Kitkaedatidler

Tianne, she/they

[txttletale]

efforts towards a "positive vision of masculinity" or whatever are so funny because what these guys are trying to figure out is literally "what's a way of being a good person that's Not For Girls™"

[the-pallid-princess]

adding @unidentifiedfuckingthing 's comment

[thestuffedalligator]

Dragons are fireless until they undergo the Hroom, the traditional draconic ceremony where a fledgling dragon will go out into the world and make a bargain with a spirit of elemental fire to live in their soul in a state of mutual symbiosis. The spirit receives shelter and nourishment, while the dragon receives a source of elemental fire, which it can only now use to defend itself.

In many draconic cultures, the Hroom marks a dragon’s coming of age, a time to recognize that a dragon is now of a proper age to hold a weapon and defend itself. Some dragons believe that it is only by bonding with an elemental spirit that a dragon has a soul, and that a dragon is only a whole dragon when it has both the mortal shell and the inner spark.

There has been a backlash to this in recent centuries, of course. Fledglings these days are going out and making bargains with all kinds of things. This is usually spirits of elemental lightning and ice, but more than one dragon has come back to their clutch with a fairly bewildered witch.

[thestuffedalligator]

#Does the witch live inside the dragon's soul after...?

Metaphorically, yes. One dragon had married the witch she brought back to her clutch, and she said that meant their two souls had become one, which was basically the same thing.

The other dragons in her brood said it didn’t work that way, but she was able to breathe pure magic afterwards, so it at least worked that way for her.

[alientitty]

a few indian brutalist buildings

[dubiousculturalartifact]

The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

It ain’t Kermit

[anyroads]

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

[merlinmumbles]

Okay but who's the one human actor playing?

[literary-potato]

I vote Nobody, but I could see arguments for Helen of Troy or Circe as well.

Also important:

How does the Circe turning men into pigs thing get handled given that Miss Piggy is a pig-Muppet and there are multiple other muppets who are already canonically pig-Muppets?

They get turned into real live action pigs, nobody remarks on it

They get turned into real live action pigs & Piggy looks directly at the camera

They get turned into chickens

They get turned into live action humans

Nothing happens at first to the guy Muppet-pig, so Circe has to get creative

Other/I’m bald/vanilla extract

Voting ended onJul 30

Just to clarify my vision on a couple of these:

* by chickens I mean Muppet-chickens à la Camilla (Gonzo naturally would have some reaction to this)

* in the “nothing happens at first to muppet pig”, what I’m visualizing is that Cpt James Pork (or whatever his name is - the pigs in space one) is in the crew, everyone else in the crew gets transformed into either live action pigs or non-sentient Muppet-pigs (walking on 4 legs, etc), and he is completely unchanged… until Circe sighs and snaps her fingers again, and he turns into some other animal (maybe a chicken? or possibly a live action human, in which case it’s obviously either an INSANE celebrity cameo pull with someone who’s normally top billing, or literally William Shatner)

[literary-potato]

Can I just say I really appreciate that our collective commitment to the Muppets is so strong that at 120-something votes, not one person has chosen other/vanilla extract?

[gardengarlic]

Every time this crosses my dash there's a different string of comments and they are all gold so I'm consolidating.

[vintageeveryday]

Mugshot of a teenage girl arrested for protesting segregation, Mississippi, 1961.

[attackoftheskydancers]

Her name is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland. Her family disowned her for her activism. After her first arrest, she was tested for mental illness, because Virginia law enforcement couldn’t think of any other reason why a white Virginian girl would want to fight for civil rights. She also created the Joan Trumpauer Mullholland Foundation. Most recently, she was interviewed on Samatha Bee’s Full Frontal on February 15 for their segment on Black History Month. Don’t reduce civil rights heroes to “teenage girl”.

[shiverandqueeef]

how measurements work in canada (ie/ badly)

[your-dads-filing-cabinet]

@/teaboot

[teaboot]

This isn't even a joke it's just what we do

[dykerightsmp3]

the fact that Reylo discourse is now almost entirely 'is this ship toxic :)' always throws me off so much because I genuinely think the MUCH bigger issue with Reylo was that it pushed a black man to the side as Not Love Interest Material in favor of a white nazi. Like the issue is that shipping Reylo arrived transparently because people did not care about the black man – which I know, because the ship became popular before we even had The Last Jedi! When they'd barely interacted! If Kylo were black and Finn were white, Reylo would not be popular and it would never have become canon in any way, and I do think a refusal to grapple with that is honestly very embarrassing.

[andrastee]

Like Dogs, Shianni: Tabris, Judaism, and Dogs

I was drawn to play as Tabris because of the strong parallel between the city elves and the Jewish people. As I played, I was also really interested in the role of dogs and mabari and how Tabris would relate, culturally, to being around one and having one. I found significant ties to Jewish cultural understandings of dogs, connected back through elven monotheism and their narrative role in the alienage. I compiled some of this below, but there is plenty more, I'm certain. The iconic "Like dogs, Shianni" has more weight than I think people realize, both in-universe and in the real world.

Giant disclaimer that I am analyzing the city elves and Tabris through the analog of Judaism, that is, as a monotheistic minority culture living in segregated city quarters. This is not to diminish or remove the many other analogs to real life people and cultures that elves represent in Dragon Age. I just found the connections between them deeply rich in ways that I think people who are not familiar with Jewish context would find interesting! A general content warning for discussions of ethnic violence, pogroms, miscarriage, massacres, and dead bodies.

The Canticle of Shartan

In Dragon Age, it is established that the Canticle of Shartan is central to elves who believe in and worship the Maker; it is Dragon Age's Exodus parallel (the connections between which will have to be for another post). It is important enough to elves to have been vengefully de-canonized after the Exalted March on the Dales. Additionally, the Chantry has removed evidence that Shartan was an elf in art and literature. If Leliana becomes the Divine in Inquisition, she re-canonizes this Canticle.

What's interesting is that in the little actual text we have of the Canticle, dogs are one of the primary metaphors employed in the text through Shartan/the narrator's voice. In the first instance, Shartan tells the People who are considering returning to Tevinter:

"A dog might slink back to the hand it has bitten And be forgiven, but a slave never. If you would live, and live without fear, you must fight."

Dogs are used in the text to measure power, status, lowliness, and degeneracy. In the above, the condition of bondage is worse than being a dog.

In the next instance:

Darkness fell upon the Lonely One, A night without moon or stars, As the legion followed, like bloodhounds, The trail of the rebels.

The narrator compares the Tevinter legion pursuing the elves to bloodhounds--a poignant deglorification of their Roman-adjacent military might. The elves are the strategic geniuses while the legion are mindless hunters; by lowering the status of the Tevinters to dogs, they legitimize themselves above them, as a free people.

The third instance is after the People kill the legion. They are frightened by the sound of Andraste's army marching into Tevinter, though they do not know it is her:

Seeing an army beyond counting gathered in the distance, Shartan said to the People "Let us not fall into the jaws of the wolf together..."

It is more than likely that polytheistic elven tradition seeped into the language of the Canticle, with Fen'Harel as a wolf-god associated with curses and exile. The change in metaphor is striking to me as it could foreshadow Andraste's power and dignity--while a dog is a low imitation, a wolf is it's more dangerous, more respected forebear. Wolves are, of course, associated with Fen'Harel, and even as a trickster, Fen'Harel is still acknowledged as a deity.

Regardless, danger, enslavement, mindlessness (a kind of enslavement) and death are associated with dogs, wolves, and canines.

Dogs in the Alienage

Throughout most major Jewish texts, similar to the above, dogs are equated with lowliness, uncleanliness, and evil. In the Hebrew Bible, dogs are associated with prostitution, and considered animals that maul people and eat corpses. Even Jewish law, halakha, describes in kosher guidelines food so unclean it is nifsal mei'achilat kelev, "something one would not feed to a dog." The Talmud records a case of a dog barking at a pregnant woman, and she miscarried; the dog's bark "caused the Divine Presence to depart from the Jewish people." (Bava Kamma 83a:7).

In the opening cutscene of the Tabris origin, we see a dog lying beside working and impoverished elves; we later see elven children playing with this dog during the wedding preparations. So there's not a general cultural dislike or removal of all dogs, and dogs can be pets. I believe, however, there are significant limits to this relationship. Historically, Jewish legal codes regulated that dogs must be chained and/or only let out at night because of their association with destruction and violence. When going around the alienage, there are no dogs out and about--we only see dogs loose after the purge. Notably, the dog seen is not a mabari. In Dragon Age, it could be that mabari specifically, war dogs, represent a new magnitude of violence and lowliness.

Mabari and the Orphanage

In Jewish mystic tradition, dogs symbolize demons and the presence of evil in the world. They are referred to as such in the Psalms: "Dogs surround me;/ a pack of evil ones closes in on me" (22.17) and later in the poem "Save my life from the sword,/ my precious life from the clutches of a dog" (22.21) [Translation from the Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, Oxford University Press].

When investigating the horrors of the orphanage, two of the major signs of demonic activity are dogs. One dog is dead, and has been for some time; the other is alive and feral. It is the same dog that was playing with the elven children that has gone feral, while the mabari lies dead.

When you enter into the orphanage, mabari have taken over the rooms alongside the restless spirits and demons. Considering the Talmudic story about dogs and children above, it is significant that dogs replace the elven children that were once there. They are the remnant of the pogrom.

A survivor says this about the dogs in the orphanage:

"The dogs hear the bad men too. They make the dogs so confused, so angry. Poor little pups barking at the noise. Make them stop!"

What's interesting is the elven woman shows a lot of sympathy for the dogs. If the "bad men" are both the violent humans and the demons, then the "poor animals" and "pups," are reacting with and like the restless spirits of the elven children and adults massacred. There are literal dogs inside the orphanage, just as outside, but they are the physical manifestation of a corrupted weakness in the veil, the death and violence. If elves believe dogs are demonically connected, perhaps dogs are drawn to such belief wherever elven spirits rage. Their angered and grieving souls have been corrupted, and their being stuck, frightened, and haunting that place is equal to the lowliness of doghood.

A major role for dogs in the story of Exodus is during the tenth plague, the Death of the Firstborn, which also connects dogs and noise:

"And there shall be a large cry in all the land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again; but not a dog shall snarl [or bark, or move its tongue]..." (Exodus 11.6-7).

The silence of the dogs enabled and recognized the ancient Jewish people as a free people. The elven woman is also asking for the silence of the dogs, the quieting of spirits through justice and the expulsion of the demons. She is asking, in a way, for the restoration of their dignity.

We see in the Canticle of Shartan and the way in which restless spirits who died violent deaths become equated with mabari, the violent acts of humans degrade themselves into demons and dogs, and degrade others to a status even beneath that. The silence and absence of dogs represent the dignity of elves as a free people, and justice in their memory.

So, when Tabris tells Shianni she killed them "like dogs," it is a kind of redemption, a denigration of humans because of their violence and a recognition of elven dignity. Just as the People in the Canticle of Shartan slaughtered the "bloodhounds," and how the dogs in Exodus were silent during the last, violent plague for liberation.

In Conclusion

I think this provides an interesting angle into Tabris' relationship with mabari, Fereldan culture, and the differences in monotheism between humans and elves. I also think it can add new weight to the Nature of the Beast, with elves cursing humans after racial violence to be half-dog, half-man (this is deeply grounded in Dalish perspectives related to Fen'Harel, though I think there is important cultural bleed-through) and how an elven warden might respond. I hope it sheds light on what I feel is significant Jewish symbolism, and the metaphorical thread of dogs as it relates to monotheistic city elves found in the game and in-game sacred text. I hope it was an interesting read, and can add to whatever storytelling you'd like to do with your Tabris or city elf characters!

[luna-azzurra]

People often choose familiar pain over unfamiliar peace. That sounds dramatic, but it is basically pattern learning. If chaos is what your character knows, calm may feel like a setup. If neglect is familiar, attention may feel like surveillance. If love always meant losing power, being loved may feel like being trapped. This is why “just choose happiness” is not an arc. Happiness can be the scariest room in the house.

[evilsoup]

Let's take like a conceit from a hollywood movie kind of scenario: if there's an emergency and someone shoves a baby into your arms then you are responsible for it, at least until you can safely hand it off to someone else; there is an obligation there imposed on you simply by the situation you are in and your status as a human being, without there being any kind of "guilt" or debt you have to pay off. This is the sense in which there are moral obligations imposed on you by the general state of the world. It's not that you have done something wrong, it doesn't mean that you have to take on guilt for some shit your ancestors or fellow countrymen did. It is because you are a human being in a society which has the material capacity to enable everyone to live a good life, but then systematically prevents this for vast swathes of humanity, that you have an obligation to try to change the situation, proportionate to your capacity to act.

[lavenderstobins]

let's attack the citadel with mama

[fangs4faggots]

i think we should start openly mocking male creatives who can't figure out how to write women. like actually i think it's embarrassing that it took elliot page transitioning for christopher nolan to give him a good role. why did it take like ten years to get the first female lead in a marvel movie? why is it a Known Fact that stephen king can't write women? why is 50% of the population omitted from large ensemble works? i asked my friend to name a movie directed by a man with a majority female cast and he said ghostbusters 2016. ghostbusters. ghostbusters. g

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

This whole obsession with wheelchair users struggling on foot down the aisle at their wedding or across the stage for graduation is 100% powered by ableism.

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

“The heartwarming story of how one woman worked for 8 months straight so she could escape the horror that is being in wheelchair for a few short minutes to struggle slowly and painfully down the aisle on her special day.”

[feraladoration]

“the horror that is being in a wheelchair” bitch it’s hella better than struggling slowly & painfully down the aisle ffs

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

“Despite being permanently paralyzed, her one goal since her accident has been to walk across the stage for graduation. The whole crowd gave her a standing ovation and broke into tears when she dragged her paralyzed legs across the stage with the help of leg braces and a walker to collect her diploma, after which she immediately sat back down in her wheelchair, which she will use to move around for the rest of her life.”

How the hell is this an inspirational story? This person needs better goals. And a therapist.

[smoldragonborn]

They’re toxic in an even greater way because as a disabled person, I didn’t realise till I was reading this how much I had internalised that. I genuinely have had feelings of fear and shame about using a chair or a walker if I get married. And why? Because I’m constantly seeing “heartwarming” stories about disabled people who shed their mobility aids for that moment. Why the hell am I afraid of using them to get married? Anyone who marries me or attends the wedding will know I need them and love me regardless.

Bless this post for making me realise I’d internalised that shit.

These types of stories teach people, both abled and disabled, that using mobility aids, especially wheelchairs, is inferior.

[margomoment]

here are some beautiful brides in chairs with dresses they ROCK. I know a lot of disabled ppl with internalized ableism think they “won’t look good” if they use their chair, but here’s some literally gorgeous gals for ur consideration

(that last ones cute as fuck and i teared up at it)

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

Who needs a bouquet when you can be a bouquet?

[smoldragonborn]

I made my addition to this post in June 2019. Its now January 2020 and I no longer feel guilty about the idea of going down the aisle one day with mobility aids.

God bless the disabled community, y'all saved me from some internalised bullshit

[thegayemu]

This post floated by a few months ago, and I remember something to effect of there’s a difference between recovery and refusal. That is, like, I have a friend that suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury. He can walk again now, and I don’t think I’ve seen him use his chair in a few years. When he walked at his graduation, it was to show off his recovery. That he wasn’t quite ready to go through a full day upright, but he could walk across a stage, unassisted, and soon he would be able to do that every day. There’s also a difference in someone like me choosing to not use a mobility aid. My mobility is intensely fluid, especially seasonally. So, I would plan a summer wedding. And while I love my cane it can also be the biggest pain in my ass, so I’d want to just go unassisted. But that’s normal for me, at least right now. I can walk without an aid during about half of the year. It’s reasonable to assume I can make it through one day without it. All of that is different than someone that is fully and permanently paralyzed, that will never walk again, dragging themselves along because they feel that’s somehow better. Overall though, my biggest takeaway is fuck the media. Because disabled people should be able to make whatever decision they want without the media turning it into this grand inspirational story.

[noping-out-deactivated20241117]

Disabled people should be able to make whatever decision they want without the media turning it into this grand inspirational story.

THIS.

[bifinmediasres]

Couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add my disabled joy to this post. Look at this love!

[aprillikesthings]

Taking the opportunity to add these photos of Jessica Kellgren-Fozard and her wife Claudia, from this twitter post. Jessica also has a youtube channel that’s primarily about disability and chronic illness and LGBT stuff (it’s amazing!) 

[haveyouhadenough]

I would also like to personally share, Annika Victoria who ALSO has a youtube channel. This photo was taken from her instagram - she made her wedding dress dress herself, BY HAND. Her youtube channel is mostly DIY fashion and sewing tutorials. I love her so much, she’s so unapologetically herself and informative

[theinfiniteofthought]

I also wanna add these pictures of Ade Adepitan fucking rocking this badass suit at his wedding! Give my fellow disabled mascs some love too

look how much fun they’re both having! yes!

and also this couple, who are both wheelchair users

this is from their beautifully coordinated wedding!

[dharmagun]

Higgledy-piggledy unparliamentary green parrots quarrel outside in the trees

Squawking out epithets uncomplimentary Squads of unmannerly Oversized peas.

[alexanderwales]

I really like the practice of putting years after a movie title, mostly because it gives you context of when it was made, which is often the most important part of understand where it sits in the culture and history of film. I say What Women Want (2000) and you immediately get where and when this film was made, and can extrapolate information from that. It's a great convention for talking about film, maybe because film tends to be less timeless.

[sannel]

To the glistening eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy the Valiant. To the great western wood, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant southern sun, Queen Susan the Gentle. And to the clear northern sky, I give you King Peter the Magnificent.

Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen. May your wisdom grace us until the stars rain down from the heavens.

An amazing art by CrazyTom.

P.S. Art is published with permission of the author. Please, do not repost!

[gabriellelestat]

there’s a cultural obsession with labelling all female authors as unintelligent or otherwise only capable of accidentally stumbling into brief moments of genius in their works that we need to start pushing back against

[space-feminist]

“I was always bothered when people say, ‘I cry to your music, it sounds like a diary, it sounds so personal,’” Mitski says. “Yes, it is personal. But that’s so gendered. There’s no feeling of, ‘Oh, maybe she’s a songwriter and she wrote this as a piece of art.’”

(source)

feel like it's related to the phenomenon mitski's discussing here - if women's art is only seen as unfiltered diaristic emotion then of course it can only ever be accidental genius, never created with intention and thought