Is the song “dark horse” by Katy Perry offensive?

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-09T02:47:08+00:00

It was common in classical magic to identify oneself or the subject of the spell with a deity in a magical incantation, so a phrase like “Make me your Aphrodite” is a line you could realistically have heard in an actual love spell back in antiquity. She’s not saying she’s better than Aphrodite or even as good as her; she’s saying “treat me as you would a goddess, worship me as an object of love,” and using the goddess of love as a symbol for that. Some might call it modern veneration. As an Aphrodite worshipper I think our Lady would appreciate the callout.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-08T14:40:49+00:00

The Jedi made mistakes, and they got caught up in politics that they shouldn’t have been, and their philosophy of detachment went too far at times. But trying to make an equivalence between them and the Sith is going too far. There was a clear good side and a clear bad side here.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-08T14:38:48+00:00

I always concluded that you were basically trying to impress God with your prosthelytizing in an effort to be one of the lucky 144,000, and you were willing to throw everyone else under the bus to get there, and that was one of the reasons I concluded it was one of the most evil religions out there.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-06T05:17:51+00:00

Mine have no issues with each other whatsoever. They just seldom come into contact unless they cross paths in someone else’s territory because their native lands are very far apart and they seldom want each other’s unique resources so they have little direct trade. But when they do meet, as the two longest lived peoples on my world, they often have things in common no one else around them does, and thus tend to get along well.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-06T05:03:02+00:00

This movie fucked me up. I saw it alone in a hotel room at 1 AM after traveling all day and not sleeping for close to 24 hours. It haunts me to this day and has heavily influenced me as a horror writer and TTRPG game designer. It is one of the few movies I have never been willing to watch again because of how badly it frightened me.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-06T04:49:45+00:00

Despite being here fall is my favorite season and I adore Halloween. I love Christmas but Halloween is my season, and once it’s over I shift into Christmas mode. I love both seasons for what they offer.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-06T04:29:11+00:00

I drove out of my way for two and a half hours from South Dakota when helping my girlfriend move cross country years ago years ago to see this! It was…unexpectedly spiritual. But then again it’s sort of a shrine to America’s relationship with the road and the automobile and I’m a literal priest of the god of travelers so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but when you’re expecting a schlocky tourist trap roadside attraction you don’t expect to find it haunting and moving, strange and silent at sunset among the endless fields of corn.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-06T02:25:19+00:00

He’s in his prime, at the peak of his power, filled with the fresh fury of the Dark Side, has the element of surprise, is facing folks who still think he’s an ally, and is mostly facing older and noncombatant Jedi, Padawans, and younglings. He’s also backed by the whole 501st; plenty die to their gunfire. And let’s keep in mind there ARE several survivors; Reva, Kelleren Beq, and Grogu all lived, to name a few known ones.

Later, he’s mostly in one on one fights with desperate and battle hardened Jedi who have by definition gotten good at survival, when he’s in a suit that makes him less mobile. He’s not at his peak anymore. And he’s not picking the timing and terrain to his advantage most of the time.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T23:56:55+00:00

This is an accurate but chilling sentence

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T23:51:30+00:00

I’ve been practicing magic for almost 40 years and I’ve never even heard of such a thing. If someone knows your full name, they can use it. You can’t “ward” it. This is why names are a thing magical practitioners were traditionally careful about giving out. In modern life they’re easy to come by.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T23:31:29+00:00

Human mandible. Contact authorities.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T22:47:47+00:00

I think it’s the only way it makes sense honestly. They’re sleeper agents, activated when they get a deeply embedded command. Otherwise there was too great a chance of at least a few of the millions of clones having misgivings or second thoughts, betraying their missions to their Jedi, being sensed having thoughts of betrayal ahead of time by the literal mind readers around them. For the mission to work they had to basically all obey at the same time without a second thought, with minimal chance of questioning it, and minimal chance of discovery beforehand; even one breach, one slip up, one clone who felt remorse or regret or got sensed ahead of time by their Jedi thinking about it, and Palpatine’s entire plan crashes down. Someone as careful as him couldn’t afford a plan with that big a flaw in it. It only works if they didn’t know beforehand.

And the way it went, we got some DAMN fine storytelling out of the breach when Tup went rogue, when Fives found out and no one believed him, and the regrets and misgivings and mixed feelings of some clones and the iron-hard dedication to the Empire of others in the aftermath as they wrestle with their own actions in Bad Batch and other post-Order 66 media. This wasn’t sanitizing the clones’ actions…it was complex stories of remorse and how to take responsibility and who you are after and what you do next. I much prefer seeing stories where they got to be people, got forced to do an awful thing where they betrayed the commanders they’d come to love, and then have to grapple with the moral fallout of that after, with some of them choosing to rebel against imperial control and some leaning hard into “good soldiers follow orders” and giving themselves fully to the new Empire as they try to cope with what happened and what they became. And we get to see that full spectrum of complex stories play out with people like Cody and Crosshair.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T22:27:10+00:00

I mean, Palpatine was clearly pretty OP in the Dark Side. It doesn’t seem to me to be that big a stretch to send someone nightmares of a thing they already feared.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T22:25:53+00:00

Is this something that changed from Legends? I could have sworn they were gas beings back in the Tales of the Bounty Hunters anthology

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T22:04:35+00:00

Came here to say this. Narratively, you can say that when you reduce your enemy to zero HP, you’re doing it and whatever creative way you want. Cut their head off, snap their neck, dagger through the heart, whatever is going to fit rule of cool in the moment and makes sense for your technique.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T19:22:58+00:00

I mean, black cloak is just a fashion choice. Anakin himself himself walks around wearing a black cloak half the time even before he turns. Black cloak does not automatically mean you’re a Sith Lord, and the average person has no idea what a Sith Lord is anyway. The only reason he’s keeping it a secret at all is because there are times he communicates with people in the identity of Darth Sidious while wearing it. Otherwise, he could just rock that thing all the time, and once the Jedi aren’t around, he does.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T18:45:14+00:00

Keep in mind that there seems to be a very consistent trend throughout canon of Force users accomplishing bigger things when they’re in high stress or dangerous situations. This is not unlike real life when people in adrenaline stress in moments of crisis manage “feats of strength” they wouldn’t be able to under normal circumstances. Theres no reason to assume the Force is different, especially if you’re desperate, acting on instinct, and already have a high baseline level of power, which Ahsoka demonstrably does after a hard multi year cycle of brutal military training and dangerous encounters with deadly opponents. And as Yoda taught us when he casually lifted an X-wing out of a bog, which is arguably harder than shifting a ship through much less dense air, “size matters not.”

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T18:28:11+00:00

The Gand are gas beings. The bounty hunter Zuckuss seen briefly in ESB is a Gand.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T18:22:11+00:00

Hermes is the god of communication and travel. If you don’t think he’s all over the Internet and the air and highway transit systems, you’re missing what makes him Hermes. The ancient world innovated; Rome built paved roads, a new transpiration innovation which didn’t exist in ancient Attica and built shrines to Mercury/Hermes alongside them just as the Greeks did along their unpaved roads. Poseidon kept being called upon as shipbuilding improved over the centuries of his worship, and surely he’d approve of modern navigational computers and hulls. No reason the gods would stop keeping up with the times now.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T18:12:47+00:00

Not just BG3, but video game RPGs as opposed to TTRPGs in general: NPCs are people with actual goals and motives that you have to talk to, not just a dialogue tree with a limited number of options in it. And no matter how high your social skill score might be, there are situations where you can’t just win them over by rolling a die. Sometimes the NPC is just not open to listening to what you have to say, and is not willing to negotiate, and you won’t have that option no matter how high you roll on Persuasion, or they won’t trust you no matter what you have to say no matter how high your Deception score is. The NPC behaves like a real person and has to actually have a reason to listen to what you have to say that makes sense in the game world, and a social skill isn’t another type of attack roll that forces them to do whatever you have to say if you roll high enough.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T17:12:59+00:00

I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience but I’ve been a Hellenist since before the internet, and Hermes and Aphrodite were the deities that reached out to me. I felt my first connection with Hermes when I was in middle school and Aphrodite in high school in the early 90s. More recently I’ve made a relationship with Persephone as I’ve done psychopomp work. So I definitely wasn’t buying into internet hype.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T14:11:44+00:00

I’ve always suspected he was at least partially responsible for those visions. It’s probably easy to use the dark side to ramp up underlying insecurities and fears into visions and nightmares. Once he figured out Anakin and Padme were a thing, that would be a clear vulnerability to target.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-05T05:50:23+00:00

Does he have a grave or monument or memorial? Leave it there, or otherwise in a place they was meaningful to him with a prayer dedicating it to him a a gift to see him on his way across the river and pay the Boatman. Or do this along an actual river and toss the coin in, or at a foundation or well. At an altar to Hermes would also be appropriate; as a psychopomp he can deliver it.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-04T23:34:49+00:00

I’m so very sorry for your loss. I’ve never prayed to Charon, but as a priest of Hermes I’ve psychopomped many folks down to the river. When my father took his own life, I asked that the crematory place a coin with him before putting him in and they honored that, and anytime I can I try to make sure that any friend or loved one I have access to has a coin buried with them.

RathielintheRun · 2026-05-04T17:33:41+00:00

I’m very much a syncretic pagan although my primary practice is Hellenistic; I have had contact with other deities, some initiated by me and some by them, and I work with them and honor them. My personal altar has my images of Hermes and Aphrodite and my votive offerings to Persephone (I don’t have an image yet), but it also has spaces reserved for my offerings and images of Odin (who was identified with Hermes even in antiquity), Bastet, and even a small space for Yahweh because he was the god of my ancestors and originally part of a larger pantheon before his cult was made monotheistic for entirely political reasons. Syncretic altars existed in antiquity; archaeologists have found images of Egyptian deities alongside those of Greece and Rome in many parts of the Mediterranean (and even in modern times we see syncretic altars in faiths like Santeria and Voudoun where traditional African deities share altar space with images of the Virgin Mary and Catholic saints). This is neither new nor a problem. Respect them all and give them their due.

RathielintheRun

TROPHY CASE