immortality as theft (you have to steal life from something else) immortality as parasitism (there is something else inside You that is keeping you alive and you become less of yourself more and more the longer it stays in you) immortality as violence (everything is trying to kill you because everything is supposed to die and the universe will always try to find a way to right the wrong that is You) you understand
#at least once a month I think about that one post about laminating a paper towel#and how that makes it immortal but also forever prevents it from fulfilling its true purpose#yes you will live. but at the cost of everything that makes you You
Peeling off the broken breastplate of a stoic knight who only fights and never speaks, just to realize there’s nothing in there. Not metaphorically—the armor is literally empty. It doesn’t appear to affect him. If the armor stays mostly in the shape of a knight, he just gets back up to keep fighting. But with the chest plate off he just sits there, equally impervious to curiosity as I reach up into the cavity where his body might’ve gone. Stubbornly, no answers are found anywhere in there.
So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.
He comes back next time with some grievous injury to his nothing, presumably from the massive shredded gash across his thigh plates. He sits and waits. I fix it for him. He is still nothing in there. I decide to add a drawing on the inside, of the type of beast I imagine could rend metal into scraps with a single blow. He puts it back on. He no longer moves as if he is injured.
Over time the interior of the knight becomes decorated with whatever odds and ends I could think to attach to the inside of a guy who’s got room to carry it. What really gets me is that he never removes any of it. Never requests a change. Not even when I installed a curtain rod for a small tapestry, or a bud vase to carry roses for his beloved, or an accordion folder for letters. He didn’t say a word for any of the many, many drawings of mythical beasts that now fight forever inside of his shell.
There are plenty of other forges. I’m not entirely sure why he keeps coming back here anyway. We’re pretty popular, but he could get his armor fixed a lot quicker (and with fewer ridiculous modifications) literally anywhere else. I asked him if I could get a look at his nothing again. He flipped up his visor and nodded his head so I could take a look. It was the same as it had been, filled with drawings and trinkets and weird little fixtures I’d put in there. I asked if he was annoyed by it, or liked it, or felt anything at all, but he literally only ever says nothing, so I’m not sure why I asked.
There’s not much room left in his nothing now. When he comes back for repairs I’ve had to fix my own foolish additions. Some of these pieces are intricate and irritating to repair, but I fix them anyway. It feels wrong to take any of it away from him now, even though I’ve been rudely encroaching on his nothingness to the point where it’s barely even there. How he squeezes his nothing back into a body so full, I’ll never understand. But it’s a game to me now, finding a spot not yet filled and putting something there. A dark part of me wonders if he ever gets filled up completely, if whatever sorcery holds the nothing-knight together may break, and it will all clatter unceremoniously to the floor.
When he hands me his breastplate yet again, it is so shockingly disfigured that I wonder if being made of nothing has somehow kept him alive. No ordinary knight could sustain such injuries. So I fix it. And he waits, unmoving, in a quiet corner of the forge. It’s like he’s watching, even though I know the reading glasses I put inside his helmet were just for fun. I’m careful to put it all back exactly the way it was when he last left. There’s no room to add more this time.
He examines the breastplate, and pauses before putting it back on, like he’s looking for something. Is he worried about the fit? But it suits him just as it always did. He calmly points to a little space, about an inch, between a miniature shelf and one of many pockets. There’s nothing there. I ask him what’s wrong, and again he points. It’s the most emotion I’ve ever seen from him, and it’s barely anything at all. I take it to mean he wants something there.
I spend some time engraving a little snail in the gap. He watches, as much as nothing can watch. When I’m finished he holds the breastplate, but he doesn’t put it on right away. I ask him if something’s still wrong. He says nothing, and puts it on. I tell him I can’t add anything else. Even if he could ask, there’s no room left.
Next time he comes back, there’s nothing wrong with his armor—he lets me check to make sure. I ask him what he’s doing here. Out from one of many pockets, he retrieves a tiny rusted knife. It’s in miserable condition, barely worth saving. I tell him I could make him a nice new one, but I’ll fix it if he likes. He puts it away and reaches around to find something else, a needle and thread. Better condition, but I’m not a sewist and I tell him as much. He puts them away. He then retrieves a little twisted piece of wax paper. I open it. It’s candy. I ask if I can eat it. He says nothing. I eat it. It’s flavored with cinnamon. I’m surprised he let me take it.
He keeps bringing me candy now. His armor is the most laborious to repair out of every client my forge serves, but it’s my own fault so I can’t complain. Sometimes he keeps me company while I work. I wonder if he is trying to tell me something when he hands me mints. I wonder again at the lemon lozenges. He stares at me when I eat, as much as nothing can stare.
One day he brings me a little jar of honey. I thank him, I tell him I’ll save it for dinner. He watches me work, he puts his repaired armor back on, and he stays. My shift passes slowly, and when I finally pack up to leave it’s dark outside. He follows me out of the forge. I ask him where he’s going. He points to the jar in my hand. I ask him if he wants to watch me eat it. He says nothing, but the nothing-knight clearly wants something, so I open the lid and dunk my finger in the honey. I try not to get any on my chin. He stands there, inches away, watching me try to consume this jar of honey without a utensil. It tastes like clovers. About half the jar is left when I’ve finally had enough of pretending to be a bear, but he doesn’t move to leave.
I ask if he’s going to follow me home. He says nothing. I tell him he can if he wants to. Again, nothing. I start walking, and he follows at my side. I know he’s not going to say anything ever, so I fill the silence. I tell him I’m grateful for the sweets, I tell him about how his various components are made, I tell him I’ve never met anyone made of nothing before. I tell him it’s a rare opportunity for a smith to work so much on the inside of something. He says nothing. I tell him again how much I like the candy.
It occurs to me that maybe filling me with sugar is as close as he can get to filling someone else’s empty armor with trinkets. I’m not sure if that’s really why he does it. I tell him I don’t have room to be filled with anything on the inside, not like him. I’m not a container for much besides food. He offers me another piece of candy. Maybe he likes containing something, the way I like to feel full. Maybe it’s nothing at all.
—
I didn’t edit this even a little bit. Thanks for reading!
Of appetite—of my own appetite—I recognize this: it flashes up, quicker than thought; it cannot be exiled; it can be held on leash, but only barely. [...] I am no fool, no sentimentalist. I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.
Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!
Hello!!! I'm so excited to finally share this little time-based guess-the-sailor fangame with you!
In Who is That Sailor? you have 30 seconds to correctly identify the characters shown on screen. The more you identify, the more time and points you get. See where you land on the leaderboard, and compete for the title of Master of the Muster Roll!
It's available as a web game on itch.io, and as an executable for Windows.
What has your experience been like as a native t*rror fan?
IT SUCKS LOL NOBODY WANTS TO TALK TO ME cause i'm a fucking buzzkill and i don't like to leave discussions of colonization and colonialism and imperialism to nothing more than a disclaimer and a frowny emoticon. i actually don't think "obviously they're all bad people" is good analysis, i don't think any interpretation can hold up when all you say is "obv a huge part of this is the racism" when all anyone does is just name it and then proceed to side step and talk around it for the rest of time. in this fandom for all the literary analysis and cool shit it's like the actual damn themes of the show are the only things people DON'T talk about and instead write thousands of words on homosocialism and class struggle and military service and victorian values and will analyze and analyze every character But with the racism REMOVED. as if it's too serious (read: just not fun!!!) to be included in with everything else, instead of being the sole point of origin around which all characters in the terror are formed, around which every theme is developed, around which is the very foundational reason every white person gets away with saying "polar exploration" like they were fucking exploring anything, around which is the reason imperialists felt they had such a right to the rest of the world that they did it in the first place! and i don't like to be a buzzkill, recently on discord i've been eating my words a lot because i realize that i can sound so negative about the things i like, but it's because i like them that i am so so so critical of their flaws. and the show itself doesn't even mince words the way the fandom does, i love the way the show is written (and as always by gosh one day i will get my hands on a copy of the book but today is not that day) and it actually does so much that i dreamed it would. it isn't actually just "white navymen doing white navymen things and we don't question the politics of why they're doing those things" it's narratively centered around the question of what is a navyman and what is a colonizer and how do these men bring their victorian english royal navy society to a world that is just absolutely fine without it, and how do they all end eachother through nothing but their adherance to a structure that (like all structures, like all borders) is enforced by violence when they never had to Do All That in the first place? it's good! it's really good!! i'm writing an insane essay about personifications of imperialism in the terror right now! but the fandom somehow seems to have watched an entirely different show from me. i don't mind being fandom silly i like to ship characters and in fact the terror is far from the most imperial text on which i spend my time (hi, aubreyad! mwah!) and be very facetious with, i just also don't think that by treating the central themes of the show (without which all interpretation and analysis falls through because it is not founded first on anything) as Untouchable Topics because they're So Serious is actually doing us any favors.
and that is just my like, baseline level gripe is that i wish white people cared about racism more than they do. the most they can muster is saying they care, of course they do, and then proceeding to somehow forget that caring is a verb and an action and needs to actually be done for you to say you do it. this doesn't even MENTION the anon asks i've gotten since the first time i expressed this sentiment. i was told indigenous perspective on polar exploration literally Doesn't Matter and Isn't Needed beyond the oral history we already have - which i don't know if i need to spell it out but one of the most common ways people are unthinkingly racist to natives is to want our words and our bodies and our relics and our writings and our ideas and our medicine and our stories and our history, but they don't want them all together in one place being breathed life by US. they want to put them on their powerpoints and tell other white people about the fun facts they've learned, about a people who aren't here anymore, and goodness forbid there's one of us in the room, who dares to remind anyone that you're talking about actual people, and that it should be indigenous people who get to talk about their own damn culture first instead of having to give up space so some white person can speak on our behalf.
that's a specific message i got a while ago that really hurt me, because it was framed so good-faith as if the person was really truly genuinely just curious about what justifies native ppl speaking at all. i was being asked to justify even being part of the conversation at all, something i guarantee no white 20-something in this fandom has had to do. but beyond that i've gotten more outwardly racist things, slurs and insults and "you should have all been wiped out we need to try again" and such. that all is just part of online life for me at this point because i happen to think shutting up about racism is not actually a good thing, so i'm kind of honestly used to it, but it was that first message written in the same polite tone that many normal asks are, many analysis posts in the fandom and many normal conversations, but asking me to justify even being alive and talking in the same place as a white person, in a fandom dominated by white people talking to white people about a culture of white people that only exists because of imperialism and racism, was really something i don't know that i've gotten over yet.
i have to cut this off here cause i am busy in offline life but if anyone wants me to elaborate on any of this completely feel free to ask, i'm actually not mean, i just (incredibly) don't like experiencing racism
The portrayal of white people who have been violently separated from their own culture stealing the power of black culture and music to try to get reconnected was SO literal and somehow not at ALL heavy-handed or trite. Fkn remarkable.
origins au where the warden dies of their injuries in flemeth’s hut after ostagar. and flemeth sees that the existence of a buddy grey warden was extremely emotionally load-bearing for the one she did manage to save so she puts a spirit in the warden’s corpse and drags them out with the exact same you worry too much young man! look, they’re fine! spiel
William Pilkington/Charles Des Voeux / rated M / 3.1k words
Liam could all but hear him rolling his eyes as he asked, “Will you sleep if I describe to you this fantastical wife of mine?” His fingers scratched at Liam’s scalp, and it was the first hurt to feel good in ages.
“On my honor.”
On the shale, waiting for the lead of their pack to make a decision, Pilkington is told to rest for the night. Des Voeux joins him (for Pilkington's sake, not his own).
i love this because it's like. why did paleolithic peoples paint the hunt. perhaps to celebrate and honour brave deeds that kept the community alive. perhaps to bring luck for future hunts. perhaps to instruct those who came after how to slay the beast. perhaps to remind us we can: that the mammoth is not unkillable.
this graffiti, too, serves those purposes!
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