#self-exile

Well met, my fellow Furians! Welcome to another HTTYD post! Today, we'll be doing another Snotlout post, and today's topic is about something that I've had for a long time but am only now writing about.

What would happen if Hiccup had won? And what would happen if Snotlout had lost the Thawfest Games?

I had watched the "Thawfest" episode multiple times and every time I did, I had always asked myself these two questions.

And, of course, every time I watched this, this scene would pop up:

Jeyne, yes. Survive and thrive.

Theon, no. Or, say, only in a very limited context do I see him surviving.

I know, it’s not popular with Theon fans, but there’s no redemption for murdering defenseless children. There will be no returning to the fold of a home. Theon has to die either literally or metaphorically.

(And no, Ramsay’s treatment of him is not that metaphorical death because it does not contain atonement. It is a punishment in the worst of hell, but it doesn’t make Theon better, nor is it truly related to his crimes. It is the sadism of a monster enacted on a victim. Surviving Ramsay only put Theon into a mental state to begin atoning, to understand himself as a perpetrator.)

If the Night’s Watch were to survive, that would be one option, a permanent atonement. But I don’t believe the Wall will remain and I don’t think the Watch will remain, either.

It is actually a fascinating question what might replace the Wall in terms of a place where you can send people to atone. A place of service and personal reinvention.

Sandor goes to the Quiet Isle. He dies metaphorically and is reborn as the Gravedigger. But Stranger remains in the stables and represents his true nature, lurking beneath. Can a place of voluntary self-exile fulfill the same function for someone who is not in the mental state to take true responsibility? And who is being served there? Is there atonement in simply going away? Septon Meribald is a bad man who does penance in active service, again it is voluntary. The Watch is a shambles because it stopped being a place of volunteers. And while it offers the option of atonement and person reinvention, it also offers all the trappings of a prison, with the attendant abuses.

Considering these voluntary places of exile or atonement are steeped in religion and this also recalls Aeron Damphair, who shares more than one parallel with Theon, when it comes to horrific abuse, we might be looking at one potential future path for Theon to walk. Ironically, Aeron is the uncle Theon mocked for his faith. But he gives comfort to Falia, endures with his soul intact. If we’re talking Theon’s future, I suppose Aeron is the one to watch.

Quaid-e-Azam went into self-exile to London in which year?

Quaid-e-Azam went into self-exile to London in which year?

A. 1930

B. 1931

C. 1932

D. 1933

(more…)

You came to this country when you felt like you were already almost at the end of yourself, you thought that you could build yourself up again here, get rid of the layers of strangeness behind which you were living, which you think of returning to now, remember when you arrived you could hardly have a conversation in any language, and now in some ways you are better, but it still feels so far off, that feeling of being able to rely on your own inner resources to have a completely good and normal day.

Then nothing was normal when you came here, nothing quite fell into place even as you watched it fall into place for others, who didn’t know what you were talking about, or why you were so confused and nervous.  Then you were sent to a place you knew nothing about, that seemed impossibly far away and difficult to access.  Then a thing that was kind of your worst fear came true, and nobody seemed concerned or even really willing to admit that it had happened, they seemed to be conspiring against you as you tried to cope with it, you checked yourself, listened to yourself carefully, this was occurring in true and easily explainable ways if only the person listening were not there with you.  So you threw yourself back out into no points of reference, loneliness in the city you sort of knew became the friendliest thing, you let yourself be pulled into something else terrible, someone willing to take control of your body and repurpose it, to pretend to know you.  To offer protection from your imagined fears.  To be feared later, to make your body more foreign, more opposed to you because of the things it wants and then later what it might do to you or what it is doing to itself, always running further from you, pulling you in more terrible directions which are always downward, dirtward.

You are trying to learn a language you are afraid of, you live with a kind and sympathetic woman whose personal warmth makes her somewhat fascistic worldview even more confusing, who speaks a useless language with terrifying fluency for a reason she is losing, you are watching her send money and love into a hole out of which nothing will return to her, she says they are not the same thing, love is the only one that she will allow to exist, but you can only think of both of them as time.  The wind blows in strange patterns that suggest violence, the toilet is always broken, the water from the sink will make you ill, you bought a kilo of apples and each one was rotten, crumbly and molding at the core.  What kind of reality is this?  What do you want to hold on to?

The last time you felt reality, that solid bottom for your mind to bob against if it needs to, you were lying in the train from Odessa.  You had taken an entire Xanax for a reason that felt good enough.  It felt hard and strange but so wonderful, like when your feet finally found the bottom again after feeling like you were going to drown for so long, when you thought you were going to drown, that reality, now it's like anything else that ever saved you from drowning, with its own terrible purposes, the thoughtless teenage boy of pharmaceuticals, where it's all in the side effect.