Martian Sunset

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian: it has wonderful balance, so we will sensibly name it “level” - as in ⚖️, balance. It’s so rare that all of us come to such a nice consensus. Hopefully it’s not because, like, English rode in roughshod and -

English, spitting: dragonfly

French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek, Romanian and a whole host of others: normally you’re more with us than everyone else - did you … get that from the celts, or…?

Welsh: no. Fuckoff. snake’s servant

Irish - BIG NEEDLE

Basque, supportively - witch’s needle!

Swedish - troll’s spindle

Norwegian - eye sticker

Danish - goldsmith

Croatian - fairy’s horse

Finnish: wolf’s rod (?)

Hungarian - sieve-knitter

Turkish - little Joseph 😊

It looks like the “libellule” variants swept over a lot of older regional names, themes in which seemed to be snakes, magic, horses/riders, witches and devils, and needles. Normally it’s English words that do that, but in this case, English is going 🗣️ DRAGONFLY 🗣️ in a mild eddy of independence, and is clearly not guilty.

As far as we know today, dragons featured only in German witch trials from Thuringia, Saxony, and Bavaria, i.e. from the eastern parts of today’s Germany. [...] The belief in a connection between witchcraft and dragons seems to belong to the bedrock of witch beliefs in this area. “Dragon whore” (“Drachenhure”) was a common insult in sixteenth-century Saxony. Dragons featured in the oldest eastern German trials from the early sixteenth century, and they disappeared only in the early eighteenth century when the witch hunts themselves finally petered out.

Dillinger, Johannes. "The Dragon as a Household Spirit: Witchcraft and Economics in Early Modern and Modern Sources." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 17 no. 2, 2022, p. 212-240. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mrw.2022.0024.

Ophelia as a character is shown to be restricted as women were in her environment to her relationships with men. Her father, her brother, and her romantic interest. She isn’t just The Girl in this story- she can easily be interpreted as any woman of her standing at this time.

And because of this- as women were, and still often are- her personhood was reduced to the context in which she served others: a daughter, a sister, a lover. She is nothing else because all she is allowed to be, all she CAN be, is what she can offer, what she can PROVIDE, the esteem in which she is held by those men.

So we see a person whose personhood is, in effect, a shadow cast by the relationships in which she belongs. “Belongs” in the possessive sense, because she has no agency, no worth or value beyond those relationships, and it doesn’t matter if she is happy or not because she couldn’t live any sort of meaningful life apart from them.

In this circumstance in which Ophelia has been raised, in this society, in this position, the Existence of Ophelia is a shadow cast in the light of three candles. Her father, her brother, her lover, who can shine their lights and cast as many shadows as they wish while she cannot.

Her brother is leaving. He is no steady pillar. If she is not sistered, she is not a sister.

And then her lover, he loses his mind. He goes hot and cold, loving and then cruel and then kind and then completely nonsensical. If she is not loved, she is not a lover.

And then her father is killed. And if she is not daughtered, she is not a daughter.

Physically, emotionally, spiritually, the context she exists within is taken away, and so she is nothing. Just the shape of a girl left adrift in a vacuum.

She is a construction of other’s perceptions, and when she is no longer perceived in a way that is stable, she loses her stability. She’s never been truly alone in herself- never seen herself outside the eyes of those who see her, patronize her, value her, and so her fate is tied to their perceptions. Her value is what they find her value to be; her personhood is what they find her personhood to be.

Ophelia dies covered in flowers, singing in a river. A nonsensical caricature of what a girl should be- beautiful, whimsical, lighthearted, young, left literally and figuratively adrift. Desperately grasping to fulfill the role she was shaped into despite no longer possessing the context in which it has function. Like post-traumatic stress, all that’s left of her is the flinch-and-run response to the bang of a gun you hear on the radio a hundred miles from the battlefield. A reaction to an action that is no longer happening.

She is reduced to Madness as Madness truly is- the rational, logical, straightforward actions of a hero suddenly dropped into the wrong story, giving the right answers to the wrong questions.

I’m not an academic, so my interpretation might be way off, but I love Ophelia because broadly speaking she is an answer to the question of what makes us who we are. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a tree is not perceived, is it even a tree? If your only value is to others, what are you when there are no longer others to value you? What happens when their value of you wavers? Fluctuates madly without reason? What are you then?

When you read the text and then the lyrics, what the song is essentially saying is "Ophelia died because in her society, a woman without a man was as good as dead. Fortunately I have a man, so / don't *need* to be a fully actualized person in my own life. Hashtag girlboss". Which so wildly misses the point that it’s sort of amazing that the construction of the song itself betrays absolutely no rational reasonable shred of a clue that it’s anything less that 100% sincere in this interpretation.

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residuals and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to their blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. Boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NG’s financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

But you freely admit the system is bad. That it values the wrong things.

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"