truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.
Silmarillion is tragedy but LotR is hope taking tragedy’s hand and telling it that even darkness must pass.
I think that’s part of what makes reading the Silm after LotR such an experience, because you know all that pain and tragedy, it’s not for nothing. That without all that happened in the Silm the victory in LotR wouldn’t have been possible. That all those things happened to bring the world to that point.
So yes, I will read a thousand fanfics of people bringing Maglor home. I will read of Frodo, Bilbo, and Sam finding healing and peace in Valinor and helping the Elves heal their own sorrows and tragedies. I will greedily consume tales of the mending of the division between Feanor and his brothers. I will drowned myself in anything that takes LotR’s hope and turns it on the Silmarillion to mend its tragedy.
The Silmarillion tells us that tragedies happen, but LotR tells us there is hope and compassion and healing to overcome them and move forward.
I’ve been overwhelmed that this post got as much attention as it has since I really was just making it for myself. I threw some thoughts into the void, and was startled that it resonated with so many others.
I have seen some things regarding it though that I did want to address. Some people have been saying in reblogs and tags of this post things along the lines of Silm not being without hope, and them not feeling that LotR is a particularly optimistic story, which isn’t really what I meant.
It’s not that the Silm is without hope, because it certainly has moments of it, but it’s that nearly everyone involved in the events of the Silm doesn’t get to see that hope and work and tragedy pay off in the end because they die horribly or are left in torment and anguish.
It’s important to remember that LotR is a cumulation of events after years of tragedy, the work of countless people fighting evil and giving hope to others while having none left for themselves.
The heroes of the Silm light the torches, fighting impossible fights, defying evil and darkness, and hand those torches off to others when they perish. They do not get to see their work come to fruition, they are trapped in the tragedy, not knowing if what they’re doing is going to matter or mean something in the end.
By contrast, the heroes of LotR get to see all of that work pay off. They get to see a world that is finally rid of both Morgoth and his successor Sauron. Not free completely of evil or sorrow, because it’s still Arda marred and reflects the consequences of Morgoth and Sauron’s corruption, but it is one that is no longer being constantly terrorized by gods with malevolent intent. They know that you can pass through the tragedy and come out the other side because they’ve gotten to do it. Perhaps not unscathed or unchanged, but they know that it’s possible to heal and move forward.
It’s Oropher getting to meet Legolas, to hear that while he may have perished at the Black Gate, his son and grandson got to survive it.
It’s Celebrimbor getting to talk with Elrond, Galadriel, and Gandalf, learning that his work helped others stand against the darkness.
It’s Finrod meeting Elrond and hearing about Beren’s descents and knowing that his sacrifice made so much good possible.
It’s Feanor hearing Sam tell about facing down Shelob with the light of a jewel that he created.
It’s Elrond finding Maglor, showing him that his act of sparing two small boys and raising them with love was a spark that lit the world. It’s giving Maglor the knowledge that even among all the mistakes he made that in the end he did something overwhelmingly good that made a huge difference though he had no way of knowing it at the time.
That’s what I mean when I say that Silmarillion is tragedy and LotR is hope taking it’s hand. It’s giving back hope to those who lived the tragedy that lost it, or didn’t get to see it come to flower, and showing them how to heal and move forward.
“It’s not that the Silm is without hope, because it certainly has moments of it, but it’s that nearly everyone involved in the events of the Silm doesn’t get to see that hope and work and tragedy pay off in the end because they die horribly or are left in torment and anguish...The heroes of the Silm light the torches, fighting impossible fights, defying evil and darkness, and hand those torches off to others when they perish. They do not get to see their work come to fruition, they are trapped in the tragedy, not knowing if what they’re doing is going to matter or mean something in the end.”
This is what gets me about this post. Imagine defying evil and darkness, fighting an impossible fight, but finally being defeated, and not knowing if what you are doing is going to matter or mean something in the end. This hits me hard. I mean, what if the most important thing you’ve done with your life is all for naught? What if what you’ve done doesn’t matter? What if your life is pointless?
Yet, ironically, as the years have passed and I have gotten older, I find this message more and more hopeful. Though I may not see if what I do is going to matter or make a difference, I can cling to the hope that one day, it might. I will never know, of course. But it might make a difference, and that is enough to keep me going.
#As Frodo says sometimes you save the world but for others not for you
considering rainfrogs actually have an ass, unlike most other frogs, because they use their short legs for burrowing rather than jumping and that's where those muscles go, venusaur is actually very likely to have an ass! venusaur definitely doesn't jump and it probably does a certain amount of pushing dirt around.
I wish the Pokemon franchise spent more time showing disabled people with Pokemon. I think a service animal Pokemon would actually be an amazing thing.
It doesn’t even need to be big things either. I have Narcolepsy, and I think it would kick ass to have a Munchlax. I bet that little dude would be so excited to snuggle up and take a nap with me every time I have a sleep attack.
But imagine if it was a Snorlax!! You would have a comfy sleeping spot with you at all times, right in the middle of its big, warm tummy u_u
Meanwhile, I have trouble sleeping, so I would like to have a Jigglypuff to sing me to sleep. Even if I have to wipe off marker in the morning, it would be worth it to feel well-rested for once....
Mr mime could create ramps for wheelchairs if the place you need to access doesn't have one. It could also create temporary sitting places if someone with chronic fatigue needs to rest (though a snorlax would be more comfy)
Oh this RULES! That’s exactly the kind of creative accessibility that I want to see in the Pokemon universe! Easy access to ramps everywhere!!! Mr Mime would actually be amazing!
This idea has so much potential especially when you consider pokemon breeds specializing to environmental factors over time
Goodra that excrete hypo alergenic cleaning slime for people who struggle with cleaning
Drowzees trained to very carefully use dream eater to prevent night terrors
Eevees being the perfect emotional support animals
Torterra with living gardens of their charges favorite fruits and veg
Machamps to help people with low limb stability with chair transfers and lifting tasks
Speaking as a wheelchair user there are so many ways in which pokemon would be the ideal companions and assistants and this idea needs to be explored further
"...under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being."
- Robert Anton Wilson
I've never liked utopic literature. It's not really my thing, and where it's not unrealistic I find it painfully out of reach.
But.
For almost all of human history, more than 50% of children never reached adulthood. As recently as 1800, the lowest child mortality rate of any country in the world was over 30%. It was not an expectation but a fact of life that every parent would experience the trauma of losing a child. The rare lucky few who didn't experience it directly would still be traumatized indirectly, in the fear they felt when their children got sick and the vicarious grief of seeing siblings, cousins, and other extended family die. To have a child was to live with the knowledge that you would likely lose them as you first held them in your arms.
This trauma was endemic to the human condition. A world without that trauma was the realm of science fiction, or divine heavens.
Even today our world is far from utopic, especially where the topic of child mortality is concerned. According to the last statistics I read, 400,000 children have died in the last year specifically because of how Elon Musk and Trump have cut USAID. The maternal mortality rates of black women and the childhood mortality of black children continue to be disproportionately extremely high in the United States. We have an anti-vaccine movement which is killing children. I don't think a single person living today would call the current state of affairs of child mortality a utopia.
And yet.
The average child mortality rate worldwide is just over 3%. The highest national child mortality in the entire world is in Angola, and since the chart above was published in 20q3 the infant mortality dropped by almost half, until the USAID cuts reversed that. But even with the USAID cuts infant mortality is still 50/1000 in 2025, compared to 57/1000 in 2013. Think about that for a moment. The worst child mortality rate in the entire world, recently made worse by a cruel and massive cut to aid, is still less than half of what the best used to be 200 years ago.
There are nations with child mortality rates under 1%. There are places in the world where the death of a child is such an anomalous horror that people don't even plan for it. That people don't know what to do when it happens. There are nations where most people have never personally dealt with the death of a young child in their families.
That would have been unimaginable for almost all of our ancestors. There was no amount of wealth, privilege, or power which could earn you relief from this particular flavor of human trauma for almost all of human history. Now we can take that absence for granted. Now even one of the most vile cruelties of our age doesn't even begin to approach the same level of omnipresent children's death that the safest place in the world used to boast.
That's what solarpunk is to me.
It's not utopia. It's not even better stewardship of nature or more renewable energy, though those are genre staples for a reason.
There's a reason that when I wrote a solarpunk story about a world which gives us more room to handle grief and where child abuse is dealt with infinitely better, I still wrote a story were a neglected kid in a traumatizing household dies in the opening chapter. I don't want to write a story about a world where children never die. I want to write a story where that's such an exceptional tragedy that people don't know what to do about it, and yet their society still handles it better than we would.
Robert Anton Wilson's quote, about how we have never seen a truly sane human not deranged by anxiety and grief, undoubtedly applies to parents losing their children. And yet. That did not turn out to be an inherent part of the human condition. It turns out that you can have a world where the worst child mortality is better than the best used to be. You can have a world where people have never even heard firsthand of somebody losing their kid. We may not have fully fixed that trauma yet, and we may never, but it is a trauma which can indeed be fixed. It does not have to be.
That's what solarpunk is to me. Whether it is set in the present, in the near future, in the far future, or in a totally alternative universe. Whether it's about confronting traumas in the now, dealing with their culmination, heading them off, recovering from them, or the state of having already built a better world. Solarpunk is a set of stories which look at some of the traumas of the human condition and say, "This does not have to be".
Typically those are the anxieties and griefs of capitalism, the hopelessness many people feel about climate change, and the isolations many people feel from their communities. But the unifying thread of solarpunk is simply that it says things can be better. That one day, we can have a graph like the child mortality one above, but for resource inequality and industrial externalities instead.
Welcome to JTV Pokecenter! Please ensure your pokemon are in a carrier, on a leash, or in their pokeballs at all times. Thank you!
Your friendly neighbourhood veterinary clinic is probably the closest thing in real life to a pokemon center, eh? So here are some pics of a few of my patients re-imagined as pokemon. I’ve been meaning to do a mashup like this for a while, but now seems a particularly relevant time.
(And if you ever visit our little clinic with your real life critters, I’ll check out your pokemon as well for free! ;) )
Here’s a thing I’ve had around in my head for a while!
Okay, so I’m pretty sure that by now everyone at least is aware of Steampunk, with it’s completely awesome Victorian sci-fi aesthetic. But what I want to see is Solarpunk – a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between. A balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics.
A lot of people seem to share a vision of futuristic tech and architecture that looks a lot like an ipod – smooth and geometrical and white. Which imo is a little boring and sterile, which is why I picked out an Art Nouveau aesthetic for this.
With energy costs at a low, I like to imagine people being more inclined to focus their expendable income on the arts!
Aesthetically my vision of solarpunk is very similar to steampunk, but with electronic technology, and an Art Nouveau veneer.
So here are some buzz words~
Natural colors!
Art Nouveau!
Handcrafted wares!
Tailors and dressmakers!
Streetcars!
Airships!
Stained glass window solar panels!!!
Education in tech and food growing!
Less corporate capitalism, and more small businesses!
Solar rooftops and roadways!
Communal greenhouses on top of apartments!
Electric cars with old-fashioned looks!
No-cars-allowed walkways lined with independent shops!
Renewable energy-powered Art Nouveau-styled tech life!
Can you imagine how pretty it would be to have stained glass windows everywhere that are actually solar panels? The tech is already headed in that direction! Or how about wide-brim hats, or parasols that are topped with discreet solar panel tech incorporated into the design, with ports you can stick your phone charger in to?
(((Character art by me; click the cityscape pieces to see artist names)))
Seeing that first image was just a wave of nostalgia. I remember seeing it for the first time, one of the little ripples as it diffused and spread over the site.
I’ve met a bunch of friends through the movement - of action, as life imitates art - and we’re bit by bit making it happen. I hoped it wouldn’t be quite so countercultural by now, but the more time we spend on it, the more time we still have to make it real.
We can build a thriving future, for everyone, worth surviving for.
Recognizing the solarpunk elements in pokemon and coming to cherish them is where The Friendly Necromancer came from. Which is my pokemon fanfic about a Banette possessing a dead child and making sure that kid gets to have his pokemon journey, even though he's gone. A story that celebrates every single pro-social and pro-environmental message of pokemon, that screams at the top of its lungs that whimsy and joy are non-negotiable parts of pokemon even in the grittiest adult-oriented explorations of it.
Walk with me for a bit. It's a long walk, but I'll tell you about it.
I had this idea in my head for a long while, about a Shuppet/Banette possessing the corpse of a kid who died alone. The way Banette evolve from Shuppets was such a fascinating concept to me. A ghost which gives abandoned dolls meaning through vengeful curses so strong they consume the ghost's soul in the profess, because the love a cherished and beloved doll once incited deserves such respect even when that love has faded.
There's an element of xenofiction to it, in this creature with such deeply alien morality that it views abandoning a doll as an act which should earn an execution worth dying to see through. And yet. There is also something deeply relatable in the idea that there are things we discard and throw away which deserve so much greater respect. That some acts done without malice but simply a lack of thought or care nevertheless demand retribution, which ought to have that. Which deserve a burning spirit, hateful with vengeance, to come crawling out of the dark shadows of the world and hunt them to the ends of the earth, precisely because they thought so little of it. And for many children engaging with pokemon, we hope, a discarded and unloved doll is the greatest injustice they can imagine when engaging with such a concept.
But many children can imagine much worse. When I was a child, my father was an abusive monster. The kind of monster who got ProPublica articles got written about him, in the years since. And there were several times when the sheer callous neglect of the child protective services system and the police almost crushed me. A time when, but for the most incredible act of luck, the callous malpractice of the police would have seen me permanently consigned to my father's care, never able to see my mother again.
And there was a when no such luck came to pass. Where because there was recorded evidence of me being abused (yes BECAUSE of that), the courts took sole decision making from my mother and gave my father equal say, letting him use that to torment me and my mother for years. The court psychologist (a work colleague of his) said my father was abusing me because he was upset over not having a say in his kid's life, and he'd be better if the courts gave him equal say. The court did, and then never checked in to see if he was still abusing after being given that control. Which he was. It got worse.
My father went on to be a child family investigator for the courts for years, even with a guilty plea to domestic violence against my mother under his belt. During which he accepted bribes to take children from loving parents and give them over solely to their abusers, including violent and sexual abusers with documented histories of what they'd done. He did this to literally hundreds of children, who were unseen and unheard by an uncaring court even as they begged for help. He wasn't the only one either, this was endemic; he was merely the most obviously odious example an investigative journalist decided to dig into.
So the idea that a child could be an abandoned thing, could go from a living breath person to discarded refuse? That was familiar territory for me. And the idea that this child would deserve a vengeful spirit of justice that would burn the world as their funeral pyre? It lit a fire in me.
But it didn't go anywhere. There was no place for such a story to go. It could maybe fuel a short story, a deliberately nihilistic piece about a suicidal vengeance which couldn't bring the child back. But I wanted a story about that ghost living, not about it dying. The idea of where such a character came from, the origins of this ghost possessing a child, compelled me. But I wanted a character who came from that, not whose story ended there, and I couldn't imagine what would drive them after that point.
Also, at that time my father still hadn't seen any justice for his crimes (he still hasn't, but he can't hurt more children at least). As a young adult I'd tried to bring attention to his abuses to the relevant authorities, but stalled out. He'd found out and threatened me, which I was more than willing to risk, but my mother was terrified that he'd kill her. She lived closer to him, and he blamed her for me not talking to him, so she was scared he'd turn any impotent rage on her instead of me and begged me to stop. Which I did, a decision which I hated every time I thought of the kids he was continuing to hurt. So while the occasional fantasizing about a Banette hunting down neglectful and abusive parents was warming, I knew writing out that unreachable fantasy would turn that fire into cold ashes in my belly.
And then I found solarpunk.
It was a beautiful aesthetic at first. A sweet idea.
Then someone on Tumblr called pokemon out as solarpunk, clipping a scene of a protagonist riding a bike with rooftop solar panels and wind turbines in the background, calling out the ferries and public transit and lack of cars. And something clicked. Oh. Solarpunk isn't just the energy aesthetic, it's city planning which isn't car centric, where kids can and do bike anywhere. I was just learning about alternatives to car centric infrastructure at the time and it was such a beautiful vision to find had been there all along in this world I'd loved as a child.
Someone else's post mentioned that pokemon centers are kind of utopic and I thought that hey, that's part of solarpunk too. Every human setllement, no matter how small and rural, having a dedicated place which provides free food, shelter, and medical care, alongside low-cost survival goods and always available expert care. Another post mentioned how cool it is that the pokemon world is effectively a sci-fi death world, and yet safe for kids to travel in. Not because it was paved flat and the monsters all killed, but because pokemon rangers work so hard to help make sure human society and construction isn't in conflict with nature, to make humans safe by redirecting and supporting nature in thoughtful ways rather than destroying it. And what beautiful, aspirational thoughts those were.
I started to see pokemon in that light. Not as a story which is always solarpunk or goes as radically far as some other solarpunk stories, but as one which values many of the same things and provides a rich scaffold for solarpunk ideas.
Until one day, I put the two ideas together. What if the Banette and its dead, abandoned child were part of a solarpunk story?
Because solarpunk isn't about perfect utopias where bad things don't happen. It's about societies which deal with bad things in better ways. A solarpunk world isn't one where parents never abuse their children, where it's impossible for such mistreatment to slip through the cracks. But it is one where such things aren't ignored. Not necessarily fixed, a lot of solarpunk takes place in climate settings where things will never go back to how they were. But where there's an after, a positive constructive afterwards to follow the damage which cannot be fixed.
And oh. Oh, oh, oh.
There it was. There was the story.
One must imagine a world where that Banette can be happy.
There can be, there MUST be, a world where a child can die alone and abandoned and yet good things come after. There must be a world in which a shade comes screaming out of the shadows that this child mattered, he mattered, he mattered, HE MATTERED!!!, and yet the shade can also be happy. Where there is purpose and friendship to live for, and growing up to do, and good works to be done. There must be an after worth living for!
Pokemon lore says that Banettes zipper their mouths shut because when they open their mouths their soul pours out. A trait they use to fuel their most terrible curses, burning their own soul on the pyre to extract a terrible vengeance for the lost and abandoned dolls they possess. And yet! There are Banettes in pokemon who aren't on a suicide mission, howling down a one-way road to oblivion. There are trainers with Banettes, who love them and play with them and care for them. There are Banettes who live. Who LIVE!
So there must be another option then. Something beyond a suicide mission to destroy injustice. Something which leads to a world worth living for, for those who are left to live it. But not a world that forgoes justice either, a trite politely smiling story about how the real vengeance is living well. No, not that. But a world where it's not the job of those left grieving and wounded to burn themselves on a pyre seeking that justice. One must imagine a world where that burden is shouldered by a community strong and whole enough to bear it, so that those who fell through its cracks can live for what is left that's worth living for. Where a person's lost life can be made to matter by something other than dying to kill for them.
In such a story, there must be tragedies that will never be made right. There must be climate disasters which even the people of such a better world will never be able to undo! There will never be a world where bad things do not happen to innocent people, where stewards of the environment foresee every disaster before it comes to pass, and so we should not have to imagine such a future for it to be worth living in! Not everything will be fixed! Not everyone gets to live the full lives they deserve!! Some things are tragedies that will never lose their sting!!!
i did another fanart of TFN.
(not exactly how this scene went in-story, but artistic liberties exist to be taken)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/28971960/chapters/71097216
story by @crazy-pages / @sengachi-writes
The artistic liberties are fantastic! This looks so cool! I love the shadow effects around Diya's arm, and the gas behind Svartis especially! How did you do those?
"should we tell authors on ao3 when we have discord conversations about their fics" i don't speak for everyone here but if y'all ever find a group chat discussing my fics you can should must and WILL send me screenshots of the whole damn thing. inflate my ego. gimme
this whole thing with people discussing a fic in secret, on closed discord servers, instead of leaving a nice comment, is such a loss for fandom. we're losing fic writers with every fic with hundreds of hits and barely a comment.
writers publish to be read. fanfic is meant to be a conversation.
I say this very gently and with much love, and I say it not only as a writer myself but as someone who has been privy to many 'but how can they not know that work is amazing! I love it! I gushed about it to every friend I have and recced in x, y, z servers and [...]'
The writer or artist doesn't know this.
They have no way of knowing that you found their work beautiful and lifechanging or even just a bright spot on a bad day or that you think about it every day or that you told all your friends about it, and those things are great, but we have no way of knowing them! You may not be doing it intentionally, but you're excluding the writer or artist from the community feeling of fandom that you are carrying on (that is so great! fandom is a community! continue to talk and play!) even with their work.
Please, please just drop a line even that is "oh gosh I absolutely love this work, I screamed to every one of my friends about it when I first read/saw it!" even if you don't have the spoons to share more of the specifics that made you flail at your friends or what you said in private. (Though if you do, we will love you forever for it.)
Please include me in the conversations and let me know if you like my fics/where it's being discussed, it's disheartening to know someone somewhere is talking about it and I have no idea </3
Oh, definitely include authors in your conversations! We’re not faceless entities. We’re people, just like you, who have struggled to get words on pages, and who anxiously refresh AO3 waiting for those comments that may never cube because you’re discussing it elsewhere. Yes, even your favorite writers. Even the ones you perceive are popular. Tell. Writers. We are just like you and we want to know when our story is being loved on.
Comments are life to an author. Even if you comment with a ❤️ emoji, it tells me you took the time to do more than “press the kudo button”.
And sometimes, if you comment, that author will comment back and you can start a conversation and meet a new friend. Because that’s what fandom is. Fandom is community. Fandom is not faceless pushing a button and moving on.
There is no algorithm in fandom. There are genuine people who love a thing and love to get together and talk about a thing.
Let writers know their story is one of those things!
