East of the Sun

[bananiii-0]

[teganj42]

Not that I think we'll find out any more about her through the Obrimus Manor break in (maybe if they'd gone through the family crypt rather than the vassal one, but I think the vassal crypt was the smarter choice), but I do continue to want to know more about Occtis' mom.

I still think it makes the most sense that she died when he was young and didn't have much impact on his life. He hasn't mentioned her yet, and based on how Occtis has talked about Thjazi and Thimble to others, I think he would have at least had an offhand comment about his mother being nice or kind to him if that had been the case. And there haven't been many opportunities for Primus or his other children to make any passing comments about Lady Tachonis, but I get the feeling from this absence of any mention that she was either cold and distant and died awhile ago or was meek and quiet (and died awhile ago).

The biggest question is still whether there has been one Lady Tachonis, or if some of Primus' children are from a second (or even third wife). The more we see of Primus, the more I'm convinced he would've taken as a wife a quiet, proper noble from one of his vassal houses who had strong sorcerous talent in her bloodline to pass on to his children. Whether a first or subsequent wife, I think that would be the type he would be looking for. She could take care of the social obligations as well, but once his eldest daughters were old enough they could take over those tasks, and even when they were younger Trimus was available to fill that role (I know we haven't heard much about her but I think that Trimus, maybe after seeing her brothers start having all those kids, went "no thank you" & decided to stay unmarried and childfree and has her own necromantic hobbies to pursue outside of her occasional House obligations).

Outside of having his children, I can't see Primus needing a wife to accomplish his goals. I'm not sure if eight was his target number or if he was considering more, but once he knew Occtis didn't have sorcerous abilities I don't think he wanted to risk having another child like him (because then that would be a pattern and not an outlier). So that brings me back to Lady Tachonis dying when Occtis was young and then not being replaced when no more children were needed.

[teganj42]

Still thinking about all the Kattigan reveals in the last episode, and I really think it was the location and being commoners that made Marienna and Esme Primus' targets. We don't know much about the forest they lived in (other than it was "kind") but I think there must have been some source of power or magic there that Primus needed at the time, and a couple of isolated commoners whose disappearance wouldn't be remarked upon/investigated by the wider community fit what he needed for whatever ritual or casting he was executing there. From what we've seen, anyone can be expendable to Primus if using them will get him closer to his goals (and commoners are especially expendable - I'm not sure if anyone not noble even registers with him, other than be part of "the masses"), but even when acting rashly he will set things up so he can cover his tracks.

I think Tertia was chosen for the first attempt at the Diva Vindicta ritual because she was the most expendable option available (not one of Primus' children and the youngest of his brother's). She was also the easiest to hide when it went wrong. When he had to pivot to Occtis and wanted to destroy House Royce at the same time, Primus decided wherever they both ended up would be where the deaths fueling the ritual would take place. And while he didn't expect to need to cover up Tachonis involvement in the massacre, he was able to explain it away as part of the destruction of Royce (realistically, Aranessa was going to end up staying at the estate of one of her vassals in Dol-Makjar, so any choice she made would've worked for Primus).

What this all brings me back to is that one of the most heartbreaking parts of Primus murdering Marienna and Esme is not because of some special power or blood that they had, but likely because they were ordinary, in the right place for what he needed and the most easily vanished without the wider community or anyone in power thinking it was worth investigating their disappearance.

[dol-makjarcoffeehouse]

I just want to make a quick note about this before people get too silly about the situation. It's very important to remember that Robbie is Native American, and is putting a lot of work into making sure that Kattigan has indigenous cultural touchstones as part of his characterization. And that is the appropriate lens through which we should view his missing and murdered wife and daughter, I think.

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.

Sometimes stories that are old can be new again in different hands, from different point of views, so just... mind how you step here.

[everroth]

I said I wasn't gonna post any discourse rants but I just wanna +1 this as an indigenous person whose great great grandfather was murdered because this is beyond discourse for me.

What makes this story so important (and not fridging) to me is that this isn't some half developed character that only exists to create something for Kattigan to overcome, Kattigan is an alcoholic and a druidic initiate that has been heavily implied to have had a land stewardship relationship with the land he was living with his family on, and it's for these reasons that people assume his missing and murdered wife and daughter are neither missing nor murdered and that has severed his relationship with his druidic magic and connection with the land.

This is important to me because my great great grandfather's murder was ruled accidental without criminal investigations because he was an alcoholic and he was drowned on his indigenous band's historic land which is on an archipelago and the only people who had evidence and were calling for an investigation were indigenous women. The first time anyone outside of the band took it seriously was in around 2014, 40+ years after his death, when a new hire at the cold cases unit saw the case after the TRC investigations, but the murderer that everyone in the community agreed had done it had already died of old age.

The reality that came with that? My great grandfather converted to the LDS and joined the military, getting himself disenfranchised temporarily along the way. I never once heard him speak his indigenous language, not even to say hello, even though I know he grew up speaking it even after his father was disenfranchised for 3 generations and his mother was sent to residential school. His family fell apart when his father was murdered. I've spoken to his five sisters a total of 9 occasions, and not 9 each, there have been 9 occasions I can remember ever where I have seen at least one of them, despite the fact that they are all still alive. One of those occasions was their mother's funeral in 2009 which was the first time I'd ever seen smudging done, and remains the only time I've seen members of my family smudging. 5 years before anyone called. In 2015 he got into a car accident and stopped being able to visit the archipelago safely, so he got one summer up there since having any inkling of justice before he couldn't be on his land anymore. I've been to one pow wow in my entire life and it wasn't with him or any of his other descendants, only one relative from his side of the family was there, one of his sisters, and she was part of the organizing council, it was my other parent's family that came with me, and at that point my dad didn't even know his mother was indigenous because she was adopted in the 60s and her birth certificate has never had her real parents on it or she wouldve been scooped never would've known it either. My dad didn't learn that past the fact that she was adopted until a year and a half later in 2023 when I asked her point blank if she was indigenous after hearing decades of suspicions from my mother's family. My great grandfather died early May of this year.

This isn't fridging, this is our real story. It's not subverting a trope, it's reality for people that haven't been listened to and who are dying before anyone cares that their parents and spouses and children were murdered or taken. And I'm begging you to please listen before reducing it to subversion of a trope because it's not commentary on what hollywood likes to repeat a bunch, its explicitly what they refuse to show and that's why so many people don't know how to listen.

[guidingb0lt]

CRITICAL ROLE 4X29: Opening Night

[captainofthetidesbreath]

Primus: "My son may well be in danger at this very moment."

his son, at this very moment:

[foldbaron]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!! 🌈

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

Julien and Teor need to continue to be in the same party just for the comedy potential of someone is minding their own business when suddenly two veterans of the Falconer's Rebellion leap 30 feet at them

[lowercass]

[yghiilra]

So different, yet kindled all the same.

I’ve loved their dynamic ever since they first met, and the last couple of episodes have only made me love them more 😮‍💨

[littlebosslady7]

Thaisha Lloy Lore drop from @quiddie on her instastory.

[luckthebard]

I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.

This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.

My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.

We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.

A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.

The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.

Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.

(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).

History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.

[gros-chat-fait]

The Gala Incident - The Three Parties*

*(minus the Magpies)

----

Rounded out the sketches I did while figuring out King Gus' design for the last drawing.

[akajustmerry]

In light of the no.1 trending topic on this site, I'd like to inform youse that Kitty Kendall, one of the survivors who bravely spoke out against Neil Gaiman and accused him of rape in 2025, has said here and here that if you are looking to support her and other survivors, you can make a donation to OurVOICE (the counselling service Kendall herself used) or your local rape crisis centre. If you can't make a donation, you can help to ensure people do not forget what Kendall and other survivors have gone through and continue to go through as they pursue legal action, and that Gaiman has already spent a lot of money in the attempt to sue these women for speaking out.

[bb-bluearcher]

I have seen some people complain how the OPLA writers omitted that everyone was watching over Nami when she was sick because of Sanji's line and, I have to admit, I was sorta thinking similar too (I think I do have a 'sheep mentality' or whatever you wanna call it)...

Until you remember Sora. Plus, the fact that in OPLA (thanks to the power of foresight), Sanji shares his experience about his mother.

So, it kinda makes sense for Sanji to be the one who had the most time watching over Nami. He's scared. He's worried.

Not to mention that he obviously has experience with caretaking. At least compared to the others. If I had to pick, it would be Sanji.

That isn't to say that the others didn't watch over her. Realistically, Sanji wasn't there 'the whole time' for those four days. I'd wager that there were moments Sanji had to leave the room to cook, but not before making sure someone is there with Nami. Hell, the others probably had to force him out so he could sleep and they take turns keeping watch.

Plus...it's possible the others...don't feel comfortable seeing Nami (someone strong and independent) so sick and weak...

Like Usopp. His mom died to illness too...

It's not that no one cares...

They care so much that they are scared and aren't sure what to do.

[nicotine-and-tangerine]

also!! something important to note, that emily said in an interview, is that it was very deliberate to have it be sanji we see the most with her not just because of sora but because we hadn’t seen them together like that before

nami has had one on one moments with all of the rest of the crew across both seasons; luffy throughout all of season 1 which ends in arlong park, the scene in the bar with zoro and her worry about him during his fight with mihawk and then scattered moments with usopp, the way she holds his hand whilst watching zoro’s fight and then their conversations in little garden but sanji is notably missing from that, who is also in the same boat: by 2x06 he’s had interactions like that, meaningful ones, with everyone but nami. obviously we see how much he cares for her but it’s pretty much always within the realm of his flirtation and that flowery nature of his when it comes to her. having those scenes where we see him being incredibly vulnerable and worried for her was important for both us as the audience and nami as a character to see and understand just how much he cares for her, not because she’s a girl and because he’s flirting but because she’s his friend and his crewmate and he loves her because of that

that’s why their conversation in 2x08 is so important for both of them; nami seeing him completely stripped back and vulnerable, no act, no flirty or quips, just him, scared and upset talking to his friend about something very important to him

there’s also the fact that the season was written to have a bit more focus on each straw hat for each island and with the idea that each stop would provide them with a “challenge” in some way; luffy in loguetown, nami on reverse mountain with her navigation, zoro in whiskey peak and usopp on little garden which were also obvious choices which left sanji and drum which coincidentally also made perfect sense as he’s faced with something that reminds me of the worst time of life and losing the one good thing he had then which was sora, and seeing her when nami was sick

tldr: it was a very deliberate narrative choice to focus on sanji throughout drum in regards to nami’s sickness because it was important both for their relationship and how the audience views it, and to fit with the theme of one straw hat per island

[teganj42]

I think the holly sprig might have been used to try and locate the coffin of Olbalad. Pascard and the Drowned Men knew House Tachonis was actively looking for the coffin when he passed it on to Thaisha and Occtis in Venatus. The holly could have been intended to help the Tachonis find it in Venatus, or to try and trace it after it left the city/slipped through their fingers. The wood of the coffin came from Sylandri's barrowdell, and the holly could either be one of the types of wood used in the coffin or at least be connected enough to the wood used that it could be part of a Locate Object spell. I imagine after Sylandri fell that any surviving plant, any surviving reminder of the Goddess of Life, would have been nurtured by the Sisters and brought with them to the Mournvale (if it was not already there to begin with).

[tommieglenn]

Occtis and Pin

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