This Place Is Cold!

Dancing trees

Agony by Vetarmora

A Pack Of Gray Wolves, Canis Lupus by Jim And Jamie Dutcher

If they just let people burn the goat it wouldn't be a good ritual sacrifice. People that burn the goat are legitimately risking jailtime but they do it anyway. That's what makes the goatburning so powerful.

There is no easy way out of learning to be literate when it comes to fiction.

You cannot say "An author is never what they write".

You cannot say "An author is always what they write".

Authors who are completely normal people with healthy understandings of every dark topic in our work can write extremely fucked up shit about topics including bigotry, rape, you name it. If you think writing about those topics at all is "glorifying" it, then you will falsely believe those authors are horrible people.

But horrible people can actually be authors - and sometimes they hide their horribleness in ways you can't recognize. Sometimes they don't - sometimes they are just fully and openly bigoted.

But if you can't tell the difference between "A story that has fucked up shit in it because those things fit the mood, motifs, message, or genre" vs "A story with fucked up shit in it because the author thinks those things are morally good", you are going to fucking struggle in life and you will in fact be very susceptible to bigoted propaganda.

And no, I won't sit here and say it's always easy to tell the difference. But with practice, you can in fact tell the difference between a story where the author is writing about the main character being ravaged and raped in a sexy way because it's a safe way to explore that fantasy, VS, an author who clearly just thinks women should be raped and subjugated because that's their actual worldview.

That can involve examining the individual piece of media, other things that author has written, who the author is, etc.

Authority (2019) - Eliran Kantor

Spring in the Tetons, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

© riverwindphotography

Decay exists as an extant form of life

So, I was studying for my finals and reading the bit in Snorri’s Edda about Ragnarok and at one point a wolf swallows the moon and it says “og gerir sá og mikið ógagn”. Now, I understand that the meaning of the words have changed a bit over time and all that, but to a modern Icelandic speaker, this just sounds like “one of the wolves took the moon, which was unhelpful”