This year I had the delight of helping Unwritten Earths Symposium bring this tabletop role-playing game to book format via contributing the cover and a set of glyphs/icons that illustrate game concepts and mechanics.
Many people in the comments are saying “trauma”, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. It’s called Childhood Amnesia, and it’s a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to “trick” your brain into remembering with different tactics.
This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.
This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is “stored in the body”, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories won’t generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.
reblogging this because I’ve legit seen people freaking out when they realised they can’t remember some of their childhood, thinking they might have some repressed trauma.
washing dishes is evil because you go "oh fuck there's so many dishes this is gonna take foreverrr" and then you enter the dish abyss and emerge with your abdomen somehow covered in water and your hands all wrinky and then you look at the clock and what felt like half an hour was actually 10 minutes
Thoughts on Qifrey's slutty slutty black turtleneck thing that got very much out of hand and became thoughts more broadly on the theme of concealment and Qifrey's character:
(manga spoilers below the cut)
Because while the obvious purpose would be that it protects against anyone seeing potential manifestations of the silverwood, that doesn't explain why he starts wearing it as a kid before he or anyone would have known about the silverwood. So I think the top is something that has come to serve multiple purposes throughout his life. AND I think it has an important role to play related to the one silverwood attribute that it seems like a lot of people skip over: it heals injuries in its host (to allow them to escape to "safety").
When he was a child, I think the black top was devised as a solution to cover the wounds and scars from his abuse and captivity. While it's hard to see in the illustrations that there's any obvious neck wounds, his wrist is clearly shown as marked by some kind of bondage (Beldaruit's flashback in ch. 36)--which is also why the thing extends so far onto his hands. It makes sense that as a child he would be self-conscious about these obvious scars, and so the garment was created to allow him to have freedom of movement with the most coverage.
With the revelations of the silverwood, I think the meaning changes. First, because obviously now there is the potential for someone to see its growth on him, but ALSO because when it does manifest, his wounds and scars are erased. This is what we see at the end of ch. 93 when he walks into the lake--not just that gazing at Olly has activated the silverwood, but that in being activated, it is erasing the scar left from the Romonon injury on his shoulder. If anyone were seeing Qifrey's body regularly, the sudden disappearance of scars would obviously be incredibly suspicious. I personally imagine the first major Silverwood incident at the Tower of Tomes is what erased the neck and wrist scars--but he couldn't ever let anyone know that. Any time he is seen without the layer is a potential risk for questioning.
(This is also why I think fics/fanon that describe his body as scarred are wrong. The eye wound remains because the eye can't be replaced, but there's a reason why the silverwood always starts there--that's the injury it's trying to heal. Otherwise though, Qifrey should actually be unsettlingly unmarked by all his injuries).
Finally, on a more meta level, the fact that the top is there to cover nothing--that is, not the presence of something but the absence, is fucking genius. I'm sure like many of us, when I was first watching/reading WHA I assumed that the layer was covering some kind of glyph or magical marking on his body, considering how much that was signaled as the ultimate wrong in the early parts of the story. If not that, then yeah, maybe some kind of scar. But then when we finally see him stripped of it, there is nothing.
This is paralleled by the hair/black lens used to cover the lack of his right eye. It's hard not to see this as Shirahama's direct response to the (especially shounen) anime/manga trope of the character with a hidden "magical eye." There's obviously the Kakashi-type, and Lelouch from Code Geass, and a million others I'm suddenly blanking on. But the trope is predictable: ooh, can't see this guy's eye, must be some kind of taboo magic, etc. etc. So again, in the same scene where we see him without the black top, we also see him without the glasses, and all that's there is... nothing. Not some scary powerful forbidden magic eye but just a horrendous and heartbreaking injury, a total absence.
Parallel that again with Qifrey's entire story as one of lack, and it all comes together. Who is this mysterious guy, deep down? What kind of crazy origin story? And like, yeah, the Silverwood story is tragic, but especially in the midst of so many fantasy tropes about lineage, Qifrey coming from nothing, nowhere, is profound. I'm sure we'll eventually get more answers, but for now, it's the fact that all of these forms of veiling, hiding, covering, concealing, keep getting revealed as ways of covering up a kind of nothing--that really amazes me.
vaporwave
pixelskylines
stormborns
jacobvanloon
amandla
andulkaphoto
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
