sodium flame

the preceding context, which is not the point but is necessary, is in chapter 4 or something, there's this change, where lucifer's reading from a book about something unmemorable, changed/restored to being a book about a girl who was falls in with a 'bad crowd' and is tricked/forced into burning herself (lu reacts with vicious disgust-based ableism/pity as well as doing it in a context that's very........clearly testing yenatru to make sure he reacts the way they want, they aren't very on-the-nose vicious usually):

but that's not the main point. the main point of this change only makes itself clear many many chapters later, when lu is about to go track down tamar:

hopeful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

that’s the problem!!! the problem lu has is not having to be around a g-d manifestation, the problem is not the triggering reminder, the problem is that tamar is someone who liked it, who doesn’t want to be saved from it. tamar being miserable and forced into it and hating it would fix everything for them!!!!!! would immediately be no problem for them!!!!!!!! even though that would approximate their own trauma more and should hypothetically be more triggering!! but that is not their problem, triggers are not their problem. hopeful!!!!!!!!!!!

even though, a few pages earlier in the same chapter, talking to the same person, they said:

and i wrote in my liveblog chat, i feel very deep shame and embarrassment every time i try to justify the connection but truly:

the stated reason for this revision was 'better continuity with The Lives That Argue For Us, and I see exactly why.

that’s a little glib but, arguing with g-d, being people who have been laden with sufferings due to disobeying g-d, arguing with g-d, making community in exile and scattered away from our temple or other tangible cores of g-d-connection in a broken world, the claim that being a people who must argue with G-d and whose history of having to deal with the consequences of this responsibility was Important Actually, arguing with g-d………uhhhhh that’s kinda baseline, dutiful, not-even-edgy jewishness. human jewishness. it is compliant with even Your Old Stodgy Uncle’s Jewishness. NOT that most jews would phrase it that way, and definitely usually in the ‘traditional’ normie-jewish sense of this struggle being an illustration of reverence of G-d’s superior wisdom and authority and exhortations to our obedience to It. but that just kinda proves my point imo! 

anyway, xtians popularizing some Big Shot Angel to define and occupy this schtick and niche that in judaism is occupied by 1) jews 2) more jews 3) pre-judaism humans 4) many of the textual aspects of……..well, G-d. lmao. but then christians ALSO characterizing this whole niche as Cool and Blasphemous and Hot and about a superhero-vs-supervillain (regardless of which figure is which) battle between the poles of G-d vs a wannabe-god angel with humans as the helpless passive meat being fought over, instead of the tension/battle being between G-d and jews, with jews (and maybe other humans), not some angel, as the main agentive pole #2 who is in tension with G-d as pole #1…….it’s……..well becuz of this, i think a lot of jews find lucifer as trope, archetype, or mythological character, to be kind of unnecessary-feeling, not particularly subversive, possibly even a bit invisibility-inducing or irritating, and overall just not very emotionally arousing or evocative (positive or negative) as a concept. lucifer is kinda presumptuously savior-y even. displacing us from our role maybe. jesus-y perhaps.

buttttttttttttt i can see why xtians and culturally xtian readers, in particular, who are the type of reader to be big fans of lucifer or satan in an xtian role, would……….be WAY more open to accepting many chapters of argument about (very Very good ideas about) the nature of souls and selfhood, IF it’s coming from the mouth of a continually stated to be sympathetic lucifer. whereas they would hateread the same thing with deep suspicion if it was coming from a G-d-aligned character (also becuz ex-christians appear fundamentally incapable of parsing G-d-adjacent as ‘jewish’ instead of christian or the nonsensical idea of ‘judeo-christian’). anyway i guess this hypothetical xtian reader would not have the capacity to notice that in Stars lucifer is pushed as a straightforward priestly mentor who bestows Truth, while G-d and his harem girl are the characters with personalities/vibes closest to Fun Villain tropes (and have slightly antihero/antagonist-y (affectionate) roles, despite also definitely not being villains). 

my OWN perception of sehhinah-lucifer as a rigid prescriptivist spouter of a deeply christian interpretation of body-soul dualism and soul-essence inert purity as truer than life and acts and consequences (all only made narratively interesting through the lenses of trauma and ironic meta role reversal) is……..probably largely very similar to what a rebellious culturally xtians/ex-xtian reader would’ve perceived if instead it was an unfallen g-d-loving angel who was saying those things. (and doubly so if such a book also had a foil in the Devil burning people’s eyes out in exchange for showing them the secret knowledge and beauty of creation’s power source. lmao lol.)

anyway my point was: i’m coming from a position where the pre-existing concept of lucifer the myth has no real potency to me whether positive or negative, just vague familiar obviousness and sort of western society overexposure. (in fact, while this may be a tangent, to demonstrate the heterogenity of responses to cultural tropes…..i’m far more viscerally elated by the series’s transgression of more locally culturally dominant taboos (locally culturally dominant to me, a second-generation-immigrant partly-non-ashkenazi jew) — e.g. taboos against apotheosis-style polytheism, or taboos against stuff like a) greedily and presumptuously begging for and maiming oneself with G-d’s beauty without being directed to do so by G-d, or even worse, without doing anything useful with it, and breaking your community ties and duties to pursue desires. or b) the ‘strip textual consequence of all slippery projections of connotations and consider why it could actually happen’ instead of a just-so-story mechanism of how and why angels fall in general in the sehhinah world, or why G-d would ‘smite’ people. these are some of the most rattling (in a good way) and mental-code-rewriting of this series’ concepts!!!!!!) and yet i’m also a position where i do just…..assume almost all abrahamic fantasy nowadays that isn’t either 1) explicitly specifically jewish or muslim, or 2) deeply trad and shit, or both, to be lucifer-sympathetic if lucifer comes up, becuz like, duh! 

Now she laughs. “What, not even gonna ask me why I did it?”

Ah, but there is the irony, isn’t it? “I assume: to see.”

At the expense of everything else. Infinite sights traded for one other, albeit one available by no other means. The public and the private switched: what has become of her eyes visible to all and yet knowable only to those who also have given up their sight to the pyre indicated within. Or without? God is not anywhere in particular, God alone has no body, but God is here, in her eyes. Because They chose this too—God! How ever could anyone be so sure in Their own beauty to demand such a price for seeing it!

HELLO????????????????

(spoilers under the cut)

(and eg the experience during Lives of having those basically scrambled and blocked out temporarily during the god-y2k event is distinctly different and disorienting).

i guess maybe it's just a simple authorial thing of the author 'being actually curious about what the day-to-day life of a blind person is after they went blind'.....and also interested in imagining magic what-ifs of day-to-day life in a magic entanglement, without analogizing it strictly to an irl thing too........ and

tesena untethered from reality, displaced, kjorel is not there to cling to anymore, weaving because counting as ae weaves is the only thing ae is certain of existing, losing aerself in the thread which ties itself into knot messages before aer eyes, a snake poised to bite and strangle aer—tesena begging G-d, "show me a map of the room", hastily adding a "please" at the end. G-d replies, showing the room, but it's not what tesena needs (what is it that ae needs?) and G-d, holding back Their mirth at seeing the beauty of the variety of existence, confused why tesena does not (will not) trust what aer senses are telling aer. tesena, who does not have the words, and doesn't have the feelings, whose interiority is as difficult for G-d to understand as G-d is difficult for those who rely on words to understand. G-d who tries anyway: snake threads, tremors, little faeries and the displacement of objects, light which swallows and shines and shines and shines, tesena in a room of mirrors and someone else walks in and laughs, points and laughs, they don't see tesena they see half-washed away sandcastles and tesena cannot scream

G-d who understands in that moment

kjorel who has to live with being psychotic-by-adjacency. who feels ghost touches and prods from nowhere, asking tesena, "was that you?" and tesena laughs and laughs and laughs and doesn't explain but kjorel knows what it is. kjorel seeing figures in the haze of the light his skin gives off. kjorel who feels tesena react to things that he can't really perceive, who feels his skin crawl with unknown paranoia, who feels crawling in him but it's not really in him

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Šehhinah - Ivana Skye Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Tamar/Original Male Character, Tamar/God, Tamar/Elīya (implied) Characters: Elohim | God | Allah (Abrahamic Religions), Tamar (Šehhinah) Additional Tags: eldritch sex shenanigans, eldritch g-d, Judaism, Sex Work, Body Horror, i guess dot jpg, Ableism, Mind Sex, Theurgy (Šehhinah), Holies (Šehhinah), author is just letting their jewishness and psychosis flower as wildly as possible lol, Blind Character Summary: shortly after running away and staring at the soul of G-d and getting her eyes burned out forever, Tamar has a prostitution encounter with an ad-hoc client on the street. -

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both involves God as an absorbing (in two different senses) curious, tricksterly character who delights in inviting the new and the other and the chaotic and can be actually worthy of monotheism; and the secret realization that God is not in fact the only god, and that there are normal humans who, if told this secret, could, by identifying as a god, make it become so, reach apotheosis and in effect topple Them in some way? x

God who, according to the covenant made before even Nam’ir’s time, is still painstakingly listening and sorting through the endless cacophonous arguments of hundreds of generations of the world about what kind of afterlife should exist. God is a character with as distinct a personality as any human character, as any sci-fi alien creature: curious, capricious, laughing, deeply proud and vain, a fierce dominant lover to those They burn, a brilliant incorporeal alien telepath who also struggles with communicating in language and strives to help Teśena’s paradoxical theurgy barriers, scoffing at the idea that any person can be ‘too much’ or ’too much like themselves’ — though They do not yet know what Nam’ir knew. The way God’s own limited point of view and expectations are brought through as something relatably familiar enough to feel ironic is fantastically delivered on. x