Im Glad @jordanlhawk Likes My Griffin Stress-baking Headcanon. Now I Have Tons Of Headcanons Thanks To

I’m glad @jordanlhawk likes my Griffin stress-baking headcanon. Now I have tons of headcanons thanks to it. Here goes:

Griffin excels at anything lemon custard. The old ladies of Widdershins love his lemon custard filled cupcakes. He brings them extra, and they use them as finger food for their late night occult gatherings.

I can totally see Widdershins having Gilmore Girls type town meetings with the Arsenic and old Lace type of insanity like: “The Dweller of the Deep occult gathering has been moved to Tuesday at midnight, leaving the Librarian’s stealth and espionage classes to move to another night since both need the town gazebo. Also, remember no blood rituals at the Whyborne and Griffin fan club, it’s for all ages and during teatime. Blood at a tea gathering, honestly, yes I’m glaring at you Ms. Crabfeathers.” 

Thing I’ve been mulling over for a while: some really good YA fantasy novels of my childhood (Young Wizards - no one who knows me is surprised by this) really emphatically gave me tools to understand and dismantle my own “white supremacist delusion,” as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it. The construction of the cosmos in these books formed my worldview at a really early age. They have helped me, decades later, to believe deeply and truly in both my own ability to support and uphold Evil in all of its guises, no matter how ‘good’ or ‘nice’ I may inherently see myself to be - and my own power to dismantle Evil in all its guises, within myself, as well as in the world beyond myself.

I was watching this IG live video where Taylor powerfully explains how important it is to shift from seeing whiteness as something intrinsically ours to possess rather than as the result of a dehumanizing system that we can - and in fact are ethically called upon to - uproot. I understand Taylor to be saying that I, as a person assigned power by whiteness, have a duty to continually identify and reject the delusions of whiteness starting with myself. 

There’s an image Taylor uses, in this video, of searching inside of yourself for the spaces where this toxic ideology of whiteness has taken hold - and to find and uproot it. And immediately I saw a climactic moment from High Wizardry, one where Dairine has a realization about how intimately entropy has its hold upon her:

She stopped, as the answer rushed into her mind from the manual. Where entropy is, it said, there its creator also is, either directly or indirectly…

I’m a product of this universe, after all, she had said to the mobiles. It’s in me too…

Her heart turned over inside her as she came to know her enemy. Not a Darth Vader, striding in with a blood-burning light-sabre, not something outside to battle and cast down, but inside. Inside herself. Where it had always been, hiding, growing, waiting until the darkness was complete and its own darkness not noticeable any more. Her Enemy was wearing her clothes, and her heart, and there was only one way to get rid of It…

She was terrified. Yet this was the great thing, the thing that mattered […]

I’d hazard a guess that many of us have a primary conditioning to see evil precisely as “something outside to battle and cast down.” I say this about evil in general; I think it’s probably extra true for the ways that white people approach the evil of white supremacist delusion. I see it a lot with the teenagers that I now teach: the actively anti-racist white kids who really want to march, to have hard conversations with other people, to change laws, to show up at city hall meetings…and who don’t understand that, while those are all good and important things to be doing, if they are all you are doing, they will not be enough. They are all ways of seeing the problem as “something outside to battle and cast down” instead of as something that is LITERALLY “wearing [your] clothes, and [your] heart.”

The good news - also from High Wizardry - is the possibility of full and complete liberation on the other side of the recognition, and the reckoning that follows. The snatches of it glimpsed within this life, the work of widening the ground… The belief (which Duane’s world offered me, and which my Christianity never did) that even the one who dreamed Evil into being can be liberated and redeemed from it…and that that, and no less, is the scope of the work. 

(YW also taught me, perhaps most importantly of all, that this work is collective and done best when part of an ever-widening family / network / team.)

My favorite parts of Necropolis were how grumpy Whyborne was, his fez, and his camel constantly trying to eat his fez.

So it’s Tamora Pierce’s birthday today, so I drew a little something for her (even though I’m not even a third of the way into this book yet, haha). From Battle Magic.

She’s the greatest earthbender I’ve ever seen

Some rando: You should think about stopping your prescription

Me: My pills make me not want to die tho

They: You shouldn’t want to die, that’s not normal

Me: Yeah that’s why I’m taking my pills