She Said What She Said… ✌🏼❤️🔊

one word prompt: falling

‘hey, bea?’

ava talks at night. you learned this fact while sharing a bed with her, night after night, tucked up in a bed that had been exaggeratedly labelled a double. wrist to wrist, shoulder to shoulder (ashes to ashes). on some nights, when ava was feeling lonely or mean, she would hook her ankle around yours too. or wriggle, making frustrated breathy noises, onto her side like a fish on the sand, and throw an arm across your waist and her face right into the curve of your neck. and then she would talk.

(you can feel her lips against your neck when you concentrate. you have been filling your mind with other, better, safer things instead. like how many hours it’s been since you left switzerland. like miguel being michael being doctor salvius’s son. like how many hours it has been since you prayed, since you emptied out the vessel of your heart and mind, entrusting it’s contents to God. it has been twenty-three days, four hours since my last confession, you think, and stop precisely there.)

‘bea?’

‘i’m here.’

‘how’s your leg?’

you hum. flex the muscles carefully working up from ankle—twinge—calf, knee, thigh. your thigh hurts in a dull way you recognise. it was the strike that staggered you, numbed your leg to the point where it couldn’t bear weight. it would be bruised for a long time but shouldn’t cause you any trouble.

‘much better. and yours?’

in the dark, you can’t see the way she kicks out with both legs but you feel it, the way the bed shakes and the sheets pull and give way, messily. she kicks again and the cool air from the air-conditioning floods beneath the sheets, now fully untucked. her heels thud back down to the mattress. the sheets settle more slowly, falling around your limbs.

‘ava!’

‘gotta test them. all good again.’

‘you’re worried,’ you say, because that was another thing you learned in switzerland. anything you say to each other in the dark can be forgiven. anything you say in the dark is only as real as you want it to be come morning. ‘about the halo. about being paralyzed again.’

‘yeah. and a lot more than that.’

it’s not a perfect darkness. when you turn your head, her profile is outlined by the glow of the balcony lights. anything you say in the dark is forgotten, forgiven. what about what you might do? you reach out. touch two fingers to her forehead. she gasps. doesn’t move as you follow the light, the path laid out in front of you. you chart her forehead, dip at the bridge of her nose. such a light touch. she doesn’t move. when you reach the tip of her nose, she scrunches it just to make you smile. you’re still smiling as your fingers drop to her lips.

ava breathes out. hot air against your fingers. you trip over her top lip, lightly graze the bottom, and when you make it to her chin you’re breathing like you ran a marathon.

‘bea,’

‘i would stay,’ you tell her. ‘if it went out. if you wanted me to. maybe,’ you say, because you can be mean too, ‘even if you didn’t want me to.’

how differently would the show have gone is supergirl and lena luthor just decided to fuck nasty shortly after they met

Literally if Lena had just ridden Kara to completion on that couch in her office in season 2 National City would have been healed, I know it

― Jamie Anderson

Fairy godmother cranes guide their confused gator back into pond

Hey! You have a lot of big brain theories about Warrior Nun and Alchemy. Do you have any theories / ideas / thoughts about the Halo specifically?

wow, thanks anon! you're my first ask, this is cool. i have one pretty expansive and bonkers theory about it but i don't know enough to really back it up with anything solid. short alchemy-related answer is i think it may be this, imprisoned:

the symbolism of warrior nun and its metaphysical themes are stacked like a layer cake with 10 flavors and i have trouble keeping it coherent outside my head so i apologize for the ridiculous length of the rest of this answer

i have a lot of thoughts and reasoning, but nothing confirmed. i have shapes. there are so many repeating shapes in the symbolism of warrior nun (and anywhere else it's found too i guess). but one big thing i think i've learned about how the delivery of symbolism works on this show is that when something is repeated it's a big freaking deal and we need to pay! attention! i mean look how broken we all were by the repetition of the motto of the ocs when ava tried to force beatrice to take a different path in adriel's cathedral. these creators use repetition of symbols to say when something is important, even crucial to the story they're telling. which. i guess is what symbolism. even is lol

so a little bit about alchemy and how the way it works is woven into the theme of the show. journeys are imo THE most important and enduring repeating theme of the show. we see it with dialogue, with locations splashed across the screen, with characters traveling through scenery, with changing motivations and alliances of the characters, and with subtler things like the use of labyrinths and spiritual paths, the internal search for individual truth and freedom, with the appearance of the widening gyre from Yeats' Second Coming (an alchemist himself btw), and with the liberal use of alchemical symbolism and the concept of alchemical journeys

i've posted about the rosarium philosophorum before, and it is incredibly significant imo to what is going on in warrior nun, both symbolically and literally plot-wise. it's a story, it's a riddle, it's a weird ass sequence of pictures, it's a guide on how to achieve the highest self no matter who or what you are, and i suspect that it is a writer's resource for one of the many ways they want to tell the story about journeys. it follows a 1-20 path and some of the iconography of these images appear as early as the literal opening scene of the show. ava is the primary figure we see on this journey, but so is everything else

i'll say here real talk that i am always in the process of learning more about this stuff, and as beatrice said, there's always more. there are other models and concepts and principles of alchemy like the azoth ritual and all of the stuff in latin that i can't read for shit which is also important but i simply haven't had time to research and apply directly to the show, even though it's definitely significant. there's just. too much here to go through it all. it will literally take months. it's a constant chase of information and it seems endless. so i assume there is always more context than what i am seeing with this stuff

i am no authority on it in any way, shape or form. also if anyone else wants to look into this stuff with me i am incredibly open to input and thoughts about these bizarre and individualized by design concepts and please feel free to use the "it's labyrinths and it's alchemy" tag and i will find it. or just make your own tag and tell me, i'll for sure happily check out any other thoughts on all of this. i use the labyrinths and alchemy tag because that's me screaming "look at it! looooook! are you seeing what i'm seeing?!" it's about sharing and i appreciate any collaboration on this stuff (to feel less insane when i keep seeing it mostly ahshdbc)

okay, so anyway back to the rosarium philosophorum (it means "rosary of the philosophers" in english which might be a more helpful reminder of how the philosopher's stone pops up on warrior nun, but. latin is cool, camila's right okay. also vincent's rose tattoos are a screeching hint that he's still important to the plot even if that man should ** ****). at the end of the sequence (which is at *one of* its base levels a recipe for the philosopher's stone. alchemy itself is a layer cake of many flavors of symbolism which i'm suuuure only adds to how coherent i sound talking about it. layer cakes in layer cakes, labyrinths in labyrinths lol) AT THE END of the sequence of 20, the figure represents higher self, perfect synthesis, some religious iconography that warrior nun fans are very familiar with by now, and many other things pertaining to a final flawless whole. another way of illustrating this is with the use of the picture i posted in the beginning of this reply, which is called the "anima mundi" by robert fludd

the anima mundi means "world soul." it represents the connection to all things that all things have. the overarching network we all belong to because we're alive. if we have souls as individuals, the anima mundi is the soul of the universe itself. the world soul is one interpretation of a repeating theme through philosophy, science, alchemy, occultism, religion, astronomy, astrology, even technology, ect. so many connections between a concept *about* connection. it's kinda beautiful. macrocosm in microcosms

when you search for spheres recurring in alchemy, you are going to find a ton of stuff. a LOT of circles. one of the most famous and readily available images of an alchemical circle is "the flammarion engraving" from a book by french astrologer (and many other things) nicolas camille flammarion called "l'atmosphère: météorologie populaire" or atmosphere: popular meteorology" in english. look at the stars. LOOK at the stars

another way to say layer cakes in layer cakes and labyrinths in labyrinths is "wheel within a wheel." the biblical prophet ezekiel said it in the old testament. he had a vision of god that revealed to him the structure of the universe and all its connections. some wild shit happened to him after that and "ezekial's wheel" is a source that is used for some of the descriptions of angels, which is always interesting. wheels and circles and spheres occur in countless iterations of metaphysical thought and are repeating patterns in warrior nun, too, so that means we gotta pay attention to it

this image of the stars here may be the clearest of the celestial sphere depicted in alchemical art. it also calls to mind the story of the labyrinth of chartres, with the alchemist on his knees. i've posted a little about that story before, and one interesting detail about christian pilgrims traversing spiritual labyrinths is that they often did so while walking on their knees

remember ava fighting adriel in the s2 finale and how she fell and stayed on her knees for a while after michael was killed. ava was making her journey to the heart of the labyrinth, the arq, the end of her current trajectory, the center of regeneration, the threshold of hell, her highest expression of love, just as the dancers depicting jesus on his knees harrowing hell did in the story of the labyrinth of chartres. just as the alchemist depicted here is doing. repetition of patterns is everything

speaking of ava and speaking of stars, here is ava in s1e1. my favorite scene of the show and what hooked me in the first place. this is a meaningful scene for many reasons

here is ava again in s2e1. notice the patterns on the lamps hanging above her, the celestial heavens yet again appearing in her story as if the stars are following behind her on her journey

look again at the first picture of the anima mundi. it's the same image as what's depicted in flammarion's engraving of the alchemist. only in flammarion's version, the figure more explicitly carries the soul of the cosmos... on their back

if you made it through all that, you're a saint, sorry anon

“Almost everywhere where it gives happiness, there is joy in nonsense.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Ava mimicking Bea’s fight style because she was trained by her