Subject: *grins* *grin freezes*
Author:
Posted on: 2015-05-03 03:37:00 UTC
You and your sarcasm, hS. Do you have to give me writing ideas with everything you say? This is getting ridiculous.
Looks like that's another for my eventual post of odds and ends...
~DF
Hello there, I, like Iximaz, am a victim of the Mary Sue Hunter tv tropes page
The Agents I currently plan on bringing are a Satyr and a Delta Red Agent Eon Wolf from the website 'DNAdopts'
I've always considered agents to be at their best when they consist of nothing but a species. ^_~
hS
-all your fault.
...at least I know where to look if I ever have writer's block.
~DF
SPEAKING of sarcasm - did you know that in subtitling, they use the punctuation mark (!) to indicate sarcasm?
Jay: I just found a newt!
Acacia: That's great(!)
We were astonished, I tell you.
hS
You and your sarcasm, hS. Do you have to give me writing ideas with everything you say? This is getting ridiculous.
Looks like that's another for my eventual post of odds and ends...
~DF
((I'm so sorry))
As if HQ wasn't crazy enough...
To our world of weird! Have a hobnob juicebox. There's a random side effect. :D
Welcome, fellow troper, to the madhouse. Here's some introductory Bleeprin and chocolate- you're going to need as much of it as you can get.
It was signed by all the famous people, both real and imaginary, that ever wears sunglasses! Double awesomeness!
Have one of my own shed feathers and a complimentary kit of Spikes!
So what are your fandoms? I'm assuming Harry Potter is one of them since you marathoned Rose Potter.
Have a perfect pear! I swiped it from my Animal Crossing game through a plothole. >:)
Due to the surprisingly low ammount of PJO sporkings, and Iximaz's Agents from 3-Apple-14 being the only one to tackle them, I just read through that one
Let's search for some PJO badfics together! Btw. who would your godly parent be? I'm all the way for Hekate :D
Though given my personality, I'm a little more likely to be a child of Hestia. (Does that automatically make me a Mary Sue? I don't wanna get offed by the PPC! D:)
... and be a modern-day Vestal Virgin. I'm sure she'd be willing to adopt her worshippers - she seems the sort.
In fact, that's probably the best option for Hestia, as well. Athenea creates children through intellect because she's a wisdom goddess. Artemis gets 'children' by them joining the Hunt, because she's a huntress. Hestia is the goddess of hearth and home - she'd absolutely adopt people as her children.
To continue the wild speculation: Hestial adoptees would be ordinary mortals. She's the one who gave up a throne on Olympus, who tends the fires in every Greek house - I think she'd be far more inclined to care for mortals than demigods, in general. And Hestial adoption would bring... virtually no benefits. No immortality like the Hunters, no magical powers over fire. In fact, it would be a working adoption: you'd take up the responsibility to tend for the human race, and in return, Hestia would help you out at need.
Oh, and on the Roman side, they're required to be virgins. ;) Not so much on the Greek side.
I think that's a workable concept for 'children of Hestia'. It has no basis in canon, of course, other than the general framework; but I don't think a reasonable PPCer would kill you for it.
hS
Instead, I'm going to talk about something that isn't seen so much: other religious systems. White people aren't the only ones with complex pantheons, thank you very much. =]
What might be interesting is the kind of divine summer camp setup you'd get after the African Diaspora. Voodoo and Cajun Creole syncretic belief systems, after all, derive heavily from traditional Yoruba beliefs. That's what syncretic means. So... maybe a child of Olokun?
The Yoruba faith that made its way to Nawlins and other places around the Southern United States is based on the orisha; powerful beings that are aspects of a single god (and his three manifestations; now, where have we seen that before?). There's four hundred of 'em, so there's bound to be at least a few kids knocking about. Big families. Whatcha gonna do?
Now, Olokun's a sea god - the name means "owner of oceans" - but he also works with rivers and streams and so forth. He'd also probably have a complex or seventy billion about the Maafa, since his worshippers were abducted over his oceans to live as slaves far from home. I'd think that him and his would be working constantly to help slaves escape over that period, but there's a limit to how much they can do. Perhaps the syncretic nature of belief means they don't have the same power that they used to. Perhaps their connection to the spirit realm, Orun, is dwindling. Perhaps Olorun is merely unable to send as many irunmole to Aiye, the physical world, as he would like. No matter, what we have is what we have.
A child of Olokun, raised in the poorer areas of New Orleans, ravaged as it is by broken levees and uncaring right-wing politicians, poorly educated (and without the tickets for charter schools), sucked into a miserable life over which they feel they have no control... well, there'd be a lot of anger there. Especially after some dickhead in a weird costume shows up and tells them they're actually the offspring of someone they've never even heard of and surprise, you get to go to some manky bloody campsite in the middle of nowhere. I mean, woohoo, right? Your father's a literal god and the first thing you ever hear from him and his is that you've got to go to his private bloody Jonestown? I should cocoa. So you run. You run and you run and you run, and you can't stop for fear of turning back...
And then, by accident or plothole or the sheer unimaginable eeeevil of "uncanonical" deities having their own campsite, you wind up in a maze of grey corridors with a sunflower for a boss and, Iunno, an X-Men badfic refugee for a partner.
A child of Olokun, done like this, could make for an interesting counterpoint to Percy Jackson himself. Good kid, mad city, as the album title (almost) goes. An angry young person who hasn't asked for much out of life and still didn't get it, resentful of their heritage, suckered into a job working out their anger on Mary Sues and Gary Stus. They still wield water, and have power over it, but they don't like to actually use it because, well, Katrina. As for why they stick around? Well, it might be insane and full of monsters and the walls are all grey...
But it beats the hell out of the Lower Ninth.
...
Sorry, I kinda forgot where I was going with that. Anyway, might be interesting. =]
... James Lovegrove's 'Age of...'/Pantheon not-quite series? Bunch of books that are probably best classed as Military Science Fantasy, each on the theme of 'gods from a given mythology are active in the world today'. He started out with the Big Three, of course, but more recently he's done Voodoo, Hinduism, and of all things the Aztecs (plus a trio of shorts which includes 'Age of Anansi'. African spider-themed trickster god... yeah.
I've actually read all of them at this point, mostly for the worldbuilding; I can't vouch for the quality of the writing after first read, I'm afraid. But the setups are all different - some books the gods are real, others they're not, others it's ambiguous. Might interest you.
As for your Olokun idea, I like how well thought out it is. The main issue I take is that you've stuck with the 'child of' theme from PJO. So why's that an issue? Comparative religion, of course! ^^
The Greek myths are all about close relatives. Zeus defeats his father, his wife squabbles with him, his illegitimate children beat things up. So the Greek Riordan books are about children of the gods.
The Romans as a society were obsessed with lineages. The emperors claimed descent from Venus, and actually, a large portion of their social structure was based around 'was one of your ancestors one of the first senators?'. So the Riordan Romans break up the direct families, and expand out to include descendants of other demigods.
Egyption mythology doesn't really have 'children of the gods', but has a lot of magical rituals, and the idea of the Pharoah being a god. So the Riordan Egyptians have... well, you get the picture.
Does the Yoruba mythology have a focus on children of the gods? The impression I get is 'probably not'. I don't know what they do have as the primary theme tying gods to humans, but that's what you'd want to focus on for your 'Nawlins Waif and the Gods of the Yoruba' story, not copying from the Greeks. And if you did that, it could be a very interesting read (hey, you probably don't even have to change the story you've hashed out - which, in case I didn't say, sounds very interesting).
(Also, what does this imply Riordan's going to do with the Norse? Heck if I know. The Norse gods were basically the weather: human interactions with them were limited to 'go party with them when you die' and 'stay out of their way'.)
hS
((PS: Egyptians aren't white people. ^~))
((Not heard of James Lovegrove until you told me about his work. I'll check him out! I'll be interested to see what he did with the Nahua faith. =] ))
---
The touchstone of the Yoruba faith is ase, the spark of life. It's basically humanity's ability for self-determination and it comes from Olorun. Directly. Which is... an interesting paradox. An alaase is someone who, through training and meditation and all that good stuff, is able to directly, consciously affect the life force of others, which would be an unusual powerset for a protagonist, especially one affiliated with Olokun.
Among the Yoruba, which patron orisha you get is up to your lineage - and it can be either maternal or paternal. The imori ceremony, or "knowing the head", is generally performed right after you're born, over which a diviner determines what lineage you have, whether it be your mother's, your father's, or directly traceable to an orisha. For the purposes of this story, we can... delay it a bit. After all, it's not like our protagonist would have been in a position to have it performed on them, what with growing up in a dirt-poor part of New Orleans. In any case, if you're part of a divine family tree, you undergo an initiation rite upon reaching adulthood, in which your thoughts are made the spiritual vessel for the ase of the relevant orisha.
That, I think, is the link between gods and mortals in the Yoruba pantheon - a direct connection, this spark of life that makes a human more than just a sack of offal and bones. That, I think, should be the source of the power of a Riordanesque protagonist. Becoming an alaase, finding yourself, working in harmony with the quintessence of the god that lies within... it's a powerful image. At least, it is to me. Dunno about anyone else. =]
Also, another thought; the Yoruba creation myth states that the world was originally a watery, marshy wasteland, before Olorun - who connected the Invisible World to the physical one by a great chain - summoned land into being atop it. Which is also how you build, say, Venice.
Or New Orleans.
---
((And I'd totally forgotten about the Egyptian pantheon being a thing in Riordan's books. That objection is withdrawn. =] ))
The description you've just given sounds very different to the sort of system that would produce 'hey, kid, you're the son of INSERT GOD HERE who was boinking your mother!'. You've used terms like 'affiliated with' and 'patron', and the imori/ase/alaase setup you've described would translate well into the 'Kids Who Know Gods' setting of the Riordanverse. If anything, it's too good - none of the other pantheons simply drop a Real World practice directly in! It would be like having a series which goes 'Perky Jackman, you are a chosen servant of God! Now go join a monastery.' ^_~ (Obviously not in terms of the plot, but in terms of realism).
So you probably would need to invent a support structure analogous to the camps, simply to make something of your own in there. Mm... a distributed network might be interesting, tapping into the slavery history. Can't go to Camp Africa-Blood if you're working on the plantation eighteen hours a day, can you? But if the gods/orisha can carry messages, you could have a 'go to this street; someone will help you'.
That 'working in harmony' notion sparks off an idea: maybe it takes time to learn to understand what you're being told. So it becomes a story of hunches and impulses, and Nawlins Waif not even being sure it's real - but on the other hand, with everything that's been happening...
hS
Because, er, you can be. And by being so, you eventually become kind of sort of an avatar of that orisha. So that's a thing. =]
But yeah, your way's almost certainly better. And also, not only do the orisha of Yoruba religion have the ability to carry messages, they've also got a dedicated chap for the job: Eshu, the god of chance, of unpredictability, of the nail for whose want a kingdom was lost. The god of the way your whole life can spin on a dime and hurtle off to somewhere new.
Which means this plan, that finding your orisha heritage is a combination of guesswork, gut feelings, and just plain being in the right place at the right time... works. And it works really well. I'm already imagining our protagonist going full-on tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist about the whole thing, standing in front of a board full of newspaper clippings and weird occurrences in the neighbourhood, strange disappearances, weird markings, and - tying it all together - the man who wouldn't drown.
The old gods walk among us, Shaniqua, and they're running scared...
Unclear description on my part: whether or not you can be (purportedly ^_^) related to an orisha, I didn't think - and was correct - that it was the focus of their interactions with their deities. To the Greeks, being a son of Zeus was pretty much the first, last, and only qualification needed to be a Hero (TM). To Romans, who your ancestors were was the be-all and end-all of your life. To the Yoruba, it's not the mere fact of your relationship - it's what you do with it.
So, I like this. When're you going to write it? XD (And I love that final tag-line, for the record.)
hS
I mean, I want to, don't get me wrong, but...
I have no idea where to start. I mean, I could start with Shaniqua watching the man who wouldn't drown... not drowning, probably during Hurricane Katrina, but here's the thing: I went into this without knowing one single Goddamn thing about New Orleans, and the more I learn, the sadder I get. I want to show her walking through a landscape that's almost post-apocalyptic in tone, because that's how New Orleans felt to me during what little research I've done so far on it - that after Katrina, Rome fell, and only now is it starting to bounce back, solely to the benefit of the rich white folks who lived there. The poor people? Sucks to be you guys, y'all get underfunded, overcrowded public schools an inch from privatization to be run by whichever collection of delusional twerps is willing to stump up the cash, regardless of what they actually intend to teach.
The relief efforts focused on getting the rich districts back to normal first. It was a travesty, and a tragedy, and New Orleans isn't being cleaned up - it's being sanitised. The poor people are just another problem for whom the solution is being forced elsewhere, because, as Bill Bryson once put it, "Americans don't know they want something until it's gone forever". That's how Mardi Gras feels in this Nawlins; an imitation of its former self, every edge filed off, krewes sponsored by McDonalds and American Apparel, with the thrown doubloons redeemable in branches of Starbucks for a gasometer of coffee that tastes like the literal personification of the Photoshop airbrush tool.
It used to be a party. Now it's a parade.
No, that ain't quite right. Now it's some ethnic festivities for rich white spring-breakers to gawp at brainlessly before going back to college on Daddy's money and write breathlessly inane blogs about what an experience it all was. You want a real Nawlins experience, blondie? You can't get it. 'Cause it means being poor and being black and being hopeless. It means being woke up every day at Too Damn Early o'clock by the smell of wet rot, goin' to a school where the kids have more knives than the cafeteria, watchin' your friends disappear into drugs and gangs and the pages of the paper when their luck runs out. You had a party. We are the people who gotta clean it up for the next damn white people on the next damn bus-
...
Wow, um, Shaniqua? I'm not sure who you are yet, and I'm not sure you are either, but you are angry and you are afraid of getting lost in a country that doesn't care about you one bit, and I am sort of very slightly in love.
Actually I plan on having a Satyr agent, though I may or may not have his partner as a son of Athena of Hephaestus
I was actually asking about you personally - which god is your favourite :D
I would go for Hermes personally
As I said, son of Hekate here :D Or so I would hope!
I have been meaning to read them for a while though
Welcome, newbie! Pull up a chair, and just have fun! :D
Also, have this SACRED COOKIE OF INFINITE KNOWLEDGE (: :)
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I'd show you to the exit but once you're here it's hell to try and leave.
Second poke! YES!
Anyway, welcome!
Stumble around!
Read some stuff!
Join in!
Take this Weighted Companion Cube, and if it threatens to stab you, ignore it, because it obviously can't speak.
Aaaaanyway, welcome to the home of The Protecters of the Plot Continuum! As your gift you can have this replica of The One Ring, that does... something... I dunno, haven't tested this one before... just take it... and good luck. *hides behind a convenient desk*
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Welcome! I was too, honestly.
Here, have this Hitmonchan. It knows Comet Punch!
Heya, and welcome aBoard! For a newbie gift, take this honking pocket flamingo! If the urple bow around its neck becomes too much, feel free to remove it. ;)
If you have not already read the Original Series and the Constitution, might I direct you to those?
Also, care to share your fandomsso we can get to know you a little better?
Hope you like it here!
I have already read the constitution, and Marathoned your Rose Potter sporking, though I am on chapter 2 of the original series