I was thinking about that moment in the Sound of Music where Captain Von Trapp rips up the Nazi flag. And then I thought there should be a version of that but with Bail Organa ripping up the imperial flag.
And then I thought, there should be an AU where Bail and Breha call up Obi-wan and go hey, we know you’re off being an ex-space-nun/monk but we have a whole bunch of children that we need your help raising. You should disguise yourself and come be our nanny.
And Obi-wan is like “???? I left you with one child what do you mean you have a whole bunch now??!?” And they’re like “we’re not telling you because the mystery is the only way we can get you to visit.”
So Obi-wan shows up and Bail and Breha have a whole mess of ex-padawans and initiates that they’ve found and rescued (definitely Caleb and Cal) and are now raising alongside Leia.
And Obi-Wan Kenobi cannot turn his back on that. More hope for the future than he even dreamed could exist. So he stays and teaches them how to hide themselves and eventually is convinced by Bail and Breha that it’s okay to teach them to hope too. That the have to believe that one day it will be safe to be a Jedi again and then they will need the teachings beyond just how to hide their force signatures.
Then Bail and Breha both seduce Obi-wan together.
But eventually someone tips off the empire (one of the padawans has shit taste in partners) and Obi-wan and all the padawans have to flee to Spitzerland (Space Switzerland).
Pick your own adventure whether any combo of Bail/Breha/Leia goes with them for as sweet an ending as you like (although I don’t think Leia could truly stay out of the fight for long, no more than Owen can keep Luke from longing for the stars)
Anyways this has been The Sound of Meditation, another of my “I don’t know who this is for, this might just be for me” AUs.
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one of the best parts of making up increasingly wild and specific aus with a friend is sending them posts like "this is sooo blorbo in torture chamber au number 15" and they reply back like "YESSS btw have i told you about my latest idea for how to torture them even more" and you get to enjoy a little snack and kick your feet with glee
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I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
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Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
i love how fat people know Exactly what i'm talking about but skinny people don't get it at all + are wildly misinterpreting this and making it about themselves
like this is about the very specific way people interact with sexual images of skinny women vs sexual images of fat women. i feel like it's a bigtime self report that you think this is about how sexual comments on the internet are bad
Two magicians made a blood oath when they were children that they would never harm each other. Now they are mortal enemies and have resorted to inconveniencing and annoying each other, knowing if they harm one another they’ll die.
ok but can you imagine if anakin and obi-wan did some sort of force pact like this
and it’s funnier if you realize that it was 100% ANAKIN’S IDEA because of course it was and obi-wan just went along with it despite the blatant attachment because of course he did
like lil snot nosed padawan anakin wanting to do a best friends forever ritual like a preteen messing around with a ouji board at a sleepover and obi-wan indulges him because he doesn’t know anakin dug up an ACTUAL force ritual from the archives instead of, like, a shitty livejournal page on the holonet because he knows anakin doesn’t have friends in the temple yet and he wants his padawan to feel secure
or even better newly-knighted anakin who is ALREADY extremely territorial about his master getting another padawan and won’t stop drunkenly weeping about it during his celebratory bar crawl so obi-wan (who is also soused because he thinks he’s no longer responsible for this overgrown manchild and is thus cutting loose in celebration instead of on a mission because he’s just that fed up) agrees to always be there for anakin as anakin is there for him or some such nonsense and anakin accidentally makes it into a binding cosmic pact because Chosen One
so on mustafar they’re just whaling on each other with their lightsabers set to the lowest sparring setting for, like, younglings (too bad anakin didn’t use that setting on THEM) and anakin just starts rage crying and obi-wan has to go sit down because he did NOT sign up for babysitting an emotionally unstable sith lord (”YES U DID MASTER U DID THIS TO ME–”) and the next 20 years are a ridiculous galaxy-spanning prank war that vader prioritizes over the ACTUAL star war
like obi-wan is this wise, awe-inspiring last samurai figure and vader is this TERRIFYING eldritch abomination of pain and rage and cruelty but the minute they see each other it’s like middle schoolers flipping each other off when the teacher can’t see them except they both 100% still go around killing people a lot
luke is like “well why the fuck can’t YOU kill him, ben” and yoda just starts cackling
OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)
Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.
Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.
This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.
During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.
The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).
Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.
Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.
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You know, judging by how fast Wen Qing caved on Wen Ning's showing up in Yiling with wwx and jc, even though she was real mad about it, I bet he has been doing this to her for years.
Probably started by bringing her injured animals to doctor on as a kid. Later on, not necessarily a lot later, he started dragging in bullied disciples to patch up and hide from Wen Xu or somebody, and then probably he'd just kind of...fold a lot of them into his canonical personal retinue of loyal subordinates, however that worked exactly.
Wet kitten Wen Ning constantly dragging smaller wetter kittens back to his big sister to protect. She has tried all the arguments already. She knows there's no budging him.
Also lmaoooo hang on, Wen Ning had Wen Qing outnumbered a lot of the time, didn't he. She didn't have personal minions she could trust like that. These people just extracted a high-status prisoner from the custody of an erratic and violent superior pursuing a personal grudge without blinking, for their Wen-gongzi.
Wen Ning's ability to get up to shenanigans due to all the pathetic life-forms she'd allowed him to accumulate must have dawned on her with belated horror.
@falsegrailwar was like #please. please read op's tags oh my god
and i was like hmmn what did i say??
#they were supposed to watch his back! #and keep him busy! #and take a sword for him if the opportunity arose probably; wen ning wouldn't want that but wen qing would
#these unnamed subordinates with no lines are rapidly becoming my favorite mdzs supporting cast #like what did they think about the plot #wen ning got pressganged by jin zixun in the company of his subordinates #so some of them probably lasted all the way to the Siege
#there might have been a guy who personally carried jiang cheng out of the charnel house of lotus pier #or retrieved his parents' bodies from the corpse heap #and roughly four to ten years later#watched jiang cheng come to kill him #and had his corpse dumped in the blood pool #and knew for a fact that jiang wanyin did not even know he existed and wouldn't care if he did
#it all goes in circles and some of us get ground up in the gears
i can see why i left that out of the main post but yeah. i stand by these tags a;sldjsdfkl;
#this is one of the reasons i really like fics that go#'hm we could do a big war to depose a tyrant oooor#'we could do a coup? current ruling family blows but look! a niece and nephew who hate their uncle and just want to do medicine!'#i'm sure there are reasons why this wouldn't work but hey#wen ning would make an excellent sect heir! he wins people over so well! (tags by @spookymirrorsprite)
Wen Sect Leader Wen Ning lives rent free in my mind. Saves everyone from Wen Ruohan. Frees Wen Qing up to do her medical research to her little mad scientist heart's content. Makes Wen Yuan his heir. Depending on where it falls in the timeline, he can two-birds-one-stone reconciliation with the Jiang sect and getting rid of his own rivals by handing the likes of Wen Chao to them, or just prevent a bunch of tragedies altogether. Time traveling fix-it fic Wen Ning going hmm I wonder if I still have some corpse powers and then punching through his uncle's ribcage to test it.
....man, time travel Wen Ning murdering Wen Ruohan with his bare hands and seizing power would be such a twist from everyone else's perspective.
like. you could not tell he was the kind of guy who would quietly and unapologetically rescue his sect's enemies out of moral conviction, but he was. people contain multitudes. so same way, in this scenario the political world is rocked by this mediocre, sweet-tempered, unassuming teenage Wen cousin purging the upper ranks of his family and usurping the sect by force.
Wen Qing's reputation before the war (at least the part Wei Wuxian bothered to recall) notably consisted of one part 'medical genius' and one part 'only normal person in the Wen leadership.' Wen Ning turning out to be the most insane murderer in his family would be accepted as narratively coherent, despite being a shocking twist.
bets would be on about whether he and Wen Qing would go on to kill each other off. i feel like they'd lose a lot of vassal sects and guest disciples on account of the sect doesn't seem as stable or powerful suddenly.
diplomatic relations would not normalize for a while, unless he managed to do this during the war so all the other sects felt it was a favor to them, because killing family members for power tends to be frowned upon. nie mingjue in particular i think would be of the opinion that Sect Leader Wen Qionglin was a mad dog.
i feel like Jin Zixun would suddenly be getting a lot of side-eye in case he had similar ambitions lmao.
#the implications of his having corpse powers in his normal body intrigue me#in that this suggests something wwx did fundamentally altered his soul#which cannot have been the intent#also he was in fact a cultivator so i wonder how his body is going to handle having normal cultivation#and whatever resentment-based nonsense he brought back with him#many interesting plot threads from wn doing this insane thing!#not a boring fixit concept lol (@whetstonefires)
The tension in the long term of Nie Mingjue and most of the rest of the cultivation world holding their breath to see what other horrible things Wen Ning would do in the name of ambition, while Wen Ning mostly just doesn't do any of them would be great, I must say.
#also important to remember that wen ning would NOT be normal about wwx through all this (via @maggiedeshiboux)
which would baffle everyone, given they met once. and, huh, that interaction with Wei Wuxian championing this kid against his mean cousin, whom he went on to clear out of the way of his succession, would look really different suddenly in hindsight lmao.
if this was back far enough that the qishan indoctrination never happened, wwx wouldn't even feel more than moderate dislike toward wen chao lmao. he's just an especially obnoxious young master.
further thoughts: if Wen Ning did follow up impulsively killing Wen Ruohan with deliberately getting rid of Wen Chao and Wen Xu so as to carry off a coup, it would not be because he wants to be sect leader.
so to what extent would it be to protect Wen Sect, or at least people in it, from being run by Wen Xu, to what extent would it be to protect all the other sects from the possibility of Wen Sect still waging a war, and to what extent would it be to protect Wen Qing from the fallout of his murder?
i feel like the last part is not non-zero, given she died the first time because he punched someone to death.
but making the decision to double down on the violence in order to be able to control the outcome is a fascinating move, it is not even in the top five most likely reactions for him to have.
the characterization here would be so interesting to get right, because Wen Ning is so passive right up until he plants himself like a mountain, and he's never had to stay in mountain mode the way he would to pull this off. so he'd be taking leaves out of Wei Wuxian's book, deliberately.
but much as he admires him, he knows how comprehensively things wound up going to shit due to partly Wei Wuxian's choices (particularly the impulsive choice to reanimate Wen Ning's corpse to murder people) and is ultimately confident enough about rejecting wwx's reasoning to blow things wide open with Jiang Cheng.
so he'd have to be trying to copy Wei Wuxian's way of seizing control of the circumstances and do insane things because someone has to do them, while also applying his own sense of caution, and pursuing the idea that you can't just seize control when you want to and then let it go again, it's something you have to maintain.
ironically making him more like wen ruohan than he has any business ever becoming.
i think if he didn't tell Wen Qing everything he'd blow up.
but while he's more of a talker than Lan Wangji, he is not someone who uses a lot of words, or who would be good at explaining as large and complicated a story as this would be. so 'everything' would take a really long while to fill in.
also: jin zixun will now, due to the recent precedent of Loser Cousin Murder Usurpation, be super easy to frame for murdering jin guangshan and jin zixuan. if meng yao finds some way to break into the family without a war, he should use that.
whyyyyyy do so many people rightfully annoyed by "friends don't do that" and "no platonic explanation" stuff decide to hit back with the "oh do you not have real friends? you've never cared about a friend? you've never had an intense or devoted or physically intimate friendship? what the fuck is your problem?" rant. it pisses me off so much. speaking as a person who went a long time without friends because of my neurodivergence and other disabilities. i was on your side about "friends don't do that" being fucking annoying and wrong! but hearing the negative qualities you imply about friendless people would've fucked me up bad as a depressed autistic middle schooler. or as a frequently bedbound college dropout. why are we acting like this is progressive. why.
potentially shocking statement here, but having friends or not (and, among people who do, having specifically intense and devoted and physically intimate friendships or not) is a fucking morally neutral thing. and not having relationships like that does not inherently make a person say the amatonormative stuff that started this whole argument! i don't kiss my friends, but that doesn't mean i'm going on a crusade that kissing is always romantic and never platonic! is that too difficult for you to believe? and if you can believe that, can you also believe that not participating in other aspects of friendships doesn't inherently give you amatonormativity brainrot, either? it's literally just like this:
[ID from alt: edited meme where a stick figure fires a beam, labeled "do you not have friends JFC WTF is wrong with you." The beam bounces off "shipper who will keep saying amatonormative bullshit no matter what you do," and instead, it hits "person who doesn't have friends who now knows that you think there's something wrong with them." End ID.]
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Okay, I need to add some clarification and correction to this.
This photo is known as The Pale Blue Dot. It was taken by Voyager 1, a space probe meant to explore the outer reaches of the solar system. Far from dying, she's still out there doing her job and is the furthest human made object from Earth.
In the mid 80's, they knew Voyager 1 would soon pass beyond where her cameras would matter and she needed to save power, so the question became: what's the last thing she should take a picture of?
Carl Sagan and Carolyn Porco both independently had the same thought: take a picture of Earth. Us. Yes, it would be essentially just one pixel. It wouldn't be scientifically useful. It might even damage the camera because of how intense the sun is, even forty times as far from Earth as Earth is from the Sun. But they got it sorted because it's NASA.
3.7 million (not billion) miles away, that's Earth. Caught in bands of light, artifacts of the Sun's incredible power even 4 million miles away. We are an island in a sea of radiation and vacuum and it's all we have.
I can't say it better than Sagan did, so I'll let you alone with his words:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
