Kara Dreamer (obsolete) ⚧ @kara_dreamer@witches.town

find myself idly wondering if there's any good "House, M.D." fanfic. it occurs to me that's a example of a show that wasn't good, but could have furnished good characters for a better writer to do something with.

ugh, finally picked up the thread of my Alphys story again: https://mastodon.art/@kara_dreamer/1784345

give us this day our daily Alphyne (full pic - https://www.deviantart.com/art/Valentines-alphyne-590427745) https://witches.town/media/6QOzhAf5fjxGMSTDkwQ

hey, @LottieVixen, d'ya mind inviting me back to your Discord server?

holy shit Undyne (source - https://shiinyao.deviantart.com/art/Undyne-s-Bath-time-Undertale-657417292) https://witches.town/media/nrV3cjCqq1vWj3i0VRc

Still, my connection with pagan myths has never been particularly _deep_. It's been largely an intellectual and aesthetic fascination. The _emotional_ connection isn't a strong one, not like my emotional bond with "Undertale" and its characters.

Even with Loki, the pagan deity with whom I've had the most direct dealings, the relationship is somewhat distant and businesslike compared to what I get out of dealing with my "Undertale" pantheon. Loki can move me to laughter, or to frustration; and they've bailed me out of a couple of tight spots. But Loki doesn't, I dunno, shake me to the depths of my soul.

(I might really be asking for trouble by saying that)

Anyway, enough on my Christian dabbling. I've finally wandered back onto the subject of the pagan deities, and I want to talk a bit about where _they_ stand in my current religious / magickal practice.

I started out as a wannabe classical pagan, thanks to three years of college Latin and Greek, and also the strong influence of a writer named Jo Walton with whom I was online friends for a couple of years until we gradually fell out with each other. Another source of inspiration was the novelist Mary Renault. Going further back, I was an avid reader of popularized stories from classical mythology (e.g. from Bulfinch's anthology) and read Homer at a young age.

The weird thing is that Lewis, in "Surprised by Joy" and elsewhere, seems almost to admit that the Christian stories never gave him the same sense of deep emotion, of "Joy", that he got from the pagan stories. To quote again: "the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels". Yet weirdly Lewis ended up rationalizing this away: he came to consider his experiences of "Joy" to be mere signposts pointing him towards Christianity, which the real thing and therefore did not need to inspire "Joy".

Need I say that I reject Lewis's rationale?

Of course it didn't really work. I couldn't evade the uncomfortable truth that Christian mythology gave me no strong feelings or insights. I know that lots of Christians profess to a deeply emotional, personal relationship to Jesus, but I never felt much more than a glimmer of intellectual sympathy with his story. Jesus was...dull. Even his sacrifice failed to move me, and I wonder why. Maybe because it's all made to seem like foreordained clockwork? *shrugs*

I'm getting a bit far from my originally intended point, so I'll wrap this particular topic up: if my adherence to my personalized "Undertale" mythology represents one extreme—worship of a purely internal and idiosyncratic pantheon, more or less on my own, with only slight and indirect support from a larger community or body of shared spiritual knowledge—then my adherence to Catholicism was at the other extreme. I joined a very large community for impersonal reasons.

Sure, I was being *told* that I was building a spiritual relationship with a deity of immense power and importance—indeed, the only such deity, according to Jack Lewis et al. Indeed, according to "Surprised by Joy", Lewis had been convinced by Tolkien that Christianity was the "real" myth of which all the pagan myths to which Lewis had been drawn were merely imperfect reflections. (see below).
https://witches.town/media/bPjf9fSRAlHqBm_QITA

I did eventually find my way into a small subset of the Catholic community that I liked. I mostly enjoyed going to my parish church in Seattle, and my godparents were good friends for a time who invited me into their family (giving me, among other things, my first real taste of a loving family Christmas.) But I didn't get much more out of it than "this is kinda nice". I came to dread forcing myself to prayer because it didn't feel like I was connecting to anything.

Compare my numerous difficulties with trying to be a practicing Christian. My emotional connection to Christianity was based almost solely on my strong, largely intellectual response to the works of a small number of mostly British writers, chiefly Lewis and Chesterton, with a bit of contribution from Dorothy Sayers and others. _Direct_ experience of Christianity, for some reason, just didn't produce any strong feelings in me, though I tried hard to open myself to them

On the other hand, the *personal* connection is very strong, and easy to strengthen when needed. Playing "Undertale" for the first time was one of the most profound emotional experiences of my life so far, and replaying the game and its music have triggered numerous spiritual experiences. And there's also an immense body of fan work to supply me with powerful and evocative images. This has contributed to keeping "Undertale" in its central place, despite misgivings.