vindicatedmoon

-I refuse to tell you the ending, you have to ~decide for yourself~! -And then they woke up. -And it was all miserable and pointless and nothing got fixed and nothing was better and everybody died or lived morosely ever after, now stay awake all night contemplating the futility of life and feeling shitty so I can masturbate to the idea that i have made Powerful Art.

Protip: it doesn’t take any skill or insight to make people feel bad. Just like it doesn’t take any skill to refuse to come up with an ending and make the reader decide, or to handwave all the questions of the narrative by saying they were never real at all. What takes skill is to gather together all your woven threads and knot them in a way that won’t unravel, that completes the narrative, satisfies the reader, and makes sense under scrutiny. That can be bittersweet sometimes! Characters can sacrifice a lot for their ending! It doesn’t have to be rainbows and kittens! But if the ending makes readers wish they hadn’t invested emotional energy in the outcome of the story, then the story has failed.

However. 

I will point out that what will cause this does in fact vary wildly by reader. And catharsis is wildly and intensely personal. 

My favourite Shakespeare play, hands down, is King Lear. And done properly, the end message of King Lear is in fact “it was all miserable and pointless and nothing got fixed and nothing was better and everybody died or lived morosely ever after.” 

At the end of King Lear, there are three living people on stage: Edgar, Kent, and Albany. Except then Kent goes off to kill himself because Lear is dead, leaving Edgar and Albany with no actual win. 

Nobody wins in this play. Everybody loses. The badguys lose. The good guys lose. There isn’t even really any meaningful return to order: there is no Fortinbras who comes in to sweep the old rotten dynasty away in a new and vigorous move; Augustus does not enter from stage left to bring about the new and vigorous Rome; the Prince does not finally get his head out of his arse, and both Montague and Capulet as well, and end their feud - 

There’s nothing. There’s Edgar, and Albany, in a broken and fragmented country that now has no king and no heirs (Edgar has no claim to the realm, only to his father’s lands, and Albany has the … most tenuous claim ever to maybe his now-dead-wife’s third of the realm … ) with no redemption and nothing but … an end. 

If done correctly it is a brutal bleak play about people hurting each other all around in a circle with no hands clean, the story of the inherited trauma and damage of multiple generations and the brutal reality of the decline of a previously strong mind under the power of dementia, with pride and fealty and ambition and misdeeds and institutional brutality of social status all bringing us together to this stage full of dead people and no meaningful future. 

I fucking love it. It is cathartic as fuck and I will fight you over it. 

It is absolutely true that it has no inherent objective superiority to something rather more uplifting. Its bleakness itself is not what makes it amazing (that’s the crafting of how the fuckery of each character traps them in this net of horrible that ends with the end of the show); the bleakness is neutral and imparts no particular virtue. 

But also … the bleakness is neutral, and imparts no particular vice. 

Happy endings can be lazy, and they can also be cowardly; brutal endings full of woe can be lazy, and they can also be cowardly; and any kind of ending to any story might be not for you, as a reader, and there’s no need to justify that any more than there’s any need to justify loving either one. Catharsis, and the emotional response to a story, is very personal, and shifts and varies not only from person to person but within the same person at different times. 

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

[translation:

Damn those lesbians

they’ve scandalized noble women

They’ve made war without spears

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.

I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven, because I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so tiny-tiny you have to close your eyes to see.

- “moo juice!”

- E G G - G I E

When Xenia's Sixth Season began, we were treated to this scene:

I had an inkling, based on the happenings of Season 5, as to who the missing soul is. If you recall, Xenia, Ruelle and MC go to the Autumn Temple to search through all the old souls there to see if they can discover who is missing. This goes back to Season 4 when Xenia is sent a letter signed "Val", but after conferring with Danilo, it is confirmed that this is not Val, but rather the acts of a soul who had gone missing about 11 years ago - coincidentally, the exact number of years ago that Xenia attempted (and failed) to resurrect Val.

While at the Temple, MC is drawn to an older section. Ruelle asks why she is going there, that those souls died 100 spans ago. And what happened 100 spans ago? The assassination attempt on the Two Queens that led Safir to fall to a permanent sleep and Edera to flee with their daughter.

But aquagirl, we know who was behind the attempted murder, a Prince of Winter. Even says so in the opening scenes to Sevastian's route.

In case any of you did not read Sevastian's route, I can tell you this - we learn that the Prince of Winter who was beheaded was innocent. He was a friend of the Queens, and as a final act of loyalty to protect them, allowed himself to be beheaded. So...the real assassin is still out there.

Now back to Xenia. I believe that the missing soul is that of the true assassin, more specifically, perhaps the former spymistress. In Myrine's response to Xenia above: "Someone else has taken up the mantle of pulling the strings that keep the nation moving."

This is further confirmed when you go back to the first scenes of Xenia's route - here, we have mentions of spies turning against the Queen and working with the assassin.

One of the fascinating things about Reigning Passions is its world building, and how all these pieces of the prologue are finally coming together, making more sense of the puzzle.

I'll leave you with the last piece of this puzzle - but I'm going to let @silverteresa discuss this one. Not only is she the Piama expert, but also the one working with me on this theory (as well as the Winter Piama theory).

Same Energy

Vivienne's heart:

This ask has been in my inbox for a number of days now, and honestly, every time I try and contemplate what it’s asking my mind stalls. “What are the rewards of being loved?” reads like like asking what kind of cheese the moon is made of, or how much dark there is before the dawn. It’s definitely a question! Theoretically it has an answer! But what kind of answer can I give that will make sense, since apparently….the reward of being loved isn’t being loved.

I mean, in the original essay, the one that gave birth to the meme, the trigger for “being known” is not really all that mortifying. Timothy Kreider emailed his friends about a herd of goats he was renting. Someone accidentally replied-all “oof,” which inspired the reflection about the gap between how we imagine people see us (charmingly off-beat renter of goats, perfect) and how we are actually known by the people in our lives (someone who fritters away their income renting a herd of goats for no discernible reason.)  Kreider concludes that this actually isn’t a gap at all—we are all fully capable of loving people profoundly while still seeing their faults, finding things they do annoying, and commiserating with mutual friends about that person’s quirks. 

I as an individual might like to think I am exempt from this, that I am dazzling and charming and the people who like me don’t even notice my foibles, but the truth is they do, it just doesn’t effect their love for me. 

Hence the “mortifying ordeal”—not only do I have to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s gaze, but I then have to accept that the people who like me do it in full knowledge of who I am. At any given moment, people are walking around fully aware of the fact that I’m a know-it-all and a bad loser, that I am not always emotionally available; my first instinct is to argue and my taste in music is somehow pedestrian and pretentious at once, that I am mostly trying, and a lot of times I fail. All the less-than-perfect things inside me are not secreted out of view; they are very obvious to anyone who has spent enough time with me, who has chosen to be around me for more than a half hour.

And that’s the people who like me!

So if we didn’t want to be known, deep down under all the squirming icky, insecure mess that makes being known such a terrifying prospect, then you’re right. The ordeal isn’t worth it, we should all pack up and go home, because people are always going to fucking see us. The random coworker who watches your face during a meeting knows you; the cousin who listened to your snarky comment knows you. You stumble through the world being known, inevitably, inexorably.

But being seen is necessary to be truly loved—and when it comes down to it, to be loved is to be real. Kreider references The Velveteen Rabbit in his follow-up article, appropriately titled “I Am a Meme Now.” I don’t think he’s wrong to draw on the idea that people observing our secret places, our weird faces, our strange comments and experience of the world makes them ultimate more real. Our experience lives inside us, in our head and impulse and feeling, so we are not objective in this—but we can’t escape all that leak out of us into the sight of others either. We can’t escape being known by someone who isn’t us, and rendered more than just our subjective selves through them. (In some ways, being known by someone else can be even truer than what we know about ourselves.)

The reward of all this—the only one that counts—is that sometimes, someone looks into your bloody beating insides and stays. They see your ugly expressions and listen to your nasty comments and peel back the heavy, wet layers of your intestines to see the guts beneath and still, they love you anyway. 

I know that when a lot of us went through PE we didn’t get lessons like this, we weren’t taught how to modify exercises or build up to them, it was all “run a mile in one go or perish” but almost EVERYTHING has to be trained up to.

I know a lot of people who have gotten frustrated and quit workout programs because they couldn’t do the thing right the first time; I have seen a lot of crossfit gyms where they didn’t teach modifiers and expected people to be fully able to do their ridiculously dangerous exercises with no practice or buildup (I have a lot of pent-up yelling to do abut crossfit).

It’s *not* easy, it *does* take work, and no, not everyone can just do a push-up and you shouldn’t feel bad or worthless if you get winded after jogging a couple dozen yards.

If you’re just starting to think about getting into exercising and you don’t know where to start I recommend the Fitocracy beginner bodyweight program for strength training and Couch to 5k for running.

Even if you don’t plan on *doing* Couch to 5k you should take a look at the way the plan is structured because it shows the kind of progressions you should expect when coming into a new exercise for the first time.

This is beautiful. I-