Hey, can y’all rb this if it’s okay to send you messages asking about your ocs, cause on god I wanna interact with y’all but I am terrified of being annoying lol
Or I don't even know if it IS HC so much as kind of an inverse HC, in that it's a place where like 90% of the fandom seems to HC in stuff that I don't?
Here we go. Please be gentle. As always, I pledge to the flag of #AllHCAreValid.
I think Gra and Goh are incredibly lonely out there in the desert, and aren't at all enjoying that aspect of their lives.
I mean, I would hope this WOULDN'T be that controversial? After all, these are characters whose very titles establish that they like to go around Thra and interact with all its lifeforms and stuff (the *form* the interaction took might've varied, but...)
And when the Gelfling show up on their doorstep, Gra is more hype than a golden retriever puppy. Mind you, we can and should attribute part of this to drugs, and part of this to the sheer pleasure of knowing one's many-trine-long shop projects were not wasted and the Hail Mary pass to save Thra and make themselves whole has finally connected.
But even given that, they just seem SO super hyped that I have to think that, y'know, birb who's had no or very little social stimulation in hundreds of trine miiiight feel a little relieved to be entertaining company. :-)
The only reason I even 'worry' this is controversial is because so many fanficcers -- and I mean from the really-great to the not-so-great -- seem to treat the half an Age the two spend at the Circle of the Suns like...almost a couples getaway? A blessed idyll? And they do this with such light, offhanded assurance, as though it's one of those things of which the Dothraki say, It Is Known.
Again, #ALLHCAREVALID, but I personally find this difficult to get...*as* someone who's been gifted with what I well know is the sheer dumb cosmic luck of living many many years with my True Love, or what's surely within a degree of the closest to true love as exists on mortal earth. Like, I am exceedingly, eternally grateful.
It's just that...and I hope I'm not bursting the bubble here...even the Truest love is still hard work, it won't last if you don't work it, and even if you really really do it can still end. And no matter how goopy goo-goo eyes y'all are in the relationship's first stages, eventually everybody but the most intro introverts is going to find that the company of one person is just not enough to make a livable life out of. It just isn't. I heartily wish each and every person who actually desires a True Love in this life to acquire one -- but just know that it's not like in the movies. It's not even going to be easier than your other less-epic relationships were. Maybe in some ways harder, in fact.
It'll just be more *worth* the agony.
Even that, you might sometimes doubt. But in the end there's something hard to describe that still makes it worth it. That's the main difference I've discerned. <--[[NB: *Does not* apply to abusive lovers]]
Being forever out in the neverwhere alone with your love for an indefinite period isn't a recipe for wedded bliss. It's a recipe for driving yourselves and each other to drink. Ask like 2/3rds of retired couples, especially the ones where one or both partners were working outside the house AND (points at this and points AT SKEKGRA) deriving their identity from their work -- and then suddenly......not.
Once more, #ALLHCAREVALID and I have seen this trope written beautifully and I have enjoyed reading those beautiful pieces, but strictly from a suspending-disbelief standpoint just...no. Also I have to admit, something in me rebels at the idea that NOTHING of what the Skeksis (AND Mystics, in my telling) go out of their way to make an *especially painful* punishment is really -- sticking around in any meaningful way. That they're just like "oh welp, like we care, what more to life is there than making puppets, smokin' that crack, and each other." To me, it kinda cheapens the sting of the whole banishment, and I feel like it should have ongoing sting. The nail is NOT self-installed, and the exile is NOT a blissful retirement to the Bahamas.
On that note:
2. I seem to be one of the very few people in the fandom who doesn't ship them in the *traditional* sense, either.
I mean, I know. It's fandom. Fandom seems, from this relative newb's perspective, to be ~70% about sex no matter what the IP. :-) So I shouldn't be surprised to find myself in a minority.
And a minority many of whose fellow occupants I find odious because a lot of them are in the "no homo" school, or else the school of "Henson was a nonsexual, anerotic, angelic being who would've been SCANDALIZED by people writing sex scenes with his characters, even though he gave the Jen puppet an entirely extraneous wang AND started *The Dark Crystal* with an Edenic scene of nude Jen saved from an R rating *only* by a literal strategically-placed leaf." Like, just in case any parents in the audience needed the warning that this was not a small-kids, fluffy movie. ^^ (Funny thing is, I took it totally in stride as a kid watching it in the theater run. It was only on rewatch as an adult that I was like "HOLY SHIT was Henson making a statement with this, and oh God no *wonder* this quasi-flopped, people surely must have thought this was weird and Inappropriate for Children -- even though I of course still think it isn't.")
Yeah, nah. Are you kidding me? This is a puppeteer who grew up in the *40's/50's in Mississippi* and then ran off to TVLand in the 60's to eventually make tons of money off his weirdness. OF COURSE HE WAS A FREAK, and you know what? I find that wonderful news. (Bro, have you even heard the Frank Oz funeral-eulogy story? *QE fucking D*.)
But then when I go to explain that I don't conceive of Gra/Goh as a conventional romance but as something that kinda transcends any experience us single beings can know, other fen think that I am dissing Mere Romance and Mere Sex as being beneath me, or beneath the characters. Again -- hell no. Good, believable, stirring romance and sex are hard as hell to write and my respect for those who can do it is very high. And romance and sex IRL? They are awesome. Five stars. <3
I'm just saying these are literally personality-instanced aliens, is all.
I am officially agnostic, though I have my private opinions subject to change without notice, about whether Skeksis/Mystics have any kind of reproductive equipment. Or anything like what modern humans consider 'erotic' feelings (physical or mental). There are valid cases for and against. And although I don't personally write such content, I don't object to the depiction of erotic or sexual activity between Gra/Goh either. Hell, IF they had the slightest capacity for it and they thought for one single instant it might help them rejoin into their UrSkek, I think it's safe to assume they 'd try it at least once for that reason alone.
I just want the dyad to be something beyond that. And again, I don't mean beyond as in superior. I mean beyond as in Other, as in alien, as in behind a paywall very few other beings can get through in their mortal lifetime. And yes, as in spiritual -- though for a third time, I'm not parsing 'spiritual' as 'better than affairs of the mere flesh.'
And I try very hard to make sure I write it *as* that -- to make sure that I'm not just doing a deep platonic friendship (as wonderful as those are) or a 'brotherly' relationship, but putting in material that sorta blurs the very boundary of the self, the definition of personality, the idea that a person can only be in one place at a time.
As I go, in fact, it's developed almost toward an idea of the Skeksis and Mystic personas being *masks* or *roles*, on some fundamental level -- a self-illusion that each half occasionally, disconcertingly, briefly becomes aware of here and there, but then almost always panics and buries. I'm talking about, you could have one of those Shakespearian SkekVar/SkekSo scenes going, and all of a sudden poor SkekVar realizes that NONE of this is actually the General talking to the Emperor at all -- it's *VarMa talking to SoSu*. Only for some bizarre dream-logicky reason, they're wearing these weird faces and playing these weird murderbird characters...almost like they're onstage in a play they somehow can't opt out of acting in. And when they want to relate to the others of their kith, somehow, it can only ever be through the filter of this mask. So they're never saying what they truly want to say to the other Twice-Nine, or even usually thinking what they want to think; instead, the *best* they can ever do is grope blindly toward each other's souls, trying to interpret the hazy signal of the other Ur/Skek through this noise of these adopted personae -- and why bother because it's all fake anyhow -- but then if it's fake, why is it all they know, and nothing they can seem to escape from?
And *that* would within about 3/4ths of a second be FAR too much for a simple birb like SkekVar to deal with. So the most signal you'd ever get from them that it'd even happened is merely ::snort:: :-D And pretty soon the episode of ego-vertigo would dissipate -- drowned in the bodily experience of the normal persona with extreme prejudice aaand probably a lot of food and booze. ^^ There'd still be mysterious moments in which, however many leagues apart, Var and Ma would briefly seem not like 'opposites' but like a resonant pair, almost as if they had some shared nature and path after all...this is something, though, that only the very few who get to see both sides (*such* as Gra and Goh --or perhaps on the longer scale, Aughra) might have any inkling of.
See what I mean though? It's hard to even articulate! Because it kinda should be, I guess. :-D I guess that's my point.
Again, #ALLHCAREVALID! This is simply what *I* *me* *personally* want to do with the opportunity that the divided-soul trope in DC represents. I enjoy giving Gra and Goh these experiences of disrupted self within my fiction. (Btw, apparently LSD &c primarily work THROUGH disrupting the part of the brain responsible for a sense of distinct self :-( #Imjustsayin #urdrupes)). And I enjoy looking through their eyes to see the selves of the other UrRu/Skeksis -- showing the personalities of the latter to be blurrier and more self-contradictory than one would have thought, as well.
And then, by contrast, the fleeting moments where Gra/Goh do experience something close to full unity -- be it achieved by a vision or a dream or let's be honest drugs -- would be way more intense to them than what you or I could possibly experience. Us being people who get to just blithely go about all day sure of our unified self, at least 99% sure of where the border between us and the rest of *idam*, this thing, All There Is, lies. (The other 1% is called either "satori" or "hallucinogenic therapy"/"ayahuasca experience"/etc. :-) )
We aren't without our times of not being sure who the hell we are or which of two completely incompatible things we want, of course. Which is why UrSkeks and the divided-soul trope writ large have relevance to human experience. We all have our times. But most of us don't have it often enough to even come close to fucking up our faaairly comfortable everyday sense of "I am this person and this is what I'm about." :-) These tree aliens are a different matter.
So it's not a problem with romance at all? ...It's more a devotion to the idea of the Otherness and alienness of the thing, because I personally feel like that's what Henson and definitely Froud were kinda trying to get at with the UrSkeks, and with what is eventually big-Revealed about the Skeksis and Mystics' true nature. (I remember that moment, too, in the theater. It was my first encounter with the trope and it was a bit mind-blowing. Like, that method of resolving protagonist/antagonist conflict in a story had honestly never occurred. ...I do have the excuse of being, what, nine or so? :-D But still. Striking. And I liked it.)
Anyway. Seemingly unusual, possibly controversial, hopefully not of such a nature though as to get anyone actually mad. ^^
Two beings whose sole existence before was basically exploring and traversing the land (a little pillaging thrown in there for skekGra)... yeah I’d say being stuck in one place for hundreds of years would be absolute torture.
When I first watched the show the logistics of just how the hell the two of them could make it work really didn’t bother me. Now I’ve been thinking about it more and more. Not because I think it’s impossible, it’s just so improbable. How could a skeksis and a mystic who have just met end up being able to tolerate each other in a small living space for over 600 years? And I know “just met” is open to interpretation... maybe there’s some wiggle room. I mean we don’t really know the time line between when they saw the vision and the banishment. I know in WDTTCTR you’re working with a matter of months... or at least as much time as skekGra is allotted before the emperor gets suspicious. Still, and this is personally speaking, it just doesn’t seem like enough time. Not that skeGra and urGoh couldn’t develope a bond within that amount of time, I believe they could. No, I don’t think a few months would be enough to undo the already hundreds of years of brainwashing the skeksis and mystics have shouldered on each other about their opposites.
So that brings us to The Vision. The Vision makes it all make sense.
The Vision is a great starting point in their desire to articulate their crusade for unity to their brethren. What better way to put the fear of Thra into their kin than a good old fashioned vision. But basing their entire relationship on it (even just the birth of it) on a vision cheapens them greatly for me. I feel like if they’ve managed to live side by side for as long as they have it has to be deeper than that. And so I propose my HC which is probably even more controversial (although I didn’t think yours was controversial at all??? XD)
There was no vision.
These two wackadoos have been meeting in secret for years. Perhaps they had a couple of “visions” here or there but they were most likely just hallucinations from the drugs they were taking during their secret rendezvous. It makes perfect sense to me. Out of all the skeksis and mystics it’s THESE TWO that would end up constantly running into each other. And over the years the bond grew stronger. I go back and forth in my head on how long it takes them to make the plunge. Sometimes it’s as fast as thirty years. Sometimes it’s closer to two hundred. Two people learning to love each other at the slowest pace possible (with multiple setbacks of course). Just think of the slowest burn ever.
When I think of their relationship in those terms, the circle doesn’t seem as monumentally depressing as before. They know each other inside and out already, the hardest part would be being stationary. Although there is something to be said about being thrust into that situation and having to navigate it without knowing anything about the other person. I do like to entertain that idea sometimes, but they both have to be so absentminded and devoutly religious to The Vision for it to work.
Guess what movie I watched and loved and watched again and loved even more and then binged the prequel series of and then watched again wiser and more knowledgeable and completely obsessed within the span of like a week?
I literally cannot believe that I never saw The Dark Crystal growing up (although I am certain it would have traumatized me)! The film and the series give me such a strange and striking feeling of nostalgia, even though I’ve only just seen them for the first time! It’s so rich in inspiration and imagination I can tell I’m going to be thinking about it for the rest of my life.
Beccy Henderson (Deet’s puppeteer) shared some behind the scenes photos today from The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance, including this cute photo on the whiteboard. Stonegrot forever 💙💚
i’m like one of those baby birds that had to be raised by a caretaker with a puppet bird head on their arm, but instead of a california condor it was a skeksis from the dark crystal (1982)
Hey, I'm more comfortable saying this on anon, but I saw your art on Reddit. I wanted to let you know the person, Roketto, isn't a good person. She's racist, Islamophobic, anti-lgbt, transphobic, and a whole lot of other things. There's even a whole Google document made on her. Please be careful.
damn.... I mean I don’t know why I’m surprised. You’d hope someone moderating a group/subreddit who has a decent amount of power would be a good person and that’s not always the case. The crazy thing is is that I’ve READ that google doc years ago! I wasn’t in the fandom then and just forgot about it. It completely slipped my mind they were the same person. I assumed they just left the fandom after that (since I’m kinda late to the DC party...) anyway thank you ❤️
Lapsena tahtoi seurata Jumalaa, kun ei paholainenkaan tullut hakemaan. 🥀
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I was listening to this Finnish metalband called Villieläin and particularly my fave song from them called "Yön kuningatar" ("Queen of the night") and Seladon just popped to my mind 👀
The rules to Chardee Macdennis are so skeksis it’s ridiculous listen to this shit
- NO QUESTIONS
- Cheating is a part of the game and expected, but if you are CAUGHT cheating you will be punished. Cheating players should be harshly berated by the other team
- There is no penalty for an injury time-out unless it is successfully determined that the player has faked this injury (Chamberlain), and then the cheating penalties apply
- Bathroom breaks are only allowed during OFFICIAL TIME-OUTS. Diapers are permitted, but any player soiling themselves to the extent that it is visible or smellable to other players must clean themselves up off the clock and go to JAIL
- If a glass/bottle/cup is completely tipped over on its side, then you have brought great shame upon your team
- Jail is either a dog kennel or timeout chair, which a player must sit in facing a corner/wall and feeling deep shame (Chamberlain...)
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