Humans Show Up In The Silmarillon Like A Game Patch. Halflings Too. Hmm.

image from Picasso's sketchbook. i stole this from someone on twitter but i forget who, if the person i stole it from sees this, sorry

Mild hot take but I don't think a Gnostic or Buddhist or Kabbalistic reading of Revolutionary Girl Utena is necessarily incorrect. I'm used to people dismissing readings based on those assumptions out of hand but I don't think that's quite fair.

Not that this layer cancels out the more obvious and central stuff about gender and fairy tales of course, especially given how heavily gendered Gnostic and especially Kabbalistic symbolism is.

(A thorough reading of Utena from a Kabbalistic symbolism lens sounds interesting but very much beyond me at least, lol. Maybe if I ever read Wolfson and Idel.)

Still while I'm confident the show does flirt with more esoteric and mystical ideas I don't think it views organizations built around those ideas very fondly. Most esotericism is premised on exclusiveness coming from possession of secret knowledge and the groups which position themselves on that ground (the Black Rose society and to a lesser extent the Student Council itself) are portrayed as cults, more or less.

Selected pages from the Rothschild Canticles, c. 1300.

The canticles live in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and are fully digitized. :)

I want to play Fallen London again but the problem with Fallen London is that while you're playing it's all perfectly simple and ingrained but the moment you step away for like, a month, then when you come back suddenly the entire game is like "If you really want to continue this storyline you'll have to get 9 Whispers of a Lovelorn Dream and sell them to an authoritarian rabbit in the 87.2th circle of hell where it'll bestow on you the Token of an Inadequate Perfume-Maker, but first you'll need to buy the Indefatigable Jetski from the Fulminating Dowager at Watchmaker's Hill by collecting enough Pieces of the Flayed Corpse of God and converting them into Baptized Rat Kings." and I'm like wow I cannot believe how recently I understood what all of that meant. but now I. do not.

aborted otaku older sister: i would have loved to yell at you for touching my $200 scale figure.. if i were alive..

waving a spring onion around is pretty fun. the blue haired dame was onto something

do we think asumu actually is emotionally manipulative and cunning or is she just the homer to kyrie's frank grimes

look at this wonderful gif of scallops getting scared and scattering like a flock pigeons

i think it is unjust to deny a child their right to dig a hole motivelessly