big fan of when a character is a vengeful ghost but they're not even dead
"So you collect ghosts?"
"Not intentionally. Ghosts are just drawn to me. I'm a ghost sponge. A ghost magnet. When I'm hired to check out a haunted house, I walk in and take all the ghosts with me when I leave. And if it turns out there's a demon the ghosts eat 'em. It's a very efficient system."
"...Say that last part again."
"The ghosts eat the demons. Like a pack of hyenas taking down a wildebeest. I've seen the ghost of a 90-year-old Ukrainian babushka tear apart a demon with her teeth."
Constantly obsessed with the concept of a man forced to be a myth. What do you do when every step you take is embedded into the text. Every word you say prose to read. You're part of something bigger than yourself. The narrative tugs you along like water currents. There is no time to rest, to be human. You must be great, you must be legend
you contradict yourself because you contain multitudes. i contradict myself because i am wrong.
Question: What is the greatest magic of all? Answer: Friendship, right? [B]: The greatest magic of all is not friendship, it's chronomancy, the ability to control and warp time. If friendship were the greatest magic, look, it's a pet peeve of mine (...)
DUNGEON MASTER BRENNAN LEE MULLIGAN ANSWERS DnD QUESTIONS (TECH SUPPORT | WIRED)
when they got "character who made an undeniably terrible decision but man i dont know what i would have done either" at the function
i looooove characters who are sacrificial lamb coded. characters who have never lived for themselves. characters born to be a tool, a weapon, a sacrifice, all of the above. a character raised by the heroes to save the world, at any expense, even their own health, even their own life. a character raised by the villains to end the world, at any expense, even their own health, even their own life. characters who are denied personhood so they can be used as tools instead. characters who never even had a chance to be people because they were shaped into something else from the moment they were born. characters who were born to die.
hey, so i just read "the psychology of the transference" by c.g. jung bc my psychoanalyst told me to. all of the misogyny, rampant racism and overconfident speculation on the role of incestuos desires for the human psyche aside (lmao), i found it a worthwhile read. one of the main points that he seems to make in regards to alchemy is that it wasn't *really* about chemistry/material processes, but more about the images and metaphors used to describe the alchemical process. and jung compares this alchemical imagery, which in large parts revolves around themes of divisions and fusions, to subconscious (psychic) processes that in his opinion also revolve around divisions and fusions (like dissolutions or integrations of the self, contradictions in gender relations and other social relations, etc). and idk, that part makes sense to me. did alchemists really care about the physical world? or did they care about gender, sex, identity, art, death, the horrors, etc?
YES. THE TEXTS HE IS TALKING ABOUT ARE PROTO-CHEMISTRY WORKS.
Alchemy was demonstrably, overwhelmingly, about the physical world. Jung's psychological interpretations of them are --and I cannot stress this enough-- entirely invented ahistorical bullshit.
I cannot overstate the amount of damage that Jung has done to alchemical scholarship. His interpretations of alchemical texts have caused literally thousands of historical proto-chemistry texts to languish in the historical wastebin of "Psychological mumbo jumbo" or "it's just old therapy language tee hee!"
What's worse is he actively misrepresents many of the actual religious or mystical ideas present in the texts he cites. For example, many alchemical texts in the Arab world we're the result of Isma-ili mystics from northern Africa and more gnostic-influenced parts of the early Muslim world. Their equivocation of Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Enoch, and unique relationship to both hermeticism and Jewish apocrypha, gets ENTIRELY sidelined in Jung's reading, in favor of "it's just early psychology."
Furthermore, Jung tries to make the argument that these images present in alchemical texts are somehow representative of some deeper, universal structure within human psychology. Which is, --again I cannot stress this enough-- howling clown bullshit. Alchemical texts are similar because chemistry works the same wherever you are on the planet. He actively ignores the hermeneutics of different alchemical theories, which change RADICALLY depending on culture and location.
All this in service of adding a pseudo-historical foundation for psychological theories that are about as scientific as astrology.
hey, so i just read "the psychology of the transference" by c.g. jung bc my psychoanalyst told me to. all of the misogyny, rampant racism and overconfident speculation on the role of incestuos desires for the human psyche aside (lmao), i found it a worthwhile read. one of the main points that he seems to make in regards to alchemy is that it wasn't *really* about chemistry/material processes, but more about the images and metaphors used to describe the alchemical process. and jung compares this alchemical imagery, which in large parts revolves around themes of divisions and fusions, to subconscious (psychic) processes that in his opinion also revolve around divisions and fusions (like dissolutions or integrations of the self, contradictions in gender relations and other social relations, etc). and idk, that part makes sense to me. did alchemists really care about the physical world? or did they care about gender, sex, identity, art, death, the horrors, etc?
YES. THE TEXTS HE IS TALKING ABOUT ARE PROTO-CHEMISTRY WORKS.
Alchemy was demonstrably, overwhelmingly, about the physical world. Jung's psychological interpretations of them are --and I cannot stress this enough-- entirely invented ahistorical bullshit.
I cannot overstate the amount of damage that Jung has done to alchemical scholarship. His interpretations of alchemical texts have caused literally thousands of historical proto-chemistry texts to languish in the historical wastebin of "Psychological mumbo jumbo" or "it's just old therapy language tee hee!"
What's worse is he actively misrepresents many of the actual religious or mystical ideas present in the texts he cites. For example, many alchemical texts in the Arab world we're the result of Isma-ili mystics from northern Africa and more gnostic-influenced parts of the early Muslim world. Their equivocation of Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Enoch, and unique relationship to both hermeticism and Jewish apocrypha, gets ENTIRELY sidelined in Jung's reading, in favor of "it's just early psychology."
Furthermore, Jung tries to make the argument that these images present in alchemical texts are somehow representative of some deeper, universal structure within human psychology. Which is, --again I cannot stress this enough-- howling clown bullshit. Alchemical texts are similar because chemistry works the same wherever you are on the planet. He actively ignores the hermeneutics of different alchemical theories, which change RADICALLY depending on culture and location.
All this in service of adding a pseudo-historical foundation for psychological theories that are about as scientific as astrology.