I've been real busy lately because it's December and I work at the post office, so of course I am
But that doesn't mean I can't show up with an unprompted PSA
Hey! Have you ever mailed a letter to Santa Claus? Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to that letter? Well wonder no longer! If it had a stamp and a return address, then odds are that it ended up on the USPS's Operation Santa page!
Every year, the USPS collects letters to Santa Claus, and processes them to black out any identifying information. Last names, addresses, things like that. Then, the letters are posted on the Operation Santa webpage and people can adopt the letters.
Once you adopt a letter, you can buy gifts for them, wrap them up, and package them. Then you get a barcode from the website, and bring them to a post office. The clerk there will scan the barcode, which prints out a label with the address on it, and sends out the gift.
It's anonymous on both ends, and is generally just. A really nice thing to do.
I highly recommend it if you have some money to spare this year and want to give a kid a moment of magic this year
It's one of those things that the post office just happened to be positioned to do, and ended up knocking it out of the park. Unfortunately, I don't think they advertise this nearly well enough, and most letters end up going unanswered
Rereading the Scholomance trilogy while sick at work, and I can't stop thinking about how much its about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
Fuck.
Okay, so the ability to make a Golden Enclave relies on a truly impossible capacity for mana, which is part of why they never took off. One guy could make them, ever, until El came along.
And then she cast them as a group spell to save Orion, and now they can be cast as a group spell. It doesn't say why in the book, but it feels obvious. Magic works how you believe it does. Everyone sees that it can be cast that way and now it can.
That's literally the fucking point of Omelas, though no one on this site seems to realize it, because they've never read the actual story. That's what walking away is. You're walking away from the belief that someone has to suffer for your utopia.
Walking away from the belief that someone has to be crushed into a maw-mouth, down at the foundation of your perfect city.
And I know that this was on purpose! I know that! Because while Naomi Novik was writing this trilogy, she also wrote the Transformers fanfic Victory Condition, which is explicitly stated to be a take on Omelas! And to boot, she fucking named Orion Lake Orion. Presumably because naming him Optimus wasn't subtle enough.
Who wants a small essay about Neanderthal vampires! Time to move this screed from the groupchat to the internet at large! I have to actually eat at some point during this lunch break, and maybe posting this will let me relax long enough to grab a power bar. Please ignore how much I switch between tenses.
Neanderthal vampires exemplify community. They live much longer, emphasizing the importance of elders. They require the community to live even more so than others; they can survive from animal blood but become sickly. They must feed from their people. As elders require the community to live, so do vampires. They are the heart of a strong family. They lend their strength and experience, and in return the community feeds them.
They are not considered predatory. They are a rare and fragile gift. They need a strong group to support them to begin with, even before they can help support their people.
It is a very rare group that can support two at once. Sires are not counted on to support fledglings. Rather, the community teaches a new fledgling based on cultural knowledge.
A family may approach a larger, established group with the request to turn one of theirs.
I have chosen to interpret Neanderthal language capabilities as existent, but utilized less than humans. They would come across as extremely terse, favoring demonstrations and body language above words.
Vampires would also serve as the main source of record keeping across generations. Without written language and with much less of a tradition of spoken language, vampires would serve as a repository of information across generations.
A lone vampire is considered a tragedy. To outlive your family is terrible. They might join another family, but there is a cultural expectation that they might also commit suicide.
Neanderthals are noted from genetic records as having females join other families while males stayed with their birth family. The cultural reasons behind this are lost to prehistory, so I have chosen to creatively interpret this as women leaving home at the cusp of adulthood to find a new group, as a reversal of commonly assumed human gender roles. They would take on the role we associate today with "young bucks". Possibility more sexually forward, possibly seen as braver than men.
Because of this, female vampires are more likely to find a new family than male vampires. It is expected that a female vampire may be part of multiple family groups before succumbing to grief or accident, while a male vampire is expected to die with their first family.
After all, a female vampire's first community that she took care of likely would not be the one she was born into. She would have experience in finding and joining a new family.
Men would be considered to be prone to grief, and so are not as heavily favored to become vampires. There are instances, though rare, of male vampires who's family have died becoming predatory towards those who killed them. It's considered a great tragedy, and any local vampires are called together to stop them. This is strongly associated with grief-stricken vampires striking out against homo sapien groups, but in practicality, this likely happens just as often against other Neanderthal groups.
This is one of the reasons women are favored for vampirism, since they are considered to be less prone to grief. Vampirism is not strictly segregated by gender, however. It's a trend rather than a rule. The choice of who to turn depends much more on the individual family that is considering having a member turned. The person would be selected from a relatively small group, so individual personality and skillset would be much more relevant. Gender would have an influence, but it would not be the deciding factor.
Denisovans populated islands much more than Neanderthals. There isn't any evidence of them traveling between islands, but it is entirely possible considering how little information we have about them. If vampires could not cross running water, then perhaps they would be unable to travel with their family to different islands. Considering Philippino vampire analogous stories, perhaps this plays into vampires being a danger rather than a member of the community.
Neanderthals would consider them to be stricken by grief, as that is how they characterize their own predatory vampires. Abandoned by their family and unable to travel island to island, Denisovan vampires would be vulnerable to starvation. Characterizing them as driven mad by grief would be an easy way to make sense of them.
All this to say, a Neanderthal vampire would be confused and horrified at the common perception of vampires today. A solitary, predatory figure who maintains secrecy would be repugnant to them.
Also, if a Neanderthal vampire did survive to today, she is more likely to be a woman.
The last Neanderthal vampire would call modern vampires grief-mad, comparing them to orphaned vampires of her own traditions, and vampires from Denisovan customs. This would not make sense to anyone but her anymore.
Perhaps she would blame herself for not teaching homo sapiens how to have vampire family members, and instead letting Denisovan customs be the dominant force.
After all, as a woman, it would be her duty to take on another family and carry on her traditions. A man might be forgiven for giving up out of grief, but she is supposed to be above that, even if no one else expects that anymore.
The last Neanderthal would never again be at full strength. Homo sapien blood would certainly feed her better than animal blood, but it is not the same. She would never again be fed by her people. She will never see them again.
Likely, she would end up adopting human families in central Asia, perhaps up into Russia. Rural, isolated families that would not expose her to the modern world. Perhaps she hibernated shortly after she lost the last of her people in Gibraltar. Perhaps she never knew they were there, and despaired too soon.
Either way, she has had almost 40,000 years of being weakened and lonely. Who is to say if she even remembers what it is like to be fed by members of her own species. Who can say how deep her grief runs.
During this episode, where Optimus is disassembled and Megatron takes over NYC, I'm going to write a fic where the reason we don't see Rumble and Frenzy for a while is because they're busy losing a fight to the Ninja Turtles in the sewers
I just want to see one reverse robins fic where Bruce is actually the second guy to punch people while dressed as a bat, because a decade before, his weird uncle Terry was having his own issues
