concept: a death god that is actually surprisingly supportive and on the side of the good guys, supporting actions and promoting policies that will lead to the kingdom growing and thriving instead of being destroyed, because the more the kingdom grows, the more people there are, and the more people there are the more people will eventually die, and when youâre an immortal god of death, you know thereâs no need to rush. youâll get them all in the end
i like how the responses on this post are cleanly split between âhey this is a great story idea i love itâ and âthis is absolutely terrifyingâ
Yes. A Death that is kind, and patient, and inevitable.
A Death that need not fight against you, that will often fight for you, because why not? It will gather you home eventually. Why not enjoy you first?
A Death that treasures those who fight it most ardently. That loves healers and defenders and survivalists and necromancers and mad scientists and immortal gods. That lets them pour everything they are into fighting it, denying it, adoring every desperate scrap of strength and will and brilliance and raw determination poured out against it. That catches you when your strength is done and all your will and brilliance run out, that gathers you close beneath a warm, dark cloak, and whispers well done, oh child, you were magnificent, well done.
A Death who will not seek to hasten an inevitable end, who will chastise those who seek to hasten it for others in Deathâs stead, who will slowly and patiently plot and sow and siphon away from the great monsters of the world. Because who are they to hasten Deathâs domain, who are they to deny Death its time and its place, who are they to cut short these vital glories that illuminate it so? Who are they to presume upon its will, that is so much larger and so much longer than theirs?
Who are they to call, and presume that Death, of all beings, should obey?
A Death that is not a hunter but a gatherer, who is always and eternal, who loves you, and can afford to wait. A Death who will fight for you and defend you, who will place its hand upon those who would speed you to its embrace, who has no need to rush you, only to greet you when you call.
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that theory that the Arkenstone is a SilmarilâŚitâs doubly implausible, but imagine if nobody knew. If the dwarves were guarded enough of their greatest treasure thatâŚyou wouldnât even need to hide it from that many people, honestly. Mostly a few elves, and all wizards.
and then Bilbo sidles up to Gandalf like, âThorin and all are holed up in the Mountain, but I think theyâre being nuts, so IâŚkind of stole the Arkenstone, I think.â And (itâs been thousands of years since the light of the trees was doused save for the precious brilliance locked away in Feanorâs gems, since oaths and blood and war that raged until the skies cracked and the earth shattered, and the little people of the Shire have no memory of it at all) he pulls out a fucking Silmaril.
Gandalf: *hurriedly glances at Thranduil. the king of Mirkwoodâs eyes shine with curiosity and greed, but not recognition, nor the terrible lust that overtook Feanor and his sons. right, right, he was never in Thingolâs court while the jewel that Luthien and Beren took was there. weâre good. weâre good for now*
Gandalf: Thatâs, uh, nice, Bilbo. Put it away, would you?
Gandalf, telepathically(?): EMERGENCY RINGBEARERS ONLY CONFAB NOW
Gandalf: [mental image of a goddam Silmaril in hobbit hands, labelled âthisfuckingrockagain.jpgâ]
Galadriel, who watched 95% of her family slaughter everyone within 100 miles for several thousand years over these things, including each other and themselves:Â no.
Elrond, who was very nearly one of those people slaughtered, and did watch most of his town be killed before he and his twin were kidnapped for a while:Â Absolutely Fucking Not.
Gandalf:Â Apparently fucking yes. The legendary Arkenstone-
Galadriel:Â Youâve got to be kidding me.
Elrond: Thorin Oakenshield has a Silmaril right now?
I mean, given that Tolkien retconned âThe Hobbitâ so Bilboâs little invisibility ring became an ancient piece of jewelry that controls minds and drives the mighty mad, one can at least understand why it seems plausible that the other shiny white gem that destroys empires and makes the mighty go mad with greed could be linked from his kidâs book to his gigantic early mythology in retrospect??
You know this actually explains a lot about why Gandalf didnât immediately raise the alarm about Bilboâs ring out of an abundance of caution.
I mean, what are the odds, what are the fucking odds, that this one little hobbit stole both a Silmaril and the Ring of Power? Like, you are Gandalf the Grey and you have already dealt with the heart attack to end all heart attacks because this little innocent fool stole a world war inspiring artifact once. You still get flashbacks every time Bilbo offers to show you something and have to employ all of your angelâs serenity and thousands of years of learned composure not start giBbERinG â pleaseletitnotbeanotherartifactpleaseletitnotbeanotherartifactâ.
And then. AND THEN! One day heâs like, âhey Gandalf let me show you this neat ring I found back on our journeyâ. And on the inside a tiny part of you is screaming ânottheoneringnottheoneringnottheoneringâ while a more rational part of your brain assures you it could not possibly be the one-
âItâs this plain gold ring thatâs very precious to me and turns me invisible!â
AND THEN YOU FUCK OFF AND SEARCH THROUGH EVERY POSSIBLE TOME YOU CAN TO PROVE IT CANâT REALLY BE THE RING OF POWER, SAURONâS RING OF POWER, THAT RING, THE ONE RING, LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE TOME, BEFORE FINALLY FUCKING ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THIS SHIT IS REALLY HAPPENING AGAIN
Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DONâT EVEN KNOW.Â
Odysseus: Regret it why?
Cassandra: You wonât believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.
Odysseus: ⌠Iâm Nobody. Fill me in.Â
*A couple of months later*Â
Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, sheâs great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother whoâs not going to treat you like shit.Â
Penelope: ⌠Iâm going to need more details, but okay, sure.Â
First, in order to be Nobody, Odysseus must have already left Troy, been fucking around to find out, and ended up meeting and tricking Polyphemus - and most likely being cursed by Poseidon, which is the whole inciting event for the Odyssey.
Second, since this is after the fall of Troy, Cassandraâs already been taken captive by Agamemnon, so thereâs an urgent ticking clock for Odysseus to get to her before Clytemnestra and Aegisthus do (and kill her), while heâs doomed to be bad at sailing and essentially marooned.
All that being said, thereâs something delightful about Odysseus overcoming his curse from Poseidon while circumventing Cassandraâs curse from Apollo with a blessing from Athena - the thick soup of boons and maledictions from a crowded pantheon cancelling each other out, with human ingenuity and cooperation at the core of untangling them together.
 @queerqueerspawn YAY DISCOURSE Okay, so hereâs how I was picturing it:Â
Cassandra, having *just* been taken captive, *during* the final sack of Troy, is ranting up a storm about how profoundly theyâre all going to regret this because why the fuck not at this point.Â
Odysseus, who has not lived this long by ignoring important stuff like ranting seers, goes over to ask, you know, whatâs up.Â
Cassandra tells him that nobody ever believes her when she makes prophecies but for the record HIS FUTURE IS TERRIBLE.Â
Odysseus may not have encountered Polyphemus yet, but heâs still the guy who came up with âNobodyâ as a workaround on the spur of the moment. A seer saying âNobody believes me, thereâs a curseâ is absolutely enough to give this very clever man the idea to call himself âNobodyâ a little ahead of schedule and ask for more details. He was smart enough to think of it in the original timeline, he can do it now!
Cassandra, who has no reason to lie at this point, gives him the low-down.Â
Odysseus, reassured that Agamemnon is not going to live much longer in any case and also fuck that guy, basically shoves Cassandra into a bag and escapes with her before Agamemnon can catch him. Thereâs a fair bit of chaos at this point and heâs one of the sneakiest people alive, he can manage it.
Cassandraâs advice gets Odysseus home in record time because she is able to keep him away from Polyphemus and thus Poseidonâs curse, along with all the other things that go wrong.Â
Odysseus thinks Cassandra is GREAT. After what happened with Apollo he is WAY too smart to try to get into her robes, but sheâs smart, sheâs gifted, and sheâs been treated ridiculously badly by pretty much everyone. He decides to adopt her - what better gift to bring his son than a future-seeing sister with absolutely no loyalties left to anyone else, right? - and presents her to his wife as a new daughter. Penelope, being pretty sharp herself, can really see the advantage to a gifted seer nobody else can take advantage of who is also Extremely Grateful and Loyal to Odysseus and his family and is down with this plan.Â
Cassandra loves the plan and is an enthusiastic assistant in Odysseusâs future endeavours. Curses and blessings cancel each other out. Happy endings all around!
One plot hole: Penelope does not call herself Nobody.
So Odysseus comes home with some hot young thang who is Extremely Grateful and Loyal to him, and is about to get her hackles up about the hypocrisy of him chasing away her suitors who had only just begun to gather when Odysseus ups and outs with, âI want to adopt her.â
Penelope reassesses the situation.
Sheâs a sweet if deluded dear, and it is just like her idiot husband to want to take care of the sweet and the deluded, is that not why he went to war in the first place? Bundle of idiots, the lot of them.
And aside from the nonsense about seeing the future, Cassandra is quite good about being a princess and developing a relationship with Telemachus.
ââŚ. yeah, okay, honestly there are worse gifts you could have brought home.âÂ
I do like the idea that Penelope would be willing to take the crazy kid on because honestly, the poor kid seems nice and itâs reasonable that if she helped Odysseus somehow they should do something for her.
But if you think Odysseus wouldnât do the Nobody Routine with Penelope and Telemachus so they can have their Own Private Always Correct Seer, you clearly donât think heâs as smart as heâs supposed to be. Like I said, heâs VERY SMART, he would have figured the Nobody thing out VERY QUICKLY.
âJust introduce yourselves as Nobody, itâll make sense in a minute.âÂ
âDad, this is kind of weird - âÂ
âI have had this argument with the WHOLE DAMN CREW like five times already just DO IT.âÂ
*ten minutes later*Â
âOH WOW APOLLO IS QUITE AN ASSHOLE HUH.â
âIf youâd been in the war *I* just went to, the idea that a god would completely destroy one young womanâs life just to cover up the fact that he treated her badly would not surprise you EVEN A LITTLE BIT. The Gods donât treat people very well. Except Athena, sheâs been pretty good to me.âÂ
Side note: I like the idea of Odysseus hearing about the suitors gathering in Penelopeâs house, and decides to do some preliminary recon.
Cassandra, a completely new an unknown person, is enlisted to waltz up to the front door and knock. She, being very pretty and female, is promptly harassed by every drunken asshole there.
She looks at them all trashing their Kingâs house, harassing his servants, and trying to bang his wife, and says, without a hint of irony:
âWhen he gets back, Odysseus is gonna kill you.â
They do not believe her.
Despite it not actually being a prophecy, it does come true.
âŚas an aside, someone should totally make a series of this. Itâs just Odysseus and co. trying to rules lawyer their way out of a bunch of ancient curses. Like, Odysseus is still fated to encounter all the problems of his voyage, but instead of him going to them, he stays on land with his wife and kid by his side, and all of the curses end up washing onto his shores.
For example, Iâm thinking Circe gets bored on her island without some poor Greek King around to talk to, so she decides to travel and is knocked by a storm all the way to Ithaca.
Sheâs naturally pissed and angry gods donât mix well with natives.
So Odysseus and co ask Cassandra what to do, and sheâs like âSorry, chief, but Penelopeâs really not gonna like how you handled this one the first time aroundâŚâ
The plot twist is that apparently Circe is bisexual and seamstresses turn her on, and Penelope also loves Circeâs habit of turning annoying people into animals, so Penelope and Circe get along much better than expected.
It helps that Penelopeâs tongue is just as quick and flexible as Odysseusâs. She sweet talked her way around a hundred horny assholes for ten years. She has Circe wrapped around her little finger within a day. And she has other things wrapped around her within a week.
And like in the original Greek myth, Circe starts helping them out and guiding them through the hellscape that is Ancient Greek Mythology. Only this time sheâs doing both of Telemachusâs parents.
#odysseus#the iliad#the odyssey#greek mythology#Alternatively Cassandra just lists prophecies of people getting cursed and Odysseus and co go out to rescue them.
the fizz comes from carbonic acid in the water splitting up into COâ and HâO over time. And carbonic acid is â as an acid â sour.
By adding milk to sour water you've created a very convincing emulation of spoiled milk, so I'll believe in a heartbeat that the taste is Not Greatâ˘.
Look if there's one thing, just one thing, that I wish everyone understood about archiving, it's this:
We can always decide later that we don't need something we archived.
Like, if we archive a website that's full of THE WORST STUFF, like it turns out it's borderline illegal bot-made spam art, we can delete it. Gone.
We can also chose not to curate. You can make a list of the 100 Best Fanfic and just quietly not link to or mention the 20,000 RPFs of bigoted youtubers eating each other. No problem!
We can also make things not publicly available. This happens surprisingly often: like, sometimes there'll be a YouTube channel of alt-right bigotry that gets taken down by YouTube, but someone gives a copy to the internet archive, and they don't make it publicly available. Because it might be useful for researchers, and eventually historians, it's kept. But putting it online for everyone to see? That's just be propaganda for their bigotry. So it's hidden, for now. You can ask to see it, but you need a reason.
And we can say all these things, we can chose to delete it later, we can not curate it, we can hide it from public view... But we only have these options BECAUSE we archived it.
If we didn't archive it, we have no options. It is gone. I'm focusing on the negative here, but think about the positive side:
What if it turns out something we thought was junk turns out to be amazing new art?
What if something we thought of as pointless and not worth curating turns out to be influential?
What if something turns out to be of vital historical importance, the key that is used to solve a great mystery, the Rosetta stone for an era?
All of those things are great... If we archived it when we could.
Because this is an asymmetric problem:
If we archived it and it turns out it's not useful, we can delete.
If we didn't archive it and it turns out it is useful, OOPS!
You can't unlose something that's been lost. It's gone. This is a one way trip, it's already fallen off the cliff. Your only hope is that you're wrong about it being lost, and there is actually still a copy somewhere. If it's truly lost, your only option is to build a time machine.
And this has happened! There are things lost, so many of them that we know of, and many more we don't know of. There are BOOKS OF THE BIBLE referenced in the canon that simply do not exist anymore. Like, Paul says to go read his letter to the Laodiceans, and what did that letter say? We don't know. It's gone.
The most celebrated playwright in the English tradition has plays that are just gone. You want to perform or watch Love's Labours Won? TOO FUCKING BAD.
Want to watch Lon Cheyney's London After Midnight, a mystery-horror silent film from 1927? TOO BAD. The MGM vault burnt down in 1965 and the last known copy went up in smoke.
If something still exists, if it still is kept somewhere, there is always an opportunity to decide if it's worthy of being remembered. It can still be recognized for its merits, for its impact, for its importance, or just what it says about the time and culture and people who made it, and what they believed and thought and did. It can still be a useful part of history, even if we decide it's a horrible thing, a bigoted mess, a terrible piece of art. We have the opportunity to do all that.
If it's lost... We are out of options. All we can do is research it from how it affected other things. There's a lot of great books and plays and films and shows that we only know of because other contemporary sources talked about them so much. We're trying to figure out what it was and what it did, from tracing the shadow it cast on the rest of culture.
This is why archivists get anxious whenever people say "this thing is bad and should not be preserved". Because, yeah, maybe they're right. Maybe we'll look back and decide "yeah, that is worthless and we shouldn't waste the hard drive or warehouse space on it".
But if they're wrong, and we listen to them, and don't archive... We don't get a second chance at this. And archivists have been bitten too many times by talk of "we don't need copies, the original studio has the masters!" (it burnt down), or "this isn't worth preserving, it's just some damn silly fad" (the fad turned out to be the first steps of a cultural revolution), or "this media is degenerate/illegal/immoral" (it turns out those saying that were bigots and history doesn't agree with their assessment).
So we archive what we can. We can always decide later if it doesn't need preserving. And being a responsible archivist often means preserving things but not making them publicly available, or being selective in what you archive (I back up a lot of old computer hard drives. Often they have personal photos and emails and banking information! That doesn't get saved).
But it's not really a good idea to be making quality or moral judgements of what you archive. Because maybe you're right, maybe a decade or two later you'll decide this didn't need to be saved. And you'll have the freedom to make that choice. But if you didn't archive it, and decide a decade later you were wrong... It's just gone now. You failed.
Because at the end of the day I'd rather look at an archive and see it includes 10,000 things I think are worthless trash, than look at an archive of on the "best things" and know that there are some things that simply cannot be included. Maybe they were better, but can't be considered as one of the best... Because they're just gone. No one has read them, no one has been able to read them.
We have a long history of losing things. The least we can do going forward is to try and avoid losing more. And leave it up to history to decide if what we saved was worth it.
My dream is for a future where critics can look at stuff made in the present and go "all of this was shit. Useless, badly made, bigoted, horrible. Don't waste your time on it!"
Because that's infinitely better than the future where all they can do is go "we don't know of this was any good... It was probably important? We just don't know. It's gone. And it's never coming back"
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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo weâve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and itâs revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? Thatâs lived in my mind for years and I havenât seen it in a long time
Oh, love that story, adding it to the list:
20. Princess Talia
and adding a few more contenders
21. Thyme
22. The Monster under the Bed
23. A Meaningful Death
24. Humans are unstoppableâŚuntil they arenât
25. The Monster under the Fridge
26. Antler Guy
27. Cleric slamming healing spells
Adding a few more I remembered:Â
28. The Frog and the Scorpion
29. HSTHETE
30. The First Witch in the World
31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by ForestsÂ
32. A Faerie taking a NameÂ
33. The Dragon on the FarmÂ
34. Synovus & MenaceÂ
35. Raising the Anti-ChristÂ
36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)Â
37. Doctors without BordersâŚin Space!Â
38. The Villain-WranglerÂ
39. The Last ContactÂ
40. The 100 Parent-Point ChildrenÂ
41. And the Heavens WeptÂ
42. The Night GentlemanÂ
43. The Serpent God and their PriestessÂ
My specialty at work (eg, what I tend to get thrown into) is wrangling clever but extremely poorly behaved children. (The children are adolescent, but children nonetheless.) They tend to be boys. They tend to have ADHD. (It's possible that the focus on the clever rules out the ADHD girls, who have cleverly developed better masking skills by adolescence.)
The current bright and terrible-on-purpose disaster, A, is aware of the ADHD diagnosis but has apparently been told nothing about the disability. So a lot of our conversations go like this:
Me: Well, I'd ask you why you decided to start making richly detailed but extremely inappropriate jokes during class, but I'm pretty sure the answer is that someone started yelling at you for doing it before you realized that you were.
A, leaning backward, looking concerned: Are you following me?
Me: Yes, that's what I do with the spare time I don't have during the day, follow aggravating children around. We have so few of them here.
A, put out either because I've called him aggravating or because he's not special and aggravating: Sarcasm isn't very nice, Ms. T.
Me, sarcastically: I'm so sorry. Maybe you looked at the work first, thought boring, and then decided to be an enormous brat.
A: You can read minds?!
--
Me: Clearly we need executive dysfunction strategies for you, because if we don't get in front of it you'll be an adult who sits on their sofa for forty minutes yelling at herself to do the dishes and never does them.
A, trying to politely muffle laughter: Are you doing all right, Ms. T?
Me: Out of dishes, but fine. What's working in your classes? Your Literature grade is good, why are you doing the reading?
A looks left. Right. Up. At his phone.
Me: ... You aren't doing the reading, are you? The other kids ask questions because they don't understand it, and you figure out what it has to be about from the answers and never read.
A: Are you in my Lit class??
--
Me: Okay, look, ADHD brains are weird, and we tend to get them from our families, so these -
A, immediately: My dad.
Me, derailed from my drug interaction speech: Yeah, okay. When your dad has coffee, does he get calmer?
A, backing away: You're stalking my whole family now?!
isekai about a nyc apartment block getting teleported into a fantasy realm, and how this group of people who previously have only had incidental contact with one another come together to build a vibrant community in their new circumstances. there's a season-long arc about introducing bagels and pizza to the fantasy world that gets into the details of sourcing ingredients, developing new technologies, and learning how to work with supernatural substitutions.
oh the whole thing for sure, im picturing the whole city block with a crust of sidewalk just dropped onto the outskirts of a small medieval village. im thinking theres probably a corner store and a couple other things included too, so youve got the people who work there or were shopping at the time of the transfer too.
i hadnt thought of animals but having a whole thing w pigeons would be awesome too; have new york feral pigeons meeting with tamed messenger pigeons of the era, a raccoon that was sleeping in a trash can eats a magical necklace and starts talking. love it.
My friend's kid gave me pinkeye and I have been on a particularly fuckt up sleep schedule about it and dreamed an entire Italian Opera on the themes of heaven and hell and the power of love and recognition of the self in other and the tragedy of loving the idea of something rather than the thing itself and the dream ended with the phrase "-And then it was banned EVERYWHERE."
The plot starts off with a hybrid of Cinderella and the Taming Of The Shrew where a woman with her own daughter marries a Duke who has an older daughter, and then the Duke dies under "Mysterious circumstances".
But he leaves in his will that his fortune won't be disbursed until his daughter (the elder one) marries.
The elder daughter (like, 20ish?) is refusing to get married because her step-mother is trying to set her step-sister (age 12) with IDK A Medieval Italian supreme court judge?? (Age 65) , but the marriage can't go through until the Duke's fortune disburses and the mother can pay the dowry.
Other thing about the Eldest Daughter: She Always Speaks The Truth. Not only does she refuse to lie, but kind of like a retroactive Cassandra, everything she says is True. As you can imagine, this is not terribly popular In Fantasy Medieval Italian High Society.
The mother, big mad about being stuck with this stubborn, awkward girl, gets a Lawyer and a Bishop and a bunch of other authority figures to modify the will so that "Should the plague take my eldest, we will not be bereft *wink*" AKA if the eldest just dies or disappears without getting married, the mother will get the money anyway.
(They all know she's going to kill the girl, but they're getting a cut.)
The Step-Mother then, in true operatic fashion of Going Way Too Hard tortures the Elder daughter, and locks her in the basement to bleed out and die.
There, in the darkness, abandoned by God and the Law and Family etc. the daughter turns to the last thing she has left.
BLACK MAGIC
(Come on, it's Opera. Everybody knows Black Magic)
So she summons a Demon
As One Does.
He appears to her in the darkness- And is immediately terrified and transfixed because even though it's totally dark, she's looking right at, and through him, and Can See Him Exactly As He Is.
Which is Spooky, because he's been having some serious self-esteem issues lately- Demon has his own problems, you see- He's a Prince of Hell and thus he's the victim of Hellish Politics and beset by all his fellow demons. And he's Terrible at machinations and scheming because he too feels an attachment to The Truth and it's making him feel Demonically Inadequate, even if he's got the Wrath and Violence part down pat.
...So He's been lurking on the material plane to get away from it all and been watching her suffering, because he too feels the kinship of being betrayed and hunted by all that ought love him and telling The Truth no matter how easy it would be to lie.
So now, here he is in the darkness, and his crush is looking RIGHT AT HIM and he's genuinely frightened because he's never cared about someone's opinion of him before.
His aria about this is pretty great, but THEN:
She reaches out to him and says
"There is something wrong with you
There is something wrong with you that is also wrong with me
What is this kinship I feel with you? The affliction grants you Grace and Beauty, and leaves me a Hobbling wretch
Yet I believe we share some kinship- I know the fear in your eyes, for I see it in every mirror"
(I know the first two lines are from a poem in Mirror Traps by Hera Lindsay Bird, but this is what my eye-pain-delerium brain supplied me with)
He goes down on one knee in front of her and promises to do anything she wishes- He's seen how she suffers and If he cannot have his own recompense, he will have hers-
-For what price?
You are wise, and I am weary- I am a Demon and there is but one currency we trade in. Give me your soul, and I will give you everything you desire.
She thinks about it for a bit, and he makes every offer he can- I will torture your stepmother as she tortured you! The Judge lusting after your sister? I'll make his dick explode! That bishop that has his head up his ass- I'll make him shove it up there so far he turns inside-out!
-Love me. She says. The suffering of others will do nothing to ease my own, though some bitter part of my would thrill to see it. Love me, Truly love me as neither of us have been but deserved, and my soul will be yours.
âŚIf I were to Truly Love you, then my soul would be yours.
-Would that be such a terrible thing?
âŚIt would not. He says, and promptly spirits her off to his palace in hell, and explains his situation as he tends to her.
[At this point my brain extensively hallucinated some real smutty hurt/comfort, because I am hurting and need the comfort]
Once they understand each other, they decide to do a strangers on a train-
He goes to Earth where the mother is planning to marry the younger daughter off to the creepy old judge and tricks everyone into betraying everyone else in disguise as a simple manservant, and spirits the younger daughter away back to Hell to play with Hellhound puppies all while making sure he Never Tells A Single Lie, because it's not a sin for a demon to be honest- it's a demonstration of his Mastery that he doesn't NEED to.
Meanwhile, She goes to the royal court of Hell and goes around to all the Demons and tells them The Truth about themselves, which they can't stand as all their power is based on a sense of self-importance and secret rules that don't actually have anything to do with reality. After losing most of their power to The Divine Wrath Of Autsim, they scamper off to Earth to get more power from their humans, who are all in a tizzy because there's some kind of political thing going on, and the Elder Daughter and the Demon play off each other's work to get everyone ready to fuck up each other's shit.
(This part of the dream got muddy because Actual Plot is something I have to do while conscious and I'm not doing more than I have to until my eye stops trying to to persuade me to gouge it out with a spoon)
ANYWAY, The Final Act is the Big Wedding where all the Humans are plotting to murder each other and the Demons are all shriveled up little creatures and The Daughter and The Demon Prince turn up and reveal it was them all along and that ALL of you suck and have also ruined each other- the Judge has gotten the lawyer disbarred, the Lawyer had gotten the Bishop caught committing fraud, the Bishop has gotten the judge excommunicated and ALL the mother's friends and allies are broke and their careers are dead and now that they have no social agency, they can't hurt anyone anymore.
And then the caterer steps forward and reveals that He's Actual For Real God, and he is SO PROUD of the daughter and the demon for stopping this corrupt fracas without violence or lying! The shriveled demons are Human Souls that had been cast into hell to atone but weren't learning the lesson, and the humans are headed that way unless they really get their shit together.
The demon prince remarks that it's odd that God would be pleased with the work of a demon.
What Demon? Says the Daughter, who always says the truth.
Yeah what Demon? Laughs God. You're one of my Best Angels, who oversees the rehabilitation of the wicked. You looked like you were getting overwhelmed though, so I found this Paragon of Truth for you. And you Paragon looked like you were in need of help so I found this Angel for you! Now, is someone getting married today or are we just gonna let this cake go to waste?
God marries them, there's a big party and The All Live Happily Ever After as the King and Queen of Hell, and her sister gets big into Demonic Dog Breeding.
and then I explicitly dreamed the voice of some art historian saying "-And then it got banned EVERYWHERE."
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In medieval culture, an event like a royal christening is not a private party; itâs the public social event of the year. To not invite any person of rank to such an event is a deadly insult.
Maleficent is certainly someone you wouldnât want at a party, but sheâs also someone powerful enough that only a fool would ever dare treat her with such blatant disrespect. The only way the King and Queen could possibly have gotten away with not inviting Maleficent was to not invite any of the fairies at all; inviting the other fairies and excluding her is explicitly taking sides in the conflict between the fairy factions.
Which means they made themselves her sworn enemies, and she responded by treating them as such from then on. If you actually get into analyzing the social dynamics of the scene, itâs very clear that Maleficent was willing to show mercy at first by giving the King and Queen a chance to apologize for their disrespect to her. She doesnât curse Aurora until after she gives them that chance and they throw it back in her face with further disrespect.
And yeah, if the King and Queen had done the properly respectful thing and invited her, Maleficent would have given Aurora a scary awesome present. Moreover so would the other fairies, because at that point both sides would be using it as an opportunity to show off and one-up each other. What they gave her before Maleficent showed up was basically just trivial party favors by fairy standards.
YEP. In the original versions, the only difference between the three âgoodâ fairies and the âbadâ fairy (who I donât think even had names?) was that the bad one wasnât invited - in other words, she wasnât any more good or evil, she just got (accidentally, I believe) excluded from the festivities and in a fit of pique cursed the baby.
From the medieval perspective, those four fairies were all exactly alike - the blue or pink ones wouldâve cursed the baby just the same if they hadnât been invited.
But yeah, sign me up for the AU where they did invite Maleficent and she not only gives Aurora an awesome present but becomes a mentor and they end up ruling all the land with an iron fist.
As I recall, the reason she wasnât invited was because the Royal Family had run out of golden dishes for honoured guests. Rather than embarrass themselves by having an honoured guest eat off a less-fancy plate, and thus putting into place a hierarchy of honoured guests, for some level of political sense, it was better to have someone just not asked to come instead of having one honoured guest being treated lower in station than the others. Of course, if said uninvited guest found out, she would not be happy, but still⌠King and Queen made a bad call based on dishes, and did something even more insulting than offer her a tin plate.
I was riding with my sister, talking about basketball. Specifically the Southern Conference happening this weekend.
Me: So It's a basketball tournament?
Sister: Yes.
Me: And it's happening in March?
Sister: Yes.
Me: But it's not March Madness?
Sister:No, March Madness is the national college basketball tournament. This is just the teams from the south deciding which ones get to go to March Madness. Sort of like a prequel, or a smaller version.
ME: So it's March Intrusive Thoughts, then?
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"You wanna talk roots? Let's talk about how most of 2012-2015's fan culture is not just extinct, but erased from existence."
I'm actually curious about that, I've never been in any fandom long term. What was 2012-2015 Tumblr up to, and why was it erased?
Porn, queer theory, sex positivity, and beginnersâ attempts at racial justice.
Most of it either disappeared, deleted, or died after the 2018 porn ban and the subsequent antisexual crush of SESTA/FOSTA.
Followed in rapid succession by all the US fascism.
Thereâs this notion that fandom is separate from the greater culture but itâs really, really not.
The same political forces that led a bunch of basically normal but newly impoverished people to join Qanon and become screeching bigots also led fandoms to rephrase âI donât like this shipâ as âthis is pedophilia.â
Nothing new, to be clear. People have been doing that for centuries.
The difference is a matter of centralization and scale. Tumblr WAS fandom, it was where fandom occurred, for about 6 years. Multifandom and crossover content in particular is just GONE. There werenât places for that to move to as everyone dissipated into separate, semipublic, and even MORE ephemeral spaces like discord.
Itâs hard for me to describe, especially unmedicated, but the elimination of huge swathes of fandom in late 2018 just.
Fandom used to be on the absolute bleeding edge of sexual politics, and now itâs this regressive, sanitized, commodified space where people think history began in 2016.