer is: well uh, we have some theories about this maybe but the issue is being a good human while you are alive, because living as a human right now is not a speculative exercise, but actual reality. 

…actual, I-swear-I-am-not-making-this-up, childhood character CONVINCING JON from Fraggle Rock.

The evidence: Convincing Jon was a motivational speaker who could convince anyone to do anything: his first appearance involved him convincing people to stop doing things they enjoyed, even when the result almost destroyed their home. He is ultimately unable to undo the negative consequences of the disaster he has created.

Sound Familiar?

Hustlecat Print! (photoshop)

If you didn’t know, a bunch of my best pals are kickstarting a visual novel called Hustle Cat!  If the kickstarter gets to $30K, everyone who backs at $60 or above will receive a copy of this print!  But act fast, there’s less than three days left!!

Which is why Ryan, McConnell and their ilk are so arrogant. They feel that their seats are assured, even if the majority of the voters want them out of office. It’s the November 2016 election all over. They don’t mind having the illusion of elections, but they don’t want elections to have any impact. They are in office–and they never intend to leave.

But even though impeachment is pretty much only something Democrats are yelling about right now, there is limited Republican support for an independent investigation of Trump’s ties with Russia. 

Fairy tale dragons? They’re like Smaug. They’re arrogant, talkative, they hoard treasure, they eat virgins. They’re amoral rather than evil, but they are intelligent monsters.

The dragon in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the one indirectly responsible for Eustace’s draconic curse is along the same lines.

At that time that is what a dragon was. There was a general consensus in western literature that dragons were, well, that.

In Medieval stories, dragons are to be killed by brave men. Gawain fights “wyrms” - a kind of wingless dragon. St. George slays a dragon. So does Beowulf. So does King Arthur. To be a worthwhile myth hero you have, at some point, to slay a dragon.

Early modern and nineteenth century dragons - we see one counter example - Faustus chariot is drawn by dragons in “Doctor Faustus.” The first really solid “friendly dragon” story is The Reluctant Dragon, which became a 1941 Disney film. That is the first story I can find about a dragon that befriends a human - but it’s friendship, not “human masters dragon.”

The second friendly dragon is E. Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons” who decides he’d rather hang out with the princess than fight the prince (the first example of subversion of the dragons eat maidens trope that I can find).

But they’re the minority.

In the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing, dragons were the bad guys. The rare exceptions were dragons deciding not to act like dragons.

Then something happened.

That something probably started with a 1948 children’s book called “My Father’s Dragon - about a kid who runs away to Wild Island and rescues a baby dragon. Heard of it? If you’ve studied kid lit, sure, it won a ton of awards. Otherwise…nope, and certainly in Dawn Treader, written in 1950, dragons were still bad.

In the 1960s we start to see a couple more “good” dragons. But it’s almost always the same thing. Dragons are bad, except this one. This is a special dragon.

Then in 1967 John Campbell ran a story in Analog named Weyr Search. Heard of that one? Yup.

It was part of a novel called Dragonsflight, written by Grand Master Anne McCaffrey.

And she completely changed what dragons were.

Anne’s dragons were gentle, genetically engineered protectors who bonded to a human rider at birth and were “mastered” by that rider - the dragons offered instinct, but the reason came from the humans.

Anne McCaffrey was one of the first female authors to write science fiction by women about women - and while she had a number of flaws and was honestly a better worldbuilder than writer she inspired a lot of people.

And changed our view of dragons as a fantasy trope.

Since then most fantasy writers that include dragons have them as friendly and willing to be ridden by humans. Even the “good” dragons in the DragonLance novels.

In other words: In the space between Tolkein and Martin, who’s first short story collection was published in 1976, almost a decade after Weyr Search Anne McCaffrey turned dragons on their head.

Daenerys’ dragons owe more in their lineage to Ramoth than they do to Grendel, the dragon slain by Beowulf.

What you say is so true, fantastic world building, not the best writer.

“nocturne”