#entry 33

Designation: FROZEN LEGACY

Filed By: Knight-Warden Orin of the Crown Watch

Date: [Redacted]

Status: CRITICAL STASIS - ZONE PARALYSIS IN EFFECT

Distribution: Tier-4 Clearance, Crown Vaults, Dreamwatcher Class-3 Required

SUMMARY:

The Galar region is in a state of living paralysis. Ever since the initial corruption of Dynamax phenomena by residual Eternatus pulses, the land has been caught between states of stasis and rupture. Entire cities remain "active," yet unmoving. Wyndon is officially lost. Its heart no longer beats. In its place: stillness. Not peace. Not death. A breathing stop.

Dreamwatchers are now assigned to every roaming unit, trained to resist the "legacy loop dreams" emanating from the Wild Area. The Sword and Shield Slumber Cycle is repeating, but differently.

KEY EVENTS:

02:00: A Dynamaxed Corviknight dissolved mid-flight above Hammerlocke's river spire. It reformed seconds later in perfect stillness, encased in a vitrified Dynamax sheen, hovering thirty meters off the ground. It has not moved in six days.

03:12: A fog descended over Route 10. Visibility fell to zero. Those who entered returned hours later frostbitten, speaking with a northern Galar cadence despite being born in Kalos or Alola. They described events from the wrong version of Galar.

04:00: Stadium cores across the region began humming in harmonic unison. Several reported projecting Eternatus-tinged beam signatures without any power input.

06:33: A group of certified Dreamwatchers breached Wyndon's southern gate. Only one returned. Their eyes were crystallized. Their mouth kept opening. A low moan, rhythmically:

"He is beneath the pitch. Beneath the pitch. Beneath the pitch."

WARPED LOCATIONS:

Wyndon: Entire city preserved in near-absolute stasis. People reported seeing themselves through windows, younger versions, weeping. The air is unmoving. It is not recommended to enter.

Hammerlocke Vault: Ancient murals have rewritten themselves. Zacian now depicted weeping into a mirror, while Zamazenta sleeps beneath black roots.

Lake of Outrage: Dynamax clouds here have taken unnatural shapes. Letters, sometimes names. One researcher saw her own surname form in red lightning. She has since gone silent.

Slumbering Weald: Reports of ghostlike wolves with blades of rot and shields of bone. Do not follow their howls.

SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES:

Wards of the Crown Tundra have sealed themselves off. The Peony Expedition is listed as missing, presumed folded.

Dreamwatchers are now trained from childhood; those exposed to Dynamax phenomena are monitored for dream leakage.

The League has formally dissolved. Only the Crown Watch remains, and they do not hold matches, they hold vigils.

NOTABLE TESTIMONIES:

"The moment you remember the past glory, it becomes real again. And so it begins again. We are the sword in the stone, forever sinking."

"My daughter spoke in rhyme last night. Not her voice. She told me: 'The heroes failed because the story demanded failure.'"

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Avoid all Dynamax zones unless escorted by three or more Dreamwatchers.

Report any speech loops, memory errors, or mirror hallucinations.

Burn all unauthorized fanworks relating to the Sword and Shield legend. The myth itself may be contaminated.

I went looking for the exact Julien Baker quote from the podcast I was talking about in #31 because I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past few days and I found it:

“I don’t think I lived a very embodied life until after ‘Turn Out the Lights’; I think I lived in my brain. I think I lived in my thoughts and my ideas, my ruminations and anxieties, and I didn’t at all interact with myself as a queer body in the world, I thought of myself as a queer concept? It only took years and years of therapy, but I was like... I really didn’t... I don’t know, like, I was (a) very disembodied person. And so like those thoughts and, like, making art about being a queer body in the world, like, that is new for me, even though I have been speaking about queerness conceptually for many years.”

Ever since I started listening to Julien Baker back in April, and taking a deep dive into her discography, and scouring the internet for any interviews and podcasts featuring her because she’s just so eloquent and well-spoken and intelligent I could listen to her talk for hours, it’s made me start thinking about the concept of 'queer joy' for the first time. I’m not quite sure why now because I generally haven’t really wanted to think too much about my sexuality in the past. In my defence, I was preoccupied with other equally heavy matters.

But I think I’ve known since I was about 14 that I liked girls too. You’d think that I’d have known sooner, given that I had been in an all-girls school for 8 years at that point, but before then I just assumed that my crushes on girls were very intense friend crushes. (Which they may have well been; I’m still not really sure which ones were friend crushes and which ones were crush crushes. Things get complicated when you grow up not having many friends to begin with.) But I’m lucky enough that at the time, I had a couple of openly queer classmates, and the people that I generally hung out with in school were super chill about it, so I never felt like I was going to be shunned by my peers in school specifically because I was queer (in any case, I was already being shunned for other unrelated reasons).

My first memory of witnessing public, blatant, open homophobia first-hand was about 2 years later on New Year’s Eve 2015, when Adam Lambert was slated to perform at the New Year’s Eve countdown party at the Marina Bay floating platform. I knew it was happening not because I was a fan of his, but because the older folks in church had been buzzing about it in the months leading up to it, loudly whispering to each other as they mingled after service about how it was so scandalous that this openly gay American man was going to be performing at one of the biggest events of the year here in Singapore. I honestly wasn’t too bothered by it; I was young and I had a lot of other unrelated things to worry about, and the gossip of church uncles and aunties was none of my business. But for some reason that I don’t remember, I was in church for the New Year’s Eve watchnight service for the first time in my life instead of watching the countdown on TV. As midnight slowly approached, I watched idly as a string of fellow churchgoers took turns going up to the pulpit to share their testimonies and thanksgivings for the year gone by. I was frankly starting to fall asleep when a very well-respected church uncle walked up to the pulpit. He was one of the most jovial and earnest church uncles that I knew, the kind of guy that every Christian man probably aspires to be. He led the primary school worship ministry, regularly taught in Sunday School, and had 3 model-student, model-Christian sons, all named after angels. And as he was walking past the pews, he stopped just short of the pulpit and made a big dramatic show out of peering out of the window at the quickly abating thunderstorm. Then he stepped up to the pulpit, gave a wry smile, and said: “Just checking the weather. Y’all know why, right?” And as the church uncles and aunties around me all nodded and murmured in agreement, I suddenly felt my chest tighten and my skin flush in anger. I watched the rain slow to a drizzle as I sat there in the pew with no choice but to swallow my rage in silence, feeling betrayed and blindsided but not fully understanding why.

I didn’t (and still don’t) listen to Adam Lambert’s music. I literally only knew two things about him: that he was on American Idol, and that he was gay. And I’m willing to bet that none of the church uncles and aunties there knew anything more about him either. At the time, I told myself that I was mostly just angry on behalf of all the queer friends and classmates I had, but in hindsight, I definitely felt something personal mixed in, even if I didn't want to see it.

Perhaps it was because of that night that I didn’t really want to think about my queerness in the years that followed. Perhaps it was because I had a crush on a boy at the time for the first time in my life, and I was still riding on the high of what, in my mind, was my first ‘legit’ crush. Even though I was lucky enough to have openly queer and accepting friends, the vast majority of my teen years was spent avoiding any thought of my own queerness like it was some kind of disease that would infect my heart if I dwelled on it for too long, a foolish attempt to run away from all the pain and anguish that I knew was waiting for me. There was already enough pain and hurt and guilt and shame in my life, and I didn’t need or want any more of it. And because I had a crush on a boy at the time, I kept thinking that all I had to do was start dating a boy and eventually get married to a boy and I would never have to address my own queerness, to myself or to others. I convinced myself that I didn’t think about it because I just didn’t and not because I actively didn’t want to, and if any of my friends asked, I'd just shrug noncommittally and say "I don't know, maybe, I'm not sure".

I spent 10 years running away from myself, desperately living on that ethos like a drug addict because I was too scared to live otherwise. I hyperfixated on that crush for so long, clinging onto the hope that this part of myself could stay hidden forever if I could just keep liking this boy and daydream about holding him. But slowly and all at once, I was over him. I don’t even know exactly when, why, or how. I thought I would be happier about it because I had known for many years that the feeling wasn’t mutual and I had been telling people that I was trying my best to move on. But after I realised that I was over him, all I could feel was fear. And then, being the hopeless romantic that I am and spinning out about Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn breaking up, I was lying in bed thinking about whether or not I believed in the concept of soulmates and had the sudden thought — oh god, what if my soulmate is a girl? And in that moment, I felt like I was about to throw up. I immediately opened tiktok because I could feel the anxiety rising and I needed to distract myself, but the algorithm just kept showing me fancams of Julien Baker and Josette Maskin, and all of a sudden the anxiety turned into a panic attack. It’s not like I haven’t found female celebrities attractive before (I mean, I have historically had no issues whatsoever publicly freaking out about how hot Taylor Swift is), but there’s something undeniably gay about being attracted to masc women, whereas with femmes like Taylor Swift, I can still gaslight myself into thinking “I’m not attracted to her, I just want to be her because she’s objectively attractive to the cisgender heterosexual male gaze”.

Some weeks later, just this past Sunday, in church again, I almost lost it during the opening worship song, which was ‘Blessings’ by Laura Story. I was perfectly fine during worship practice the day before, but standing in the corner of the stage waiting for my turn to harmonise with the worship leader, looking out at a congregation that was supposed to be a safe space for the oppressed and vulnerable, it was like a gear in my head suddenly clicked into place. I’d cried to the song before, many years ago, but I had never attached it to my queerness until now. As I lay in bed that night after a particularly exhausting day, alone with my thoughts for the first time since that morning, I remembered the song again and sobbed deeply, confronted and humbled in the midst of my anxiety by the truth that there is nothing I could do or not do that will make God love me less.

We pray for Your mighty hand to ease our suffering And all the while, You hear each spoken need Yet love us way too much to give us lesser things

When friends betray us When darkness seems to win We know the pain reminds this heart That this is not This is not our home

As pride month rolls around, I can't ignore the fact that I'm still scared. More scared than I've ever been. And seeing countless tiktoks of Julien Baker performing with the words “queer joy” emblazoned on her guitar and banjo, I can’t help but think how foreign and elusive that term feels to me. How could I not, when all the memories I have associated with my own queerness are coloured by anger, shame, guilt, and deep, overwhelming fear? I’ve known the concept of my own queerness for a decade now, but I’ve spent so long being scared of it and running away from it that I don’t even know what it really means to be queer.

I used to think that if I could just fall in love with a boy, all of this would go away and I would never have to come to terms with it. But I had the realisation that that’s just the voice of internalised homophobia / compulsory heterosexuality talking, and my queer friends don’t magically cease to be queer when they aren’t actively dating anybody, or aren't actively attracted to anybody, so how could I be any different? Human sexuality is inherently carved into human existence; it is an irremovable part of me that I can’t scrub out like a stubborn stain, or throw a rug over it and pretend it isn't there, or toss around flippantly like a garment that I can put on or off whenever I feel like it. To be queer is to exist, to live, to thrive, to be human. It may be true that there is no pride without pain, and that healing requires first uncovering and scrutinising the hurt. But I’ve come to the realisation that having ‘queer joy’ is to embody one’s queerness wholly, in fullness, to feel through it as an integral facet of human existence — and to look at the world and all of the heartbreak and sorrow it brings, to carry it with me in all its heaviness and stare down its ugly face, to acknowledge that there is nothing I can do to prevent it from being thrust into my arms — and to choose joy anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still terrified. Even throughout typing this, I can’t stop my fingers from trembling and my heart from racing and in all honesty, I still feel like I’m about to throw up. I can’t change that. But after spending so long running away from my own queerness, I’ve come to the realisation that as scary as it is, I need to come out to myself first before I can learn to let myself heal. Being the coward that I am, it’s taken almost 10 full years for me to do it, but nonetheless, here it is:

Hi. I’m bi.

Day 97, over a story tall, by like 3 inches! I’m so freaking huge. And so are my tits, they probably each weigh as much as Evan *laughs*