Rabbit Cube

A very tiny percentage of creators go on to be famous, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t remember little things you did for years and years. Who came up with most of the world’s most famous jump rope rhymes? Who coined some of the famous idioms we use in daily speech? Who made up ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells?” Somehow, all of these things stuck and spread around.

When I was a small child, I saw a high school put on a production of the musical HONK. In one song, the mother duck describes various dangers that her baby should avoid in the water, including fishing line, which could strangle him. A member of the ensemble played the role of fishing line, doing a maniacal laugh and over-the-top strangling motions, and I found it hilarious– and to this day, that’s an example I often think of when talking about how ensemble members can still stand out in theatre. The guy who played the role might not even remember that he did that, but I do.

I took Suzuki violin lessons as a kid. The teacher made up lyrics to some of the songs, and she let her students make some up, too. Now whenever I hear the instrumental of one of those pieces, I always remember these ridiculous lyrics about a skunk that we sang in violin class. I don’t even know which student invented them!

In middle school, I found a video about atoms parodying Bill Nye made by some kids for a school product. It probably had less than 1,000 views, but I think of quotes from that video all the time. They had a parody of “We Will Rock You” with the chorus, “Protons, neutrons, electrons” that I think about a lot.

a) No, I'm not going to adopt your superstitions.

b) That's not their name. "Skinwalker" is an english bastardisation. The romanisation of the Diné term is yee naaldlooshii.** Like 1/100 of the valiant defenders of the Navajo on this site even clock that it might be odd for a group native americans to have a centuries old taboo against a very recent (1970s) english word.

c) As far as I can tell, there is no actual taboo against using the name for superstitious reasons. The name is associated with unpleasant topics (cultural association with death, plus, yknow, that time they murdered a bunch of their own tribe members in 1878 through witch hunts, still within living memory when the first ethnographies were being written) and they don't want to talk about them with outsiders.

Fuck you, OP, and everyone else you galavant by "permitting" them to "shake off the guilt" of being racist thieves.

Everyone wants permission to jump in and start tearing cultures apart. They're just waiting for someone to give the signal - ignoring ALLLL the people who say not to fucking do it - because they think it's a bullshit thing to gatekeep from them, and "We were really doing you a favour by paying lip service to your bullshit 'traditions' anyway."

"AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL - **simplifying - we have the RIGHT to strip everything from you because we don't have any value put onto it. IT'S JUST A SUPERSTITION HURR HURR, AND I DON'T HAVE TO ADOPT THAT, JUST TAKE THE THING AND STRIP IT OF ITS MEANING AND THEN WAVE IT FRONT OF YOU. WHY NOT MAKE MY OWN? BECAUSE FUCK YOU, INDIANS, YOUR SHIT IS OUR SHIT."

so you could once again cherrypick what you wanted from us and use it for your own gain.

No, I am unlikely to ever write stories about wendigos or skinwalkers. I have no personal stake in giving anyone, let alone myself, permission to write about these.

hurr hurr dumb fuckinh indians don't even know those shit things aren't real

No, idiotic tumblrites act like these creatures are real and insist on horror movie rules when discussing them for some reason. You can just go on wikipedia to find examples of actual first nations people happily using "wendigo" because the taboo against saying their name does not exist the way some of you seem to think.

Literally everyone who reblogged that post was white, too.

Straightforwardly untrue. Don't lie about people's race to get points in tumblr arguments.

we have the RIGHT to strip everything from you

It's important to me that you recognise that writers, animators, artists, whatever, do in fact have that right. Like, just as a matter of engaging with the world as it exists, they do have that right.

the Algonquin

Algonquian. "Algonquin" is the english name for the Omàmìwininìwag, a specific tribe from what is now ontario and quebec. The Algonquians are a group of tribes, spanning from quebec to northeast USA, midwest USA, and alberta, that share a language family.

just don't wanna talk about it with white people for reasons I, a white person, disagree with.

"no no

Flexible feather armor

Well, on some level that started already in Chapter 4, with the Hammer of Justice introducing the idea of Lightners being reborn in Dark Works as Darkners under very specific circumstances.

But the Flowers really put that point front and center. They are living things that receive some sort of Wish-Fulfillment in the Dark World, much like how our Lightner characters receive cool outfits and powers… but the main Wish being fulfilled for them is having a higher form of consciousness and a more anthropomorphic form, like how Darkners come to life in the Dark World. Flowery’s portrait is Black-and-White, much like the Lightner characters, because he is a kind of Lightner as far as the metaphysical mechanics of Light and Dark function… except he also has colorful Darkner-like Golden eyes.

And so much of the conflict of this Chapter is based on their unique liminality. They’re Lightner enough that being reduced back to their Light World ‘inanimate’ form feels much more like a death to them then it feels to a regular Darkner (who can find contentment as inanimate objects, as they are ‘alive’ from the Dreams the Lightners associate with them)… but also Lightner enough that they can’t actually survive for long in the Dark World, their physical bodies still have their regular physical needs, but unlike Susie, they also can’t exactly pull out of the Dark World, grab a snack for nourishment and then pull back in.

And then the Secret Boss is another kind of Liminal being, a more traditional Darkner (in the sense of a truly inanimate object come to life) that’s also being brought to life due to being possessed by a Lightner ghost. Another sort of unique being who is not quite as Ontologically Doomed as the Flowers, but struggles with figuring out what her identity is in her own way. She feels more at home with other Liminal Beings like the Flowers, despite being technically a different kind of being.

All of this feels like build up to exploring the nature of Ralsei, the so-called ‘impossibility’, who already has some of their own ‘Liminal’ elements - they look much more ‘like a Monster’ than any other non-Gerson Darkner, they can appear and survive in every Dark World, and from a meta-narrative perspective, their role as a Darkner Playable Party Member seems to clash with the game’s meta-commentary making Darkners to be like a whole species defined as Video Game NPCs on some level.

They don’t quite seem to match any of the ‘Rules’ of the Liminal Beings we know of so far. Resurrected Lightners like Gerson are specifically mentioned to only appear in very specific Dark Worlds, so this is like the opposite of Ralsei’s situation, and even with their white fur, their portrait seems considerably less monochromatic to me than Flowery’s. But I think this is still a thematic build-up being done to explore different kinds of liminality between Light and Dark and how they affect the relevant characters, before we get into the particular kind of liminality that Ralsei represents.