Yeah...We get that way about a lot of shit honestly? Like in general. You should see the wank about the new Sabrina show on netflix in witchblr and what not. It's...pretty fucking ridiculous. And yeah the balance and gatekeeper bit in particular is the thing that really pings. A lot of people who get up to it are people who take things like Samhainn very seriously and some of the more politically active get involved in things like expanding the options one has with what can be done to your body after death and other such things. I'm only like tangentially on the side given the whole Morrígan oath deal, but the dead being treated right after death is rather important to me. I mean my goddess outright sticks war dead who weren't given proper rites into her spooky ghost horde until they're set to rest properly. And she's overall Very Concerned With Justice.
Tell me... About the witchblr wank.... Also Matt def runs Samhain rites in his garden. He doesn't usually have a lot of ghosts on his property because he needs the silence to cope, but he def does offer them a space during those days to try and give a stand-in mourning to those who didn't get a proper one.
Witchblr wank centers around two main concerns. One, this is not accurate to real world witchcraft and, two, it makes witchcraft look evil. Satanism tumblr is also kind of pissy because it presents Satanism as outright bad too and there's concerns with accuracy again. And like. No. It's not accurate to your practice, random person on the internet. Of course it's not. It's a tv show pulling heavily from Satanic Panic kinds of horror film, especially things like exorcism films. It's based off a comic series that pulled heavily from pulpy horror comics about demons and Satan and what not too. While it is clear they've done some degree of research with the names of certain things coming up and what not, in general it's also very clear that, no, they aren't writing it for us. They are not writing it to present an 'accurate' and positive portrayal. That's not its purpose. Also we get into the matter of like...witchcraft varies a lot? Like even just among Wiccans there's a lot of variance! That isn't even counting the people who aren't Wiccan! Like Gaelpol witches tend to be much more accepting of curses and hexes as a method of problem solving, a complaint made about the show's portrayal. Anyway...Needing silence to cope is A Feel honestly. Though generally the gods are out doing their own thing, doing things with them tends to be a draining process and after that you just kind of need...Radio silence to recover. At least that's how it's been for me and the other people I know who are into like ecstatic mysticism type shit. Others aren't and thus don't ever report that kind of issue. Also that is very sweet of him...Offering mournings for people who didn't get a proper one. (and a thing i know i've heard come up in terms of like practices some morrígan devotees and necromancers get up to)
Oh man i can imagine that wank verbatim (also since Eluveitie's Desumiis Lughe is a personal fave song of mine i sure hope gaelpol is enjoying their curses) Yeah outside of the Rave Matt draws....a lot less on Hel, both out of respect - he doesn't wanna bother Her with trivial stuff - and out of just it taxing his body hard and his mind harder. Channeling her while awake, when he's not just aspecting, means that he spends the next few days as dissociating lump. See also: why she's so very gentle with him in the Rave. Rave works differently because there's no death for him to draw on aside from what he brings along, so he has to default to her power more than he normally would. Honestly i spent a lot of thoughts on his practice and faith and it'll never be in the Rave because he's empathically not At Work in there so you don't get to see him worship or put a restless spirit down or stuff like that. But /man/ i want to, sometimes.
Oh Lugh's a very good god to go to for curses on that note. Especially where things like oaths, lies, and murder are concerned. I feel he'd also be a good option for 'kingly conduct' type issues (misuses of power by authorities, that sort of deal). He takes these matters very seriously, and he'd probably be my go to for like wrongs done to my family. He's a family man. Takes family seriously. Along with him being one of the ones I've a tight relationship with, since at least with Gaelpol people tend to heavily emphasize building up relationships with gods before asking for help. And yeah that makes sense. It's not really something that would likely show up in the Rave because of like what it is and the style of RP there...Alas. I've got cases of that with religion and practice stuff with several of my characters too...Some of Fieth's crap has come up more at least in regards to like providing an excuse for her to be here, but a lot of it there just isn't really...Any point in it showing up or opportunity really. Abhaya, who is far less played and I don't know if you've run into her, is a bit more Religion Themed just by way of being like...literally from Chinese Heaven there's a lot that isn't gone into in the Rave because...I mean there's no opportunity for that? You don't get to see her Sorcery as a result and her magic based around Merit Transference. And her worship methods...definitely probably aren't going to show up because so much of it is like 'and then we sit on the floor and meditate for hours'.
New Rave: sit all the god-bothered characters into a room, get a theology discussion going, watch unfolding Chaos. But yeah there's a lot of lore that just doesn't work in the Rave and i'm suffering because Wanna Ramble and your girls sound so cool too ahhh. (Also fun fact Matt is like the only chara i have who actually IS genuinely religious the Rest doesn't care or is actively hostile to the concept)
Funnily on the note of hostility Abhaya is incredibly fucking hostile to her own religion. She's got...complicated issues with it. That happens when you get used by a cult to perform assassinations and the like for the government in Heaven, only to learn that they never actually gave a shit about you and what they told you probably isn't true. But you know what is true? And she's seen in person and knows is definitely a thing? Hell. and boy howdy does she have the pieces that'll bring her there when she finally dies On the one hand Buddhism was used to abuse her. On the other hand it is literally the only solace she has given her likely fate.
if you take this and layer it with some inaudible whispering, you get something very very close to what Matt's daily life experience is like if he steps off his property without his shields up and in place. And now you know why most Necros lose it at some point.
ok so @kastilin has been enabling me, so. some rambling about my favourite trashboy (Matt) Spoiler: Matt, death, the usual So i touched upon this in the rave ooc thread already, but he's basically the world's most morbid homing pigeon. The thing is, he perceives Life and Death as...something. I'd say a magnet field, because that's the closest I can conceptualize it as. Humans are like normal magnets, with both 'poles' on them, and the closer they are to dying, the more that 'vibe' takes over. It allows him to make rough predictions about someone's lifespan. Not in a 'i can see your Death' way, at least not unless he taps into divine backup powers, but just making a general estimate about someone's lifespan based on how 'dead' they're feeling to him. It's a variable and someone who's very ill will feel have more dead vibes right until they get to some medical support and start coming around again. So places where people live and go age and go about things feel like a 'neutral' background field of things. Corpses are of course just Dead, and immortal things - truly immortal, not just long-lived ones - are just Life, they're like unipolar magnets in his perception, wells or peaks in the general 'field' of life-death interactions. Undead anything pings as 'dead, but a step to the left' so like another color on the spectrum, or wavelength. Things that are just... outside of the continuum of Life and Death are deeply unsettling. It's like living your entire life with his background painting of things and then suddenly there's this incomprehensible VOID where STUFF ought to be. Gives him really bad vertigo and nausea and fortunately doesn't happen very often outside of the SPR. The way he perceives it he also gets info on how much Death/life there is and in case of graves, how deep it's buried and how old. There are quite a few archaeological sites he could point out and just doesn't because disturbing them with mundane methods - never mind relocating the bones - can fuck the contained magic up for him. So his normal perception of things, aside from all the normal senses humans have access too include this kinda magnetic-field awareness of things, with stuff like graveyards being big wells, or nodes of certain kinds of magics being big peaks. And he uses that to orient himself. That boy's never seen a city map in his life, and he doesn't need it. from arriving in London to having enough of a feel of the lay of the land to find his way home in the pitch of night with his eyes closed, it took maybe a week at most. He'd be completely fucking lost for a while if you removed him from there, but in his territory he just sorta constantly triangulates himself between those wells and peaks. He couldn't tell you the name of the street to safe his life, but he can tell you the exact distance to the next three graveyards, even if two of them haven't been used in several centuries and one only contains half a dozen graves. Especially because his perception of this field stretches quite a bit beyond any line of sight he'd have in the city if he wasn't standing atop a skyscraper. It does also mean that he can be incredibly useful in finding missing people, provided they're already corpses by the time he goes out looking for them. Or alert the ambulances to someone dying in his neighbourhood/some place he passed. His range for that is much smaller just because people usually don't die that suddenly and because the sheer mass of alive ones tends to drown out a single death unless he's fairly close already. Also that means that Pinkkat is just this massive peak of Life in his perception - one with an 'Eat me' sign on it no less - so he could probably use him as a beacon too if they'd ever meet outside the rave.
i feel so bad for him every time there's an eldritch party in the rave but this is SO COOL, i love that he uses death/life as a compass
Thank you!! I almost wrote 'a pillar of Life' but decided not to make it that easy for you There's a distinct reason because Overly Many Eldritch Things in the rave result in him going 'hey boss you take this call' Also I LOVE coming up with ways that human (or nearly-human) characters interpret input that's outside of the normal sensory realm. I have an OC (Ariel) who's an empath and perceives emotions as tastes. Putting him into the rave would result in him being completely nauseaous the entire time because Those Tastes Don't Mix, so he's never gonna be introduced but MAN.
Spoiler: 'tis time for rambles about The Trash Boy again I don't think I ever linked it because it's not...come up a lot... but I do have an image to what Hel looks like, or rather what she looks like to Matt. And basically I'm keeping with the 'classical' look in so far that one half of her face looks alive, and the other one...doesn't, but that half - right side, here, is looking like a more frostbitten version of this with more blue tones and more veining but the same sparkly-shiny thing and the same 'teeth' because I conceptualize Death as a somewhat 'hungry' thing, which also has interesting implications for Matt, someone poke me about those so that I can attempt A Wordsing on the subject Though 'hungry' doesn't mean bad, it's just... the way it is. Neutral. But Hunger is a desire for thing, a wanting, and I conceptualized Death as an Entity who Wants, in a welcoming way? All things end, there's no need to hurry it along, but in the same vein, all things will be welcome when they die. There's again a whole lot of how Matt conceptualizes his relationship with Hel that connects to this and I might to write about that, too? I already have, in some part, in the SPR but *hand wiggles* might also need more wordsing.
*pokes* also can i just say i fucking LOVE death as a thing-that-wants but portrayed in a like, neutral, welcoming way? i was legit so delighted when i saw like, hints of that in the rave?
awww thank you! Spoiler: Death, Hel, Humans not meant for this stuff. Woops long Ok so, Death as a hungry entity has certain implications for Matt, because he's still human, and there are only so many ways humans can deal with this sort of thing. So the fact that he has a constant connection down into this Hunger does certainly enhance his tendency towards hedonism. Because there's this constant undercurrent of wanting something, missing something, and not being able to pin it down, let alone fulfill it because it's nothing that a human CAN fulfill. The other thing only happens when he overuses his power. Essentially his power requires him to maintain a balance of what he stores and what he uses. Basically you can imagine it like the wall keeping a water reservoir contained. If he uses too little, the fact that he constantly draws the energy of things dying around him into himself means that it 'spills over'. When he was small, that meant he sometimes had roadkill follow his parents car by sheer accident, until he learnt to keep a better grip on it. On the other side, if he uses too much, the reservoir runs empty and the wall 'collapses' and his control goes completely out the windows as his body tries rather desperately to 'refill' the reservoir. Because the only way to refill it is to find death, or lacking that.... create it. So Matt drained of all his reserves, with no divine backup to keep him going? Results in him going almost feral, and everything and everyone alive becomes a potential target for him to suck dry. He can do that with a touch alone, if he's that far gone and that far from being in control of his actions, but in that stage it's usually messier. Because that Hunger is still there, and his very human brain interprets that, combined with the need to 'feed' on something as.. well. A desire for food. So his kills in that state usually are very very messy, teeth-and-claw kinda ways. And that's really mostly a failure of the fact that he as a human cannot really understand. He's essentially too human to really control something so far removed from human understanding, and that means that things get very messy on occasion. He's got failsafes for it, like a 'well' in the back of his garden. It's started life as one of those small garden ponds, but he's poured a lot of magic, and more importantly, religious devotion into it, funneling excess magic in there and also sacrifices to Hel. And as a result the thing's turned into a sizable deposit of necromantic energy that's only not a ley line origin because it's tightly contained. And if he feels himself running empty, he can dip himself into that and hope to regain something. Mind, it's only ever 'hoping' because those are things he's rightly given away to his Mistress and being given some of it back if a gift from her, nothing he's even remotely entitled to and he know that. His relationship with Hel has a lot of elements of 'surrender' in it. Because he's aware of the difference but he still loves her, in some fashion. Not quite in-love love, but also not quite...not. He loves what he can understand of her, and he admires everything else even as it frightens him and a lot of their interactions are him offering things up - himself included, on occasion - and saying 'it's yours' and being ok with if she takes it all. He's delighted to get things back, but he doesn't really expect it. And she's generally gentle with him because a deity tied to Death is very aware of how fragile he is, despite it all, not just physically but mentally too. So when she asks for stuff, it's usually very carefully tailored to not be more than he can bear to give over. Not that she asks for things often, it's much more often a case of Matt giving things over because he feels that it's the thing she deserves to have. Alright, I think this has gotten rambly enough for now?
Basically: Matt's the only truly religious character I have, and I have invested considerable thought in how exactly that works for him
OK, so Time to write down what i already know about my LANCER Pilot. Don't got her stats yet, but her personality is starting to crystalize. So, girl who was into tinkering with machinery since she was a smol. Her parents supported her in that, hoping that she might get into drone engineering. They had a pretty massive argument when she signed up for the military instead, and didn't talk at all while she went through training, though meanwhile their rrlationship has improved again, and she messages them regularily. Loves her machine to absolute bits, and has heavily customized it. I don't think she'd switch shells if she was given the chance, she's just so invested in this one, it's her baby. She's dojng most of the repairs herself, and basically gasn't had clean fingernails for two decades. Also occasionally tweals the code, but she knows less about coding than about engineering. Might give her a point into technophile later for that bonus fledgeling AI. Because she talks to her Maschine a lot, in battle and outsude of it, and getting an answer would absolutely floor her. Sspecially because she's not at all tried to build an AI. It doesn't show much underneath her flight suit, but she's pretty stacked from all that 'climb arojnd your mech and lift parts of it over your head' she does on the daily. With other people i'd say that she's frienfly, but kinda intense. Loves to talk, can potentially come off as stupid for it. Doesn't care about that muchly. Robosexual (fixing a mech or build-a-spouse Workshop? You decide!) and not that interested in humans, but when she goes for them, mostly goes for the girls. Don't have a Name yet, but if i get to pick a callsign (might not, DM had the group pick them in their other campaign) i'd go for Blackthumb.
Mech: Blackbeard shell, melee focused. Will get a level in Metalmark (next level) and black witch to get access to some excellent goodies. Ferrous Lash and Shock Wreath are things i desperately need. Mounts: nanocarbon sword (heavy), charged blade (Main) two flechette launchers (aux), one prototype weapon (thanks, Engineer perk) Also:tiny supply drone as per GreaseMonkey perks.
I still need a name for her... At least I settled on a callsign for her mech? Baby's gonna be on record as Mixcoatl, the mexica god of the hunt.
