Siarah - Siarah

I feel called out by your post about Tanith because I have a big family and the first thing I do when I encounter my assortment of people in the ~12 age range is compliment their collection of injuries and battle scars. Also lowkey the best insight into Dexter is the little musings about his history and the small displays of restraint and mercy he demonstrates while possessed by the Remnant. Which is still out there somewhere. Just so you know. Darquesse let it go and it could be anywhere now.

Well, there's a difference between having a scraped knee from playing (or other stuff normal kids do) and having huge ass bruises, because you had to jump from a rooftop in order to escape from a vampire...

Yess, Dexter is one of my favorite characters. Compared to Tanith he wasn't as cruel while being possessed, but I think that had a lot to do with the Remnant. Still, he left Val to die when Samuel attacked and he kidnapped Alice. The only mercy he showed was not killing her.

You mean the remnant is still out somewhere? I'm not sure, but I think Darquesse killed it after ripping it out of Dex.

@sierralafontaine said he looked soft on my to do board and it fueled me to draw him again!

He's such an underrated character and like the only sane person in the earlier books

does anyone else just occasionally rlly miss kenspeckle grouse tho

When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”

He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)

I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.

What is your objective?

Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.

I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.

I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.

Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.

Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.

How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?

Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.

Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?

valkyrie cain: i'm not like other girls

valkyrie cain: i'm darquesse

What do you think China’s childhood was like? Every book, her view on it seems to change..

tbh it’s actually quite interesting seeing China’s different takes on her childhood, because in a way I don’t think she’s ever really recovered from it unlike Bliss, who got out at such an early age. Indeed, often when discussing her past, China always compares herself to her brother, portraying herself as weaker, slower in escaping - but the interesting thing is, she never really mentions what it was they escaped from, rather than just the mentioned indoctrination of all believers.

But the first time she really mentions her opinion of her childhood, and not just her general experience as a worshipper, she brushes it off, saying:

It had been a happy childhood. Completely insane, but happy. - MC

What’s even more interesting is through the rest of this extract, China keeps making jokes about her questions of faith + the general situation

True, she had generally had more fun in the old days... and she didn’t have to spend half her day praying. She’d never been able to understand why the Faceless Ones weren’t praying to her. - MC

But then, what I find interesting is the subtext in any of her memories of her childhood - they’re awful and yet she almost normalises them. And even when she admits to some of her troubling memories, they’re pretty watered down:

All though her childhood she’d had trouble sleeping, plagued as she was by the stories her parents would tell her of the Faceless Ones.

Doesn’t that make you feel happy? And China had said, No, Mother, it gives me bad dreams, and her mother’s face had changed in an instant and China had spent the next three days on her knees, praying to the Faceless Ones, begging for their forgiveness. - B

It’s a pretty horrifying image, a young girl (which China is very much implied to be in this extract) being forced onto her knees for three days straight because she dared to voice her fears.

Idk if it’s a coping method or something, but in a way, I see it as China almost blocking out the trauma of her childhood - we see her mention it occasionally, but most of the time she just laughs it off (which is really worrying)

I think something people often forget is that unlike some worshippers of the Faceless ones, China didn’t choose to be one, she was born into it - she had no choice, she was practically indoctrinated and it’s clear that some traumatic things happened behind the scenes that enforced her to stay obedient

What’s even more interesting is that when China leaves the church of the Faceless Ones, she doesn’t go straight to the good guys, she isolates herself and she also has some very interesting conversations about myths/fantastical elements in the world, with this being one example:

“I’ve heard nonsense. I’ve heard something that doesn’t even deserve to be called a rumour. - SP

Seems like another one of her coping methods up until TFO is to deny the existence of these gods, these legends, because in a way China never got over the indoctrination of the Church - if she fled and the gods were real, she’s damned. So if she brushes it off, just like her childhood trauma, pretending it’s not real, then she can cope - she’s not damned, which seems to be a prominent fear of her childhood

untroubled by half-remembered visions of doom and damnation + she had hidden her fears from her parents and suffered those nightmares in silence. - B

It’s interesting to see the relapse of faith in this most recent book - I’ve discussed my predictions for China in this post but I think it’s pointing towards an unraveling mind in many ways, as we also see China having a lot of flashbacks to her past as if she’s starting to relieve a lot of her repressed trauma - that could be because of Solace’s influence or something else, who knows..

Time for random Dexter headcanons:

- He totally uses his magic instead of a microwave whenever he wants to warm up something. It´s way faster and so much cooler.

- He doesn´t like to stay in one place for too long but if he has to, then he´d always chose his apartment in Dublin. It´s home. Whenever he goes there, he leaves lots of trinkets he found during his travels. By now the apartment looks like a tourist shop. The other dead men call him a clutterer but Val thinks it´s wicked. 

- There´s a framed picture of all the Dead Men together on his nightstand but whenever the others come over, he hides it because he knows that Saracen and Erskine would make fun of him.

- He's an overthinker. Sometimes everything gets just too much and it´s just too much pain. In those moments he really needs a drink - or rather one too many. 

- While Saracen is the womanizer, Dexter is known to seek comfort in someone else´s bed when he´s drunk. 

- All the overthinking causes insomnia. When things are really bad and he lays awake the whole night, he´ll watch documentaries on YouTube. That´s why he´s an expert on the most random and most useless subjects.

- Cats just love him. Even the really grumpy ones. He´s like a magnet for them.

- He heard about what went down between Ghastly and Tanith from Erskine but didn´t realize how much it hurt Ghastly until he talked to him at the Requiem Ball. He never forgave himself for not checking up on his friend sooner. 

- Out of all the dead men he was closest to Saracen but Erskine was a close second. That´s why his betrayal hit him especially hard. 

- Most of the time he prefers to listen and doesn´t talk too much unless he has to say something important. That´s why he´s the go-to person for the other dead men if they need to talk about something. 

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen paperback classics featuring Richard Adams, Edgar Allan Poe, Simone de Beauvoir, J.R.R. Tolkien, Richard Wright, Harper Lee, and others! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on May 9, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

imagine Nerf gun wars between Tanith and Valkyrie.

Shameless self promotion, but I´m about 50k words deep into a (German, sorry to all of you British folks) story about what could have happened if Valkyrie and Skulduggery had joined Dexter´s team during TM7... the main POVs are Dexter´s, Val´s and Saracen´s and the focus is on the mission as well as on the characters´ feelings / relationships.