Heart Full of Gasoline is one of my favorite stories ever, not just for the ship but just…in general, works of fiction. It’s a huge comfort read and sometimes I’ll save it for a rainy weekend or I’ll read it if I’m going through a Time. Today I realized that part of the reason I love it so much is because it’s like a horse girl movie with Jaime as the untamable horse.
I am both 🥺 and 😂 over this message. Thank you so much for saying that about HFoG, first of all, that is extremely sweet and I am so grateful!! And Jaime being the untamable horse is SENDING ME so ALSO thank you for bringing that into my life. 😄💕
Ok, based off of Moira saying ‘this is why I never went to church!’ Do Saporians have an organized place of worship for any deities? Are there masses or whatever held for Zhan Tiri? Is it a weekly or monthly thing, or are some ppl super devout and worship on the daily? Zhan Tiri does have a statue that gets offerings, was it common to do that pre-conquest, did they have small altars or shrines inside? Are there traditional prayers to Zhan Tiri by fishermen against storms? (All the questions!)
broadly speaking char malách has temples, cathay has barrows, and zhan tiri has henges or gardens. and then you get shrines everywhere - big ones in public squares or government buildings, and smaller ones in private houses and so on it’s very. everywhere. and then there’s places that aren’t like... places of worship specifically but are held as sacred grounds by their cults. so, uhhh
thorn syconium / zhan tiri
cashághē is the formal name of the socona henge, about five miles east of socona and right up against the edge of the peatland just south of the pingora mountains. it was always one of the larger henges and it’s one of the few that escaped being completely dismantled by coronans during the occupation, mostly because the nature of the terrain made it too hard to get to on horseback. so now it’s the seat of the syconium and kind of the place where henge holidays are formally celebrated.
the syconium doesn’t really do... like anything resembling mass or sermons, organized worship is very oriented around henge holidays, of which there are... eleven (sometimes twelve) minor ones per year and then five major festivals. the five major festivals are like if you’re pious, if you’re observant at all of the syconium’s tenets, you go to a henge to observe the festivals if you can, and if you can’t then you do the observance at your own shrine. and then the minor henge holidays occur every month on the fifteenth of the month, they’re called crēzáthanchīl / lady’s day, and you Can go to a henge for them if you want to but only deeply devout people do that. they’re pretty much just days of rest and, traditionally, feasting.
the five major festivals are:
azdīnach - the vernal equinox:
this one is kind of weird because, um, the sorchān calendar has a three year cycle of full year (ghaénīchē), small year (ghoshnīchē), and long year (nicheílean) and. in full years, the equinox happens on the 26th of araeháziray, which is the final month of the year and the last month of the ‘formal’ winter season. and then small years don’t... have a spring equinox, hence the name. and then long years have two spring equinoxes, one on the 9th of azlóhot, which is the first month of the year and the first month of the ‘formal’ spring season, and then one on the 19th of the intercalary month shaecaher, at the very end of the year during what’s called ‘little spring.’
so because of this weirdness azdīnach is a festival very concerned with beginnings and endings. the spring azdīnach is the ideal time to open a new chapter of your life; the winter azdīnachs are best for letting go of things that have been harming you. if you’re a farmer or gardener you start planting on azdīnach, if you have a child you name them during the festival or at least hold off on announcing their name to the community until the festival, and one of the biggest components of the festival is funerals! for everyone in the community who has died since the last one.
[there is no burial or equivalent component of saporian funerals, so it’s like - within the syconium, when someone dies the burial rites are done and the body is planted right away, and then you hold the memories until the next azdīnach and everyone in the community participates and mourns together.]
cresilínaeraegh - the summer solstice:
the saporian name for this one translates as ‘flower-maker’s day’ and out of the five it’s definitely the one that is the most. like fun. the festival itself is generally just kind of a big party, there’s a feast, there’s history songs, and prior to the conquest it was mostly notorious for being extremely loud and often very drunk gkjslkdjf. but theologically what cresilínaeraegh is about is commemorating the creation of ki itself, which was a joint… effort would be a strong word since it was kind of an accident LMAO but a joint project of zhan tiri’s and ri ni’n’s and huma’s and turul’s! and then this gets generalized into a celebration of life and growth in general.
azchīlál - the autumnal equinox:
so. this is kind of the shadow twin of corona’s festival of lights, in that the festival of lights is kind of ‘we are saying goodbye to the sun and bracing for the winter to come’ and has this big focus on symbolically remembering and honoring the sun in order to survive until spring. and azchīlál is more like ‘we are ritually killing the sun to perpetuate the endless cycle of rot and renewal’ KLASDJFK. azchīlál is the one where you get the ceremonial sacrifice of goats and other animals. harvests during the day and the sacrifices / feasts / revel after sundown.
tároshdhan - 15th of tárosh
this is one of the lady’s days but it’s the important one, and of the five major festivals it has the most significance and like, weight. traditionally it’s considered the day zhan tiri achieved or discovered choimghē (so, the day she ate ri ni’n), although i tend to think sorchā fudged the dates here a little bit. tároshdhan is very very very heavily associated with magic and the mingling of the profane and sublime. it’s kind of a witch’s holiday; magic is thought to be most potent on tároshdhan, there’s a lot of syconium rituals that are properly supposed to be performed or begun or ended on tároshdhan, stuff like that. (the crēdathámanē takes several years and is supposed to both begin and end on tároshdhan). the festival itself is accordingly pretty focused on magic and ritual.
crēlādīnacharogh - the winter solstice:
this one translates as ‘sun-eater’s night’ and in a similar vein as cresilínaeraegh it commemorates the slaying of jinarche and creation of the cosmos by [what would become] zhan tiri. in contrast to cresilínaeraegh though it’s a very solemn holiday! it’s kind of an accounting of wrongs and it’s kind of equally about atonement and retribution. crēlādīnacharogh is both a time for making amends or laying grudges to rest and for striking back against those who have harmed you, and there’s whole theological arguments to be had about identifying when the former is appropriate and when the latter is necessary. it has a reputation for being the bloodiest and most dangerous of the syconium’s holidays and prior to zhan tiri’s banishment i think that reputation was pretty earned because. if zhan tiri decided to smite you this is the day she’d do it. jksdfkj
it also has an element of paying reverence to huma, which is a really common characteristic for winter solstice holidays throughout the world because of the ‘humaic winter,’ which rosalia references in moonless air 13 and which - basically early in the shattered era one of huma’s cults pissed her off so she took the sun away. for six months. which caused famines and freezes and obviously it was night all over the world for six months while people frantically petitioned their gods for help. gkjsdjkf and then after that she was cajoled into bringing the sun back but this obv had an enormous cultural impact and now virutally every culture across the globe has some sort of holiday that boils down to ‘appreciate the sun or she might disappear again’ and also a big part of the reason why huma, despite being the third oldest god around and supremely powerful, has only a teeny tiny handful of small cults scattered around.
anyway! other important places for zhan tiri in saporia include:
janus point/cresezáhan - a much smaller ceremonial henge built around a yew tree zhan tiri inhabited from time to time, enough to imbue it with her power. unlike cashághē it’s not the sort of henge you’d go to for holiday festivals; it was used for specific rites and by witches who would visit it to collect magic.
stashalaghē - the pitch pond sirin visits in benighted chapter 2. like cresezáhan it’s a deep reservoir of zhan tiri’s magic, and specifically it’s located in the hollow zhan tiri tears in the peatland in this snippet. there’s no henge built around it because, for personal reasons, zhan tiri didn’t want one there, but it’s otherwise used the same way janus point is.
the charcāthēn gardens - these don’t actually exist anymore, but they were a sprawling, half-wild garden in charcāthēn’s religious quarter prior to the conquest. sorchā grew them, maintained them, and lived in them, and they were kind of a cross between open-air theater, community garden, school, and nest.
lady’s point/crēchíol - all that’s left of this is the defaced statue of the lady cassandra sees in benighted chapter 22; it used to be a much more elaborate and well-maintained shrine. this one was built by źatīr thēshala after they swore fealty to her and - kjsdfjk yes alcorsīan sailors would leave offerings there (of shells and bits of seaweed usually!) for good luck before they disembarked.
and then anyone who keeps a garden or a farm or anything where they’re growing plants or keeping animals will probably have a shrine to zhan tiri somewhere. prior to the conquest this was often like, literally a little statue you’d stick in the garden somewhere, but in modern times it’s a lot more common to have like, ‘stealth’ shrines where it’s like, a murex shell tucked away somewhere or a bundle of feathers tied to the side of a planter box or something like that that a coronan wouldn’t be able to identify as an icon of zhan tiri.
the splendorous temple / char malách
pre-conquest there were large, elaborate temples in each of saporia’s major cities - artois, alcorsīa, and charcāthēn - with the one in charcāthēn doubling as a seat of government where the thaómazhatēm convened. the one in artois was torn down during the occupation, the one in alcorsīa survived for a lot longer but was effectively barricaded by coronans and sat empty and neglected for centuries until it was also torn down about a hundred years ago, and the one in charcāthēn has been gutted and is partly in ruins but also still in use, albeit secretly.
services in the temples also don’t really. bear any resemblance to mass - there’s no preaching and i think of it as being more akin to like, a creative workshop? the temple in charcāthēn definitely skirts around the illegality of ternary worship by fronting as an arts school ajksdfjk and i think if a coronan stumbled into a service they… really wouldn’t see anything amiss unless they knew what to look for and where and knew enough saporian to recognize epithets of char malách. and then there’s also i think a really strong culture of like, small group philosophizing where you get together with some friends and a cháthar and just talk over tea.
i think of the splendorous temple as having tons of little holidays scattered throughout the year and really pious people might observe all of them but most just kind of pick and choose the ones they like! a lot of them involve lighting fires in some capacity jksdf. but. the Big One is cháraen, which always happens on the 5th of chámchar so the last month of formal summer. and cháraen’s festivities are basically.
- a water fast begins at noon on the preceding day (the 4th). adults who are observing the fast will generally spend the night cooking, because
- you get up at dawn on the 5th and break fast either in the temple itself or in your own community; both options are a potluck style feast where you’re expected to bring your own homemade dishes
- then for the rest of the day and evening it’s - almost like a fair with music / dancing / street performances but also the idea is you spend the day Making Things, so on cháraen you see a lot of people in the streets with easels and in heavily pious neighborhoods a lot of craftspeople and artisans will open their workshops and give lessons to the public - as a consequence of this a lot of apprenticeships get started during cháraen because it gives professionals an opportunity to spot young people who have the knack for their craft or just seem really passionate about it.
- at midnight there are huge community bonfires or even like pyres and you ceremonially burn the things you spent the day making.
it’s. meant to be a celebration of the beauty of both creation and destruction, and like a time of reflection on mortality and the finite nature of existence and finding appreciation in what one hands whilst accepting that loss is inevitable but survivable.
char malách doesn’t have as many sacred places as zhan tiri does because he’s a lot less liable to get attached to specific places but one really significant location for him is laran house & the golden spring. which has actually indirectly shown up in the story, here:
“—And this is ‘Daybreak on the Golden Spring.” Nigel clears his throat as he glides to a halt before the next painting, and Rapunzel gives it a dutiful glance. A tumble of pale stone, dewy ferns; honeycombed with small azure pools. Steam rises off the water in misty suggestions of gold, giving the whole landscape a gauzy, sun-struck look. “Marvelous piece. From Pamona Percy’s garden series; she completed this one in fifteen… forty-six, if memory serves. See how the water shimmers? She mixed powdered nacre with her paints to achieve an iridescent effect.”
it’s a system of hot springs nestled in the pingora mountains - i think of it as being actually quite close to rapunzel’s tower because the idea of calanthe visiting on the regular really tickles me - and laran house is… kind of a cross between an inn and a museum? built just beneath it. it is super off the beaten path, to the point that i don’t think corona is actually aware of its existence. but the springs are sacred to char malách and touched by his magic - the legend is that the springs bloomed in the wake of massive volcanic eruption that was a manifestation of char malách - so laran house is run by the temple and gets a steady trickle of saporian guests.
the barrow makers / cathay
there is a vast system of interconnected barrows under the hills of śaedhíhran, a town close to charcāthēn that is essentially a fully-fledged city populated entirely by cultists, barrow-wights, and an assortment of criminals and dissidents who aren’t too squeamish to hide out from the law there.
most religious saporians pay reverence to cathay on her holidays and [if they’re not following syconium burial rites and funeral customs instead] during funerals, and otherwise let her be. her cult is largely composed of bone-witches like sitheach, and then undertakers, grave-diggers, barrow-makers and so on, people for whom death is a profession. and then she does get some really extreme little murder cults that pop up now and again but, while mass murders and wars do draw her attention, cathay doesn’t really… care? about individual deaths so murder is not like, encouraged. and the ternary cult is under constant pressure from the syconium and the splendorous temple to not be killing people willy-nilly so it tends to dispatch the murderdeath cults when they pop up gjkdksf anyways
the point being. barrow burials, funerals, and parts of salanmora are open to adherents of the other two cults of the ternary, as are the rites involved when you’re hiring on undead workers (i have mentioned this before i think but a LOT of saporia was built with undead labor, and most pre-conquest saporian buildings will have a little shrine to cathay built into them somewhere as payment for services rendered), and bone-witches are allowed to do temporary reanimation in front of other people, but everything else is closed.
a key component of the faith is repudiation - bone-witches give up their given and sometimes family names and take on new monikers, they might sacrifice certain memories or feelings, it is… not uncommon for the really highly-ranked ones to have undergone amputations and replaced whole limbs with bone constructs and stuff like that! it’s considered to be one of the strictest and most difficult magical paths not just in saporia but anywhere. and it’s all very secret and even within the cult one’s personal repudiations are considered to be extremely, extremely private information. it’s between you and cathay and nobody else has a right to ask.
when the cult gathers it’s almost always for wight-raising, which is an Event! traditionally it happens during the closed portions of salanmora or on the 5th of shóldan (in spring), dathamánē (in summer), sicáraen (in autumn), or shalámaer (in winter).
and the difference between temporary reanimation and wight-raising is a temp wight is only viable for a few hours at most - cathay’s magic is propagated through the blood of the caster, so basically with temp wights as soon as the cuts scab over the magic washes out of the corpse. whereas a permanent wight is prepared and usually done by large groups of bone-witches; there’s a variety of different rituals for different kinds of wights - the rite sitheach used with lance in moonless air chapter 8 was pretty much an abridged version of a rite that would, with an actual corpse and a few more bone-witches to help, result in a flesh-wight that wouldn’t rot until the magic unraveled a year or so later. these are the popular choice for undead labor because they’re physically quite a bit stronger than bone-wights and also a lot less intensive to create, vs bone-wights which can last for centuries but are comparatively weak and take a huge amount of effort to raise.
wight-raising aside a lot of the religous practices in the barrows involve meditation, both individually and in groups, often in magically-induced altered states of consciousness like what happens during the public portion of salanmora. it’s a very. contemplative faith that is very concerned with separation from the individual consciousness and seeing and appreciating and being integrated with the pattern of the collective.
i think the first rite anyone goes through when they become acolytes of cathay is spending the night alone in a crypt or a catacomb with nothing but the dead for company - it’s about facing the reality of death and then relinquishing your fear of it and if you can’t do that then you’re not allowed to fully enter the cult.
I find them fascinating and empowering or inspiring or something? I'm definitely not in a cult but I think I get a lot out of seeing people who felt powerless and risked a lot finally stand up and say fuck this to some kind of Injustice. Injustices get me really fired up in stories, I just get outraged on people's behalf, and so the Triumph of being able to say no is kind of electrifying. I'm sure there's some interesting psychological things to say here about my dad and how I grew up in particular and some parallels to how trapped I feel in my life now that I'm sure my brain is drawing, but yeah, they're good to read. Religious cults are kind of one of my weird background special interests, particularly the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints. You end up with a working knowledge of several cities and families after a while.
I just finished "Escape" by Carolyn Jessop ( the last name is a dead giveaway of this one's topic if you're at all familiar with FLDS polygamy escapes) and it was pretty decent. She was married off to one of the big important assholes in the sect and managed somehow to be lucky enough to get a college education while still inside.
I got really invested in "Beyond Belief" by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of the leader of Scientology. I think it's my favorite of all of these, despite FLDS stuff being more my usual focus. I think maybe this one just fed my Hunger for Injustices To Rage At particularly well and it is an excellent primer for all of the lingo and other stuff that goes into Scientology. I came out of it realizing that I understood what was meant when someone said "WOG World" or "the cans" or "he is out ethics 2" or "rockslammer" or "blown"
"Stolen Innocence" by Elissa Wall is another FLDS one. One of the things I found interesting is that this one is a girl going through a lot of the same cult wide events but just as a younger person than the author of the first book. When you read enough of these you start to recognize people who are not the main antagonists you start to see background people in one person's story being the main focus in someone else's and it's very interesting to me.
There's a similar thing going down in "Breaking Free" by Rachel Jeffs, daughter of Warren Jeffs, the FLDS 'prophet'. I listen to most of these on Audible and this one was read by the author which was a little weird to listen to because she just has a very strange way of speaking, but it's again another story of a woman who is born into an arbitrarily important family and decided to say fuck this. She's seeing the events the others are encountering but from the inside. I think in a way a lot of these books feel like just getting an alternate perspective or filling in a puzzle piece. One book might mention Warren Jeffs daughters and now here's a book about one. Another book might casually dismiss all of Merril Jessop wives and the other book is about one and you get to see who all those people were who amounted to a sentence and a half in another book.
Maybe it's a bit of sonder feeling.
A cousin obsession I have is former (mostly evangelical) Christians becoming atheists. Seth Andrews' "Deconverted" is great for that, particularly in audiobook form because he reads it himself and he is a radio broadcaster so his voice is delightful to listen to. I just found him on my list when I was scrolling through recent things so I thought I'd include him.
I think I'm headed next for Flora Jessop's " Church of Lies" because it looks like she turned out to be a really intense human rights activist, or for "Perfectly Clear:Escaping Scientology and Fighting for the Woman I Love" by Michelle LeClair, which by title alone is telling me that there will be cults and lesbians and good for her, I'm into it. I obviously haven't read either of those yet but I'm ready. I have samples for two books about women who left the Westboro Baptist Church lined up on my Kindle, so perhaps I will be able to report back on more haha
Someone I recently followed reblogged something about aces needing to feel persecuted and oppressed and that's why we're 'always' posting 'proof', and how this shows we have a victim complex. But as far as I know the posts showing proof of poor societal treatment of asexuality is in response to people claiming that ace people have no problems. So it's a double bind, isn't it? Silent we're 'cishet' and problem free, vocal we're obsessed with 'proof' of oppression and have victim complexes.
Honestly the anti-ace/aro crowd is really good at silencing tactics.
They want us to shut up+to be able to spread lies (of various kinds) about us in peace, without us letting those they’re trying to convince we’re worthy of disdain(+just love whining) know they’re lies
They’ve been pulling this shit for years now with more success than I can believe sometimes and it’s tiring+wild af
I saw your Harry Potter RP art and as a reader of your comic, of course got lost in the mental sorting of NS characters into the houses and my most immediate impressions were Lucy as a Slytherin Squib who somehow managed to sneak past the hat and rolls an astounding Bluff check to get through their classes, Philomena the most adorable Hufflepuff, and January the quidditch jock with a creative side who does stupid broom tricks to impress Philly. (Crashes into a classroom on accident once)
january is canonically a gryffindor beater in the hogwarts rp who also participates in duelling club, and tetsu also appeared as a ravenclaw but hasn’t been developed further
and yes phil is definitely a hufflepuff
lucy is a bit of a mystery, i haven’t figured out how to transfer their deal to hp but if they Were in a house it would absolutely by slytherin
If this doesn’t spoil anything later on, did Cass being trans also impact the captain’s hesitance to hire her in the guard, aside from the concerns of her being Saporian? Was he worried about her being outed and subject to abuse after?
unfortunately. spoilers alksdfjk
there’s some big chunks of trans lore™ coming up in 13 and 14 that will shed more light on this so you will not have too long to wait
but! for now i will say:
1 - no, because he didn’t know
2 - if he had known, absolutely this would have been a gigantic worry for him that would’ve gone hand in hand with his other reasons for keeping cassandra off the guard.
in... very general terms, like - i’ve mentioned before i think that i am loosely and partially modeling the coronan attitude towards gayness and transness on medieval europe in that both get lumped together as a form of gender nonconformity, such that cassandra being trans and cassandra being a lesbian would in corona be seen as pretty much the same thing, and the thing is ‘doing gender wrong.’ (and this cuts in both directions - in that she’s a gnc woman and that gets lumped in as ‘doing gender wrong’ as well. and sir peter def worried about the repercussions of that part of it, even as he offered her tacit support by letting her run around in trousers riding horses and swinging swords whenever she wasn’t working.)
but like anyway - saporians being wrongheaded about gender is like, a strong stereotype in corona so this distrust and disgust of transness is intertwined with the discriminatory attitudes towards saporians and i think as far as cassandra is concerned it’s all One Thing with many ugly facets; she wasn’t afraid of being outed per se because it was all snarled up with her fear of being perceived as saporian, because one would innately imply the other, it’s all a mess.
and - this is drifting further and further from the subject of your question jksdfjks rip - the reason that stereotype exists is gender transgression is a part of zhan tiri’s sphere. she isn’t the only god associated with gender in this way (p much any god who is associated with change in some way will have at least a handful of sects doing transition rituals with their magic kjsdfkj) but she’s one of the best known for it. which also means that in cultures where zhan tiri is hated or feared there tends to be a correlating amount of suspicion of gender transgression in whatever forms
tha-at all being said i think like - coronan gender roles in bitter snow are a little looser i think than they were at any point in medieval europe because i think of them as being largely constructed around somewhat garbled old understandings of the dynamic between huma and turul, which then set into Tradition as corona became more and more secular / the sunlit temple detached from huma herself and became more, like, philosophical heliolatry. but its basically: women as life-bringers / healers / steady and constant but also potentially dangerous and destructive (like huma) vs men as guides / explorers / clear-sighted and adaptable but also capricious and temperamental (like turul). men need women in order to shine; but like - in folklore in the bitter snow verse the sun is often associated with vengeance and wrath, and the moon is often associated with clear thinking, clear judgment, honesty - and corona’s specific brand of this is the moon as a balm and a guide, reminding the sun of her light in the darkness, that sort of thing. and this informs a bias towards men being in leadership rules because. decision makers should be able to think things through and discern truth from lies; women are seen as more impulsive, more reckless, more gullible.
whereas the cultural understanding of gender in saporia is a lot more nebulous and flexible because the thorn syconium was such a dominant force in the culture for so long and like, adding to that, cathay’s take on gender can be boiled down to ‘well bones are bones are bones, who cares, flesh is temporary and doesn’t matter’ and the splendorous temple’s entire approach to choimghē is about elevating the profane to the level of the sublime and the concept of gender being something one sculpts and shapes and perfects over the course of one’s life of course synergizes beautifully with that. all of this combined over the millennia of saporia’s cultural development has kind of produced this attitude toward gender that is just wildly different from corona’s.
and then bc of the xenophobia and like fear of the ternary that has been endemic to corona for so long there is this kind of feedback loop of - gender, talking about gender, exploring gender, these are seen of saporian things, so it isn’t talked about in polite company in corona, and the more it isn’t talked about the more strongly it’s perceived as a saporian thing, and that i think has made coronan ideas about the ways men and women should look and act congeal over time. like: trousers have been popular for men and women in saporia for centuries, because saporians have been traveling by air in balloons and magical airships for centuries, and it’s a lot more convenient to just wear trousers than deal with a skirt flapping around or having to tie it up and then oh no your legs are cold because you’re a thousand feet in the air and it’s windy - vs in corona trousers historically are just a thing men wear when they ride horses, and then coronans visit saporian cities and see women going around in trousers and go but why? they don’t even have horses! and that contributes over time to this cultural feeling in corona that it is Wrong, Somehow, for women to wear trousers. stuff like that.
as a tangential sidebar here, saporians esp in rural regions tend to go barefoot a lot during the summer, because saporia is very boggy and wet and that makes wearing shoes on the regular an exercise in misery, so in corona there is this association of barefootedness with, specifically, Rural Saporian Poverty, and while of course no one would ever say anything to the lost princess’s face i do think rapunzel’s hatred of shoes got a lot of side-eyes from snobby upper class and aristocratic folks because of this
I left a long comment on the recent page about January and it looks like it was deleted because it was 'detected as spam'. Was it too long or did I say something offensive in it?
fallingivy replied to your post “i have a question. can yall think of one story where, instead of a...”
Idk if what I sent counts because she was in the form of a woman when he fell in love, he later finds out she’s a snake and decides he’s cool with that?
