I’ve been seeing a sudden surge of use of the word ‘thot’ and I’m concerned
We’ve recently seen at least one ancient Egyptian deity resurrected through meme magic
Thoth is a significantly more powerful member of the pantheon than Kek and the consequences of summoning him may be even more drastic than the rebirth of Kek (Brexit, Trump winning the election, a series of celebrity deaths)
The phrase ‘return the bones thot’ radiates an obvious mystical power and it may herald that Thoth will come to preside over 2017 as Kek has presided over 2016 – the bones possibly refer to the millions of mummified ibises buried in his honor at his main temple in Khmun, by reblogging that post you may be unknowingly beseeching this ancient and powerful being to repay the thousands of years of sacrifices humanity once offered him – what form that might take, we can only speculate
Although it’s possible that Thoth has been with us for a while – his name in Greek letters is Θώθ, which is clearly referenced in the ‘OwO what’s this?’ meme
As the inventor of both magic and science and keeper of all wisdom, Thoth assuredly does know what ‘this’ is, but I’m not sure we want to find out
I’m also concerned that Thoth’s wife Ma’at may be connected to the frequent seemingly compulsive and superfluous use of the word ‘mate’ or ‘m8′ in memes
Please be careful with your memes, they may hold hidden arcane power
haha good one
*googles Θώθ*
oh bloody hell
Unlike Kek, a god of primordial darkness, Thoth is associated with balance, mediation, and arbitration. The return of Thoth may be exactly what we need in these troubled times
last night i had a dream that i met mother earth and if u were wondering what she looks like it’s dwayne the rock johnson in a flowy white sun dress with rly good winged eyeliner
you mean like this
The best part is that he would totally be down for this
THEY WERE MISSING FOR FUCKING YEARS OMG, THIS ALWAYS UPSETS ME SO MUCH
I always see the discussion that many days, months, years have passed during this story.
I present to you a different idea.
There’s several themes behind Spirited Away: Capitalism’s effect on Japan, Environmental issues, and notably, Chihiro’s coming of age story.
From what I know, the idea of time passing differently in spirit worlds, is more based on western stories of the fae.
But something more common in Japanese folklore is spirit trickery/deception. Or more accurately. What you see, isn’t always what’s actually there.
Chihiro starts this story as a young child, before her coming-of-age arc, that more or less forces her to become ‘an adult’. More accurately. The challenges she faces makes her mature as a person.
What’s the most common thing in folklore? Children see what’s actually there.
Fun Vampire Fact; the reason that Vampires traditionally cannot see their reflections in a mirror is because mirrors used to be backed with a reflective layer of silver — which, as the metal of purity, would not ‘interact’ with Vampires, who are the Devil’s work.
However, modern mirrors have used aluminum as their reflective backing for many years now — and aluminum is not a ‘picky’ metal at all. So Vampires are able to see their reflections in modern mirrors.
So THAT’S why you can’t take traditional photographs of vampires! Digital ones would work, provided there wasn’t any silver in the caption mechanism!
Nicolas Cage needs to update his information!
Also film used to have silver compounds in it, so double whammy.
gardening has this reputation as a gentle and chill hobby but you know what?? gardening is actually a constant and brutal conflict between the human need for control and the will of life to spread – a battle between life and death itself, even. in the garden I am the Overlord Supreme, Peerless Queen of the Dirt, Arbiter Above All, the ultimate and final judge over who gets to live and who must die. I drowned an entire anthill today for daring to exist in my realm, and the blood of hundreds has soiled my soul. my thumbs may be green but my hands are black and deadly.
This explains more about Samwise Gamgee than anything else I have ever read.
So many books and tv shows about werewolves worship this dominance culture, especially a male-centric dominance hierarchy, and sometimes it drives me nuts because it’s regarded as the default. That if humans transformed into beasts, of course most of the survivors would be men, and of course they’d be violent and territorial and murderous, and of course they’d be vaguely chauvinistic because ‘they can’t help it that’s just how werewolves are’.
It’s this idea that the metaphor for a beast as one’s inner nature is reserved for male characters and male violence, tossed in with frequently-inaccurate anthropomorphic assumptions about animal pack culture.
Where are the stories about the werewolf packs that are mostly female? Where are the stories about the fact that women who’ve born children have a higher pain tolerance than men and would better survive the bite? Where are the stories about the women who spend so much time controlling their passions and their emotions and their desires to navigate in a man’s world that they adapt all to well to controlling their mystical transformations too?
What does a pack of all female werewolves look like? Is there a hierarchical structure, or something else? Does it mean the same thing to be an alpha, a beta? What does it mean to be a lone wolf?
I want the stories about how men who are bitten are more likely to go mad from trying to keep a duality in their minds instead of coming to consensus and sharing space with their wolf-spirit. I want stories about the female alpha wolf who only offers the bite to other girls, because dudes have already fucked up ruling the human world, let’s not let them have the supernatural one too.
I want the story about the trans girl who’s trying to change her outside to match her inside, but all of a sudden has to deal with physically transforming her body three nights a month, because hell if you ever wanted a metaphor about not fitting right in your own skin, werewolves are a good option.
I want the story about how the hedge-witches took wolves as familiars and gave them human souls, turned them into human girls, and forced them to give up the wind and the snow and the grass for a life trapped in human flesh.
I want the story about the teenage werewolf girls who hunt down other monsters while they try to find the right shoes for prom and study for their written driver’s test. And when people joke about them going to the bathroom in a pack, it’s not really a joke. Because girls know a journey is not an adventure unless she brings her friends, and when they travel in packs, they travel in packs.
I want more female werewolves.
BLESSINGS BE UPON THIS POST AND ALL OF ITS BEAUTIFUL WORDS.
This concept of violently-enforced rigid hierarchy within werewolf (and plain old wolf) packs is not only overdone and uninteresting, it’s just plain incorrect. A lot of where this idea comes from is really just profoundly bad science from back in the day, when scientists were studying wolf packs and making sweeping generalizations about what they were seeing. They were in fact studying CAPTIVE wolf packs made up of unrelated adult individuals who had been forced into proximity and confinement… so what they were observating as “natural wolf dominance behavior,” was in fact trapped territorial predators reacting aggressively to the stress of forced socialization and imprisonment. It’s a lot like thinking you’re going to study human social family behavior by going to your local prison and observing the interactions of the human beings present in the prison yard.
Actual wolf packs are generally composed of a breeding pair of adult wolves and sometimes several years’ worth of offspring. There might be aunts and uncles and other non-breeding adults in there, who are usually relatives of other wolves in the pack. The concept of “alpha, beta, and omega” is a profoundly flawed one that has really been thrown out by modern wolf researchers, though you’ll still see it cropping up all the time as we try to explain wolf socialization to ourselves. (We’ve also used this model for other animals, like horses, and you’ll often hear about a “lead mare” and you probably have a concept of stallions who direct every movement of their herd and I could give you a ten-page sermon on why I think that’s all wrong, too.) A wolf pack is a family, not a military structure, and families have all sorts of nuance in their dynamics, not to mention a diversity that goes beyond the nuclear. When writers go straight for this hyper-masculine, hyper-aggressive idea of what werewolf pack dynamics should be like, they’re imposing human behavior on the animal, not the other way around.
Like, speaking of female werewolves, can we all become more familiar with and embrace the legend of Yellowstone’s 832F, a wolf who should be a hero to us all? She led her own pack. She could take down a fucking elk single-handed. (Single-pawed?) She had TWO MATES because one wasn’t fuckin’ enough so she was like “oh, you’re brothers? I like you both, let’s all shack up.” They apparently weren’t very useful (I’m sure they were super pretty though from a wolf perspective) so she handled mmost of the pup-rearing, and hunting for those pups, on her own too. And she didn’t rule her pack with an iron fist, though she undoubtedly ruled it because she was the most competent leader they had and surprise, animals recognize and reward competent leadership in ways we humans only wish our jobs could manage. I MIGHT CRY FOREVER OVER THIS FUCKING BAD-ASS OF A WOLF. Let’s have more of THAT and less of the “oh rar the moon is full that means my latent asshole tendencies come out but it’s the wolf I swear!”
I s2g I am not here for dudebros using their lycanthropy as YET ANOTHER REASON why they can’t just fuckin control themselves.
Wolf rants are my favourite rants.
@jolantru has a werewolf series in which the leader is a woman and a mother of two.
Here is a retelling of the Medusa myth that I’ve been working on for a few months, and thought I would post the full first draft on International Women’s Day. It is not one of my usual comedy retellings; it’s a reinterpretation of the original myth. I’ve put most of it under a cut, because it’s quite long, and there’s also some context / points of discourse under the cut as well. It’s something a bit different from my usual fare and I’m quite nervous about sharing it, but I think it’s ready.
TW: rape
The most striking thing about the absence of light is that
it illuminates the presence of sound. I hear the man moments before anyone else
would, before he has even entered the cave. He is light of foot, and I know he
is trying to conceal himself, treading softly and slowly. I hear him anyway. I
hold my breath, willing the darkness of the cave to overcome him with fear and
drive him out, but the footsteps come closer. He is the worst sort of man,
then. He is brave.
He is brave, and he is in danger.
Shrinking back against the cave wall, hoping to make myself
even more invisible than I know I already am, I cry out. “Don’t come any
closer! I don’t want to hurt you.”
The footsteps stop.
I hear a sharp intake
of breath, a shaky exhale. He is scared, then, but like any brave man he is
concealing it. If I tried, I could probably hear his heart. It would be racing.
“Who are you?” asks the man, after he has caught his breath,
voice carefully measured.
I wonder if he has seen my statues, the ones that line the
entrance to the cave like watchmen. I wonder if he knows that I put them there,
out of my sight, because I could not bear to see them motionless.
“I’ll tell you,” I say. I hear him take another step, and I
recoil. “Please don’t come any closer,” I beg. “I’ll kill you!”
Silence. “I thought you said you didn’t want to hurt me?”
He is so brave, and I am so afraid of hurting him. “I don’t.
Please, please; go back to the entrance of the cave, and I’ll speak to you from
here. I’ll give you whatever you’ve come for, and you’ll leave in peace, I
promise.”
There’s enough blood on these hands already, I think. Blood
turned from red to grey, hardened and lingering in veins long since rendered as
stone. I wonder if those statues still have hearts.
After a moment, I hear the man withdraw, and I release a
breath I hadn’t known that I was holding. “Thank you,” I say. When I can tell
that he’s retreated to a safe distance, I inch forward; not close enough to see
or be seen, or to remove the shroud of total darkness that the cave has granted
me, but close enough to feel as though we inhabit the same space. “I told you
that I would tell you who I am, and I will. I’m Medusa.”
He’s too far away for me to hear his heartbeat any more. I
can only hear my own.
“I’m Perseus.”
The eye of the Gorgon turns mortals to stone. That’s all I
know. I’ve always known, from the moment I opened my eyes and saw nothing, that
everything had been taken from sight. The halls of my childhood were lined with
marble statues, and I could touch, but could not look. I grew up in a temple,
and the statues were beautiful, carved of gods by human hands.
I live amongst another kind of statue now. We cannot always
live in temples.
All my life has been leading up to longing. It builds up
behind me, a trail of desire in my wake, and I wonder what it would be like to
live. Atlas’ burden is only the world. I wish that were all I carried on my
shoulders. I wish I bore nothing but the crust of the Earth and all the hollow
things in it. I wish I were weighted down by nothing but the elements and the
spaces between the beginning and the end. Atlas meets the eyes of the world,
and I cannot.
The living wait outside, and I
am within and without. I hold death’s glare in my gaze, and I am powerless.
There is a periphery between seeing and being seen which I dare not cross. To
behold is to be held, and my hands are empty. For fear of being seen, I have
never looked.
I can hear the sound of a stone being thrown against the
outside cave wall; dropped, picked up, thrown again. The sound of a man growing
bored. The sound of a man who wants to leave, but cannot.
Most men who come here get neither the choice nor the
chance.
“Why are you still here?” I ask, after hours of hearing that
same stone, that same heartbeat I’ve always heard.
“I need to talk to you.”
“It’s not safe,” I tell him.
“Not even if I stay out here?” he asks, and sighs. “I’m not
trying to hurt you. I need your help.”
I wonder why he thinks I am afraid of him hurting me, and
not the opposite.
“Look around you,” I say, presuming that he’s in the same
place as my statues. If he’s right by the mouth of the cave, he isn’t alone. I
have seven statues there; all with swords and shields once gifted to them by
the gods, now made of stone; helmets forged of bronze by master blacksmiths,
now crumbling. One man wears armour made by Hephaestus himself. He is as still
as the rest of them. “Do you really think I can help you?”
For a few brief seconds, there is nothing.
“I know you can,” he replies.
I pledged my services to the
gods when I was a child. I chose Athena. My mother begged me not to leave her. Athena will ruin you, she told me. She won’t keep you safe. I will. Stay with
me.
My mother had two other
daughters, each by a man she had never wanted to lie with, and I wondered how
my mother could promise to keep me safe at all when she had been in so much
danger all her life.
I lived in the house of Athena
until I bled for the first time, and then his name.
“After being cursed by Athena for her ‘transgression’ with Poseidon in her temple, Medusa lives alone on the outskirts of the world, secluding herself from everyone so as to keep both herself and the rest of the world safe. When Perseus comes to ask for her help, Medusa tries desperately to make him leave, but no matter what she does, Perseus stays. As the days wear on and she reveals more about what led her to the cave, it becomes obvious that there is a choice to make: stay safe and alone, or re-enter the world with Perseus. One question still remains, however: what does Perseus want?”
Steel Phoenix Studios 