Misplaced Creativity

This is where I put all my fandom conent, dungeons and dragons thoughts, and meta-musing. If you're interested in some homebrew content, check out my sideblog: dailyadventuremprompts.tumblr.com 

[dailyadventureprompts]

Friends, it's time! After years of work, endless revisions, it's finally done!! If you're a fan of my writing it would mean so much to me if you checked this out on your podcatcher of choice.

Welcome to the Lees: a jazzy pleasure district where the buildings walk, the party never stops, and the edges of reality are beginning to crack.

Fault & Stitchery follows Festus, a genderqueer tailor and memory mage, as they find themself tangled in wild magic, political unrest, half-truths, and lost memories — all with implications well above their pay grade.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Friends, It's Time

I have been working on this for years, and it's finally, FINALLY real.

If you've ever enjoyed my writing, or are any of the dozens and dozens of people who have sent messages saying "Hey, you should write a book", HERE IT IS.

The first episode is dropping soon, so please subscribe and get ready to be taken on a journey. This is something special, I can promise you.

Welcome to the Lees: a jazzy pleasure district where the buildings walk, the party never stops, and the edges of reality are beginning to crack. Fault & Stitchery follows Festus, a genderqueer tailor and memory mage, as they find themself tangled in wild magic, political unrest, half-truths, and lost memories — all with implications well above their pay grade.

[jbaxteranimator]

Something caught my eye about this shot

[sadhoc]

the pistachio food trend is soooo interesting because it's like. i've been following the californian pistachio water politics for years, as a californian with personal connections to agricultural workers but! basically there's been a big push in california agriculture over the last decade to pressure farmers to produce pistachios, because iran has dominated the global market in pistachios for decades, and the US government has been trying to weaken iran economically, so they want to make california pistachios a competitor. which is ridiculous, because california's agricultural infrastructure is suffering under a drought, and pistachios take insane amounts of water. so a ton of water is being redirected from the people in order to engage in a trade war with iran over fucking. pistachios.

anyway now that the US (i.e. california) is producing more pistachios than iran, the next step is to drive consumption of pistachios, so that the farmers who are producing these pistachios can continue to make money on them. ergo all the fancy pistachio coffees at starbucks and similar shit like suddenly being able to find pistachio butter in grocery stores when five years ago it was exclusively available at specialty stores and online, and the huge boom in pistachios foods in instagram and tiktok recipe content. like i watch a lot of instagram foodie reels (cooking/baking is one of my hobbies) and these get thrown onto everyone's feeds, to promote the purchasing of pistachios, so that the US can stick it to iran. it's. kind of incredible to watch this happen in real time, because it sounds like deranged conspiracy thought, but like. i've been watching this trend for the past decade and it's fucking real.

anyway one of the vegan recipe accounts i follow just posted like five pistachio-based recipes in a row and it makes me feel some kind of fucking way

[sadhoc]

it is extremely relevant that pistachios are so easy to acquire here, but acorns, which are an indigenous California food staple crop, are impossible to find even in the best stocked grocery stores, and knowing how to prepare them for consumption is a rarer skill than sourdough starter

[theunwrittenman]

This is like the eldritch knowledge of late stage capitalism: being just aware enough of seemingly unrelated facts to know that the world is hurdling towards disaster and war for the stupidest reasons imaginable.

[triaelf9]

No Mercy Percy

[self-loving-vampire]

Tradwives (and trads in general really) frequently do this thing where they post images from old advertisements showing happy white, extremely gender-conforming and heterosexual couples and do the whole "see how much better things were back in the Good Old Days" thing (without even acknowledging stuff like segregation or marital rape laws) and like...

Please be serious. You are basing your image of the past on marketing campaigns instead of reading any real history. You might as well be basing your political views on fantasy books. In fact, that might at least be more emotionally sincere than an ad.

Also, advertisements showing happy people enjoying various products still exist. They say as much about the state of society in general as they ever did.

[theunwrittenman]

The funny thing is, they really do base their political views on fantasy books, or more specifically, movies, because these are not the sort of people who read. When the alt-right talk about how badass the spartans were and how we need to toughen up today's youth, they're not actually talking about history, they're talking about the movie 300 and how it made them vicariously feel like manly men defending civilization against degenerate brown people.

Look at all the weird RETVRN people and their millennia displaced nostalgia for the roman empire, or the fact that Alex Jones, one of the biggest right wing ideologues ATM has a view of how souls work that's fundamentally a bastardized version of Dune.

These things make the Trads feel good about themselves, and anything that makes them feel good MUST be true.

The meme is "you are not immune to propaganda" but the trads don't WANT to be immune, they want to propagandized to and have someone project an idealized self image that they can vicariously live through. It doesn't mater whether it's an old cigarette commercial or Triumph of the Will.

[txttletale]

i think control also imo loses something of the fun of the SCP foundation or even other inspired porperties like LobCorp in that it fits everything into one cohesive overarchign system which is ultimately irtself just not that interesting. a little more variety and mystery in the things the bureau deals with would be nice but instead it's all just Magic Items adn Evil Magic Items which fundamentally all work the same

[txttletale]

a lot of the fun of SCP stuff or LobCorp or thje Cabin in the Woods cube sequence or fuck, even something like inside job which all arguably play in a similar space is that you have all these bizarre little side-narratives, right, like "in this box we have the last relic of an ancient civilization that summons a rain of lizards. and here we have the roswell aliens. and in this box we have Bigfoot." and i think control kind of fundamentally lacks that, its world ends up feeling small to me because of how much all ties back to the same underlying metaphysical and mechanical framework

[feyosha]

Control is really moreso a single SCP than an attempt to recreate the entire Foundationverse. The Oldest House could certainly qualify as a large and important entry, you know, one of the entries that end in -000, but you’re quite right in that it feels like it’s all operating within a single model. We never shift Genre or Tone. The 4th wall remains largely intact

To use in-universe terms, Control’s Hume Space is smooth and continuous: there’s only one set of supernatural axioms. There is only one Narrator, so to speak.

[theunwrittenman]

While I was initially a bit disappointed by how unwierd control ended up being the FBC is far more interesting when you consider it a part of the Alan Wake "metafiction" universe, IE as something that exists because someone up the chain wrote it into existence.

On some level, the FBC exists because the writer Alan Wake used the powers of his "anything I create comes true and then goes wrong" curse to create something (or someone) that could potentially save him. Everything from the extradimensional office building to the killer fridge to the janitor who's likely the Finnish god of the sea is potentially either his own creation or something else in the cosmos that swept up when the curse reformatted the universe to make his fiction "come true".

What I find fascinating about the FBC is that they're not the SCP foundation: They're an organization that realized that LARPing as the SCP foundation gave them a very literal air of authority to the point where so long as they pretend they're a part of the US government they'll be treated as such. They live in a world where ideas can become true, to the point where them studying the paranomal has changed how the paranormal works several times.

[nicheguides]

Going Mad at Sea: A Packing List.

Are you planning on a nautical severance from your sanity? Here are some things to consider packing along!

[cryptotheism]

Mohg is the most problematic queer rep of all time. He rules. Yeah he has magic AIDS that works especially well against Christians. He captured and intends to marry an eternal-child god, not for pedophilia reasons, but because he wants to commit genocide. Presumably to replace the christians with his magic AIDS blood cult.

[theunwrittenman]

The drip! The presentation! The fact that his horns are so overgrown that he's giving himself a partial lobotomy!

Nobody does it like Mohg!

[olivermarinkoski]

GODDESSES Collection © Oliver Ler Marinkoski

[robsheridan]

Happy 4th of July! If you are unfamiliar with American culture and why we celebrate the 4th, I made this Tribute to America which should explain everything. 🇺🇸

[cryptotheism]

One thing people never really mention about the conspiracy right wing is they fucking hate antidepressants. Alex Jones has tried to blame multiple mass shootings on some non existent SSRI-induced psychosis.

Now, I don't think I'm cooking here, but I think an ingredient in that soup is how SSRIs tank your libido. These losers are all obsessed with growth rates and fertility and other vaguely psychosexual white supremacist shit like that.

I can absolutely see some redpilled weirdo going on SSRIs bc his wife wanted him to, only for him to freak out that it's chemically edging him.

[theunwrittenman]

Contrast this with the fact that most of Jones's financing comes from hawking various supplements to his audience and on one of his most recent episodes was legit bragging about how painful the erections caused by his boner pills were.

So much of right wing/conspiracy culture is rooted in anxiety, and particular sexual anxiety: they think there's a social dick measuring contest hierarchy of masculinity and anything that messes with their place in it (soy in the food, women voting, black men existing) becomes an existential threat.

[sandraharissa]

Some cool Powder/Jinx design details:

1) The very noticeable, very badly cut bang that highlights that her/Vi/someone else (likely Powder herself) cuts her hair to prevent it from covering up her eye. Which then ends up growing out fully and covers up her right eye completely, making her resemble Silco. I love this implication that there’s clumsy but determined attempts at preventing the bang from growing, like it represents that there’s clumsy but determined attempts at preventing insanity from seeping in.

2) The changing eye color. It goes from this grey color when she’s ‘unremarkable’ to blue and then pink, both colors representing her trauma and how it colors her view of the world/life. Blue for the explosion and pink for the pink bullets. As a person grows older it’s possible that their eye color could change slightly like going from grey to blue but the color still represents hextech/arcane and its impact on her life. The pink is directly caused by shimmer and also represents its impact on her life. It also alludes to Silco who’s the shimmer dealer and who’s got a glowing red eye that’s very close to the pink eye that Jinx gets.

3) The tattoos and their colors also represent the trauma. Blue clouds for the arcane explosion and in s2 likely pink bullets for her minigun ammunition. To me it’s also reminiscent of Silco’s scar, it’s wearing your trauma on display.

4) Braids reflecting her mental state. Again, as Powder she had a simple, relatively short and straight braid. Based on the reddit QnA she’d have this poorly done, skewed to one side braid as little Jinx, cos Silco didn’t know how to braid hair. With her later in life taking the look of the skewed braid and making it intentionally her hairstyle, making it symmetrical and also longer, nicer. More polished with more jewelry/bolts in there. Kinda highlighting that immediately after the trauma she’d be at her lowest but that later in life she attempts to keep her life together.

5) I love that Silco braiding Jinx’s hair is semi-canon now cos I always loved the image, braiding these long-ass braids really conveys visually how effort and time consuming taking care of Jinx is. It also indirectly confirms that Vi must have braided her hair before, keeping it straight and by implication keeping her sane.

6) I also wonder what’s the motivation for the hairstyle. What would make sense to me is that if for Silco’s character it represents how much he has to take care of her then for Jinx it would represent how attention seeking and love-starved she is, right? So maybe she splits the braid in two and starts growing it out as much as she can in order to get more time/attention from Silco? It strikes me as smth little Powder/Jinx would absolutely do. Maybe it’s wishful thinking but I also used to think that about the concept of Silco braiding her hair in general.

7) They changed Jinx’s design to look more punk-like, which makes her fit the world more. Zaun’s aesthetics/fashion are partially borrowed from the 80s working class punk subculture.

8) An X on her outfit for jinX, similarly to how Mylo had an M with a crown in 'Mylo' on his outfit. Both of them also already had X's on their outfits as kids. Kinda how s2 will likely have Vi wearing Claggor’s glasses. Each sister somewhere on their outfit having a reference to the brother who was more like them.

[theunwrittenman]

Adding on to this, I've always taken the length of Jinx's hair to be a sign about her inability to move on: she possibly hasn't cut it since the night of Vander's death, litterally carrying around the weight of her guilt, the same way she made the worst thing that Vi called her into her name, the same way that her hallucinations trap her in her own shame.

Also a note on the tattoos: there's a connection between the blue smoke on Jinx's tattoos and the blue smoke of the flare Vi gave her ...it's a literal cry for help she thought could never be made good on because she thought Vi was dead.

Concurrently: Vi's tattoos are all machines and mechanisms, like her sister powder used to build in the hopes of protecting herself.

[artist-issues]

“At least it's not ferociously attacking God quite as directly as Steven Universe did…”

Not that I’m surprised by this statement, but can you elaborate on this? Kinda intrigued by your thoughts on Steven Universe.

Okie dokie, you’re not the only one who has asked me about this, so I suppose I’ll poke the hornet’s nest. 😅 I haven’t talked about this before because I assumed that everyone who wanted to hear my kinds of opinions on stories wasn’t watching or interested in Steven Universe.

It’s like asking vegetarian if they enjoyed a turkey dinner. The turkey dinner was so obviously not made for vegetarians to enjoy, so why would the vegetarian even bother analyzing the turkey?

But I think if some people are asking me why I think Steven Universe is anti-God (of the Bible) its because maybe they don’t know what the turkey is. Not completely. (Maybe not you, because like you said, you’re not surprised by my comment.) So I’ll explain my thoughts on Steven Universe.

If you’re just following me because you liked some stuff I posted, but didn’t realize that I’m a Bible-believing Christian and don’t want to hear about it, unfollow me now. Because I’m going to talk about some hot button issues here and the trolls will come out.

Steven Universe is really well-done. The jokes are funny, the writing is believable, the characters have great chemistry, great design, the concept is fascinating, the slow build-up and reveal of the plot elements is great. But when you watch the throne room scene in the last episode of Season 5 “Change Your Mind,” it’s alarmingly clear how much the whole show is not just settling for defending and championing the LGBTQ+ worldview—it goes all the way to attacking what Christians believe, on the other side.

Anything that’s pro-LGBTQ+ is doing that by default, but this show goes out of its way to do that.

You have to understand: God created and designed us. Deeper than that; He created and designed romantic relationships, and invented marriage. He didn’t just create love—He is love. So when humans come along and do what we’ve always done since the fall, and say, “I’d rather define what Your thing is and how it works for myself, God,” it’s not only an incredible slap in the face, it’s an attack on God’s actual identity—and it’s destructive for us and the people around us. Like a fish insisting it can breathe oxygen.

But Steven Universe goes beyond that. It knows that the Christian worldview is it’s biggest opposition. It digs right down to the heart of the worldview-battle. LGBTQ+ worldview says, “I should get to love what I want and be who I am, because I’m me. Love is love. (By which I mean, any action or relationship I choose to call love is love, because I’m the one calling it that.)”

Biblical worldview says “No, wait, you shouldn’t base your decisions on you alone; what you want changes day to day, and you’re broken, so you can’t ever be satisfied based on what you want—the Bible says God made you for something, and you rejected that, and it broke you. You’re not how you’re meant to be: even what you want and what you think love is is twisted up and can hurt you and others. But if you submit to God He’ll help you, He’ll fix what’s broken and give you new life by making you how you were supposed to be: He’ll live in you and through you.”

Are we beginning to get the picture?

See, the whole thing with the opposing views between LGBTQ+ and Christian people is as old as time. It’s not a new debate. It’s Satan and Eve in the garden. She says, “This is not how God said things should be,” and Satan says, “Are you sure that’s what He said? He knows if you do this thing, you’ll be like Him. You’ll be god: you’ll get to decide ‘how things should be’ for yourself.”

He lied and said that disobedience would satisfy her. That she knew what her own heart needed better than the God that made it did. That the very act of being imperfect would make her godlike.

And then Steven Universe comes along and says “if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hotdogs.”

And has a cast of created being characters who’s imperfections (Garnet’s forbidden “love,” Pearl’s obsession, Amethyst’s insecurity) are supposedly “the best thing about them; what makes them who they are.”

And has a main character who used to be a part of the god-like creator relationship, but used her power to come down to earth and completely change who she is into a fully different person.

And has a godlike Creator character who claims she “doesn’t need” her created beings (just like the God of the Bible) but they all have a little part of their creator in them so she has to repress their imperfections; she holds them all to a standard that’s impossible to reach called “perfection” and punishes them when they don’t meet it even though it hurts them to try; she expects them all to do what they were created by her for; she fixes them when they can’t meet her standard by shining her light through them and making them extensions of their Creator.

And has a main character who argues, fights back, tries to stop her, and is answered with lines that sound surprisingly like what LGBTQ+ people hear when Christians argue with them: “you’re only making things worse; you’re just deceiving yourself; even while you resist it your actual light can’t help shining through,” etc.

White Diamond just wants everything to be perfect. Like her. She just wants her created beings to “be themselves.” But what she means is, be how she created them to be.

And she’s the bad guy. She’s playing God in this show, and Rebecca Sugar is saying, “If God is telling us that can only be happy by being perfect, as He is perfect, and doing what He created us to do, then He’s wrong. Our imperfections are what make us special—unique—individuals—free—and there is nobody who has the right to take that freedom away from us, not even out creator!”

And you know what?

If God were like White Diamond, like Rebecca Sugar believes Him to be, Steven Universe would be right.

But He is NOT.

God is not a dictator who forces us to conform to a standard of perfection and then smashes us when we don’t meet it. He is a King who made us perfect to begin with, and we rejected him, because He allowed us to do that. He knew that true love was love that had to be chosen, and He wanted us to love Him by choice, so he gave us the option. But Rebecca Sugar doesn’t understand—there was never “Choose God or Choose Yourself.” There was only, “Choose God or Choose Nothing.” There was nothing except God. Then He created everything. There is no version of reality where you have something better than God, or even slightly less good but different, to pick. You’re not jumping from one ship into a smaller one, but at least it’s yours—you’re jumping from one ship into a void, and then complaining that there’s no other ship. That’s humans. That’s not God. / White Diamond didn’t make her creations perfect (Amethyst) and she didn’t make them for love. She made them for power. That’s not the God of the Bible.

Even when we did choose to try and love ourselves instead of God, and therefore warped our ability to perfectly love at all, He didn’t smash us. True, everything fell and was cursed, which is exactly what He warned us would happen if we chose it, but it was a natural consequence of breaking ourselves. And then He didn’t leave us that way. He didn’t give up on us. And He certainly didn’t just zap us, snap His fingers, quick-fix it and turn us all into robots who are extensions of Him, who say they love Him but only because it’s His voice puppeting us to say it.

No. He came to us, chose to give up His life at the exact point on the timeline when Romans, masters in the art of slow, humiliating, torturous death, would be the ones to carry out His crucifixion, and saved us Himself. Through the sacrifice of His own life. And even then, we still have a choice. We get to choose to accept that incredible self-sacrifice when we don’t deserve it, and be given new life and a relationship with the Creator who knows us and loves us better than we can love ourselves or receive love from others—OR we can just keep stubbornly insisting that our slavery to the opposite of what God wants is somehow freedom, and our twisted versions of love are genuine, and we’re not broken, and die like that. Die broken creatures who lived their whole lives stomping their feet and screaming “I’m not a creature, I’m a god!”

White Diamond sacrifices nothing, because Rebecca Sugar doesn’t know the God of the Bible. She just knows her idea of Him. She’s never actually gotten to know Him. If she had, she’d learn how silly and twisted her idea is.

Because you know what, yeah, if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs. But people aren’t pork chops. And hot dogs have flavor (not better than pork chops) but they are awful for you.

Christians aren’t perfect cuts of meat with no individuality or flavor. Just because we all know and love the same God doesn’t mean we have no personalities. It just means we don’t think so freaking much about what we are, or who we get to be, or what we like and want. Jeez, what a self-centered, narcissistic, self-obsessed way to live. She plays Steven like he’s this wonder-child, innocent and full of heart, who encourages his friends to love and keep trying. But honestly?

This is very pretty animation but it’s not real. Steven looks happy hugging Steven but self-love doesn’t ultimately get you that.

That’s all based on the premise that what he’s encouraging them to do is actually good, and will make them happy, and will help them love better. And it just won’t. Not in real life. That’s not how any of this works. Self-love is just self-obsession. And that is a sure-fire way to hurt you, and everyone around you.

You’ll never be free by choosing to run to a worse master. You’ll never be satisfied with your crappy attempts at loving yourself, because you were made to be loved flawlessly and forever by someone who is Love Himself.

And choosing to identify with your imperfections doesn’t make you uniquely you. It just makes you exactly like every other human being marching in the same line since the Fall.

White Diamond’s not relational. She’s up high and distant. That’s not God. He made you to be in relationship with Him. He loves you, totally and perfectly, and He proved it by sacrificing for You.

So yeah. That’s the problem with Steven Universe. Come get me, SU fans.

[geooricle]

I was raised Cristian and went to church for 20 years and this post I think is the perfect example of why I have never regretted the decision to stop and cut off all contact.

The idea that what Christians do and say to other human beings is irrelevant to their experiences and shouldn’t be included in art because “god isnt really like that” that makes me want to vomit, frankly. Honestly, just being openly homophobic is less upsetting because its more honest. At the end of the day what god is really like is completely irrelevant when the your parents are actively trying to do you harm every single day because of what they think god is like. “What god is really like” is so so irrelevant to the relationship of any member of the LGBTQ community to christian authority figures it’s almost absurd to even bring it up. Its really nice you think god is cool and loves you, it really is, but it helps nobody but you.

“Being happy about yourself is toxic because only Gods love matters” is just streight up cult brainwashing. I would really really recommend you seek therapy. This is not a joke. You can not sustain that belief for long without doing yourself serious and perminant harm. It did me serious and perminant harm. Just get out. I’m not kidding.

One final point, seeing a really blatant toxic parent metaphor and thinking it’s a stab at god tells me a lot more about your opinion of god than rebecca singer’s, but go off I guess.

[geooricle]

Its been a while since I looked at this because OP stopped replying to me, but I have to say arguing that the Jewish god is the same as the Christian god but the Islamic god isn’t the same as the Christian god in the notes of THE SAME POST is some real masks off American christofaschist shit.

[artist-issues]

Ummmkay 🙄 I “stopped replying” to you because…you stopped replying to me, first. You stopped replying to what I was literally saying, and started arguing with someone in your head, instead. You’re kind of still doing the same thing now. You’re picking out pieces of things that I say, then rearranging them in an order that you can try and criticize 🤷‍♀️

But whatever, other people have tried picking at this issue and it’s so ridiculous at this point that I might as well set the record straight.

The Islamic god is different than the Jewish God and the Christian God. Please do some reading. Any reading. The tiniest bit of reading would prove this.

The Islamic god is Allah, who would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present, as well as the creator of the universe. And the similarities end there.

Christians are actively being murdered right now by Muslims for believing in a different God, Yahweh, who is revealed in three Persons: God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the image of the one and only Creator God, and He claimed to be very explicitly. The Islamic believers only think He was a Prophet—they certainly don’t believe He is God, or that Allah sent an expression of himself to earth.

The kind of God who would do something like that is fundamentally different than the kind of god who wouldn’t. Two fundamentally different divinities: one who is gracious and merciful and wants to be in a relationship with humanity, and the other who is none of those things. You might as well have a reader say, “geooricle and artist-issues are the same tumblr blogger.” That’s how silly it sounds. Anywhere outside the West, Muslims will torture or kill you for believing in Yahweh, the Divine Trinity, instead of their god, Allah.

Don’t be ridiculous.

Where Orthodox Jews and Christians differ is simply in how much there is to know about God. The Jews believe that everything you can know about God has been revealed in the Torah. The “religion” started ignoring what their God was doing and saying around 6-4 B.C. We both still claim to worship the same historical Deity: same character, same name, same works–up to a point. It’s like watching a TV show together, but one group stops watching during season 2. And each group still claims to be a “fan.”

They just don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s fulfillment to His own prophecies, and we do.

And to the point, because everyone keeps throwing “Rebecca Sugar is Jewish” out there like that means anything at all in this context, and I’m so tired of it—

—ya’ll realize that Orthodox Jewish religion accepts the words of the Torah as the Holy Word of God (just like Christians do) right? And y'all realize that it is in the Torah that their God condemns homosexuality, and claims to have created mankind for His own purposes, and tells His creations they must live up to His standards of perfection, right? Which is what White Diamond is doing in the show? I mean, y'all realize that if Rebecca Sugar actually believes her Orthodox Jewish religion, she’s completely saying the opposite with her show, right?

Her religion-of-choice doesn’t change what she’s saying with her show: if I say I’m a vegetarian and then go around eating bacon, I’m just a liar, or you could say, a really terrible vegetarian. She’s bashing the God of the Torah with her show identically to the way she’s bashing the Christian God, because they’re the same God, and ya’ll bringing it up shows how little you’re actually aware of what Christianity and Judaism are—and how little you’re thinking about consistency and intellectual honesty.

[geooricle]

Yeah I was taught all that too. I went to a Christian school. I was a Christian for the first 20 years of my life, I was taught all the stuff you are saying more or less verbatim and I believed it.

It’s all lies though. Neither Judeism or Islam are anything remotely like what you describe above.

[artist-issues]

Give evidence for that. Give evidence for “neither Judaism or Islam are anything remotely like” what I just described. Simply saying “it’s all lies though” doesn’t make it so. I didn’t just listen to somebody give a lecture about these things. I’ve seen it and spoken with actual people in real life who confirm it. …and some of those people were atheists, too. What have you got?

I’d love to see you cone up with any evidence that supports the super-ignorant statement, complete with universal qualifiers: “neither Judaism or Islam are anything remotely like what you describe above.”

[prismatic-bell]

SURE! Jew here, and Jumblr is about to be ALL OVER your ignorant antisemitic ass.

Very simple: y’all worship an idol. G-d is One, not three, and not funky math “it’s three but actually one.”

You venerate human sacrifice. We teach that it is forbidden.

You celebrate death. We celebrate life.

You believe there’s no arguing with G-d. We do it all the time.

Oh—and Jews and Muslims believe in the same G-d. YOU are the one who doesn’t, because, again, YOU WORSHIP AN IDOL.

You’re wrong, ignorant, bigoted, small-minded, and insufferably smug—pretty par for the course with a certain kind of Christian.

@athingofvikings, want a go? I’ve got to get ready for work, I can’t finish the job as thoroughly as I’d like to.

[athingofvikings]

I’d rather stick my head in a running nuclear reactor. It would be quicker and I think it would be a more enjoyable experience than arguing with a Christian zealot like OP.

[vaspider]

Sometimes I start reading something, and it’s so completely ignorant that my brain just stops in self-defense.

For the record, I’m Jewish, but I was raised in both Southern Baptist and Methodist churches. I left because of the absolute fucking mess that Xianity makes of Torah, and how utterly hateful it is. That most Xians think they are being loving when they say things like ‘you think you know the way G-d made you, but actually, you’re wrong, because I, a stranger, know better,’ is just such deep cognitive dissonance for me.

But anyway. I’m not going to pull your shit apart line by line. I am only going to say this:

Satan was not in the Garden of Eden.

The creature in the Garden of Eden is a serpent, in Hebrew נָחָשׁ (Nāḥāš). There is no textual evidence to support this figure as the Christian “Satan.” How do we know? Because a) most Jews do not believe in the existence of a single malevolent anti-G-d figure, and b) a figure called ha-satan appears elsewhere in the Tanakh, what you would (ugh) call the “Hebrew Bible.” However, ha-satan is not your Satan. It isn’t even a proper noun!

You see, ‘ha’ is a definitive article. It means ‘the.’ I am not 'the’ Spider. I’m Spider. Moses was not 'the’ Moses, he was just Moses. Proper nouns do not use definitive articles. 'Ha-satan’ means 'the opposer’ or 'the accuser’ or 'the adversary,’ and he is not a malevolent entity – he’s more like a prosecuting attorney. Most importantly, he works for G-d. He is on G-d’s team. He reports to G-d. When we hear about a death, we say 'Baruch dayan Ha'Emet,’ which means 'Blessed is G-d who is the True Judge.’ If G-d is the True Judge, welp, ha-satan is the guy who reports to Him and prosecutes cases in His court. He is a metaphorical representation of the yetzer harah, or evil inclination, of human beings. He isn’t… like… wandering around opposing G-d. He does G-d’s work.

This figure used in reference to a non-human entity (it’s used to refer to human adversaries also) in Job and Zechariah. Ha-satan is the entity given the opportunity to torment Job to prove that humans will abandon their faith in G-d if He withdraws his favor. In Zechariah, the adversary shows a vision of Joshua, the High Priest, in rags and on trial for Judah’s crimes. G-d orders Joshua to be given clean clothes, symbolizing his forgiveness of Judah.

That’s it. The end.

But ha-satan is still not the figure which appears in the Garden of Eden. It’s a serpent. There is absolutely no textual support for this in the Hebrew. Any edits in translation, anything it says in your English-language Bible? That was put there literally like 2000 years after the first copies of Genesis were written down. We had nothing to do with that.

(We don’t use the word 'Yahweh’, by the way. The Tetragrammaton is unpronounceable and you sound really weird using it, because it is, bluntly, incorrect. Plus, G-d is singular, it’s literally in the Shema, the central statement of faith for Judaism. We don’t believe in a G-d who has 'three parts.’ That’s your thing. Our G-d is One. Singular. Indivisible. Not three-in-one, ONE. And yes, I know how the Trinity works, remember, I was educated by Xians – the Jewish G-d does not work that way.)

So anyway, you’re wrong, Satan wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, a lot of the things you were taught have no textual basis in the original texts and were added later by human beings to support their bigotry and hate. I know how hard it can be to hear that you’ve been taught to hate, but you have, and I wish you all the best in deprogamming yourself.

[theunwrittenman]

Also a fish DID decide to start breathing air. It’s a relatively minor point but it is absolutely a thing that happened.

[artist-issues]

Y'all are kinda missing the point of the analogy. It’d be like me correcting everyone’s grammar and spelling but never addressing the issues or even valid points in the substance of what they’re saying.

[theunwrittenman]

No, my critique of the analogy is apt: if god created the universe and gave shape to the life in it he objectively created life that could change and adapt to best fit it's circumstances, like the many, many times that fish have adapted to survive on land/breathe oxygen.

Your general argument is based on the idea that things were created a certain way, and have to stay that way, but that's a perspective that adheres to a very limited and human view of the universe in it's totality. You're denigrating your own god to make him fit in the narrow band of human ignorance. God is eternal, but he is not stagnancy, and the fact that you think you as a limited human think you can understand his design is an act of utmost pride.

Equally disparaging: you've fundamentally got Steven Universe lore wrong. White Daimond did not create the Gems, nor was she the first. Gem society was explicitly designed by an outside force and WD was put in charge of it. What she represents (both in gem society and in the story) is dogmatic adherence to social norms and orthodox hierarchy. It's understandable why you, someone who bases their self image on a similar adherence to orthodoxy would feel attacked by her villianization, but even you can admit that the bible says to beware false, flawed power structures like the ones that would deny the truth of god's universe truth to keep their own authority in tact.

[artist-issues]

“At least it's not ferociously attacking God quite as directly as Steven Universe did…”

Not that I’m surprised by this statement, but can you elaborate on this? Kinda intrigued by your thoughts on Steven Universe.

Okie dokie, you’re not the only one who has asked me about this, so I suppose I’ll poke the hornet’s nest. 😅 I haven’t talked about this before because I assumed that everyone who wanted to hear my kinds of opinions on stories wasn’t watching or interested in Steven Universe.

It’s like asking vegetarian if they enjoyed a turkey dinner. The turkey dinner was so obviously not made for vegetarians to enjoy, so why would the vegetarian even bother analyzing the turkey?

But I think if some people are asking me why I think Steven Universe is anti-God (of the Bible) its because maybe they don’t know what the turkey is. Not completely. (Maybe not you, because like you said, you’re not surprised by my comment.) So I’ll explain my thoughts on Steven Universe.

If you’re just following me because you liked some stuff I posted, but didn’t realize that I’m a Bible-believing Christian and don’t want to hear about it, unfollow me now. Because I’m going to talk about some hot button issues here and the trolls will come out.

Steven Universe is really well-done. The jokes are funny, the writing is believable, the characters have great chemistry, great design, the concept is fascinating, the slow build-up and reveal of the plot elements is great. But when you watch the throne room scene in the last episode of Season 5 “Change Your Mind,” it’s alarmingly clear how much the whole show is not just settling for defending and championing the LGBTQ+ worldview—it goes all the way to attacking what Christians believe, on the other side.

Anything that’s pro-LGBTQ+ is doing that by default, but this show goes out of its way to do that.

You have to understand: God created and designed us. Deeper than that; He created and designed romantic relationships, and invented marriage. He didn’t just create love—He is love. So when humans come along and do what we’ve always done since the fall, and say, “I’d rather define what Your thing is and how it works for myself, God,” it’s not only an incredible slap in the face, it’s an attack on God’s actual identity—and it’s destructive for us and the people around us. Like a fish insisting it can breathe oxygen.

But Steven Universe goes beyond that. It knows that the Christian worldview is it’s biggest opposition. It digs right down to the heart of the worldview-battle. LGBTQ+ worldview says, “I should get to love what I want and be who I am, because I’m me. Love is love. (By which I mean, any action or relationship I choose to call love is love, because I’m the one calling it that.)”

Biblical worldview says “No, wait, you shouldn’t base your decisions on you alone; what you want changes day to day, and you’re broken, so you can’t ever be satisfied based on what you want—the Bible says God made you for something, and you rejected that, and it broke you. You’re not how you’re meant to be: even what you want and what you think love is is twisted up and can hurt you and others. But if you submit to God He’ll help you, He’ll fix what’s broken and give you new life by making you how you were supposed to be: He’ll live in you and through you.”

Are we beginning to get the picture?

See, the whole thing with the opposing views between LGBTQ+ and Christian people is as old as time. It’s not a new debate. It’s Satan and Eve in the garden. She says, “This is not how God said things should be,” and Satan says, “Are you sure that’s what He said? He knows if you do this thing, you’ll be like Him. You’ll be god: you’ll get to decide ‘how things should be’ for yourself.”

He lied and said that disobedience would satisfy her. That she knew what her own heart needed better than the God that made it did. That the very act of being imperfect would make her godlike.

And then Steven Universe comes along and says “if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hotdogs.”

And has a cast of created being characters who’s imperfections (Garnet’s forbidden “love,” Pearl’s obsession, Amethyst’s insecurity) are supposedly “the best thing about them; what makes them who they are.”

And has a main character who used to be a part of the god-like creator relationship, but used her power to come down to earth and completely change who she is into a fully different person.

And has a godlike Creator character who claims she “doesn’t need” her created beings (just like the God of the Bible) but they all have a little part of their creator in them so she has to repress their imperfections; she holds them all to a standard that’s impossible to reach called “perfection” and punishes them when they don’t meet it even though it hurts them to try; she expects them all to do what they were created by her for; she fixes them when they can’t meet her standard by shining her light through them and making them extensions of their Creator.

And has a main character who argues, fights back, tries to stop her, and is answered with lines that sound surprisingly like what LGBTQ+ people hear when Christians argue with them: “you’re only making things worse; you’re just deceiving yourself; even while you resist it your actual light can’t help shining through,” etc.

White Diamond just wants everything to be perfect. Like her. She just wants her created beings to “be themselves.” But what she means is, be how she created them to be.

And she’s the bad guy. She’s playing God in this show, and Rebecca Sugar is saying, “If God is telling us that can only be happy by being perfect, as He is perfect, and doing what He created us to do, then He’s wrong. Our imperfections are what make us special—unique—individuals—free—and there is nobody who has the right to take that freedom away from us, not even out creator!”

And you know what?

If God were like White Diamond, like Rebecca Sugar believes Him to be, Steven Universe would be right.

But He is NOT.

God is not a dictator who forces us to conform to a standard of perfection and then smashes us when we don’t meet it. He is a King who made us perfect to begin with, and we rejected him, because He allowed us to do that. He knew that true love was love that had to be chosen, and He wanted us to love Him by choice, so he gave us the option. But Rebecca Sugar doesn’t understand—there was never “Choose God or Choose Yourself.” There was only, “Choose God or Choose Nothing.” There was nothing except God. Then He created everything. There is no version of reality where you have something better than God, or even slightly less good but different, to pick. You’re not jumping from one ship into a smaller one, but at least it’s yours—you’re jumping from one ship into a void, and then complaining that there’s no other ship. That’s humans. That’s not God. / White Diamond didn’t make her creations perfect (Amethyst) and she didn’t make them for love. She made them for power. That’s not the God of the Bible.

Even when we did choose to try and love ourselves instead of God, and therefore warped our ability to perfectly love at all, He didn’t smash us. True, everything fell and was cursed, which is exactly what He warned us would happen if we chose it, but it was a natural consequence of breaking ourselves. And then He didn’t leave us that way. He didn’t give up on us. And He certainly didn’t just zap us, snap His fingers, quick-fix it and turn us all into robots who are extensions of Him, who say they love Him but only because it’s His voice puppeting us to say it.

No. He came to us, chose to give up His life at the exact point on the timeline when Romans, masters in the art of slow, humiliating, torturous death, would be the ones to carry out His crucifixion, and saved us Himself. Through the sacrifice of His own life. And even then, we still have a choice. We get to choose to accept that incredible self-sacrifice when we don’t deserve it, and be given new life and a relationship with the Creator who knows us and loves us better than we can love ourselves or receive love from others—OR we can just keep stubbornly insisting that our slavery to the opposite of what God wants is somehow freedom, and our twisted versions of love are genuine, and we’re not broken, and die like that. Die broken creatures who lived their whole lives stomping their feet and screaming “I’m not a creature, I’m a god!”

White Diamond sacrifices nothing, because Rebecca Sugar doesn’t know the God of the Bible. She just knows her idea of Him. She’s never actually gotten to know Him. If she had, she’d learn how silly and twisted her idea is.

Because you know what, yeah, if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs. But people aren’t pork chops. And hot dogs have flavor (not better than pork chops) but they are awful for you.

Christians aren’t perfect cuts of meat with no individuality or flavor. Just because we all know and love the same God doesn’t mean we have no personalities. It just means we don’t think so freaking much about what we are, or who we get to be, or what we like and want. Jeez, what a self-centered, narcissistic, self-obsessed way to live. She plays Steven like he’s this wonder-child, innocent and full of heart, who encourages his friends to love and keep trying. But honestly?

This is very pretty animation but it’s not real. Steven looks happy hugging Steven but self-love doesn’t ultimately get you that.

That’s all based on the premise that what he’s encouraging them to do is actually good, and will make them happy, and will help them love better. And it just won’t. Not in real life. That’s not how any of this works. Self-love is just self-obsession. And that is a sure-fire way to hurt you, and everyone around you.

You’ll never be free by choosing to run to a worse master. You’ll never be satisfied with your crappy attempts at loving yourself, because you were made to be loved flawlessly and forever by someone who is Love Himself.

And choosing to identify with your imperfections doesn’t make you uniquely you. It just makes you exactly like every other human being marching in the same line since the Fall.

White Diamond’s not relational. She’s up high and distant. That’s not God. He made you to be in relationship with Him. He loves you, totally and perfectly, and He proved it by sacrificing for You.

So yeah. That’s the problem with Steven Universe. Come get me, SU fans.

[geooricle]

I was raised Cristian and went to church for 20 years and this post I think is the perfect example of why I have never regretted the decision to stop and cut off all contact.

The idea that what Christians do and say to other human beings is irrelevant to their experiences and shouldn’t be included in art because “god isnt really like that” that makes me want to vomit, frankly. Honestly, just being openly homophobic is less upsetting because its more honest. At the end of the day what god is really like is completely irrelevant when the your parents are actively trying to do you harm every single day because of what they think god is like. “What god is really like” is so so irrelevant to the relationship of any member of the LGBTQ community to christian authority figures it’s almost absurd to even bring it up. Its really nice you think god is cool and loves you, it really is, but it helps nobody but you.

“Being happy about yourself is toxic because only Gods love matters” is just streight up cult brainwashing. I would really really recommend you seek therapy. This is not a joke. You can not sustain that belief for long without doing yourself serious and perminant harm. It did me serious and perminant harm. Just get out. I’m not kidding.

One final point, seeing a really blatant toxic parent metaphor and thinking it’s a stab at god tells me a lot more about your opinion of god than rebecca singer’s, but go off I guess.

[geooricle]

Its been a while since I looked at this because OP stopped replying to me, but I have to say arguing that the Jewish god is the same as the Christian god but the Islamic god isn’t the same as the Christian god in the notes of THE SAME POST is some real masks off American christofaschist shit.

[artist-issues]

Ummmkay 🙄 I “stopped replying” to you because…you stopped replying to me, first. You stopped replying to what I was literally saying, and started arguing with someone in your head, instead. You’re kind of still doing the same thing now. You’re picking out pieces of things that I say, then rearranging them in an order that you can try and criticize 🤷‍♀️

But whatever, other people have tried picking at this issue and it’s so ridiculous at this point that I might as well set the record straight.

The Islamic god is different than the Jewish God and the Christian God. Please do some reading. Any reading. The tiniest bit of reading would prove this.

The Islamic god is Allah, who would be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present, as well as the creator of the universe. And the similarities end there.

Christians are actively being murdered right now by Muslims for believing in a different God, Yahweh, who is revealed in three Persons: God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ is the image of the one and only Creator God, and He claimed to be very explicitly. The Islamic believers only think He was a Prophet—they certainly don’t believe He is God, or that Allah sent an expression of himself to earth.

The kind of God who would do something like that is fundamentally different than the kind of god who wouldn’t. Two fundamentally different divinities: one who is gracious and merciful and wants to be in a relationship with humanity, and the other who is none of those things. You might as well have a reader say, “geooricle and artist-issues are the same tumblr blogger.” That’s how silly it sounds. Anywhere outside the West, Muslims will torture or kill you for believing in Yahweh, the Divine Trinity, instead of their god, Allah.

Don’t be ridiculous.

Where Orthodox Jews and Christians differ is simply in how much there is to know about God. The Jews believe that everything you can know about God has been revealed in the Torah. The “religion” started ignoring what their God was doing and saying around 6-4 B.C. We both still claim to worship the same historical Deity: same character, same name, same works–up to a point. It’s like watching a TV show together, but one group stops watching during season 2. And each group still claims to be a “fan.”

They just don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s fulfillment to His own prophecies, and we do.

And to the point, because everyone keeps throwing “Rebecca Sugar is Jewish” out there like that means anything at all in this context, and I’m so tired of it—

—ya’ll realize that Orthodox Jewish religion accepts the words of the Torah as the Holy Word of God (just like Christians do) right? And y'all realize that it is in the Torah that their God condemns homosexuality, and claims to have created mankind for His own purposes, and tells His creations they must live up to His standards of perfection, right? Which is what White Diamond is doing in the show? I mean, y'all realize that if Rebecca Sugar actually believes her Orthodox Jewish religion, she’s completely saying the opposite with her show, right?

Her religion-of-choice doesn’t change what she’s saying with her show: if I say I’m a vegetarian and then go around eating bacon, I’m just a liar, or you could say, a really terrible vegetarian. She’s bashing the God of the Torah with her show identically to the way she’s bashing the Christian God, because they’re the same God, and ya’ll bringing it up shows how little you’re actually aware of what Christianity and Judaism are—and how little you’re thinking about consistency and intellectual honesty.

[geooricle]

Yeah I was taught all that too. I went to a Christian school. I was a Christian for the first 20 years of my life, I was taught all the stuff you are saying more or less verbatim and I believed it.

It’s all lies though. Neither Judeism or Islam are anything remotely like what you describe above.

[artist-issues]

Give evidence for that. Give evidence for “neither Judaism or Islam are anything remotely like” what I just described. Simply saying “it’s all lies though” doesn’t make it so. I didn’t just listen to somebody give a lecture about these things. I’ve seen it and spoken with actual people in real life who confirm it. …and some of those people were atheists, too. What have you got?

I’d love to see you cone up with any evidence that supports the super-ignorant statement, complete with universal qualifiers: “neither Judaism or Islam are anything remotely like what you describe above.”

[prismatic-bell]

SURE! Jew here, and Jumblr is about to be ALL OVER your ignorant antisemitic ass.

Very simple: y’all worship an idol. G-d is One, not three, and not funky math “it’s three but actually one.”

You venerate human sacrifice. We teach that it is forbidden.

You celebrate death. We celebrate life.

You believe there’s no arguing with G-d. We do it all the time.

Oh—and Jews and Muslims believe in the same G-d. YOU are the one who doesn’t, because, again, YOU WORSHIP AN IDOL.

You’re wrong, ignorant, bigoted, small-minded, and insufferably smug—pretty par for the course with a certain kind of Christian.

@athingofvikings, want a go? I’ve got to get ready for work, I can’t finish the job as thoroughly as I’d like to.

[athingofvikings]

I’d rather stick my head in a running nuclear reactor. It would be quicker and I think it would be a more enjoyable experience than arguing with a Christian zealot like OP.

[vaspider]

Sometimes I start reading something, and it’s so completely ignorant that my brain just stops in self-defense.

For the record, I’m Jewish, but I was raised in both Southern Baptist and Methodist churches. I left because of the absolute fucking mess that Xianity makes of Torah, and how utterly hateful it is. That most Xians think they are being loving when they say things like ‘you think you know the way G-d made you, but actually, you’re wrong, because I, a stranger, know better,’ is just such deep cognitive dissonance for me.

But anyway. I’m not going to pull your shit apart line by line. I am only going to say this:

Satan was not in the Garden of Eden.

The creature in the Garden of Eden is a serpent, in Hebrew נָחָשׁ (Nāḥāš). There is no textual evidence to support this figure as the Christian “Satan.” How do we know? Because a) most Jews do not believe in the existence of a single malevolent anti-G-d figure, and b) a figure called ha-satan appears elsewhere in the Tanakh, what you would (ugh) call the “Hebrew Bible.” However, ha-satan is not your Satan. It isn’t even a proper noun!

You see, 'ha’ is a definitive article. It means 'the.’ I am not 'the’ Spider. I’m Spider. Moses was not 'the’ Moses, he was just Moses. Proper nouns do not use definitive articles. 'Ha-satan’ means 'the opposer’ or 'the accuser’ or 'the adversary,’ and he is not a malevolent entity – he’s more like a prosecuting attorney. Most importantly, he works for G-d. He is on G-d’s team. He reports to G-d. When we hear about a death, we say 'Baruch dayan Ha'Emet,’ which means 'Blessed is G-d who is the True Judge.’ If G-d is the True Judge, welp, ha-satan is the guy who reports to Him and prosecutes cases in His court. He is a metaphorical representation of the yetzer harah, or evil inclination, of human beings. He isn’t… like… wandering around opposing G-d. He does G-d’s work.

This figure used in reference to a non-human entity (it’s used to refer to human adversaries also) in Job and Zechariah. Ha-satan is the entity given the opportunity to torment Job to prove that humans will abandon their faith in G-d if He withdraws his favor. In Zechariah, the adversary shows a vision of Joshua, the High Priest, in rags and on trial for Judah’s crimes. G-d orders Joshua to be given clean clothes, symbolizing his forgiveness of Judah.

That’s it. The end.

But ha-satan is still not the figure which appears in the Garden of Eden. It’s a serpent. There is absolutely no textual support for this in the Hebrew. Any edits in translation, anything it says in your English-language Bible? That was put there literally like 2000 years after the first copies of Genesis were written down. We had nothing to do with that.

(We don’t use the word 'Yahweh’, by the way. The Tetragrammaton is unpronounceable and you sound really weird using it, because it is, bluntly, incorrect. Plus, G-d is singular, it’s literally in the Shema, the central statement of faith for Judaism. We don’t believe in a G-d who has 'three parts.’ That’s your thing. Our G-d is One. Singular. Indivisible. Not three-in-one, ONE. And yes, I know how the Trinity works, remember, I was educated by Xians – the Jewish G-d does not work that way.)

So anyway, you’re wrong, Satan wasn’t in the Garden of Eden, a lot of the things you were taught have no textual basis in the original texts and were added later by human beings to support their bigotry and hate. I know how hard it can be to hear that you’ve been taught to hate, but you have, and I wish you all the best in deprogamming yourself.

[theunwrittenman]

Also a fish DID decide to start breathing air. It's a relatively minor point but it is absolutely a thing that happened.

[talesfromthecrypts]

What was so special about the Fallout finger scene?

Everyone I know is a little freak who enjoys when two people get a little violent with each other. The removal of the fingers is a permanent mark they made on each other. He takes it one step further and sews her finger on his hand! And while not using his finger she ends up with an old dead finger on her hand. I've seen it compared to a more violent version of an exchange of rings. Its just a fun little flavor thing that people who like their character dynamics a little fucked up have latched onto.

[theunwrittenman]

Its also their respective trigger fingers, metaphorically representing their relationship to violence. Cooper has absorbed a portion of Lucy's measured pacifism and Lucy absorbed a bit of Cooper's survivalist necessity.

Cooper teaches Lucy about the brutality required to survive in the wasteland, Lucy reminds Cooper about the idealism he lost track of since the bomba dropped.

I thought it was a tad gratuitous when I watched it happened but HOLY SHIT the THEMES.

[shizucheese]

Okay okay okay, I need everyone to listen to me about this.

I know I kinda talked about this before in a reblog to someone else's post, but the idea has been rotating in my brain ever since and I feel like it needs to be further explored. A lot of people have been talking about the differences between TMA and TMP, and memeing about how people can actually quit the OIAR (which btw, I'll believe when I actually see it, by which I mean if we're able to get through the entire series without Teddy either coming back or turning up dead or otherwise facing "You can quit but you can never leave" levels of repercussions) but like nobody, from what I've seen, has been talking about what imo is the pretty glaringly obvious element at play here. So let's talk about the spider in the room, shall we? What do we know about the Magnus Institute in TMA?

People came there to give statements regarding their spooky experiences, including people who had doubts about doing so (because they weren't sure if the Institute was reputable, because they weren't sure if they believed what they had experienced, because they served a different entity so what reason would they have to do something for The Eye, etc).

The head archivist would ultimately become the Archivist, an Avatar of the Eye.

The Archivist's abilities included enabling statement givers to give their statements without going off track or leaving out details (we even see what happens when it's not the Archivist taking the statement), and being able to compel people to tell them things against their will, from statements to their darkest secrets.

You couldn't quit, at least not without gouging your eyes out.

The Magnus Institute was a part of the Eye.

Or was it? Because the other thing we know about the Magnus Institute is that the Web was using it as part of its plan to break free from the TMA world and gain access to the other worlds out there. How much of the compulsion aspects of the Institute-- people being drawn to the Institute to give statements, the Archivist's ability to draw statements and secrets out of people, people's inability to quit the Institute--was actually because of the Web? Where does the Eye's "compulsion to seek out knowledge even if it could be bad/ harmful" end and the Web's "not being in control of your own actions" begin? Was the Archivist--at least in the form Gertrude and John took--really purely an Avatar of the Eye? Or were they an Avatar of a mix between The Eye and the Web, much like how Martin, if he were to ever become a full fledged Avatar, likely would have been a mix of the Eye and the Lonely, just like his domain in S5 was? After all, Jonah was an Eye Avatar, was he not? And as far as we saw, he never needed to compel information out of people. He just Knew it (and used it to torment people).

One of the themes I've been playing around with in my TMA fanfictions since I first finished the podcast for the first time last winter is how the course of history would be different in the alternate worlds, where the Web wasn't interfering--at least not on the same scale, or for the same reasons--since it had already gotten what it wanted at the end of TMA. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing a version of in Protocol. I think the OIAR is what it looks like when it's entirely the Eye at play, with 0 interference from the Web. The Eye is all about having your secrets exposed, being watched, being followed. The tape recorders--something that would need to be turned off and on (controlled) in order to record something--were a tool of the Web. Now we're "witnessing" the events of the podcast through the audio from security cameras and other things that are constantly running; constantly seeing and listening without needing to be turned on and off. The statements aren't being given by people who somehow found their way to the institute and were on some level or another compelled to tell their tales. They're journal entries detailing a person's private thoughts. They're letters meant only for the eyes of the recipient, sharing secrets not meant for anyone else. They're recorded therapy sessions.

And the statements that are related to the Eye? The ones read in John's voice? They're forum and blog posts, which not only makes them the only ones whose sources didn't have the same expectation of privacy as the others, also ties them to the Web, since computers and websites were previously established as being associated with it.

[theunwrittenman]

My off again on again take was always that (even though she'd never admit it) Gertrude was web aligned: plans and countermeasures and contingencies, the red string conspiracy board connecting seemingly random data points that illustrated a grand design. Same goes for her ability to compel statements, functionally identical to John's "forced confession" abilities but distinctly different than the purely eye aligned Jonah's ability to simply "know" someone's secrets.

That's why the archive as we find it in season 1 of TMA is far more of a jumble, Gertrude says she's doing it to spite the eye but she's inadvertently creating a far more spider friendly space (right down to the cobwebs) that resembles how the web sees the world.

I'd argue that the Magnus Institute began as a purely eye based institution and existed that way for centuries but came into the Web's influence around the time that Jonah was planning his big ritual (inadvertently becoming a part of the Fears lifecycle of growing, gorging, and then spreading to other worlds)