hisashiburi
every now and then I remember that this thing exists. I really oughtta spend time here more often.
(no subject)
The plum blossom festival has happened and I'm not there.
The Girl's Dolls festival has happened and I'm not there.
Things keep happening and I'm not there.
The Girl's Dolls festival has happened and I'm not there.
Things keep happening and I'm not there.
Y'all, I have just been struck
with how NICE this house is.
Like, it's a sharehouse, so there's clutter, and it's a rental, so it's not the best maintained.
But it backs on to a park and I can hear the wind in the trees louder than I can hear the traffic and there's a verandah that's going to be great to sit on when it cools down a bit.
There is, of course, a whole nitpicky list of little things that could be better but right now?
It's just nice.
Like, it's a sharehouse, so there's clutter, and it's a rental, so it's not the best maintained.
But it backs on to a park and I can hear the wind in the trees louder than I can hear the traffic and there's a verandah that's going to be great to sit on when it cools down a bit.
There is, of course, a whole nitpicky list of little things that could be better but right now?
It's just nice.
A small update
I have moved house. It is mostly good, as far as sharehouses go, but people are being pains in the asses about monies.
Why is it so hard to remember to post here?
Why is it so hard to remember to post here?
(no subject)
I used to have all sorts of things to talk about. My lj was full of rambling. (I wonder if I can still import it?)
Now everything's just kind of... empty inside.
Now everything's just kind of... empty inside.
Entry tags:
holigays 2k18
So far, I have survived.
Fam is still routinely misgendering me.
Puppy has gone back to the hellhouse to clean the cat trays and put the rubbish out, and for date night tomorrow.
Getting back into the swing of journalling instead of reblogging other people's thoughts that echo mine, slowly.
Scored a surprising amount of loot considering my only contribution to giftmas this year was desserts. Pic to follow soonish.
Fam is still routinely misgendering me.
Puppy has gone back to the hellhouse to clean the cat trays and put the rubbish out, and for date night tomorrow.
Getting back into the swing of journalling instead of reblogging other people's thoughts that echo mine, slowly.
Scored a surprising amount of loot considering my only contribution to giftmas this year was desserts. Pic to follow soonish.
Entry tags:
Trigger Warning: Discussion of Rape
So over on tumblr last night someone posted a quote from Tony Abbot which was supposed to make him look better in the harsh light of the tongue-lashing he recieved from Julia Gillard.
It wasn't very well recieved.
This was the quote in question:
“I think there does need to be give and take on both sides, and this idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand I think they are both they both need to be moderated, so to speak” (sic)
And... no.
My friend Cat weighed in beautifully when someone decided to interpret that statement as "both extremes are bollocks and a middle path is more optimal". What that person was implying, which I don't think they realised, was that in the interest of "fairness", women do not have the right to say no to sex every time they do not want to have sex.
Hell no.
Dressing it up in the guise of "men shouldn't always ask to have sex every time they want to, either" does nothing to make it better, either, because a lot of people don't ask before trying to have sex with you and that's called rape. They're implying that the drive and desire to have sex lies primarily with men, and the duty to provide such sex lies with women. It implies that women saying no is a bad thing. It implies that men being told no is a bad thing. It implies that "yes" is the only acceptable answer to the question of sex.
It is NOT.
Tony Abbot is a politician, which is to say, a moralising, bandwagoning bastard who changes his tune to fit the wind of popular opinion. He has a long record of being unsympathetic and offensive to women of all classes, creeds, and backgrounds. Quoting anything Tony Abbot has said to me as an example of underlying tolerance and fairness of sttitude will be met with derision and scorn. Defending your misinterpretation of Tony Abbot's statement will not endear you to me. Engaging the Tone Argument on my friends will downright Piss Me Off.
You do not have, Tony Abbot does not have, NO ONE ELSE in this world has the right to tell me what I can and cannot, should and should not, will and will not do with MY BODY. Your desire to have sex with me does not override my right to not have sex with you if I do not want to. You may express your desires to me, but then you accept and abide by my decision. To do otherwise is to impose your wants over my right to an autonomous, rape-free existence.
(Guys get sick of being told "no" when they ask someone to sleep with them? Try being asked over and over for sex. Except most guys wouldn't see this as a bad thing, because for them sex is power. When they're actually put in a position to recieve repeated, unwanted sexual advances they find it just as unpleasant as we do.)
tl;dr even when Tony Abbot tries to get it right, he gets it very wrong, and holding up one of those shining examples as evidence of his reasonableness in the face of his very well deserved calling out is gonne getcha NOWHERE.
It wasn't very well recieved.
This was the quote in question:
And... no.
My friend Cat weighed in beautifully when someone decided to interpret that statement as "both extremes are bollocks and a middle path is more optimal". What that person was implying, which I don't think they realised, was that in the interest of "fairness", women do not have the right to say no to sex every time they do not want to have sex.
Hell no.
Dressing it up in the guise of "men shouldn't always ask to have sex every time they want to, either" does nothing to make it better, either, because a lot of people don't ask before trying to have sex with you and that's called rape. They're implying that the drive and desire to have sex lies primarily with men, and the duty to provide such sex lies with women. It implies that women saying no is a bad thing. It implies that men being told no is a bad thing. It implies that "yes" is the only acceptable answer to the question of sex.
It is NOT.
Tony Abbot is a politician, which is to say, a moralising, bandwagoning bastard who changes his tune to fit the wind of popular opinion. He has a long record of being unsympathetic and offensive to women of all classes, creeds, and backgrounds. Quoting anything Tony Abbot has said to me as an example of underlying tolerance and fairness of sttitude will be met with derision and scorn. Defending your misinterpretation of Tony Abbot's statement will not endear you to me. Engaging the Tone Argument on my friends will downright Piss Me Off.
You do not have, Tony Abbot does not have, NO ONE ELSE in this world has the right to tell me what I can and cannot, should and should not, will and will not do with MY BODY. Your desire to have sex with me does not override my right to not have sex with you if I do not want to. You may express your desires to me, but then you accept and abide by my decision. To do otherwise is to impose your wants over my right to an autonomous, rape-free existence.
(Guys get sick of being told "no" when they ask someone to sleep with them? Try being asked over and over for sex. Except most guys wouldn't see this as a bad thing, because for them sex is power. When they're actually put in a position to recieve repeated, unwanted sexual advances they find it just as unpleasant as we do.)
tl;dr even when Tony Abbot tries to get it right, he gets it very wrong, and holding up one of those shining examples as evidence of his reasonableness in the face of his very well deserved calling out is gonne getcha NOWHERE.
Entry tags:
Mmmmmm.
I'm in one of those lethargically good mood upswings right now, where all I want to do is go find somewhere comfortable and lie down and feel good until I fall asleep.
Spring weather
Yesterday it was warm. Today it's nicely chilly.
I've decided to make this my primary blogging platform, for long-form. Shorter stuff will probably go to my other social media, but I want to see what I can do about meshing them.
Yay, long-form blogging.
I've decided to make this my primary blogging platform, for long-form. Shorter stuff will probably go to my other social media, but I want to see what I can do about meshing them.
Yay, long-form blogging.
RIP Anne McCaffrey
/_______ `--._______ `--.____ \\
/__.-' `-----.____ `--.____\\`_/_
,' ___ `---.___ ___// `-.
/ _.-' )' ``---' \ \
| / | . ' |
/ / / | ' ___ ) | |
| | | _/` _ ` _,' _ `/) ' |
\_ `--._\__`--'_\-___ _,-' '-` ___ _/
`---.____ `--.__-_ /_)____, __/ ,`-'
`------__> `-------(/(/-'-\)\)
.
Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out, by Richard Siken
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
Your want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Bid deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
Your want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.
For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Bid deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work . . .
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
it’s such a lousy story.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
new stuff?
"Sunday was coming. She could feel it, and she hated it."
***
first line of... something. not sure what yet. sticking it up here because the WeePC doesn't have a word processor.
***
first line of... something. not sure what yet. sticking it up here because the WeePC doesn't have a word processor.
Entry tags:
something from a few years ago
It goes like this, Aurelie had said. Time works differently here. A thousand years can be a second or an aeon. Here, the measurement of time is a futile pursuit, because from Faerie, we can move to any time in any place.
-The past is another country, huh?
Truly. And this is the story of what happened, in that other country…
Way back, during Creation, Oberon was chosen to be Ruler in Faerie. He was wise, and just, and fair, and all those things you’re supposed to be when you’re the ruler of something. What he also was, was not stupid, so he chose his sister Mab to rule with him. They were like opposites, these two – where Oberon was tall and fair, Mab was small and slender, and dark. Like night and day, the Summer King and the Winter Queen. They ruled together, and ruled well, for as long a time as can be imagined in a place that has no time.
One of Oberon’s favourite things to do was to conjure a creature and go explore his newly-founded kingdom. He’d go, and go as far as he could for as long as he could before something stopped him – mountains, or oceans, or Mab calling him home, because while she was perfectly capable of ruling on her own, and he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, he was still her brother and she missed him if he was gone too long.
Anyway, on one of these trips, he was gone for longer than he ever had been before. Mab tried – she’d tried calling, she’d tried scrying, but either he couldn’t hear her or he wasn’t answering. She’d tried just about everything short of going out and looking for him herself when he just showed up one day, with a woman beside him. The woman was as tall and as fair as he was, and she called herself Titania.
It was inevitable, really – anyone could see what was going to happen next. After an appropriate interval, Oberon and Titania were married. Mab stayed around for a while, and then… well, it wasn’t anything anyone meant to happen, but she just started to… slip away. Nothing malicious, it wasn’t like anyone *wanted* her to leave, but… more and more, the woman-shaped gap by Oberon’s side was filled by Titania, rather than Mab. It was all well and fair that Titania became the Summer Queen, but it offset the balance that had existed before. Two women was too many, in some ways. Maybe they were jealous of each other. Upshot was, Mab left the Summer Palace, left it to her brother and his bride, and went back to her own home that she left all that time before. It saddened Oberon, that she had to leave, but he knew all he had to do was call and she’d be there for him.
There’s something you have to understand, about faeries. There’s people who think we’re creatures, same as humans and animals, and that the magic in Faerie is a separate thing, something outside of us, to be used, when in truth, Faerie magic is as much a part of its people as it is a part of the place. There are creatures that live in Faerie that have learned to use the magic to survive, but for the true Faerie, the Fae and the Fey, magic is as intrinsic as breathing. We *are* magic, in a way. There’s no way to separate us.
-What about Elementals? You said –
Elementals are the concentration and embodiment of an entire reservoir of power. We’re not just magic, we’re a force of nature.
Anyway.
Mab went away, and without her to balance it out, Faerie became the Kingdom of Summer – always bright, always hot. Always the perfect summer’s day. People grow arrogant in that kind of climate, believing somehow that the perfection surrounding them is inherently theirs, that they are perfect and powerful and can do no wrong. Others started to believe it, too, and the Fae garnered a reputation as wilful, cruel beings who looked on other creatures as their playthings. Oberon was mostly out of this; his early doting on Titania let her bring a lot of her people to be with her, but when their relationship soured, as relationships do, he took to spending longer and longer times away from his palace. Travelling, mostly, sometimes visiting with Mab. This gave Titania pretty much free reign in the kingdom, and she took full advantage of it. She came to regard the kingdom as hers, and everyone in it as subject to her fancies. It was the power, it went to her head. When Oberon realised just how messed up his kingdom was getting, he came right back to sort her out. He closed a lot of the portals between Faerie and the other worlds, stranding some of us. Then he and his lady… vanished for a while. No-one knows where they went. When they came back, Titania was very… quiet, and Oberon seemed… tired. Like a lot of the joy had gone out of him. He stayed in the palace for a while, and then left again. Visited all of Faerie that he’d been to before, talked to a lot of people – but quietly, you know? And then, well…
…now he’s gone again.
-The past is another country, huh?
Truly. And this is the story of what happened, in that other country…
Way back, during Creation, Oberon was chosen to be Ruler in Faerie. He was wise, and just, and fair, and all those things you’re supposed to be when you’re the ruler of something. What he also was, was not stupid, so he chose his sister Mab to rule with him. They were like opposites, these two – where Oberon was tall and fair, Mab was small and slender, and dark. Like night and day, the Summer King and the Winter Queen. They ruled together, and ruled well, for as long a time as can be imagined in a place that has no time.
One of Oberon’s favourite things to do was to conjure a creature and go explore his newly-founded kingdom. He’d go, and go as far as he could for as long as he could before something stopped him – mountains, or oceans, or Mab calling him home, because while she was perfectly capable of ruling on her own, and he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, he was still her brother and she missed him if he was gone too long.
Anyway, on one of these trips, he was gone for longer than he ever had been before. Mab tried – she’d tried calling, she’d tried scrying, but either he couldn’t hear her or he wasn’t answering. She’d tried just about everything short of going out and looking for him herself when he just showed up one day, with a woman beside him. The woman was as tall and as fair as he was, and she called herself Titania.
It was inevitable, really – anyone could see what was going to happen next. After an appropriate interval, Oberon and Titania were married. Mab stayed around for a while, and then… well, it wasn’t anything anyone meant to happen, but she just started to… slip away. Nothing malicious, it wasn’t like anyone *wanted* her to leave, but… more and more, the woman-shaped gap by Oberon’s side was filled by Titania, rather than Mab. It was all well and fair that Titania became the Summer Queen, but it offset the balance that had existed before. Two women was too many, in some ways. Maybe they were jealous of each other. Upshot was, Mab left the Summer Palace, left it to her brother and his bride, and went back to her own home that she left all that time before. It saddened Oberon, that she had to leave, but he knew all he had to do was call and she’d be there for him.
There’s something you have to understand, about faeries. There’s people who think we’re creatures, same as humans and animals, and that the magic in Faerie is a separate thing, something outside of us, to be used, when in truth, Faerie magic is as much a part of its people as it is a part of the place. There are creatures that live in Faerie that have learned to use the magic to survive, but for the true Faerie, the Fae and the Fey, magic is as intrinsic as breathing. We *are* magic, in a way. There’s no way to separate us.
-What about Elementals? You said –
Elementals are the concentration and embodiment of an entire reservoir of power. We’re not just magic, we’re a force of nature.
Anyway.
Mab went away, and without her to balance it out, Faerie became the Kingdom of Summer – always bright, always hot. Always the perfect summer’s day. People grow arrogant in that kind of climate, believing somehow that the perfection surrounding them is inherently theirs, that they are perfect and powerful and can do no wrong. Others started to believe it, too, and the Fae garnered a reputation as wilful, cruel beings who looked on other creatures as their playthings. Oberon was mostly out of this; his early doting on Titania let her bring a lot of her people to be with her, but when their relationship soured, as relationships do, he took to spending longer and longer times away from his palace. Travelling, mostly, sometimes visiting with Mab. This gave Titania pretty much free reign in the kingdom, and she took full advantage of it. She came to regard the kingdom as hers, and everyone in it as subject to her fancies. It was the power, it went to her head. When Oberon realised just how messed up his kingdom was getting, he came right back to sort her out. He closed a lot of the portals between Faerie and the other worlds, stranding some of us. Then he and his lady… vanished for a while. No-one knows where they went. When they came back, Titania was very… quiet, and Oberon seemed… tired. Like a lot of the joy had gone out of him. He stayed in the palace for a while, and then left again. Visited all of Faerie that he’d been to before, talked to a lot of people – but quietly, you know? And then, well…
…now he’s gone again.