Satorui's Tumblr

The Idigam, the greatest horror that the Uratha can face. Ancient nightmares so powerful and so old that only Mother Luna and Father Wolves themselves were able to beat or kill them.

They should always be more than just a big monster to punch and bite. (though, ironically some people make a good point that when you look at him and remove the comedy, Aku from Samurai Jack is a good example of an Idigam.)

The Idigam must be a presence, an entity, a force of nature that is actively trying to kill nature. They are the spirits of things and concepts which have never existed or should not exist.

Idigam are nightmares for all but the bravest (or most foolish) of Uratha, and even a Mage would find them a threat. They are amorphous, ever changing, ever shifting, and as alien to us as can be. Reality itself is poisoned by their presence, like a spiritual fungus that grows and makes the world and the spirit sick.

 "We are each a nation, independent, free of all weakness. You cannot even grasp the nature of our existence. We have no beginning, we have no end, we are infinite."

Yet, they do have weaknesses. They are prideful beings, they can want worship and adoration, become obsessed with humanity the way any spirit can, and can only take a single form at a time, allowing them to be beaten, harmed, and even killed.

You just have to remember you aren't fighting just a monster, but an entity that is a landscape unto itself, a miniature god, who has yet to crystalize.

And never forget that even destroying them can sometimes have unintended consequences or effects. One wonders, might the Stryx have once been an Idigam themselves before they forced themselves to be more solid when they struck that ancient deal that connected them to the Kindred? It weakened them and broke them apart, hence they the Stryx only seems to get stronger when it Diablerizes the Stryx in another Kindred? The many pieces becoming one again, as the Beast puts itself back together?

But never lose hope. Because they are not as strong or as mighty as they claim to be. Idigam are without that spark of creativity and understanding they are left amorphous. It is a strength but they have no structure. When they become more solid it forces them to have a weakness (like the Fair Folk in Exalted) and it becomes a thing to follow and use against them. 

Which funnily enough also brings me to another major example I like to use when toying around with Idigam and the threat they pose.

The Dark Presence from Alan Wake works well as a more powerful Idigam which feeds off of creative rituals and energies, in order to create monsters and corrupt stories into something it can use for its own yet its own weakness is that it has 0 creativity in turn. It is the dark primordial thing before Creation, so it has never truly created anything of its own, it doesn't know how to do so and maybe existed before such a concept was even real.

"It cannot create on its own. It can only corrupt".

And the Anderson brothers (Tor and Odin) finding a way to put it back to sleep with song is not unlike how the ancient Uratha may have also put many Idigam and horrors to sleep in ancient pits. Reversing their powers and sealing them away in a manner fitting of their alien nature

End of AW1: "Its not a lake…its an ocean."

Now that the end of AW2: "Once more the ocean's a lake!"

(It is now my headcannon that the Old Gods of Asgard may have been Wolf-Blooded, and this added to how they were able to survive the Dark Place, and help perform a ritual to put the Darkness back to sleep.)

But what would happen if a mortal were to actually behold an Idigam in its ever-shifting madness? What words can describe these things which are the spirits of that which should not exist, which exist beyond our realms even the deepest horror of the Abyss. Even the false kings of the Exarchs from Mage are right to fear the Idigam, and leave such things to the wolves to deal with. For the only one of their ilk to venture down to 'eliminate' these horrors returned wrong. He spoke such beautiful blasphemies!

Encounters with the Idigam, should be terrifying and alien. But they should always call the wolves to action. The Wolf Must Hunt. It is in their nature, their destiny to battle these beings and to slay or seal them away. For only the inheritors of the mantle of Father Wolf were worthy to be the ones to slay him.

And for some extra music to help add to the scene, I always felt these worked well.

I’ve been watching movies like Coco and Encanto, and I started wondering something that hit harder than I expected:

Why do I — as a white woman in America — feel like I have no real culture?

No traditions. No sacred rhythms passed down. I don’t even know anyone past my great- great-grandmother, and I barely know anything about her. There’s no lineage in my hands. Just a vague sense of being American, and that’s… nothing. That’s Walmart and McDonald’s points and $900 a pill and losing my Medicaid while the president builds a ballroom.

Then I look at these Disney movies — filled with grief rituals, family altars, magical houses tied to memory, and I ache. Because I never got that. And it makes me realize:

Disney has been the only consistent thing speaking emotional truths to me my whole life.

And also?

It’s a megacorporation.

Built to keep me consuming.

It teaches me to cry, to believe in something bigger, to love my family;

but also to buy.

To keep scrolling.

To go to Disney World and call it a core family pilgrimage.

And lately I’ve been playing Dreamlight Valley, and my boyfriend was playing Kingdom Hearts, and I wanted to re-download Toontown of all things — because those are the only spaces that ever felt like magic.

Not family dinners.

Not church pews.

Not old stories told around a fire.

Just… digital Disney.

Fantasy as inheritance.

A carefully designed nostalgia machine as my mythological anchor.

I guess what I’m saying is:

I’m 32 and grieving the culture I never had.

And Disney, weirdly enough, is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a tradition.

based off funny twitter meme

either way, she always has at least three kids, sometimes more. you don't want to ask when she had them, but she had to have them young because her youngest had to have been born when she was at least seventeen based on how time works. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

she's smiling but there's something missing in her eyes - a spark that should be there. there's no passion, there's just the movements of the day. sometimes she'll give an interview where she says she barely feels like getting out of bed, and other times she says nothing. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

her world isn't real - it's neat kitchens and made from scratch cheese. she tells you how she doesn't need feminism because she likes this life, she likes wearing pretty dresses, don't you dare pity her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

you scroll up to an ex tradewife in her forties talking about how her husband divorced her and left her for a younger girl, leaving her destitute and penniless and twenty years out of the workforce. you scroll again to a pretty young girl saying she doesn't need a job, her husband will take care of her. you scroll again. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

another woman, this time in her early thirties, talking about how she just managed to leave her abusive husband and has nothing and he took the kids, warning and pleading young girls to not fall for tradwife lies. you scroll again to a young tradwife girl saying that would never happen to her, and you're just jealous of her. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

you scroll again. a teen girl tells you that she'll just track her period, she doesn't NEED a toxic chemical like birth control. you scroll again to an obgyn pleading with young girls to understand birth control is just hormonal, and that period tracking isn't effective. you just watch happen. you can't save her.

you scroll again, and it's jd vance saying how women belong in the homes and shouldn't be allowed to vote. that their husbands should decide how they should vote. you scroll again to a domestic abuse counselor telling women their vote is private and they can lie to their husbands. you just watch it happen. you can't save her.

"(white) america has no culture"

is not the same statement as

"white american culture is so deeply rooted in white supremacy + white patriarchy + white christianity that once you, a white person, have found yourself outside the hegemony (by choice or not), it becomes impossible to participate in nearly ALL of your former culture, because there is so little left untouched by bigotry. not only that, but if you attempt to reconnect with your pre-colonial ancestral culture/s as a white american, you are very often perceived (a) as celebrating whiteness specifically, due to certain cultures being plundered by nazis for symbolism; and/or (b) as a wannabe/faker, unwelcome in "authentic" non-american cultural spaces, bc white americans trying to claim xyz heritage are often talked about as being the most annoying people on earth. which isn't even false! they ARE really annoying!!"

and when you walk into that second discussion assuming that it's the first, your condescending ass just looks stupid. we all know white america has a culture, we're frustrated because being anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and non-christian usually means that we're cut off from it. and queer culture, while rich and diverse, is incredibly fractured, diasporic in a unique way, and for many people it cannot fill that gap.

"(white) america has no culture"

is not the same statement as

"white american culture is so deeply rooted in white supremacy + white patriarchy + white christianity that once you, a white person, have found yourself outside the hegemony (by choice or not), it becomes impossible to participate in nearly ALL of your former culture, because there is so little left untouched by bigotry. not only that, but if you attempt to reconnect with your pre-colonial ancestral culture/s as a white american, you are very often perceived (a) as celebrating whiteness specifically, due to certain cultures being plundered by nazis for symbolism; and/or (b) as a wannabe/faker, unwelcome in "authentic" non-american cultural spaces, bc white americans trying to claim xyz heritage are often talked about as being the most annoying people on earth. which isn't even false! they ARE really annoying!!"

and when you walk into that second discussion assuming that it's the first, your condescending ass just looks stupid. we all know white america has a culture, we're frustrated because being anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and non-christian usually means that we're cut off from it. and queer culture, while rich and diverse, is incredibly fractured, diasporic in a unique way, and for many people it cannot fill that gap.

"(white) america has no culture"

is not the same statement as

"white american culture is so deeply rooted in white supremacy + white patriarchy + white christianity that once you, a white person, have found yourself outside the hegemony (by choice or not), it becomes impossible to participate in nearly ALL of your former culture, because there is so little left untouched by bigotry. not only that, but if you attempt to reconnect with your pre-colonial ancestral culture/s as a white american, you are very often perceived (a) as celebrating whiteness specifically, due to certain cultures being plundered by nazis for symbolism; and/or (b) as a wannabe/faker, unwelcome in "authentic" non-american cultural spaces, bc white americans trying to claim xyz heritage are often talked about as being the most annoying people on earth. which isn't even false! they ARE really annoying!!"

and when you walk into that second discussion assuming that it's the first, your condescending ass just looks stupid. we all know white america has a culture, we're frustrated because being anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and non-christian usually means that we're cut off from it. and queer culture, while rich and diverse, is incredibly fractured, diasporic in a unique way, and for many people it cannot fill that gap.

since i wrote this post, i've been trying to intentionally notice pieces of culture that feel authentic to me, no matter how small, to better identify where i'm from and where i'd like to go.

and, as part of that, i've been able to articulate that a big part of my frustration comes from the fact that i don't share very much, culturally, with a vast majority of americans my age. because i was raised in an abusive household which aimed specifically and explicitly to deny me access to the culture of my peers. like, that was the primary driving force behind every decision my parents made, and they told us this often. thus, what can be considered my culture, as an individual, is an extremely limited palette--and it's all bad. like ~100% of it, give or take a few hundred-thousandths of a percent.... it's white evangelical christian supremacy all the way down, baby. i have incredibly little from my first 20 years that i can hold onto as a piece of my early self that i actually want to bring into my current self.

Masquerade is, to me at least, more a game about impersonal horror. Like yes, you are an undead horror and it’s a difficult and tenuous thing at the start to try and keep your humanity amidst the whims of the Beast. But, the issue is that there is the Metaplot, the constant warring of ancient sects and the influence of elders who were reborn centuries before you ever came along. Elders who rule with iron fists, whose immense power keeps the world of night running as they want it to be. You have modern technology they don’t and refuse to understand? You’re dead. You have something they want? You give it, or you’re dead. In that, it’s hard to not focus on the external threats over the internal ones because your survival instincts are going to be kicking in overdrive. A very human thing, and that which is human keeps you human. Or close enough anyways.

Requiem on the other hand is very much about the personal horror. Due to the game’s flexibility, it’s easier to imagine your character having to worry about the decay of their sense of self. You’re not always beholden to the machinations of your fellow kindred, often times you can do your own thing and end up paying for it since even using disciplines can freak you out if your humanity is high enough. Wanna use Dominate? Geez it’s creepy how people just do what you want. Resilience? Ugh, your arm can not be in that position. Asphyx? Being a cloud of toxic gases is jarring, isn’t it? Everything claws at your humanity, threatening to leave barely holding yourself together. And the mechanics reflect that. In Masquerade, the 5E additions using the scavenged mechanics comes off as doubling down in an attempt to increase the hardship without actually addressing the other aspects of the game that they ended up shaving down in an attempt to compensate.