I Have Wings and I Shall Soar

they/he, asexual, aromatic, agender

[fairymousse]

In The Shadow Of A Resurrection - Chapter 8: Before The Storm Dies

For every soul that dreads the lighting strike, there’s another who fears it may never come. Rationality has little recourse in a world so strange. In the faraway villages and townships of the nation, monsters are accepted as fact.

(This is easily one of my most experimental chapters, but I also think that it's one of my favourites because of that!)

[grithogirl]

i looovveee the scale differences of how big oakhurst feels depending on if you're watching a vampire or a human, when watching the vampires everything feels so compact and claustrophobic, taking hardly a minute to get from one end of the map to the other, simply lunging over cliffs and flying over forests, the characters themselves complaining about too little space and wanting to stretch their wings and then you watch a human pov and everything feels so huge, they spend days out in the wilderness at a time because thats simply how long it takes to get from one place to another, the forests thick and each of them getting lost despite being in groups of SIX at times, what is for the vampires a quick detour is a day long trek for the humans and it adds so well to the immersion and worldbuilding, i love it!!

[quasi-normalcy]

"Well you wouldn't find this fantasy so enthralling if it were REAL and happened to YOU" Okay, yeah, no, but you see it's not real and it's not happening to me.

[quasi-normalcy]

I'd probably find it pretty traumatic if stormtroopers murdered my aunt and uncle, but no one seems to object to Star Wars on those grounds.

[thatrandombystander]

Absolutely enamoured with The Nametaker owhe who came out as nonbinary initially just to see who in their criminal gang actually was loyal and respected their authority without being a dick or starting to scheme behind their back to jump ship for a rival gang. And then after finishing the clean up decided they liked being nonbinary and stuck with it.

Top tier way to explain a character's gender and parts of their characterisation. Very efficient!

[whereispearlescentmoon]

Cleo has days where they don’t want to do anything. No making decisions. No talking. No moving. Just go right back to her roots of deep dissociation. It feels so much easier than being grounded and responsible sometimes. They just wanna drift off and not do anything for a while.

She never had to make decisions during the thralling. She never had to be responsible and smart. She just had to get through the trauma. That was the only thing she could do.

------

Cleo wakes up paralyzed. Not literally, not this time at least. There's just this feeling keeping them still. A weight pressing on their chest like hands holding them down into the bed. It's hard to even breath around it. Their lungs fill half way and spasm, failing to get any more of what they need and having to cope with the little air their stunted attempts can manage. It's not panic, Cleo knows what panic is. It's harder to tell now that they're dead, there's not beating pulse or sweat running down their forehead. But no, it's something more like dread.

It's dark out, they can't hear Pearl anywhere nearby so she must have started her day, or rather night, already. They're envious of that, of Pearl's ability to just get up and go. Like she knows exactly what to do to fill her time. She keeps herself busy, constantly, to the point where Cleo has to push her to take breaks often.

And Cleo isn't a sedentary person, certainly not. They're pulling their weight in repairing Oakhurst and the castle, tasking themself with repairing curtains that have been moth eaten and burnt, making new furniture to replace the piles of ash and rubble, tending to the newly planted saplings that in a couple of decades will replace the decimated forest around the town. There's a seemingly endless list of tasks to be done and redone and to pour their energy into constantly.

That's actually part of the problem. There's so much to do, an endless stream of decisions to make. They could do anything with their day. They want to do all of it. They want to do none of it. Tasks float in front of their eyes, a scroll opening and going going going out the door and none of it sticks out as any more important than anything else. It's all just a blur of stuff.

Okay, Cleo thinks, step one, get up.

So she takes a deep breath and she does. It doesn't happen in one movement. It needs to be broken up into every small twitch of her muscles. She sits up. She turns to face the wall. She moves the blanket off of her. She swings her left leg onto the ground. Then the right. She stares at the wall for a long while. Then she pushes herself up. She hears the floorboards creak under her feet. The whole thing takes 20 seconds. Like pitch in a glass, time flows so slow it may as well not be flowing at all.

She realizes she needs to get dressed and sighs. Another choice to make.

----

Hope you enjoyed this :)

[fairymousse]

There's something kinda Laura Palmer about Past Life Pearl.

[fairymousse]

The parallels extend to Double Life, but that's mostly because dl and pl are kinda similar narratives. Both see Pearl having a downward spiral pushed onwards by the people who are seen as her "caregivers" (soulmate vs allies), being ostracized from her community due her being labelled as unstable. dl!Pearl though is genuinely alone, being hurt remotely by Scott and Cleo. Her loneliness and visible pain lead to greater abandonment, and is only recognised as something to be used. The same does apply to pl!Pearl, with the added horror that the people who hurt her, the people who drag her down, are with her the whole time. They abandon her without the courtesy of leaving. They treat her like an object and expect her to be grateful. They put a target on her back, and treat it like a family.

I think about that scene when she's just on Red, respawned in the river, angry and upset and shouting, and everyone laughs. Don't feel bad for Pearl. Afterall, she brought this on herself. She deserves it. In Twin Peaks, Laura becomes cruel and erratic as the abuse escalates, yet it is incredibly clear how much trouble she's in. No one who notices acts in time, or at all. After her death, she's sanitised. She was the perfect daughter. Don't look at the systems and the people who hurt her. Look at the size of her funeral. Surely she must be loved.

If we were to incorporate Watcher lore into this, we could further connect the Black Lodge's employment of BOB to the continuation of the games - what Laura and Pearl suffer is a kind of ritualistic theatre, with their pain repurposed as entertainment for a greater power. To a greater extent, Twin Peaks reflexivity to contemporary crime procedurals and the meta narrative of the Minecraft SMP place us as complicit in the narrative as well. Like the Villies, we watch these women spiral towards an end we can feel in our gut. And like the Villies, we do nothing.

[fairymousse]

Laura Pearlma.

[artisimpossible]

I genuinely wonder if people realize how many projects get abandoned because the readership "wasn't there", when in reality, the readership just stayed silent. It's a big thing in trad pub that book series get discontinued because readers pirate the books or wait until the series is finished to buy a copy, leading the publisher to think that nobody actually wants the book enough to continue the series, but it happens with indie creators too.

I've discontinued a lot of free, online series because it's not worth putting 3-5 hours a week into posting a project for no readers. Sometimes I finish the series for me but just never post it again, other times I don't finish it at all because it feels more worthwhile to put my time into other things. Sometimes I hear from readers who are sad or upset that I didn't finish something they were liking, but the *reason* it never got finished is because I didn't know anyone liked it. If you like something, tell the creator, tell your friends, make some noise about it. If you would be sad if a story never finished, make that interest known because one of my biggest considerations before discontinuing a series is "will people miss this? Will I be letting people down" and 9/10 times, I come to the conclusion of "no, it doesn't even seem like anyone's reading this" only to learn after I've moved on that apparently someone was.

[healerqueen]

I've said this before in a different way, and this post said it so well. With real examples. If you like something, tell people.

If you want more content from an artist or author, if you like their stuff, tell them. It will give them creative fuel to keep going. And often it gives them other resources as well. Recommend a work to other people. Leave a comment or a review. It doesn't have to be long, just genuine, a sentence or two. Not many people know that a book's success is judged by book reviews as well as sales. Review the book on Amazon or another site to help it pass the metric of success and be recognized by publishers and retailers.

[drtanner]

Talking about it amongst yourselves in a Discord server or whatever doesn't count, by the way. You have to tell the creator, too. They're not going to hear about anything that gets said in your little server unless you tell them about it.

[whereispearlescentmoon]

People who complain about flashing light warnings are actually insufferable. Epilepsy can actually kill people. A two second warning at the beginning of a video is worth the minor inconvenience you have to face so someone won't die. This is a "manage your own triggers" situation this is actual life or death.

[lesvegas]

you can only reblog this if you're not racist

[towerologia-sideblog]

huge coming from the site who is so against black art that 'tumblr users are afraid of rap' has been a meme for the best part of a decade. You know that yall are 4channers with pronouns right?

[lesvegas]

addendum: you can only reblog this if you're not racist part 2

[fairymousse]

Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Spoilers below cut

The Penelopiad is a book I've had my eye on for a while. One of the first books I analysed on a serious level was The Handmaid's Tale. It has it's problems, but I really did connect with Atwood's writing style and imagery, and I made a small amount of effort to seek out other books of hers.

When I heard about Atwood's reinterpretation of the Odyssey, particularly focusing Penelope and the twelve dead maids, I was excited. Having read it...I think I really do like it.

Like most things, I have my problems. Helen in particular feels very flat as a character, and her reappearances never tell us anything about her that we don't already know. The book is short and fairly approachable, but I do wish it was a little bit longer. And while I like Penelope's POV, it's overshadowed every time by The Chorus Line, but more on that later.

But, if I were to pin a primary theme to the Penelopiad, it'd be the uncertainty of narrative itself. "now that I'm dead I know everything", the book opens, and yet at every turn we are unsure on why and how things happened the way they did. Whether Odysseus's tales are true, the motivations of Eurycleia, the suitors and the maids, even Penelope's own tale. We are caught in interpretation, just as Penelope is, just as Atwood herself is. There's one fact that hangs over the book though. The maids are dead, and Odysseus killed them.

I've seen discussion about how we should take the Maids in this book. Is presenting them as secretly faithful implying that the faithless would have deserved it? I'm not sure. I don't think Atwood wants us to be sure. We don't know if the maids are faithful, or if they aren't. Penelope speculates, draws conclusions, but nothing definitive. We struggle to trust Penelope herself at a point as well - one chapter has her denying accusations of infedelity, while the next has the maids confirm the accusations as the true events. Do they know, or are they too speculating on the meaning of their punishment? Where does one deceit end, and another's truth begin?

The Chorus Line chapters are easily my favourite, breaking the narrative voice of Penelope, and hijacking the medium as well. The book becomes a ballad, a sea shanty, a drama. In one memorable chapter, we attend a 21st century trial of Odysseus, with the Maids interjecting in the background. The last two segments in particular are so excellently written and evocative, in a way that is truly unique.

As previously stated, I won't call the Penelopiad perfect. It's got it's problems and difficulties, but it's position as the only Odyssey adaptation that seriously grapples with the maids is valuable, and I think Atwood does admirably with the material.

[fairymousse]

happy birthday to me 🥳

[kianamaiart]

sidney the kidney girl will return in avengers doomsday

[fairymousse]

The Penelopiad isn't a perfect book (the perspective on Helen is a bit one note, though I get it's from Penelope's perspective), but I am so enamoured with what Atwood does with the twelve maids, that I need Odyssey fans to read it for that alone.

[sherlockboylove]

no no i actually think it’s super fun that you took that aro/ace character and bent them over backwards to make them gay!!!! we all know being gay is more #progressive than being aro/ace so i’m so glad you freed them from having a storyline unconnected from romance and shipping!!! you go diva!!!

[fairymousse]

sorry to any EPIC fans, but if you're adapting the Odyssey and focusing on the throughline of Odysseus becoming a monster to get home, and you don't even touch the elephant in the room of the twelve dead slave girls, then I think the adaptation automatically becomes an exercise in cowardice.

[fairymousse]

So I'm reading this...

[new-hyperfixation-every-month]

hello carpenter nation

[qwerty-queer]

fire is a very normal part of the grieving process