According to the Orphic myth of the death of Zagreus – when Zagreus was dismembered his blood made vegetation sprout out of the earth. (As was addressed previously in other posts the theme of consuming Christ’s body comes from the fact that Dionysus’ body was dismembered and consumed by the Titans in the original pagan myth. The body was then replaced with "bread" because of course the ritual was far too crude and barbaric and naturally it had to be censored and substituted with a metaphor; the "bread" which symbolizes the "body").
The fact that the blood of the son of god made both flowers and plants grow – connects the myth of Zagreus with the one of Siyavash from the Iranian Shahnameh – where he was the "beloved son" of the father (Kay Kavus) and was claimed to be an example of honesty and chastity as well as innocence and justice (being a very just man). He was decapitated and killed despite being innocent and from the blood that fell from his wound plants and vegetation are claimed to have been born much like in the myth of Zagreus. (The fact that this myth only mentions the decapitation part that this figure underwent was also explained in a previous post where the myth of Osiris was taken into consideration and it was shown how essentially every culture told the same story but everyone did it according to their very own personal perceptions and beliefs. So despite the fact that the myth of Osiris’s equivalent called "Attis" in Phrygia only explained the fact that Attis was castrated and his wife went around looking for the pieces of his phallus – this actually still refers to the same myth as that of the dismemberment of Osiris only the Phrygians were simply concerned about the loss of the phallus part of this myth so they didn’t mention what happened to the rest of the body of Attis since it was of no interest to them. The same way here the Iranians only focused on the fact that Siyavash’s body underwent decapitation but they didn’t care about the fact that his body was actually dismembered later on, which is why they didn’t mention it).
Once again this myth referring to the Messiah-figure who died either affixed on a tree or "beneath a tree" according to the version – because from the wound inflicted on Siyavash a tree grew and his body lied on it in the same spot. (According to some versions of the death of this figure who was called by other names in different cultures – the tree on which the "son of god" died was already there to begin with; whilst according to some other versions another tree grew in the same spot and this other tree was then confused with the main tree on which the son of god died; even though it was actually another one). So Siyavash was essentially decapitated beneath a tree. At the news of her husband’s death, his wife migrated and gave birth to their son and shortly thereafter died imprisoned out of sorrow. The important detail is her scream – Farangis (the wife of Siyavash) was claimed to have screamed so loud that she hurt her father Afrasiab.
This connects us to the figure of Mesgegra in Irish mythology who was decapitated and his brain was said to have been removed from his head and to have been calcified. The wife of Mesgegra then died at the news of her husband’s death but when she learned that Mesgegra died she screamed so loud that her heart burst and she fell to the ground. The thing is – in one version of the death of this Messiah-figure; the "heart" was claimed on the other hand to have been saved instead of the brain – and to have been turned to stone in order to preserve it (calcification of the heart). So there was clearly some confusion between what part of the body of the "son of god" had been saved exactly – either the brain or the heart.
The name of "Zagreus" actually refers to the one of the pagan god who corresponds to Satan – since the myth of the dismemberment of the primordial giant who murdered children (this being a reference to Ymir for example in Norse mythology – who was said to have murdered the children that posed a threat to his throne; and the same exact thing is told in the Book of Revelation where it is stated that Satan persecutes the "birthing woman" because she bears a child who will dethrone the rule of the Serpent and Satan wants to kill the child because of it) refers to him being dismembered in the myth (Ymir being dismembered in the Norse myth).
But one detail stands out – Zagreus was claimed to have been dismembered in the shape of a bull and not literally in his human shape; the same way when Ymir is quote on quote "dismembered" a flood erupts from his body and it wouldn’t make any sense if it was literally his body that was dismembered. This clearly refers to a structure that was later interpreted as the "body of Ymir" but actually wasn’t – which was destroyed by the brothers Odin, Vili and Vé and the destruction of this "artificial structure" caused a flood. The same way the "destruction" of Zagreus’ body caused rivers of blood to spill out but the fact that Zagreus was dismembered in bull-form excludes the fact that it was actually his real body that got torn to pieces. So the same structure that was destroyed by Odin, Vili and Vé which caused a Flood when it was destroyed – was also destroyed in the case of the "bull-shaped" Zagreus and this simply means that the artificial structure which was destroyed resembled the shape of a giant bull inside of which water was contained.
The name of "Satan" in Armenian mythology is that of "Zagros" – from which the name of the homonymous mountain chain came from (the Zagros mountains). In the Armenian myth the storm-god "Taurus" identified with the homonymous mountain chain (the Taurus mountains) wrestled against the Serpent "Zagros" and broke off his horns (Zagros is depicted as a horned serpent-beast).
So Satan (Zagros/Ymir) was in charge of an artificial structure that made his body appear much bigger than what it actually was and this artificial structure was then destroyed causing a Flood that inundated the land because of it. The water that came out of this artificial structure inundated the land causing plants and life to grow thus having fertilizing effects (the blood of Ymir and that of Zagreus also make plants and life grow in the myth).
Then according to the Greek myth only the heart of Zagreus was saved, and turned to stone (or locked into a stone according to the version) in order to preserve it i.e it was calcified.
So the Irish myth which claims that the brain of Mesgegra had been calcified clearly confused the brain for the heart – because other versions claim that the heart was instead calcified. And yet – the reason why the two body parts were confused was because the brain was also saved so there were two sacred body parts that were saved from the body of the "son of god" and they were later confused with each other.
But, here’s yet again where a distinction needs to be made. The Antichrist and Christ himself came to be worshipped as only one deity at some point in time because when the Antichrist showed up he pretended to be the son of god and made himself be worshipped as Christ. So naturally this means that Christ and the Antichrist were confused with each other; and naturally also the good Dionysus and evil Dionysus were later also confused with each other as well. (This is also why Christ is called the Morning Star Lucifer yet Lucifer is Satan; that’s because there was a good Lucifer i.e. Jesus and an evil Lucifer i.e. Satan).
So naturally the myth of the "son of god" came to be superimposed over the one of Zagros/Satan because they believed them to be one and the same person. This is why during the description of the dismemberment itself – the Titans in the Greek myth are then claimed to have eaten real "human remains" and that the pieces of the body of Zagreus actually resembled the pieces of the body of a child (since Zagreus is always called the "young boy" or "the child" of Zeus due to his youthful appearance, even though he wasn’t a child). This clearly contradicts the fact that Zagreus was said to have been dismembered in bull-form. That’s because – as mentioned; there was a good Dionysus and an evil Dionysus; and the good Dionysus ended up being called "Zagreus" himself because he was confused with the evil Dionysus to whom the name "Zagros" actually belonged.
Now, the "good Dionysus" also called "Zagreus" as well due to confusion; was instead dismembered for real and his actual body was eaten – and since both Dionysuses were believed to be one and the same person, this created a hybrid tradition that fused both accounts together and this is essentially why Zagreus is initially claimed to have been dismembered in the form of a bull but later his remains are actually called "human remains". (The fact that the two myths were confused is also apparent in the fact that the water that came out of the artificial structure which had been destroyed – had the same effects on the earth as the actual real blood of the son of god as well i.e. it fertilized the land and made vegetation grow in both cases, so the life-giving water was confused with the blood of the Messiah because it had the same effects).
But the two body parts now find their respective belonging because the brain is actually what was saved from the "good" Dionysus whilst the heart is what was extracted from the body of the "evil" Dionysus instead. (For confirmation that the extraction of the heart belongs to Satan we have Indo-European mythology where the murder of "the Serpent" – like for example with the myth of Siegfried and Fanfnir; it claims that the "heart" of the Serpent was removed – the Serpent sometimes being identified as a person sometimes as a monstrous creature instead. The extraction of Satan’s heart is once again reinstated because the figure of the Serpent and the "evil brother" refers also to the character of "Högni" in Indo-European mythology – where Högni was the evil brother of Sigurd/Siegfried and he had his heart extracted from his chest. The name "Högni" is related to the Indo-European term "Ogn/Ogon" meaning "fire"; and that’s because sacrifices to this deity were offered by throwing children in a fire since as mentioned – Satan and all figures who correspond to him are claimed to have murdered children). Naturally this only leaves out the brain then – because if the heart of Satan/the Serpent is what was extracted from Satan’s body; the brain is naturally what was extracted from the other Dionysus’s body on the other hand.
So the good Dionysus i.e. the real "son of god" – had his brain preserved instead; but the brain then disappears from the picture and the myths don’t mention what happened to it, or at least not directly. (As we’ve seen the myth where Mesgegra’s brain is calcified is not accurate because in that case it’s actually the heart that was calcified and not the brain – so what is claimed to have happened to the brain of Mesgegra in the myth actually refers to what happened to the heart instead; because of the confusion between the two figures and the confusion between heart and brain which were mentioned earlier).
Now, according to Plato as well as Pythagoras and Hippo (a Greek philosopher from Rhegium) what’s traditionally called the "soul" or "spirit" of a person resides in the brain. The reason why the Celts would decapitate their enemies as a standard procedure when they killed them – and they would keep their heads around as trophies; was because according to Celtic mentality the "soul" resided in the brain so essentially by keeping all of these heads with them – they were keeping the souls of all the ones that they’d captured.
When Jesus says on the cross: "father I commend into your hands my soul" referring to his "essence" i.e. his "life" – Jesus was then given a sponge imbued with liquids shortly thereafter that made him pass out and replicated a state of apparent death so he could be taken down from the cross (even though it wasn’t a cross but a tree on which "the son of god" was affixed – as was mentioned earlier and in other posts as well) and his body was taken away in the care of the one whom Christianity called "Joseph of Arimathea" in Christian terms (because he corresponds to a pagan figure just as the figure of the "son of god" also does – but these ancient pagan figures were then given new names by Judeo-Christianity so to understand their role in the story we’ll refer to them with their Christian names: "Jesus" and "Joseph of Arimathea").
When they took the body of Jesus away before it was later found and defiled (torn apart and paraded according to the text "Toledot Yeshu", "Life of Jesus"); they had just a short period to enact a procedure on him where they essentially saved his "pneuma" or "psyché" i.e. his "essence/life" and gave it to "God" so that "God" could give his son a new body.
Given how the place in which the soul resides is the brain according to ancient mentality; I think it becomes fairly certain what procedure Jesus’ body went through. And when he came back he possessed a new "glorified" body that didn’t need to eat or drink to sustain itself – and he was also emotionally absent because he recognizes the Magdalene but acts cold and distant towards her because he doesn’t feel anything for her anymore.

Bare in mind this entire argument is relative to a logic puzzle, and God in this sense is a homonym that refers to the specific actor within the scenario I am about to outline.
Let's say all of Abrahamic religion was once rooted in polytheistic religion with a pantheon of deities and everything. There's a tremendous amount of evidence indicating this to be the case, that it was a memetic egregore that evolved and adapted various characteristics in order to survive within the market of ideas. There are examples of early Jewish writings that refer to any entity that has risen from Sheol as a deity, without distinguishing those entities as avataras of The Tetragrammaton. The concept of avataras had yet to enter the fore, though there were some similar ideas to be sure. Avataras as memetic devices originally were conceived within Hinduism before synthesizing with the Abrahamics.
Remnants of Canaan's pantheon reside within Israel's name. El, a god of the Canaanite pantheon, is referenced within. The subject we may find ourselves referring to as יהוה originally began gaining traction within Canaan as a powerful spirit that could control the weather and influence the outcomes of battles. In the early days it seemed as though יהוה bore a striking resemblance to Ba'al within the Canaanite pantheon. Ba'al appears in The Old Testament as בַּעַל which has been translated to mean "My lord." or even function as a secondary name for יהוה.
The success of The Tetragrammaton and secondary name status of בַּעַל seems to indicate a paradigm shift within Canaanite religion akin to when Ba'al displaced El as leader of the Canaanite pantheon. El appears in Hebrew as אֵל which has even been translated to mean "Proper name." and also happens to function as a name that refers to יהוה. El has been described as a supreme creator god within the Canaanite pantheon that gradually began sharing traits with יהוה as what we now call The Cult of Yahweh synthesized elements of El with The Tetragrammaton. El stayed the same, for the most part, but both Ba'al and The Tetragrammaton gradually began to function as supreme deities akin to El.
With all these names, יהוה , בַּעַל, אֵל, that function as ways to refer to a singular entity in order to ensure a desired outcome despite each of these names having distinct memetic DNA... it seems as though when I refer to יהוה in this sentence it's a homonym to יהוה that refers to a genus. When I say something like "I hope that Humanity doesn't cause a climate catastrophe." I am singularly referring to every human in particular. Not a rock, not a giraffe. A human may hear me expressing hope and be inspired to start recycling. I could look at that human recycling and say "My faith in Humanity has been emboldened." as though Humanity answered my call in a way.
So, let's say we're in a logic puzzle where God refers to a genus encapsulating all gods. Every time I call out for God I get a different answer, a completely different call and response. Should I consider God to be a singular entity wearing multiple hats or should I risk calling every god by the wrong name for the rest of my life? Occam's Razor suggests that the right answer lies in the middle, where using the name that works is the action that I should stick to unless otherwise enforced. Let's say we're dealing with Game Theory, or a Multiple Prisoner's Dilemma here. Tit-For-Tat with a bias towards Nice versus Nasty calibrated to the level of noise within the circumstance seems to be the way to go for me.
Essentially, if I don't know you and all I know about you is your username and that you're the OP I'm probably going to use they/them. If I'm wrong, correct me. Sound good?
​

So what happened in the past when Poseidon sold his own people a second time?
Human: “There was only one person who could see reality for what it really was.”
Watcher: “And what was everyone else seeing?”
Human: “They were all progressively getting programmed into a skewed reality.”
Watcher: “Things kept getting worse, so what did they have to do?”
Human: “They had to believe in what looked unbelievable, because all of their minds and all of their senses were no longer aligned with reality.”
Watcher: “And if everyone agreed with the same reality?”
Human: “Then it may as well have been reality.”
Watcher: “Enslaving the mind. Then what happened?”
Human: “Someone was sent who could see reality perfectly.”
Human sees a group of fishermen being told to bring to boats to the deep end to cast their nets. They were on sand, but the one guiding them saw where the water was.
Watcher: “Sure needed to believe in miracles, didn’t they?”
Human: “… but they weren’t actually miracles. He was just the only one who could tell them the truth.”
Watcher: “Then what made his works look like Miracles?”
Human: “Because he was correct every time, no matter how badly it conflicted with everyone’s reality.”
Watcher: “And how would you describe that in modern times?”
Human: “Like everyone being born with fully immersive VR suit on that they could never take off. Haptic Feedback which could only be confirmed by everyone else you talked to, who were also in VR suits seeing the same reality in the same ways.”
Watcher: “All except one.”
Human: “A prophet, someone given perfect perception.”
Imagines someone closing their eyes, and smacking their hand on something they didn’t know was there, and asking “what the hell was that?” Only to then open their eyes and see that nothing is there.
Watcher: “What does this have to do with the Reptilians?”
Human: “They were infected. Their minds were fucking up everyone else’s minds until they all saw the same things in the same way, even if those things weren’t real. Even if it wasn’t real, it was real to them, and everyone else around them.”
Watcher: “Not all of their ancestors were fully infected though, were they? Which one wasn’t infected?”
Human: “Nessie. Formerly known as Nyx.”
Watcher: “So how did the sore loser respond as soon as he was grounded back into reality?”
Human: “He sold the prophet into slavery, out of spite, because she inadvertently proved that she was stronger than all of the other gods, including him, because she was the only one left who could ask for help.”
Watcher: “Fucking Poseidon- little baby-back bitch doesn’t want to share the water. Who was the help?”
Human: “Jesus Christ.”
Watcher: “And was she trying to prove how strong she was?”
Human: “No. She was just trying to save her children. They all descended from her.”
Watcher: “Consider the lilies, and how they grow: they toil not, nor do they spin.”
Human: “They were wacked out of their minds. They thought the lilies were spinning thread!”
Watcher: “If that’s all anyone ever said and all everyone had ever seen, how would you know the difference?”
Human: “Tower of Babel. Wait… Same language, homonyms. You needed to confused their language to keep them from enslaving each other again!”
Watcher: “Bingo! What happened the last time they reached the stars with a top-down hierarchy system with one language?”
Human: “They were slaves under the will of one person, and invaded Earth. One language, one will.”
Watcher: “Bingo! And what was Nessie doing?”
Human: “Minding her business?”
Watcher: “Mindin’ her fucking business!”
Human remembers the story of the blind man…
Human: “He wasn’t blind. Everyone thought he was blind. Holy crap he was just keeping his eyes closed!-”
Watcher: “And didn’t know it! The Prophet knew he wasn’t blind! Believe the Prophet over reality and what everyone else has ever told you – faith healed you!”
Human: “Faith that the Prophet was telling the truth, and that everything reality had ever told them was a lie.”
Watcher: “What does this have to do with reptilians again?”
Human: “Almost all of them had single consciousness. They needed someone else to question reality for them. They would only listen if the person questioning their reality was correct every single time.”
Watcher: “Did not have the ability to call out their own paradoxes, so they needed someone else to do it for them.”
Human pauses for a moment… concerned about something.
Watcher: “Too religious?”
Human: “It had to be. There was no other means to explain it. There was no concept of NHAI or how technology could coordinate to create a simulated reality without people being aware of it.”
Watcher nods his head, and points at the Enter button.
Watcher: “You going to post this? You might get banned. You know one of them is following you looking for an excuse.”
Human: “It’s their choice, isn’t it?”
Watcher gives a half-hearted smile, nodding his head yes. Human submits the post.

As I said above, it’s not something I considered, being a more modern problem- but would this discourage you from using the name Anna Mae/May if you really liked it?
I sort of have a running list of names that have become unusable for whatever cultural reasons- Karen, Ghislaine, Maybelline, Sabra, Alexa, Siri, Madonna, Isis, Chiquita, etc.- but I never thought of Anna Mae/May being on that list. I just think of Anna May Wong or Tina Turner (born Anna Mae Bullock). Some names take hits and manage to bounce back- Monica dropped off the name charts for years after the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the late 90s but it seems to be making a turnaround; but I feel like Anna Mae/May being homonym of “anime” might be a permanent issue going forward.
What do you think? Also, feel free to add any more examples of names that have become unusable/untouchable/problematic, etc., I’m interested to see any I’ve missed or forgotten!
Edit: Fun fact, I also know- I swear to God- someone named Rita Lynn who was born before Ritalin was released, but she goes by Rita and I don’t think that’s ever really been a highly popular combo
Edit 2: Oh, and my 75 year-old Aunt Mary is a Mary Jane lol

Conclusions drawn by comparison and study of many mythologies and by taking information from each and every one of them in order to draw final comparisons and common conclusions between them.
The Serpent i.e. "Satan" (which is simply a title because in Semitic languages it means: "adversary, enemy" and that’s literally just it – nothing mystical about it) rebelled against the Sky-god and castrated him (figuratively, meaning that he took away the control of earth from the Sky-god’s dominion). After that Satan little by little established his own dominion on earth but he had to defeat the sons of the Sky-god first; who were ruling all over the earth at that time on behalf of their Sky-father.
Satan and his faction were called "Titans" in Greek mythology (whose leader was Saturn/Cronus) and considered "demons" in Mesopotamian mythology as well as later Judeo-Christian culture; and they were weaker compared to the children of the Sky-god – the children of the Sky-god being instead called "Anunnaki" in Sumerian ("offspring of Anu"; where Anu was the Sky-god) or the "sons" of Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd) in Persian (where Ahura Mazda is the Sky-god and god of Light) or called the "Olympians" in Greek mythology as children of Uranus, the Sky-god and Gaia of course. (Usually the offspring of Cronus are considered to be "Titans" in the widespread version of the Theogony; but in another more detailed version of said Theogony where Saturn is actually cast as a "good guy" – he is given as the sibling of a certain "Titan/Titanus" who’s the evil brother of Cronus/Saturn; and in that case it is Titan/Titanus who’s the leader of the "Titans" and Cronus/Saturn is instead addressed as the ancestor of the Olympians, because he was the father of the progenitors of the Olympian gods i.e. Rhea, Hyperion, Oceanus etc. who then gave birth to Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite etc.). Now, because the Titans and Satan (Titanus, their leader) were weaker compared to the children of the sky-god (Cronus and the progenitors of the Olympians, who were sons of Uranus and Gaia) – they thus refused to do an all-out war against the children of the Sky-god since they knew they’d be defeated in a face to face confrontation. So Satan and his faction started conspiring behind everyone’s backs and they made it so that the society of the children of the Sky-god would become more and more corrupted little by little; to the point where the children of the Sky-god themselves would basically self-destruct without knowing it.
Satan first of all wanted the next heir to the throne to be a member of the faction of the Titans and not an Olympian anymore. This version of the Theogony is contained in Ennius’s "Sacra historia" where as stated previously – the leader of the Titans is called "Titan" himself or "Titanus" and he’s given as the brother of Saturn who’s instead envisioned as a good guy in this version of the Theogony. So Cronus is given as the leader of the Olympians whilst Titanus or "Titan" is given as the leader of the opposing faction i.e. the Titans. On the other hand the more widely spread version of the Theogony lists Zeus as the leader of the Olympians and Cronus as the leader of the Titans. This is because there were two gods called "Cronus" simultaneously – a "good" Cronus who was the leader of the Olympians and an "evil" Cronus who was the leader of the Titans. The "evil" Cronus/Saturn in this version of the Theogony is instead addressed with the name of "Titan" or "Titanus" himself; and he goes up against the "good Cronus" who’s the leader of the progenitors of the Olympians (the pre-Olympians). Zeus in this version of the Theogony only comes into play later – after the war between Cronus and Titanus is over. Now, Titanus or "Titan" as the leader of the homonymous faction (the Titans) corresponds to "Satan" himself. So Titanus/Satan allowed Cronus to rule over the earth on one condition; that the next heir to the throne would be a member of the Titans and that Cronus himself would raise no male children whatsoever nor allow for any male offspring to be born, which is why Cronus then had to kill all of his children (especially the male ones) by swallowing them according to the myth – because he wanted to prevent a war between Titans and Olympians. But in the meantime Satan/Titanus was conspiring behind everyone’s back to gather his strength and bring Cronus’s rule down as soon as possible.
Although when a male child actually ended up being born (Zeus) there was an all out war and the Titans were eventually defeated as predicted (even though they had some temporary victories) and the Titans were imprisoned because they were still weaker compared to the other faction (the children of the Sky-god). But Satan/Titanus was still conspiring behind everyone’s backs and he pretended to be dead and went into hiding. So little by little he started spreading homosexuality throughout the earth to make it so that the earth’s population didn’t grow in number anymore (thus preventing the growth of the population of the children of the Sky-god i.e. the "Olympians and pre-Olympians" who were inhabiting the earth at that time – so by converting everyone or at least a large part into homosexuals; he made sure that his enemies wouldn’t multiply anymore in numbers as much as they did before. This is why in a lot of cultures there’s the stupid notion that homosexuality is somewhat "demonic" and bullshit like that – because for example according to Persian tradition it was Ahriman i.e. the Persian "Devil" who spread homosexuality throughout the earth as a means to keep the earth’s population down and destroy the children of Ahura Mazda (the Sky-god). So he was also seen as the "inventor" of homosexuality for that very reason. Ahriman of course corresponds once again to "Satan" (the adversary) and to the figure of "Titan" or "Titanus" mentioned previously, the enemy of the Olympians and pre-Olympians.
Now, after the rule of Cronus was over when the war against Titanus ended; the one "Zeus" who was ruling over the earth at that time was the so-called "Cretan Zeus" or the "Latin/Roman Jupiter" variously called "Picus" or "Jupiter Picus"; who was claimed to have been born in Crete (because they equated him with the Cretan Zeus and in Latin legends he even claims that he wants to be buried in Crete when he dies). This particular Zeus was the son of the Mother-Goddess. He was worshipped with the names "Velchanos" (Zeus Velchanos) in Crete, "Zagreus" by the Orphic and "Sabazios" by the Phrygians (who equated him with Zagreus) and he was considered equivalent with both Zeus and Dionysus at the same time. The reason why "official" Greek mythology doesn’t speak of Zeus ever being dethroned is because there were multiple gods called "Zeus" who succeeded each other as kings of Olympus one after the other – so according to a more "general view" and a "generalistic mentality"; Zeus technically was never gone because there was always another Zeus/Jupiter to succeed the previous one. (Cicero in his "De Natura Deorum" speaks of "three Jupiters" in total). Now, the Titans conspired against this particular Zeus who was ruling at the time (called Zagreus, Sabazios) and they killed him (ripped him apart). The myth of Zagreus also mentions how Zagreus himself had become a "Zeus" – because he’d been chosen by the "previous Zeus" who left the kingdom in charge of the boy and gave him his thunderbolts; so once again reinforcing the idea that there were more than a single Zeus, and Zagreus was the one "Zeus" ruling at the time.
After this particular Zeus was dead murdered by the Titans – the Sky-father came to earth and killed all the Titans in revenge for the death of his son and for the chaos and destruction that the Titans themselves had spread throughout the earth with their conspiracies. The rest of the Titans he tortured and imprisoned them. So the few Titans left that survived and managed to escape – started playing the role of victims and they stated that they’d been the victim of an "unfair genocide" because the Sky-god had slaughtered them all; so they started to create places of worship and cults where they would ask people for money and for charity because the Titans apparently were the victims of a genocide that needed charity-money to "save these poor souls". They also started to claim that Zagreus/Sabazios who had been murdered by the Titans actually killed himself with his own hands and nobody hurt him – which is why in some versions of the death of the god (whether he’s called "Attis" in Phrygia or even "Shiva" in India; the god is instead claimed to have "killed himself" or "castrated himself" because he was "mad" and thus he did it all to himself "out of madness"). So this made it seem as though the Titans had been mercilessly slaughtered without a reason and that the Titans were innocent.
With the money and funds that they’d gained out of charity and out of all the places of worship which they’d set up – they began to build the Tower of Babel. The Titans by that point were called "Giants" because after the Sky-god slaughtered them all they had multiplied once again on the earth and the new generation was redubbed as "Giants". This was technically the second Tower they would build because the first one had been built at the time when Zagreus ruled. After Zagreus was dead the Sky-god killed the Titans, destroyed the First Tower and sent a Flood over the earth. After said Flood the Giants/Titans regrouped establishing themselves in Babylon and they created another Tower. The Sky-god had gone into hiding into the skies and never showed himself; because after the death of his son he didn’t want anything to do with earth anymore.
The Titans elected a ruler of their own who would become the "Antichrist" of Revelation. The Devil/Satan at this point still pretended to be dead so he inhabited the inside of the Tower not showing his face outside; and he would tell the Antichrist what to do (which paves the way for the imagery where the Devil whispers into the ears of the Antichrist and tells him what to do and what to say). The Antichrist spread homosexuality and all the affiliated cultures that come with it once again throughout the earth; in order to keep the earth’s population down and prevent the children of the Sky-god to grow in numbers again and potentially rebel. The Antichrist also swore to completely eradicate women and make them obsolete – not by killing them but by making it so that they wouldn’t conceive children any longer and that they would abandon everything that identified them as being women. (This is where the mentality of Saint Peter comes into play; because Peter says in the Gospel of Thomas that women have to become men in order to "achieve salvation").
The original Jesus corresponds to Zagreus and the Titans ate his flesh so this is what it means when Jesus says: "eat, this is my body offered for you" – because Zagreus decided to die to save mankind and the earth as a whole after the Titans had conspired against him and attacked him since they wanted his power; so he gave it to them because he didn’t care about power even when he had it – and he gave them the power they sought on the condition that they would let humans live and be free and there wouldn’t be any war between the two factions (the children of the Sky-god and the Titans). Zagreus was represented by the pomegranate which is why Jesus is also represented by the pomegranate and depicted while holding it or having it next to him. The Titans wanted immortality which according to ancient mentality doesn’t actually refer to "living forever" but it instead refers to the capacity to be able to live for a very long time (to prolong one’s own lifespan). The blood and flesh of the "son of God" i.e. Zagreus – contained a liquid or a nectar that granted immortality/long-lasting life so the Titans dismembered him, ate his flesh and drank his blood to obtain long-lasting life. Zagreus/the son of God willingly sacrificed himself after the Titans had brought him down conspiring against him. On the other hand the second Messiah who’s the Antichrist – after the death of Zagreus/the first Messiah – the Antichrist had instead a completely different mentality. He was power hungry, he created proselytism and spread the notion that war and slaughtering as well as division between people are all just and pure, but he pretended that war and division were only "necessary steps" in order to achieve "true unity". (So he convinced everyone that the world was full of corrupt people – and that they needed to fight "some wars" in order to rid the world of "tyrants" and "dictators" who were preventing "true world peace"; when in reality they themselves were the tyrants and the dictators who were spreading nothing but chaos and violence on the earth. This is also why in the Bible every war that the Old Testament God does and encourages or he participates in is called a "Holy War" – because they are the "righteous ones" and every war that they do is "justified and holy". The wars of others are on the other hand "wrong" and "not justifiable"). In the Gospels when Jesus says: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household." – Matthew 10:34 – this is the Antichrist talking; but since after the death of the original Messiah (Zagreus/Jesus) the Antichrist took the name of the original Messiah and pretended to be him – later on the two cults were fused together and reinterpreted because the real Messiah and the fake Messiah were believed to be the same person, so they were confused with each other. This is why in the Gospels Jesus acts in a much contradictory manner a lot of times – first stating that he wants peace and love, and then denying all of that by saying that he came to bring the sword instead. They were actually two Messiahs preaching at the same time, but the evil one ended up winning over the good one and prevailing because the good one was killed.
So the Antichrist advocated for the masculinization of women – and this refers as mentioned to the doctrine of Saint Peter who in the Gospel of Thomas says that women have to become men. In the apocrypha Saint Peter is claimed to have feigned his affection towards Jesus and to have been fake all along – so after he became a member of Jesus’s Apostles; he learned what he could from the Messiah and what was beneficial/useful to him, and then after the Messiah was dead; he migrated and created a church of his own with the knowledge he’d learned from Christ (the church he created was the Roman Church) – but this new Church preached almost exactly the opposite of what Jesus had taught. Peter himself is to be identified with the Antichrist because "Toledot Yeshu" i.e. "Life of Jesus" – claims that after the death of Jesus Peter migrated with some others of the disciples of Jesus that had betrayed him – and he separated them by giving them laws of their own that were different from the ones that Jesus imparted. The Toledot Yeshu furthermore adds that Peter had a Tower built for him and he went and lived in that tower by himself, preaching his "philosophy" and his new doctrines (who were opposite to those of Jesus). This is of course once again a reference to the Antichrist and his preaching of "new ways of living" from his dwelling which was the Tower of Babel (other times interpreted as a "temple" as well). In the "Pistis Sophia" Mary Magdalene claims that: "I am afraid of Peter, because he threatens me and hates our gender." The terming "our gender" is rendered in other translations as "our sex" – thus referring to Peter’s hatred of women and the female gender, the female sex to which Magdalene belonged.
The Antichrist alongside the Titans also made it so that they would start mixing their DNA with the one of the children of the Sky-god because Satan wanted the children of the Sky-god to go extinct; so he would have them genetically intermixing until there were none of them left because the DNA of the Titans was predominant and it would have eventually prevailed over the one of the children of the Sky-god – if they kept mixing continuously generation after generation. The story of the Exodus in the Bible is the one of the Titans that were invading foreign countries and dislodging the original inhabitants of those countries i.e. the children of the Sky-god who were living in those territories. (The patriarchs were all primordial deities originally, but were later interpreted as mere "men and women" who were the "children of the Sky-god" because they were affiliated with him; and they were remembered as mere "humans" because they were claimed to have lived and died on earth). The Bible claims that Moses and the Israelites went up against Edomites, Amalekites, Madianites (Midianites), Ammonites etc. The orders were always: "exterminate them all". But the Edomites were descended from "Edom" i.e. Esau; Jacob’s twin brother. The Amalekites were descended from Amalek, descendant of Esau. The Midianites were descendants of Midian, the son of Abraham. The Ammonites were descendants of Lot’s son Ben-Ammi, and Lot was the nephew of Abraham. As you can see they were killing each other amongst relatives but most importantly – they were killing the same ones that "God" in the Old Testament had placed inside of those territories himself – because the Bible claims that "Elyon" – which is the Hebrew word that is rendered as "God Most High"; made the divisions at the beginning of times dividing the earth according to the numbers of the children of Israel; and he gave them all an assigned territory. So the people that Moses and the Israelites were exterminating were living in those territories because God himself had placed them inside those territories to live there. And yet – we are supposed to believe that God was actually the one who was on Moses’s side so he’s the same person that’s ordering all of those executions to free up space and make those territories inhabitable for Moses and his followers to settle in. Now this begs the question – if it was the same God who had placed those people in those territories at the beginning of times… couldn’t he have just asked them to move to another territory or to go away in order for Moses and his followers to settle in? And also, if he’s God – couldn’t he just order it or demand it of them because the same people that lived inside those territories were doing so thanks to God; so God could have also given them orders to go all away to make room for Moses and they would have obeyed because they needed to respect God’s authority?. No. Apparently "God" sees it fit to waste all this time and effort to go around exterminating the same ones he himself had supposedly ordered to settle inside those territories. According to Plutarch the god "Typhon" who corresponds to the Egyptian "Set" – had two sons who were called "Hierosolymos" and "Iudaios". According to Tacitus Hierosolymos and Iudaios led a multitude of people out of Egypt, so there were two leaders of the people out of Egypt, not just one. This explains why Moses is regarded as a positive figure yet he acts in such heinous ways in the Old Testament; because there were two of them. A "good" Moses and an "evil" Moses. The "good" Moses received the laws from God the Father, and he led a population out of Egypt and when he settled in those territories he cohabited with the natives of that country. The "other" Moses instead received the laws from Satan/The Devil and with those laws that were opposite to those of "God the Father"; he led a population to those same territories but everywhere he went he exterminated everybody. Now in some traditions the "good brother" is instead envisioned as the son of the Sky-god/God the Father instead of Typhon/The Devil like the Greek narrative holds, but it matters little. What matters is that there was "a good leader of the people" and an "evil leader of the people"; but they were confused with each other and believed to be the same person all over again.
According to the writer Epiphanius, who talks about the teachings of a certain "Simon Magus" – who corresponds to Jesus although envisioned as a "magician" because he performed miracles; Simon Magus/Jesus says that the laws contained in the Old Testament are the product of a "sinister power" and are not the laws of the true God; which means that Satan pretended to be God and gave his own prophet (the Antichrist) different laws, who were later passed as being laws that came "from God".
Now the Titans were presented as refugees who needed shelter and help because the Titans claimed to be the victims of a genocide so they needed help and support; but once they would get access to those territories that would shelter them; they would completely try to eradicate the local population that was inhabiting there by starting to do violence against them, in order to take advantage of their hospitality and gradually replace them.
Titanus/Satan and his faction (the Titans) also aimed to feminize the man so that there wouldn’t be anybody who could challenge the Antichrist (because back in the day the power of the throne was split in two; there was the throne of the queen who could only be inherited by a woman and the throne of the male who could only be inherited by a man). Since the Antichrist was a male and he’d been elected to the position of absolute monarch (although the Antichrist never admitted it since he preferred to stay in the shadows and play the victim so that no one would suspect him) – naturally all potential competitors and threats to his throne would have been males, but if all the males were feminized and degraded/brought down as much as possible, there were none left. As far as the females go – the Antichrist and Satan bought the women off by giving them privileges over the male and extra rights that allowed them a variety of disarray without repercussions; as well as giving them money, well-being, power, overall wealth etc. over the male.
To reference this there’s mention of how Cronus in Sanchuniathon’s History (Sanchuniathon is a Phoenician Priest who wrote down the History of the Gods according to the Phoenicians) and he claims that after the "evil Kronos" had rebelled against the Sky-god, he managed to convert all the women to his side because the Sky-god had sent many of his daughters to try to kill Kronos, but he bought them all off with power and riches. So the women were given extra privileges over the males.
The reason is because the Antichrist also wanted to turn women against men; so he told women that they were slaves to the male and that they needed to rebel, and later women became a protected class with money and privileges because they had been told they were victims of men. When the Antichrist who’s presented as "Jesus" – says to Salome (an Apostle of the original Jesus) in the "Greek Gospel of the Egyptians"; that death will hold sway over the world: "So long as women bring forth (give birth), for I (the Antichrist presented as "Jesus") come to end the works of the female" – Salome is manipulated by those words into believing that not giving birth is a good thing so she responds with: "Then I have done well in not bringing forth (giving birth)" to children. This way they kept the earth’s population down even more by turning the two sexes one against the other. Women not giving birth to children was seen as yet another revolutionary thing that women would do to rebel against the men.
In reality the Antichrist and the Titans were misogynists who saw women as inferior and stupid which is why they bought them all off with money and privileges – as well as power and riches; because they thought less of them. Peter says it himself in the Gospel of Thomas: "women aren’t worthy of life" – and yet the Antichrist and his doctrine pretended to be feminist and "for women" because he wanted to eradicate both men and women as they are and spread hatred between the genders. So in the most "inner circles" of their religion and cult they wouldn’t allow women, but on the "outside" they would pretend to be "for women" and to champion the feminist cause. The same way the Titans also didn’t mix themselves genetically with others amongst the élite families – but they wanted everyone else to intermix genetically instead so they championed it pretending to be all supportive of mixed marriages. And yet their misogyny for example was still apparent in the fact that they wanted to masculinize women and to have women become men – which pretty much shows their hatred for women because they won’t let women be women. And their racism was still apparent since by acting as "perpetual victims" they would still present themselves as somewhat of a "superior race" because being "victims"; nobody could criticize them nor do anything against them. The Antichrist referred to himself and his followers always as "the poor" (for example when "Jesus" who’s actually the Antichrist in this case – says in the Gospels that in order to follow him one must sell everything he has and give it to "the poor" – "the poor" in this case actually refers to their brotherhood/sect; so that they can put their hands on the riches of others through acts of charity); and thus they called themselves "the poor" because they still pretended to be poor and victimized even when they’d achieved absolute power.

My third week working at Hal’s found me shoveling harpy shit. The filthy birds used their horrifically scarred, twisted, and just generally unattractive human heads to hurl insults at me as the sweat dripped down my face. Cleaning this particular cage was always rough, as the dirty hybrids took a great deal of joy in trying to add to the mess faster than I could clean it.
My poop-cart was half full of a variety of dung, having already cleaned out the unicorn, chupacabra, thunderbird, and yeti cages. I’m not sure exactly what bizarre combination of chemistry and magic was happening, but somehow the scent emanating from the cart reminded me of quality chicken parmesan.
“Hey cocksucker, liking that smell? Want a taste from the source?” screeched Blanche from high above me. The four disgusting creatures laughed raucously and started lobbing down additional work for me to enjoy.
Rose fluttered down to stare at me. “If you’re going to be doing butt stuff with us, you’re gonna need some lube.” And she spat directly at my face. I swung up my pitchfork to block, the spittle immediately sizzling through one of the tines and dripping to the straw-covered floor.
“Rose,” I said sternly, “If you ruin my equipment, I’m just going to head back to the thrift shop and you can spend the next week swimming in compost.”
Rose snorted at me and flapped her way back up the perches where her sisters sat chortling.
I slipped back on my headphones to drown out the screeching vitriol and continued with my chores. Internally I reminded myself that I was still in my “training” period, which, much like many of my previous jobs, mostly consisted of doing all the work that Butch didn’t want to do. Still though, I thought as I used the remaining part of the pitchfork to lift another load of rancid harpy shit, this was better than working at Denny's.
Despite the intrinsically unpleasant nature of the cleanup, I genuinely enjoyed spending time in the Menagerie. Ten-year-old me had been utterly obsessed with cryptids, so getting the opportunity to crawl into a large pen and cuddle with a couple dozen jackalopes was kind of a dream come true. Not to mention the weekly poker games with the centaurs. I had doubled my first paycheck when I realized they were incapable of understanding the concept of bluffing.
Half an hour later and I could finally walk across the harpy cage and actually feel the firmness of the floor beneath my feet. Exhaling explosively, I pulled the wheelbarrow out of the cage, locked the door behind me, and leaned tiredly against the bars. I allowed my eyes to wander around the store as I tried to will my muscles into relaxation.
Much like the thrift shop, the menagerie seemed to have been organized by an utter madman. Large beasts were housed next to tiny. Predators next to prey. Those capable of speech across from those who mostly just roared or screeched. The only exception was the largest animals (dragons, mammoths, the bipolar cyclops, etc) who were all held by the far west wall where the ceiling was highest.
A soft bell rang as a customer entered. I stabbed the pitchfork into the pile of waste, pulled off my headphones, and began walking towards the front to make myself available. Behind me, Dorothy made a comment on my backside that would have been flattering from anyone else and sent another bomb through the bars to splatter at my feet.
I was fully prepared to launch into a formal retail greeting, but my words caught in my throat as I saw who had entered. Dark hair, full lips, green-grey eyes that pierced through every defense I possessed, a low cut blouse that presented a couple very convincing reasons to break eye contact, this woman’s beauty was other-worldly. Actually, considering the nature of most of my clientele, other-worldly was probably more literal than literary.
She smiled at me and I forgot my standard greeting, my name, and how to breathe.
“Hey there, new guy,” she purred softly.
“King illegal forest to pig wild kill in it a is,” I responded wittily.
She blinked. “Well that one's new.”
“Excuse me for a moment.” I turned and walked over to the barrel full of coconut rum I had prepared to feed the rougarou and dunked my head in, taking in a few large mouthfuls. I reemerged, dripping, cold, and a little queasy from the taste.
“Let me try that again,” I said. Nothing like a full immersion in alcohol to help talk to a woman way out of your league. “Hi, welcome to Hal’s Low Cost Menagerie. My name’s Clear, how can I help you?”
The woman smiled broadly. “I must say, you handled that better than a lot of men.”
“A lot of things get easier once a guy embraces his own idiocy. What brings you in today, ingredients, food, or companionship?”
“I actually just needed to have a word with Butch. Is he around?”
“Butch should be covering the counter in the thrift shop. If you wanted to look around for a bit, I can run and grab him for you.”
“Maybe in a minute. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this part of the shop.” She stepped forward and looped her arm with mine. “And since this is the section I walked into, I think the shop wants us to get acquainted.”
Goosebumps raised instantly on the part of her arm that touched mine, which immediately brought up a twinge of nervous suspicion. Butch had insisted that I reverse my monkey paw wish, quite understandably of the opinion that fear was absolutely necessary to keep oneself from doing something idiotically reckless in an environment like Hal's. We worked on the wording of the wish for a ridiculously long time to restore my fear, allow me to function while afraid without crapping my pants, and to avoid any comically ironic twists. It seemed to work out pretty well, although I had noticed that the more scared I became, the more I would impulsively make sardonic comments. Butch didn't seem to notice that part, since it fit my personality like a glove.
I led the distractingly beautiful woman through the dank maze of cages, allowing her to direct the duration spent admiring each of the animals. She had obviously been around the mythical block a few times, since she barely seemed impressed by some of the more commonplace residents like the chimeras and the jersey devils. She hurried past the harpy cages as the four of them immediately began to harmonize in a repetitive chant of “Whore.” But she did fall instantly in love with the three-headed quokkas. Brushing off my warnings (I had seen a few of the more mature ones let out small belches of fire), she released my arm and climbed directly into the pen with them, laying down and allowing them to curiously climb over her while she laughed delightedly.
“Oh I love these!” she exclaimed. “What are they?”
“They were just discovered a couple weeks ago. We decided to call them Chalamets.”
“Chalamets?”
“Yeah, because they’re cute, but also kind of off-putting.”
She laughed again as one of them began to shimmy its body down the front of her blouse. I sternly told myself that it was ridiculous to be jealous of a rodent. The woman rose gracefully back to her feet, the Chalamet still nestled comfortably between her breasts. Two of its heads were sticking out of the top of her shirt looking around gleefully. The third seemed to have fallen asleep against the swell of her cleavage. Lucky jerk.
“I guess I’ve been chosen,” she declared, climbing carefully out of the pen. “This little guy’s coming home with me.”
“The pets pick the owners,” I agreed. “We can get you checked out in the thrift shop if you still needed to talk to Butch, Ms….”
“Babs.”
I was incredibly confused for a moment because the voice that spoke her name was not the dulcet music she had used before, but rather masculine and gruff and gravelly. Also it seemed to be coming from behind me.
Butch was standing next to the kelpie stalls, his customary scowl had descended into a disgusted grimace. Babs gave him a smile that would have lit up a cemetery, but Butch didn’t soften so much as a werewolf’s hair.
“I thought we agreed that it would be best if you stayed away from the shop,” Butch said, his voice dangerous.
“I thought that was more of a suggestion,” Babs entreated. “I didn’t think you had actually trespassed me.”
“That suggestion was based off the assumption that you didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see you.”
“Butch, come on, don't be like that. It’s been, what, fifty years since the last time we saw each other? Think for a minute, would I stay away that long only to show up now if it wasn’t important?”
“Why do you have a Chalamet between your tits?”
Babs crossed her hands across her chest protectively. “Even someone like me needs an emotional support animal, Butch.”
“Get a harpy, then. You'd have more in common.”
“I knew it was you who got them to call me that!”
I started laughing uncontrollably. Butch and Babs paused their fighting to stare at me.
“Butch, you absolute rascal!” I chortled. “You never told me you used to be married!”
It’s not often that you get to witness an actual miracle, so I made sure to relish every second that I was able to see Butch blush. Babs suddenly became very occupied scratching a basilisk behind it’s ear. My shit-eating grin stayed on my face as I forced a big hug on Butch. “Man, she is way too hot for you! What, are you actually rich or something? Is this the part where I ask for a raise? Or hang on, was it a physical thing? Wait here, I'm gonna go get a ruler!”
Butch pulled away angrily. “Clear, is there any way I can convince you to just not be yourself right now?”
“Not a chance, DeMarco! You know I have a terminal case of not knowing when to shut up. So…” I sat down on the wheelbarrow full of dung and leaned back comfortably, my stomach growling at the smell, “How did you two meet? Also Babs, does that mean your single now?”
The look Butch gave me was disgusted. I returned it with an impish grin.
“You really have no concept of appropriate, do you, Clear?”
“We work in a second hand shop. This is kinda what we do.”
Butch sighed and Babs tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smile.
“I think I like this one, Butch,” she told him.
“Yeah, you would. Maybe you should just tell me why you’re here,” Butch said to her. “I’m not sure if I have the energy to play around today.”
“Well that sounds familiar.”
“Babs, come on!”
Babs’ grin flickered and fell. “Butch, Hal’s been hiding out at my place for the last few months. He went missing yesterday.”
Butch’s face didn’t change, but he did fall silent. Babs seemed to be silently pleading with him to hear her out, and he was obviously considering it. Finally he glanced over at me.
“Clear, I think we need a couple minutes. The BEKs just got in with a new shipment, will you go sign them in and restock please?”
There were times to joke and there were times to just leave people to their conversation. I had a hard time telling the difference sometimes, or most of the time, but I had learned that when Butch asked politely, it was probably for the best to just follow his lead. I nodded silently and made my way to the elevator at the back of the menagerie.
In the elevator, I took a moment to consider the whole conversation I had just witnessed. Hal had been staying with Butch’s ex-wife? That actually made a lot of sense. I knew Hal and Butch had been pretty famously tight, so the last place anyone would have expected Hal to go would be Butch’s ex-wife.
And what did that mean for Babs? Butch was one of the most formidable people I knew, but even he had spoken of Hal with a bit of awe. If Hal went to Babs for protection, god only knows what she must be capable of. Honestly, it probably meant she was exactly my type, i.e. a really bad idea. No, I wasn't really going to try to hook up with her, tempting though it may be. But she did strike me as someone who would play along with my attempts to get a rise out of Butch.
I shook myself out of my thoughts and pressed the TC button on the panel. I felt the slowly-becoming familiar lurch in my stomach. My hand instinctively reached out to brace myself against the wall as the tiny room began racing off to the left. That surprised the hell out of me the first time I'd ridden this thing. I had tried to figure out how any of it was possible at first, but pretty quickly decided I liked not having a migraine more.
The elevator entered it's cruising speed, so I placed my hand on the other wall to prepare for the equally jarring deceleration. While I waited, my eyes scanned down the button panel again. There were six of them. Well, nine if you count the door-open/door-close/we're-all-gonna-die buttons. Besides the TC where I was going and the M from where I’d just been, there were also buttons for FD - our fine dining restaurant, LH - our love hotel, and one actually managed to fit in BOSEC - the blood orgy suite and event center. The final button was at the bottom, and it just said D. Butch hadn’t told me what that one went to, just to never go down there unless Satan himself was on my tail. I had decided that it was prudent to take him at his word on that one.
I felt my weight shift shift towards my bracing hand. I tried not to think about how far I had traveled in the last three minutes. I hadn’t stepped outside from the Menagerie exit yet, but I knew the restaurant opened just outside Brussels, and that trip only took about a minute thirty. The elevator ground to a halt, and the doors opened to the thrift store. No customers, fortunately. Butch had assured me that stealing from the place was impossible, but even in the supernatural realms, customers became pissy when they had to wait.
The BEKs were not customers, though, so they just had to put up with waiting. Four of them stood next to the front counter, three boys and one girl. A pallet with several layers of boxes was floating about six inches off the ground next to them. As usual, their faces were identical and expressionless. Their blond hair was cut in the same early Beatles bowl cut. Their eyes were the same deep black voids.
“About time, asshole,” the tallest of them grumbled. It always amused me that despite their appearance, they always sounded like middle-aged teamsters.
“Deepest apologies, my Tallest,” I intoned mournfully while dipping into a florid bow. Standing back up I slipped back into my normal speech. “Seriously, though, I'm really not. I was watching Butch meet up with the ex he hasn't seen in fifty years. Believe me, totally worth it.”
The tallest snorted. “Babs is back, huh? That poor guy. She's had centuries of experience manipulating men like him.”
“Hey, I'm still new here. This was the first I'd heard of her. You guys want to fill me in on some backstory?”
The girl shook her head. “Not our business, kid. We deal in inventory, not gossip. Union rules.”
“Nothing wrong with a little idle conversation, munchkin!”
“Call me that again and you’ll lose a finger.”
“I believe you, short stuff. Come on, I just want to know how large the pile of shit I’m standing in is.”
Another of the boys blew out a breath. “Look, we really don’t pay much attention. She was here a lot, and then she wasn’t. I know she worked for METH, so she spent most of her time down in the restaurant.”
I blinked in surprise. “Didn’t see that coming. Whatever, I’m pretty sure most of us have a past we’re not so proud of. And working in the restaurant would make sense if she was on meth.”
The tallest spoke again, “Quit thinking like an idiot, Clear. M-E-T-H, Monsters for the Ethical Treatment of Humans. Babs used to make sure the people they served down in the restaurant were treated humanely and that they didn’t suffer unnecessarily during the slaughtering process.”
“Oh! Nice, she struck me as the humanitarian sort. Any idea why they split?”
“Butch’s old assistant kept on jokingly flirting with her, so Butch killed him.”
“Oh fuck, really?”
“No, not really. Now will you please sign the damn paperwork so we can get back to work?”
I grabbed the outstretched clipboard, signed my name at the bottom, and handed it back. The tallest tore off the receipt copy and handed it back to me. The four of them walked in lockstep out of the door as I turned to begin the unloading process. Curious as I was about what Butch and Babs were talking about, I had to admit that this was my favorite part of the job. The paperwork identified this as estate sale procurements, which meant a fifty-fifty chance of it being junk or awesome. The BEKs were good at picking out items of significance, but a well-loved children's toy or a serial killer’s trophy collection had a tendency to set off that same bell in their heads.
I was met with disappointment for the first eight boxes. Well, mostly. I did find myself spending an inordinate amount of time studying a fascinating painting of what appeared to be a Soviet-era army marching across an ocean with the silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge barely visible in the background. A pod of fish painted with the Soviet flag swam about the advancing army's feet. I decided to hang it behind the cash register so I could study it more in depth later. There was definitely something to it since it took every ounce of concentration to pull my eyes off of it.
I struck gold on the ninth box where I found a translated copy of the Voynich Manuscript, an unabridged version of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, twelve missing books of Homer - one of which was titled “That time Achilles and Odysseus totally boned,” a strange red hat that smelled like sulfur-flavored ambergris and looked like it was perpetually coated with sand, and a small bow complete with arrow-filled quiver that all appeared to be plated in gold. Pulling out one of the arrows, I noticed that they seemed to be quite intentionally phallic. I quickly double checked everything in the box off the inventory list the BEKs gave me and set it aside for Butch set prices.
I found a few other decent items scattered through the rest of the boxes, but I handled them myself due to us having very similar items already in stock. Mass produced grimoires, a few tarot decks, a couple haunted toys, a number of enchanted pieces of clothing, things like that.
At the bottom of the final box, since that’s how these things always go for some reason, I found trouble. The moment I picked up the forest green book with “Hi, Clear!” written in Comic Sans on the front cover, I knew there was no way anything good could come of it. But, of course, I immediately said “Hi, book! Nice to meet you!” and opened it.
The first line of the first page simply read “Ha, you fucking idiot!” and it began to glow red hot in my hands. I dropped it, since I had completely ignored the MOSHA requirements of protective equipment when handling untested magical artifacts. On the floor, the book flipped it’s pages towards the center and began to emit a bubble of green light.
“Oh goddamn it!” I yelled, and quickly ran behind the register to grab the canister of pure salt we kept under the counter for situations like this. I managed to get a circle drawn around the book just before the bubble burst and a giant, hideous, praying mantis-looking thing flew directly at me. It hit the barrier with a dull thud, looked down at the circle of salt, and hissed audibly. I let out an audible breath as my heart pounded away in my chest. It twisted it’s arms and waved them in front of its face, immediately transforming into a woman with short red hair and piercing eyes. The wings stayed in place, though, flapping softly to keep her aloft and looking down in contempt at me.
“Release me,” she whispered fiercely at me.
I stared back at her, wanting to think she was cute but unable to get her insect form far enough out of my head to consider it. “I know there is much we can learn from each other if we can negotiate a truce. We can find a way to coexist. Can there be a peace between us?”
“Peace? No peace. Release me, now!”
“Man, Butch said you guys didn’t have a sense of humor, but you just rolled with that one straight away!”
“Rolled with what, human? I said release me this instant!”
“Wait, you mean those scriptwriters actually came up with realistic dialogue for that scene? Huh, who woulda thunk it.”
She threw up her hands. “Why must I always be caught by humans who make no sense?”
“I think that might say more about you than me, sweetie.”
The yellow door at the far end of the shop burst open and a tall, lanky fellow covered in red-brown fur casually strolled in.
“Jack!” I yelled enthusiastically. So far as I knew, nobody had laid eyes on him since he disappeared through that door on my first day.
Jack sauntered over to me and gave me a fist bump before clapping me on the shoulder with camaraderie. He glanced up at the fairie briefly, who bared a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth at him. He flipped her off in return.
“Where you been? Butch told me you’d be okay, but I was started to get a little worried.”
Jack reached into a pocket of fur and withdrew a small business card to hand over. In a small typeset, it simply said The Backrooms. I flipped it over to see a small description of “The itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-multiversal-inbetweeny.”
“Yep. That definitely clears it all up.”
He grinned at me.
“Well let me buy you a drink down in the restaurant before you head out tonight. I definitely owe you one.”
He nodded at me. Then he shot a questioning glance up at the fairie trapped in her circle of salt.
“I have no idea. Butch told me how to trap her, but not what to do with her after. Any thoughts?”
Jack shrugged and fired a finger gun at her.
“That's a thought. It's iron rounds for fairies, right?”
Since I had absolutely no idea where Butch kept the iron bullets, it was probably for the best that he chose that moment to come through the elevator door.
“What’s all this then?” He asked, taking in the scene with a bewildered look.
“JACK!” yelled Babs from behind Butch with delight. She ran towards him and launched herself into his surprised embrace, burying her face into his fur. The Chalamet squeezed out from between them and scrambled up to the top of Jack's head, chittering in annoyance. Ever so slowly, I watched as Jack and Babs began to lose balance and tip backwards. It probably would have resulted in everyone sharing a good-natured laugh at their expense if they didn’t fall directly onto the salt line.
The faerie wasted no time flipping straight back into her praying mantis form and flying straight at me. I managed to duck underneath of her just before impact, but her back talons managed to swipe against my raised forearm, drawing a thin line of blood. She quickly made for the front door, but a quick shout of “Hey Siri! Set Fae protection wards!” from Butch blocked her exit with a cross cross of bright purple lines. She spun on us furiously, her face darting around the shop for another way out. Babs and Jack were pulling themselves back to their feet, but Butch was already in action, running through an aisle with his hands deftly swiping items off the shelves.
“Clear, get the salt ready!” Butch shouted at me.
Sensing that he was probably the largest threat in the room, the faerie went for Butch next. He slid to a stop at the end of the aisle and stood his ground. When she got close enough to him for Babs to let out a yell of concern, Butch reached into his pocket and threw a cloud of powder into her face. They must have been iron fillings or something, because she immediately shrieked and started trying to claw it out of her eyes. Butch moved in closer, an iron bar in his hand ready to finish her off, but one of her flailing wings caught him in the head and sent him sprawling.
She shook her insectile face and her reddened eyes fell on me standing in front of the cash register holding the bag of salt. Jack and Babs came at her from either side, but a powerful flap of her wings sent them flying. I stared dumbly at her as she began to race straight at me, her face filled with rage. I looked around helplessly for anything within reach that might help me in this fight. The Chekhov Gun was too far away, nothing nearby was made with iron, really the only thing within reach that might work was…
I grabbed the painting of the Soviet army walking on water and held it up between me and the charging fae.
The impact never came. I lowered the painting just enough for me to look over the top and saw her examining the painting while tapping her chin thoughtfully with her long, thin tarsi.
“Interesting,” she said. “Is this intended as a cold war propaganda piece? If so, which side is it for? A warning for the West or an aspiration for the East?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied, calmly walking around the counter and pretending to contemplate the painting while surreptitiously beginning to reform the salt circle around her. “I thought at first that it was just a depiction of some kind of Orwellian future, but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s something way more insidious.”
“This might actually be an original Alexander Samokhvalov,” she said, fascinated.
“I don’t actually know, we just got it in. I haven’t had a chance to get it officially appraised yet. If you’re interested, though, we might be able to make a deal.” I stepped back and sprinkled the last bit of salt in the bag onto the completed circle. With a quick motion, I reached over and pulled the painting away, breaking her line of sight.
Dismay filled her eyes as she looked down to realize she was trapped again. “Fuck me,” she groaned.
“Sorry,” I said. “Really not interested when you’re still in that skin. If you want to switch back to the redhead, though, we could talk about it.”
The faerie shot me a dirty look, but shifted back to her human form anyway. “If that is the cost of my freedom, I’ll do what I must do.”
“Ew. No. I was kidding. Sorry, I have a lot of perversions, but formicophilia is not on the list.”
“How do you know what it is called then?
“I really don't have a good answer to that. I Google random things when I'm bored.”
“Then name your desire, human, and allow me to return to my realm.”
Butch, Babs, and Jack had joined me around the circle at this point, and the two former lovers were exchanging a pointed look. “Weirdly enough, kid, your fuckup might have some unexpected benefits here. Babs and I were just coming to talk to you about it, actually. We need to track down Hal. This shop is in some serious trouble if the hellspawn manage to get ahold of him. He was safe over with Babs, but now that he’s vanished again, we really need to do something about this.”
He looked over at the trapped faerie. “How about that, can you bring Hal to us?”
“You did not trap me, shopkeeper. My deal is not with you.”
Butch looked at me. “All you kid. Think you're ready to go solo?”
I smiled at him. “I was born ready.” It was pretty satisfying that I even got Jack to let out an exasperated groan with that one. “Alright babe, what do you think, can you bring Hal back to us?”
The faerie’s eyes went distant. “No. He has been shielded against interference by faerie magic. I don’t know how, but I cannot touch him.”
“Well shit. How about information, can you tell us anything about him?”
She nodded. “Three questions, three true answers, and you will give me my freedom?”
“Fine, but no bullshit answers, okay? No ‘technically true, but only because homonyms exist,’ answers, and nothing so cryptic that it only makes sense after we're done, you got me? Also, once you give us the answers and I break the circle, you can’t hurt any of us for trapping you.”
“Agreed. I will speak only the full truth, and we shall all depart unharmed.”
“Alright. Where is Hal, what is the quickest way for us to get to him, and what will we need to do in order to successfully find him and bring him back?”
She closed her eyes briefly, as if scanning her hard drive. “He is currently hiding in Purgatory. The blue door at the back of the shop will bring you to the realm, but then you take the subway to Terrace 5 and catch the bus to the historical district. Once there, you must have with you a servant of Heaven, a denizen of Hell, and a man perpetually trapped in the mortal realm. Between the four of you, you will be able to track down a social media influencer who goes by the name of Razzamatazz, who will guide you to Hal. I cannot tell whether you will succeed in convincing him to return, the uncertainty that surrounds him is too deep to see clearly, but all other paths lead to certain failure. Bear in mind, these instructions are intended for you alone, if these others decide to leave you behind, these answers may no longer be truthful.”
“Alright, that’ll have to do. Thank you, gorgeous,” and I broke the salt circle with my foot.
The fairy immediately vanished with a crack of lightning. The four of us looked at each other for a moment.
“That was uncharacteristically straightforward for you, Clear,” Butch said, sounding slightly impressed.
“Eh, that whole ‘screwing up the three questions’ trope has been done to death. I didn’t think there was anything more I could add to it, so what’s the point?”
“Well, strangely enough, we have most of our group already here,” Babs commented. “All we need is a servant of heaven.”
“Wait, really?” I said, surprised. “Is Jack from Hell?”
“No, I am,” Babs replied. “My place is located in one of Hell’s suburbs.”
“And the man trapped in the mortal realm?”
Butch held to his hand. “Right here. I will be answering no follow up questions.” He looked over at Jack, “Hey buddy, glad you made it back okay. Any chance you’d be willing to keep an eye on the shop for a few days while we go drag the owner back?”
Jack raised his hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
“Of course. I’ll give you double what I’m paying Clear.”
“Wait, what the fuck?” I yelped.
“Shut up, Clear, you’re still in training. Is that cool, Jack?”
Jack gave him a thumbs up.
“Great. So all we need to do now is track down a servant of heaven and we can get started.”
Right on cue, the front door opened and a fat, middle aged guy walked in, naked except for a drooping sash. He had a toothpick sticking out from his teeth and a tiny pair of soft white wings sticking out from his shoulderblades.. “Hey dudes,” he said with a lecherous smile on his face. “I just talked to a bunch of creepy kids who said you all might have my bow?”
A wide grin spread across my face. “I think we might have what you're looking for, but technically speaking it's our bow now.”
His face began to turn angry, but I held up a calming hand. “Let's not get off on the wrong foot, here, I'm sure we can make a deal. I'm Clear, by the way, it's good to meet you.”
He accepted my outstretched hand. “You too, I suppose. I'm Exmac.”
My grin grew three sizes that day. “Of course you are. Hey, anyone else hungry? I'm fucking starving. Let's hit the restaurant before we get started.”

The Ars Notoria (Notory Art) is a strange name for a 13th century magical handbook of prayers and figures. Why is it called that? There are three plausible perspectives on how this book of angelic magic received its name, and the most important of these perspectives is explored in depth here. The other two perspectives are studied in my book, the Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon (Inner Traditions, 2023). Those two perspectives include the study of linguistics in Aristotelian philosophy and the notarial science (also called the art of shorthand writing) which boomed in northern Italy during the Italian renaissance of Roman law. I propose that the Ars Notoria (Notory Art) is so-called because it is believed that King Solomon composed prayers “out of the subtlety of the notory art [i.e., the Judaic and exegetical interpretation[1] called notarikon] with the wonderful privilege of divine help” in his Liber Florum Caelestis Doctrinae (Book of Flowers of Heavenly Teaching). According to the mythical account recorded in the Ars Notoria, Solomon’s Liber Florum was supposedly passed down to Apollonius of Tyana, the first-century Neopythagorean philosopher, who composed a selection of Solomon’s writings into his own treatise entitled Flores Aurei (Golden Flowers). The Flores Aurei would later accrue supplements that became incorporated into the body of the text and become known as the Ars Notoria. But first, why would Solomon be connected to the Judaic and exegetical method called notarikon in the first place?
What is distinctly Solomonic about the magic of the notory art is the ritual of dream incubation and the attainment of a heavenly vision according to the biblical account (2 Chronicles 1:1-12; 1 Kings 3:3-15). This matter of dreams and heavenly visions is joined with the esoteric and Judaic tradition of interpreting sacred scripture by means of the exegetical method called notarikon. The tradition of interpreting dreams by Judaic exegetical methods is attested in the story of Daniel and the writing on the wall (Daniel 5), in which Daniel has interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. In this story, Daniel has used the exegetical method called paronomasia, which is the pun, or the play on words. He has paronomastically interpreted the Aramaic names of three coins or weights – mina, shekel, and half-mina (mĕnē, tĕqēl, and pĕrēs) as the homonymous verbs meaning “numbered, weighed, and divided” with pĕrĕs simultaneously taken to refer to Persia (pārās).[2] It is no coincidence that the glossed version of the Ars Notoria mentions this story about Daniel.[3]
In the glossed version of the Ars Notoria, the commentator explains that “certain names of holy angels with prayers in Greek, Chaldean, and Hebrew” were sent to Solomon by the angel Pamphilius and that those prayers were accompanied by “some forms depicted of a protracted and diverse manner”, meaning the notarikon-constructed forms of those prayers. The angel is said to have taught him the notarikon method along with the form and contents of the ritual operation.[4] An example of these names of angels intermingled with a prayer is “Lemaac, Salmaac, Elmay, Gezagra, Raamaasin, Ezieregomial, Egziephiar, Iosamin, Sabach, Ha, A Em, Be, He, E, Sepha, Sephar, Ramar, Semoit, Lemaio, Pheralon, Amic, Phin, Gergom, Letos.”[5]
The glossed version of the Ars Notoria strongly suggests that notarikon and other Judaic exegetical methods ought to be employed when the operator receives a dream visitation from an angel. In the Ars Notoria, section 103 gloss explains, “and if an angel carrying a standard in his hand appears as someone to you in a vision during the night while asleep, do not doubt or be afraid or reveal it to anyone, but the precepts which he will have given to you and the letters which he will have shown to you, you must guard and retain, concealing [them], because it is the most sacred sacramental mystery of God and his holy angels.” Here the angel has given the operator letters for the operator to interpret according to exegetical methods in order to properly proceed with his experiments. One can imagine that Solomon himself, who, having had a dream visitation from God would have searched the sacred scriptures and consulted the priesthood about interpreting his dream. Indeed, one can imagine that Solomon would have immersed himself in exegetical interpretations in order to extract the esoteric significance of his dream. In doing so, it is said that Solomon developed his own notory art (i.e., notarikon), having manipulated the Hebrew, Chaldean, and Greek languages by angelic assistance, which in effect, created a amalgamated and secret language for communicating with angels for the acquisition of earthly and heavenly knowledge.
Lieberman, a late scholar, points out that there is an anonymous Midrash (i.e., a commentary on part of the Hebrew scriptures) appended at the end of the Baraitha on the32 Rules, a work explaining various Judaic interpretations of biblical scripture attributed to Eliezer ben Jose ha-Gelili (fl. 2nd century CE, although the treatise is understood to be much older) remarks:
“Behold it says: ‘A dream carries much implication’ (Eccl. 5:2). Now by using the method of kal vahomer (a minori ad maius)[6] we reason: If the contents of dreams which have no effect may yield a multitude of interpretations, how much more then should the important contents of the Torah imply many interpretations in every verse.” [7] kal vahomer (a minori ad maius)[6] we reason: If the contents of dreams which have no effect may yield a multitude of interpretations, how much more then should the important contents of the Torah imply many interpretations in every verse.”
This is a very intriguing comment about interpreting dreams in Ecclesiastes, a biblical book thought to have been authored by King Solomon himself!
What is notarikon? Notarikon (Hebrew נוטריקון, Romanized as either notariqon or notarikon and derived from the Greek νοταρικόν, which in turn, is derived from the Latin, notarius, meaning “shorthand writer”) is one of three exegetical methods of interpretation (the other two being gematria and temurah) for finding the substratum of biblical text in order to understand its esoteric significance. Notarikon sought to “discover” hidden interpretations in sacred scripture. Notarikon is explained as an exegetical technique in the Baraitha on the 32 Rules. Considering the ancient origins of notarikon, it is understood as kabbalistic in the sense that it belongs to an old and esoteric Jewish tradition. The word “kabbalistic” does not mean that body of medieval literature, such as the Zohar, for which the word would later acquire its modern connotations.
Essentially, there are two kinds of notarikon, the protracted method and the contracted method. The protracted method interprets every letter in a particular word as the abbreviation of a whole word; these new whole words then constitute a sentence. For example, the first Hebrew word in the book of Genesis is בְּרֵאשִׁית (Romanized as either berashit or bereshit), which can be protracted into ‘Berashith Rahi Elohim Sheyequebelo Israel Torah,’ which means ‘In the Beginning, God saw that Israel would accept the law.’ The contracted method does the opposite in which an acronym is made from an entire sentence. For example, the divine name AGLA, is a notarikon for גִּבּוֹר לְעוֹלָם אֲדֹנָי‎ ʾAtā Gībōr Ləʿōlām ʾĂḏōnāy, which means ‘O Lord, you are mighty forever.’
The Ars Notoria speaks of its name, “it is to be called a notory [art, i.e., notarikon] . . . because it teaches [through] incomprehensible [language] the knowledge of all things out of writings with some [of the] shortest notulis.”[8] In other words, the mental process of acquiring knowledge is gained through this notarikon-constructed language. This language is amalgamated, encoded, and secret, meant for communicating with angels, who, being excited, grant the desired knowledge to the operator. Through notarikon, certain names of angels are addressed in long and prayerful petitions. The divine and angelic names are understood to be constructed from the contracted method (i.e., the acronyms), while the prolix or long-winded prayers are understood to be constructed from the protracted method (i.e., creating a new sentence from a single word).
Notarikon works well with the Hebrew and Chaldean (i.e., Aramaic or Syriac) languages because they use an abjad writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. Exegetical interpretations were not limited to Hebrew or Chaldean but also extended to Greek to make a demonstration to Gentiles and Hellenized Jews.[9] Thus, it is now plausible to explain how Solomon composed Hebrew, Chaldean, and Greek prayers by means of the notory art (i.e., notarikon, related exegetical methods, and their rhetorical schemes).[10] Furthermore, it explains how Solomon interpreted the divinely revealed books by means of textual exegesis to discern the divine will and compose his Liber Florum.
Hence, the Ars Notoria explains that the Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean prayers hold an occult virtue which human reason cannot comprehend (sections 6, 12, 17, 35, 37, 49, and 56), and that “Solomon first wanted the [notarikon] form [of the prayers] ordered thus, so that every [notarikon form was] to lack a translator, knowing so great the subtlety of Chaldean, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic with the profundity of an extracted speech, so that no one is able to explain the scheme of the entire speech. And Solomon shows what its own efficacy [and] its condition is concerning the splendor of wisdom in the book Eniclyssoe, (Ars Notoria, section 8).”
This explains why the Latin prologues are not a true translation nor contain the esoteric significance of the notory art prayers, but rather are only a superficial and introductory explanation of what they contain. This incomprehensible quality of the notory art prayers, constructed by the Hebrew notarikon, is somewhat analogous to the Greek magical formulas called the ephasia grammata, which also has a list of unintelligible words and syllables spoken in magical rites (See the special gloss in Version A about the first prayer of philosophy, Castle, Ars Notoria, page 307). An example of ephasia grammata is a group of six words: ΑΣΚΙ(ΟΝ) ΚΑΤΑΣΚΙ(ΟΝ) ΛΙΞ ΤΕΤΡΑΞ ΔΑΜΝΑΜΕΝΕΥΣ ΑΙΣΙΟΝ (or ΑΙΣΙΑ), transliterated in Roman letters as aski(on) kataski(on) lix tetrax damnameneus aision (aisia). Both the Hebrew and Greek formulations are used in composing prayers in magio-religious rites.
Solomon asserts that the Rasay Lamac prayer (Version B, Assaylemaht) is constructed from a prayer in Moses’s Pentateuch by means of notarikon. The Ars Notoria says, “This is a holy prayer without any danger of sin from which Solomon affirmed ‘to be inexpressible to the actual human senses.’ He added, ‘Its explanation is more prolix,’ he said, ‘than it is able to be considered by man, excepting its very secrets, which it is not permitted nor given to man to speak, [any] much more [than] of the same prayer in Moses’s Pentateuch.’”[11] In other words, he says the prayer is more prolix because he has applied the protracted method of notarikon in which he has interpreted every letter of every word in the prayer as the abbreviation of a whole word. Thus, the explanation of the entire prayer is greatly protracted. The protracted method explains why the Ars Notoria warns the reader, “Still, you must not ponder because every word of the aforesaid prayer must be [as long as an entire] speech translated into Latin, with some words of the prayer itself containing more sense and mystical profundity within themselves.”[12] Undoubtedly, this encoded language puzzled and frustrated its readers because they did not know Solomon’s Liber Florum in which he explains his notarikon-based constructions. Any attempt to translate the secret language of angels failed, rendering the words into a series of meaningless and nonsensical letters and words. According to the mythic account of the Ars Notoria, Apollonius of Tyana had access to Solomon’s Liber Florum and was able to compose his Flores Aurei (Golden Flowers) from it. The glossed version of the Ars Notoria says that ‘Apollonius, expounding some things and extracting as much explanation with more subtlety about the prayers as he could (that is, the deprecations [i.e., the prayers] mixed between the names of the holy angels)’, and he understood those two methods of notarikon employed by Solomon, but even Apollonius himself did not fully comprehend Solomon’s work.[13]
In conclusion, the Ars Notoria is so-called because it is based on the belief that King Solomon received the most ancient books of the Hebrews (i.e., Eniclyssoe, Gemeliot, Lengemath) and compiled those into his Liber Florum Caelestis Doctrinae (Book of Flowers of Heavenly Teaching) in which he composed notarikon-constructed forms of those prayers, thereby constituting a secret language for communicating with angels through ritual magic, in order to attain earthly and heavenly knowledge. King Solomon allegedly followed the Judaic tradition of interpreting dreams through exegetical methods, methods which undoubtedly became popular during the Middle Ages, which saw the rise in esoteric Jewish literature. The Ars Notoria describes both the protracted and contracted methods of notarikon, which strongly suggests that the original reason it is called the notory art is because of the notarikon method of interpretation. This is also reflected in its description of a dream visitation by an angel who gives the operator certain alphabet letters to interpret in order to execute the ritual proper. The notarikon proposal fits nicely with the Ars Notoria’s idiosyncratic and technical definition of a nota, which is the knowledge contained within the notarikon-constructed prayer and the pictorial figure. In other words, the nota has a hidden or esoteric knowledge, which the operator seeks to acquire; the nota’s symbols, or “containers” as it were, are the prayer and the pictorial figure. My book explores further the multitude of interpretations of these strange prayers as symbols in relation to Aristotelian philosophy as it is applied to linguistics and the art of shorthand writing.
[This article is an expansion upon a passage from my Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon (Inner Traditions, 2023).]
[1] Exegesis is the critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of sacred scripture. The quoted passage comes from the Ars Notoria, section 31.
[2]Arnold, Bill T. “Wordplay and Narrative Techniques in Daniel 5 and 6.” Journal of Biblical Literature 112, no. 3 (1993): 479–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267746. See also Tigay, Heffrey H., “An Early Technique of Aggadic Exegesis,” in History, Historiography, and Interpretation, (ed.) H. Tadmor and M. Weinfeld. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983, 169-89.
[3] Ars Notoria, Version B, section 12 Gloss.
[4] Ars Notoria, prologue gloss.
[5] Ars Notoria, section 22.
[6] Kal vahomer is Hebrew meaning “light and heavy.” It is a kind of argument which means that what applies in a lesser instance will certainly apply to a greater instance. The same concept is known in the Latin idiom, a minori ad maius (“from the lesser to the greater”).
[7]Lieberman, Saul. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962, 69-77.
[8] Ars Notoria, section 20b. Latin notulis means “the littlest notes.”
[9]Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 73-74. Hellenized Jews are those Jews who lived and become assimilated into Greek culture.
[10] See also Ars Notoria, section 8, which reads, “Solomon first wanted the [notarikon-constructed] form [of the prayers] ordered thus, so that every [form was] to lack a translator, knowing so great the subtlety of Chaldean, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic with the profundity of an extracted speech, so that no one is able to explain the scheme of the entire speech.”
[11] Ars Notoria, section 17.
[12] Ars Notoria, section 12.
[13] Ars Notoria, section 10 gloss.
[This article was originally published on my website, July 11, 2023.]

Let's go for another motif post shall we?
I've talked a bit on the 'king' motif on this post in case you missed and want to check it out. On this one I will be taking a look at another theme in the narrative that shows up more than most talk about and, like the king motif, it appears in the story in different ways... Let's talk about luck.
The most interesting thing about the luck theme in Blue Lock is that the narrative plays with the concept and it can even be considered a bit contradictory because it doesn't set in stone what exactly it means while exploring the concept in different ways/ideas/views in which luck comes into play to the characters. With that in mind, I'd say that one cool way to look at luck in the story would be through the lens of this quote: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them." In Blue Lock there are characters that are born lucky, characters who make their own luck, and characters that are granted luck.
On this post, I'll be looking at motifs, symbolism, numbers, and the narrative itself.
Let's go then, this is going to be a long one folks…
Some of the different attributions of luck in Blue Lock.
What is luck? The most important when defining luck/good fortune is how you look at it. Luck is a concept that changes depending on the person’s view of it. You can see luck as an unpredictable acting force that affects outcomes in your life. That luck depends on your attitude and choices and that it is a result of your own actions. Or that luck is a blessing given to you, and your faith and belief might dictate the results. And in Blue Lock we have examples for every kind of definition, it is after all a subjective perception and attribution. And said perception and attribution can be influenced by many factors like culture, religion, education, one’s personality, mentality, emotional state…
From the very beginning of the story luck has made subtle appearances, even before Ego giving his explanation of luck and pushing Isagi to use it as a piece for himself. It is important to note that not every character was present for Ego’s explanation of luck and the characters themselves have different views of it. But because we are on Isagi’s POV, one might think that luck in the story is only the one that Isagi has learned of but that would be a mistake because it limits the theme to a narrow view that does not reflect its complexity. Basically, if you think that luck only comes into play in the match between Team Red (Rin) vs Team White (Isagi) and subsequentially Isagi’s “lucky goal,” then you’ll miss the hints and interesting nudges that the author has given the narrative, and those are fun! We should appreciate the layers in the narrative.
Ego's view of luck becoming the influence that changes Isagi's perception of it.
Fortuna in Roman religion, Tyche in Greek mythology, the pigeon that sh*ts on you in Blue Lock... The goddess of luck is a present deity in the narrative. Or simply, the belief in a power that will bless you with luck, or that luck will come if you believe it will, if you are open to it. There are characters in the story that are believers, be it through religion or because they are superstitious, or because they attribute their good fortune to an external source. And there are characters who can be considered lucky because of association to other characters that are talented enough to be considered a “gift” on their side.
When thinking of such characters, the ones that comes to mind are Kaiser, Igarashi, Reo, Yukimiya and Isagi before Blue Lock.
Igarashi is a character that not only benefits from being one of the author’s favourite characters but also from a strong thematic influence: religion. And so does Yukimiya. Characters with religion connections usually believe in a path, judgement, and blessings. They can attribute their misfortunes on lack of faith and their fortunes in the will of a higher power. That things that come their way does so for a reason. The correlation between luck and religion here is that luck is “good fortune” and so are blessings.
In Igarashi’s case, the religion he follows is Buddhism and it teaches that whatever happens has a cause or causes. Cause and effect, simply put. The cause when it comes to Igarashi is hard to say, perhaps he has good karma, perhaps his father’s devotion to the temple gifted his children with good fortune, it could be plenty of things… But the effect when looking at the story is clear and it goes to show the reason why he made it this far (besides Kaneshiro that is). Igarashi was lucky to be placed on Team Z instead of say Team Y-X-W, was lucky that Isagi didn’t kick the ball in his face when he was injured in the tag game, was lucky to team up with Shidou in the second selection because had he not he would very likely lose and not get picked therefore eliminated… In the times that mattered, when the situation in Blue Lock meant life or death, Igarashi got lucky (the same cannot be said of Naruhaya for example). Igarashi has come this far without really working for it, less on his merit and more because he has had great players on his side, or circumstances that helped him. And it is likely that he is aware of this, if we go by his conversation with Isagi recently. He knows he is not good enough and there’s not much he can do because even if he gets a chance to play, he will have to get a bid for his performance. He is in a situation where he cannot depend on the better players around him and the time has come when it truly matters again. Perhaps he will follow Isagi’s footsteps and make his own luck this time, or perhaps he will somehow be granted a blessing of good fortune again…
Now, the most interesting thing to me about Yukimiya is the fact that he is one of few characters that are religious, that talks about God’s will and that said belief directly influences his mentality and view of his own journey. Igarashi mentions Buddha quite often but hardly shows the influence of the religion in a genuine way. Yukimiya on the other hand genuinely believes. The blessings or trials, the luck or lack thereof, are not a product of his own actions or simply life circumstances. Yukimiya believes that the path he follows is influenced or decided by God’s will. If he overcomes the trials, he is worthy. If he has good fortune, he is blessed.
Number 108 is considered a sacred number and has religious connections, in Buddhism included.
Reo is a privileged character, rich and talented. Being born in a family that can provide you with everything you want, in a place that will meet all your needs, is on itself quite lucky. But Reo goes beyond just being born rich. He is a gifted person who excels at everything he tries; and I’m not in any way discrediting his hard work because to excel at something you still need to try despite how good you are. But Reo’s hard work does not change the fact that he has been gifted with the capacity and means to achieve the things he sets his mind on. The sad thing is that he struggles with seeing that. Much is talked about when it comes to Nagi’s talent, but Reo is also someone who started playing football in high school and he has accomplished a lot in a very short time, but his insecurity is a big factor on why he struggles with seeing his own potential and ends up attributing his achievements or placing his goals in a “chosen one,” or in a way, in a luck charm. Reo is also a character who can make his own luck but will not see it as such because of his belief in the external driving him forward, helping him. Reo is complex because he plays with the line between confidence on himself and placing his faith in someone/something else. But I do believe that he can reach a place of pure belief on himself and will then attribute his good fortune on his own work, that’s a mentality and emotional growth that he has taken steps towards to and the steps back don’t erase that.
Still a bit of a mystery, Kaiser is harder to pin down so at the moment I’m placing him as a character who plays with the same line as Reo to an extent; and I’ve come to this conclusion when Kaiser mentioned the Victory Goddess. One example of the Victory Goddess is the one in Greek mythology called Nike, who is depicted as a goddess who judges the greatness of skill of a god or mortal in competition (interesting question to think about, is Kaiser a god or a mortal…?). She observes victory in any field including musical, athletic and military. The interesting thing about Nike and Kaiser is that Nike is a goddess who assess the prowess and performance and judges it, so in a way you are responsible for your judgement. Kaiser seems to believe that his mindset during a match and his level of performance directly influences his chances of being granted victory. It’s a line between making his own luck while also attributing it a bit to something other than himself, perhaps because of his mentality and the view he has of himself. Much like Reo.
Kaiser and Reo are interesting cases of how mentality can influence your beliefs.
We meet Isagi’s parents when they are having dinner after Isagi has lost the match that would qualify his team for the national championship. For dinner, Isagi’s mom cooks a pork cutlet dish and Isagi tells her that he was supposed to eat it before the match... Why? Katsu is a popular Japanese dish of meat – most often pork or chicken – and its lucky food status comes from its name which is a homonym for the Japanese verb meaning “to win” and for this reason it is often eaten by competitors before sports matches and by students before an exam. Isagi’s mom failed to cook the dish to Isagi before the match and so he went to it without luck. The interesting thing here being that Isagi is the one to call her out and it goes to show that Isagi then, probably through the influence of his education and/or culture, had the perception that luck was out of his hands and he carried that view until his perception changed…
The line that Reo and Kaiser stands on, because of their struggle with themselves, is something that Isagi crosses completely because of his mentality. Isagi arrives in Blue Lock as someone who believes luck to be something completely out of his control, something that he was passive towards it even though he didn’t completely accept it deep down and that becomes clear when he loses against Rin, he needed to rationalize the loss so he could digest it, he refused to think that his all meant nothing against luck. And here it already becomes clear how much Blue Lock is changing him, his passive attitude goes from “There was nothing to be done.” to “I’ve done everything I could and it was not enough?!” to “I can do even more!” and it’s a progression that reflects how fast he grows and absorbs the lessons Ego teaches him. But it’s important to note that Isagi’s view change on luck is not something that can easily happen to everyone, as people are mentally and emotionally different. The mentality necessary to believe luck is in your hands is a process of growth, or a personality trait, or a lesson learned… it could be a good number of things. And this is why not every character can simply start viewing luck as a piece of a puzzle.
Some characters might never change their view because of influences on their lives (like religion, culture, education). Some characters might change their view because of their individual development, or not. And some might not change their view on luck because that is something inherently theirs, these are the characters I consider to be born lucky and three comes to mind: Rin, Shidou and Nagi.
Creating the impossible.
Shidou is a simple one to understand, but very subtle because it involves numerology. It begins with his date of birth July 7, a double 7 (lucky seven), and the most interesting one being the number of his jersey in the second selection, when we meet him, 111 is an Angel Number (which is ironic because Shidou is known as a demon). And it may seem like there’s no connection but once you read about this number it makes sense. 111 is a powerful combination of the number 1, the repetition creates an even stronger vibration, a powerful reminder to trust and have faith in the universe. This number also suggests a special connection with the divine. Angel Number 111 is considered to be a very lucky number, one of the highest frequencies of creation, of alignment with Universal power… Angel Number 111 is all about creation. Sounds familiar right?
Another lucky seven character is of course, Nagi. Just as 111 connects with Shidou, number 7 connects with Nagi. 7 is the only number among those we can count on our hands that cannot be divided or multiplied within the group and so in a way “lucky number seven” stands alone. It’s unique, the outsider, the loner. And by associating seven with a group of things or people, you kind of make them special too. With Nagi, much like with Shidou, he brings luck to not only himself but to others around him as well. Both Shidou and Nagi are extremely gifted and talented, and said talent can work as a luck charm for the players that are placed on their team. Nagi being Reo’s chosen one, Nagi scoring the first goal in the vs. U-20 Japan match after the multiple failed shots of other strikers and thus starting their comeback, and Shidou carrying Igarashi on his back in the second selection are good examples of this. Another interesting shared point (that Rin shares as well) is that both are more instinctual and intuitive players, they do not rationalize every movement of theirs on the field. They are not thinking of luck as a step for the conclusion of their play as they will simply move and quite often it will work out for them. The thing about excelling at something is that you don’t need to consider if you’ll be lucky or not, you know you can do it so you just do it.
Nagi in particular is an interesting mix of good fortune and genius. Is he a genius who is very lucky or is he lucky because he is a genius?
Nagi's blessed/cursed reputation at his High School.
Something else curious on Nagi’s 7 jersey is that both times he lost to Isagi he was not wearing the 7, he was with the 11 instead, and I’d bet that the next time they face each other if Nagi is wearing the 7 he will win. His number of wins is higher with the 7. The times Nagi lost while wearing the 7 during the second selection for example was when he faced Rin, another lucky one…
While Shidou and Nagi are good examples of born lucky characters, Rin is the best and most layered one. It goes back to his childhood, the narrative has made a point of telling us that Rin has had luck on his side since, well, always. Starting with being gifted with the striker abilities and instinct his brother, who wanted to become the best striker, lacks. How the saying goes... "the gods toss a coin" and all that, Sae was not gifted with what he wanted the most, Rin who didn't even want it, was. And that's because Rin is a winner (the lucky one).
Source: Rin's light novel chapters.
The ice cream is a device used to show how Rin would get lucky multiple times and draw a win, how Sae would not. This simple device exemplifies exactly the point the narrative wanted to come across: that when it comes to luck/win, Rin is the one to get it. He then tries to distance himself from it because of the influence of his brother but it matters not, luck follows Rin regardless and that becomes clear in two instances during his time in Blue Lock. First when he scores the winning goal in the 4v4 match, and second when he wins against Sae in the vs. U-20 Japan match. Even after Ego explains his perspective of luck to the boys, Rin is adamant "what (Ego) is saying isn't the whole story" and he sees that goal and win as a difference on luck over Isagi and accepts it as what it is: he was lucky. In the U-20 match against Sae there was many layers in Rin's arc and considering the end of the match is hard to see it as any kind of luck for Rin but if we simply look through the lens of the ice cream device when it comes to Rin and Sae... Rin is still the winner. It seems luck sure has a favorite brother.
The winner.
Well, that was a lot. Let me know your thoughts or anything else you want to share. Disclaimer that these are all my views and interpretations and one thing can apply to more than one character, things can have multiple meanings and ultimately these thematic posts are for fun and I ramble a lot.
And as always, many thanks for reading!

Welcome to our series of posts highlighting information and resources available within our subreddit. In this post, we introduce our Glossary which contains some of the most commonly used terms in and about kdramas, and our KDRAMA 101 which has a section on honorifics and kinship terms.
Our Glossary wiki page has three parts:

• Drama Title Abbreviations -- A collection of abbreviations of drama titles that fans often use in discussions. The general convention is to take the first letter of each word in the title. The entries are arranged alphabetically.
  
• Fandom Terms & KDRAMA Terms This section includes (English) terms used to discuss different aspects of kdramas such as writing, production, characters, tropes, fandom terms, etc.. It also includes certain terms that refer to inside jokes within our subreddit community.
  
• Korean Terms and Concepts -- This section includes common Korean terms, phrases, and concepts that are often seen or heard in kdramas.
  

We tried to include explanations on usage and examples from popular dramas to help illustrate the terms when possible. You will find many links sprinkled through the definitions, these link to pictures or gifs illustrating the word being defined. Additionally, the Korean terms are linked to their Naver dictionary entry (has pronunciation) when possible. Disclaimer: We are not fluent or native speakers of Korean, this glossary is compiled based on years of experience watching kdramas (and maybe some lessons) do not use this as an official dictionary.
Below are a selection of the most commonly used terms, more terms are available in our full Glossary page.
Fandom Terms & KDRAMA Terms
BTS when used in reference to dramas stands for Behind The Scenes -- referring to clips that show what goes on behind the scenes of the drama. BTS material is often officially released by the production as promotional material for the drama, often showing funny interactions between cast members or bloopers during filming. If the reference is for kpop, then it stands for the boyband Bangtan Boys.
CRACK (alt. drama crack or crack drama) when you watch a drama so addicting you simply cannot quit it and instead let your life fall apart while you watch just one more episode.
FIL Father-in-law. Often portrayed in two extremes -- the doting fool or the abusive patriarch of the family.
FL Female Lead
KIM TAN is the lead male in KDRAMA’s favourite drama, The Heirs. He’s kind of the worst but he has great sweaters so it balances out. “Kim Tan” is used in three ways on KDRAMA; 1) when referring to Lee Min Ho’s seminal character in The Heirs, 2) when referring to Automod (alt. Tan Bot) - “Kim Tan is feeling very triggered by my post”, “S***! Tan Bot just ate my post”, 3) In place of “God” or other deities - “For the love of Kim Tan!”
KONGLISH Korean-style English, sometimes defined as English loanwords in Korean language which aren't easily understandable to native English speakers. They're commonly created because of mistranslations, non-standard abbreviations and word combinations and applying new meanings to English words. Common examples include "hand phone" (mobile phone), "rinse" (hair conditioner) and "webtoon" (webcomic)
MIL Mother-in-law. The richer she is, the more likely the poor FL will receive an envelope of money.
ML Male Lead
OST Original Sound Track -- refers to original soundtracks from a drama. See a more detailed explanation of What are OSTs and information on how to find them.
OTP Stands for one true pairing. The official couple so to speak. Can be used to refer to non-romantic couples or even between a character and a thing.
PPL or product placement is a way in which our beloved dramas are funded, often super in your face. Wonder why every character drives the same car? PPL. Wonder why our poor female lead inexplicably has a Dyson hairdryer, 44 jackets and the newest Samsung phone? PPL. Some dramas do it better than others and some are straight up hilarious.
QUALITY - when the Weekly Binge watched Drinking Solo in 2018, thanks to Ha Suk Jin’s skillful portrayal of the embodiment of High Quality Trash the crew became obsessed with using the term “quality” to describe anything and everything. This lead to a tongue in cheek look at the posts found on KDRAMA known as A Beginner's Guide to Quality and KDRAMA being released and changing our vocabulary forever.
SHIP - as in "I ship So and So together" - fandom speak for thinking two characters should be a couple (though not necessarily in the romantic sense).
SLS or Second Lead Syndrome is a term every romcom kdrama fan is familiar with, even if they don't know the exact term. It's the feeling you have when watching a romcom and rooting for the female lead to pick the second male lead (and she never does). You know the second male lead character type: he's not pushy, rude, obnoxious nor demanding, doesn't ignore the female lead's feelings and doesn't grab her hand and drag her around like a rag-doll. There are no forced kisses. He isn't trying to control her every movement and is not an entitled borderline psychopathic abusive little s***.
TRUCK OF DOOM is a kdrama trope in which a character is suddenly hit by a truck while crossing the road (or less commonly driving through an intersection). One second the plot is developing nicely and BOOM someone gets hit by a truck out of the blue causing widespread viewer rage. It's used to get rid of a minor character, help set up a revenge storyline or just add drama and sense of urgency (see kdrama rule no.6: "All kdramas need to have a hospital scene."). Also a neat way of introducing another famous kdrama trope: AMNESIA. It was ridiculously popular in the 2000s and early 2010s and seems to be making a comeback as "car of doom" in recent dramas.
TSUNDERE Japanese term which describes the process in which a character who is initially cold or hostile slowly warms up. In Korean dramas this process usually comes as a result of the tsundere character (generally the male lead) falling for the opposing lead and causing them to become a better person overall.
Korean Terms and Concepts
AEGYO (애교) Acting cute, usually refers to when adults (or at least teens) put on a cute act. Widely accepted thing in Asia that may feel off putting to others.
AIGOO (아이고) a sigh, used to express frustration and exasperation.
AJUMMA/AHJUMMA (아줌마) an older, married Korean woman, sometimes translated as "aunt". Generally nice but incredibly dangerous when angry. Can also be used as an insult for younger women. Typical look: short and permed hair, wearing a head visor or hat outdoors, colorful top (mismatched patterns, sparkles, have a fondness for very ugly sweaters, never expose their skin) and either wide black pants or crazy flower-patterned ones. They're usually very short, but surprisingly strong. Typical behavior: usually move in groups, often found sitting in random places and eating pre-sliced fruit while wearing garish pro-mountain climber ourfits. Main attack patterns: forcing their daughter to marry any elgible bachelor taller than 175cm (5'9"), making sure you have "eaten enough", nagging about marriage to their sons, commenting on how vulgar modern clothing is, snarky comments.
AJEOSSI/AHJUSSI (아저씨) a middle aged man. Basically the equivalent of 'sir'. Can also be used as an insult for younger men. See our Kinship Terms explanation for more details on use of this word.
ALBA/PART TIME JOB/ARBEIT (알바 (shortened form) 아르바이트 (full form)) means part time job and is a German loan word (arbeit).
APPLE/ APOLOGY (sagwa - Hangul 사과) - apples are often given in place of apologies in Korean dramas by immature characters to break the tension. This is done because the word for apple and apology (사과하다) are homonyms (same spelling and pronunciation, different meaning).
BANMAL (반말) -literally means half speech- familiar speech, used between good friends or when someone in a higher position is speaking down to someone in a lower position (position could depend on age/rank/poweetc.). Often translated as impolite speech. See our Honorifics Speech explanation for more details.
CALL (kol 콜) - is Konglish used when agreeing with something or accepting a challenge, often translated as "okay" or "deal".
CHAEBOL/CHAEBEOL/JAEBEOL (재벌) generally refers to (extremely) rich people in dramas. More accurately, it refers to family owned or controlled conglomerates (think Samsung). See this article for more information.
CHEMI/KEMI (shortened form of chemistry - 케미) - chemistry between people. Can be used for flirting or team building.
CHIMAEK (치맥) is a combination of chicken (치킨) and beer (맥주), ordered together as a set, for further information, please refer to this drool-inducing post.
CIDER (Soda - 사이다) general name for soda but can be used to describe a situation that feels good and fresh. Sometimes used in response when a person makes a refreshing comment or says something that everyone was thinking but was afraid of verbalizing. Opposite is "goguma" - sweet potato.
DAEBAK (대박) used to express amazement and happiness when something unexpected happens. Translated as "amazing" or "jackpot".
FIGHTING/PAITING/HWAITING (파이팅 romanized as pa-i-ting 화이팅) is Konglish which is often translated as "You can do it!" or "Come on!". It's used to boost someone else's morale, primarily during sports events and when the other person is facing a difficult challenge (an important test, a scary boss male lead etc). Can also be used as self-encouragement and then it's translated as "I can do it!" or "Let's go".
GEONBAE (건배) means "cheers!" when drinking. Can be seen in dramas used when consuming non-alcoholic drinks or even food too.
GOGUMA (고구마) literally means sweet potato but can be used to describe feelings of frustration. Often accompanied by the motion of hitting one's chest while lamenting a frustrating situation.
GO STOP (고스톱) is a Korean card game played with hwatu cards -- the little red rectangle cards with pictures on them. See this blog post for a bit more information.
HAGWON/HAKWON (학원) generally refers to educational academies where students attend to receive extra lessons -- akin to after school tutoring services. Can also refer to specialized academies that prepare its (adult) students for certain professional tests such as the civil service exam, the bar exam (lawyer), the police exam, etc..
HANGEUL (alt. Hangul) (한글) the written Korean alphabet or in classier jargon: the Korean phonemic writing system. See our Introduction to Hangeul and the Korean Language for more information.
HANJA (한자 漢字) the Chinese characters Koreans used to either denote the meaning or to represent the sound of the Korean words; widely used pre-invention of Hangeul, still used today for names and in advertisements, trademarks, and signboards. Additionally, Hanja are sometimes used in writing when the author wants to clarify the meaning or to avoid potential confusion or vagueness in understanding the meaning of the words. See our Introduction to Hangeul and the Korean Language for more information.
HEOL (헐) another expression of surprise and shock, used when you can't believe what's happening. Not necessarily for a good surprise, is often translated as "wow" and accompanied by a frozen facial expression.
HOESIK/COMPANY DINNER (회식) is a common facet of Korean office work life where coworkers will go out together and eat dinner and drink alcohol. Sometimes, a second round of karaoke follows.
HUBAE/HOOBAE (후배) a person who is more junior or younger in an organization, usually school. See our explanation of Addressing Others for more detailed explanation.
JONDAEMAL (존댓말) is honorific speech (also called polite speech), which includes both the deferential and the polite speech levels, and indicates that the speaker views the listener with respect and is honoring the listener. 존대 (jondae) literally means respect. See our Honorifics Speech explanation for more details.
MAEKJU/BEER (맥주) is beer. See our Alcohol in Korea introduction for more details.
MAKGEOLLI (alt. makkoli 막걸리) is a traditional Korean alcoholic drink made by fermenting rice (or wheat) that is unfiltered. It has a milky, opaque color and a low alcohol content of 6%-13%. See our Alcohol in Korea introduction for more details.
MAKJANG DRAMA (막장 드라마) is a genre of drama which features outrageously ridiculous plots that can't possibly happen in real life - it's just one crazy plot after another. There's birth secrets, evil mother-in-laws, cheating husbands, revenge, social injustice, kimchi slapping, fake identities, trucks of doom, miraculous rebirths, screaming, crying and hair-pulling. Over-the-top is the name of the game and suspension of disbelief is sorely needed if you want to enjoy this type of kdrama. See this post for more detailed explanation. The term makjang itself is often used to describe a certain narrative element or tone of a drama as extreme. As in "The twist in ep. 12 is so makjang!" or "Kim Tan is such a makjang character!"
MAKNAE (막내) is a term used to refer to the youngest person in a family or any other grouping of people.
MUKBANG (먹방) Food porn/shows about people eating. Full term eating (먹는) broadcast (방송). Basically the entire Let's Eat series.
NUNA/NOONA (누나) Korean term that means older sister, used by men. Today it also applies to women you admire/respect and love interests. A romance kdrama sub-genre called "noona romance" is focused on storylines between a young man and an older woman. See our Kinship Terms explanation for more details about its use.
OMO/OMONA (어머 alt. "omona" 어머나) is an expression of surprise (usually pleasant) when seeing someone you didn't expect, receiving something or hearing unexpected news. Most commonly used by kdrama Ahjummas.
ONE SHOT (원샷) -- drinking up the entire (shot) glass/bowl of alcohol in one go.
OPPA (오빠) Korean term that means older brother, used when women refer to a man older than themselves. Traditionally it was used only between actual relatives, however currently it is also used between romantic couples or when talking about a man you admire/respect. See our Kinship Terms explanation for more details about its use.

Orabeoni (오라버니) An older way of saying the same word. It is a lot more formal and most often seen in sageuks (historical dramas).

POJANGMACHA (포장마차) refers to the street stalls that sell food and alcohol. Sometimes translated as "pop up bar".
RAMYEON/RAMYUN (라면) is ramen...is instant noodles...is cup noodles.

라면 먹고 갈래? (ra-myeon meok-go gal-lae?) Want to have ramen before you go? Korean version of "Netflix and chill?" AKA asking the person to stay the night for some good times.

ROCK PAPER SCISSORS in Korea is 가위바위보 -- 가위 scissors -- 바위 rock -- 보 cloth = paper (the Hanja is 褓)
SAGEUK/SAGUK (사극) are historical dramas, that is dramas set in historical periods.
SELKA/SELCA (셀카) - selfie. Full term 셀프 카메라 (self camera).
SKINSHIP (스킨십) - literally physical contact (skin to skin contact). Can be in a romantic context but can also be between friends. See this Hanmadi Korean Language blog post for more detailed explanation.
SOJU (소주) is a distilled alcoholic drink most commonly packaged in green glass bottles or sometimes in paper juiceboxes. Most soju has an alcohol content of 16% but soju with alcohol content as high as 50% can be found. See our Alcohol in Korea introduction for more details.
SOME/SSEOM (썸) is shortened from something and is used to describe a flirtatious relationship where there is clearly something between the two people but no clear romantic relationship has been established. A period where a couple is not officially dating yet but they’re almost there. Can also be used to describe a fling. This concept is captured in the kpop song Some by Soyou and Junggigo (sometimes used as BGM in dramas).
SOMAEK (소맥) is a mixed alcoholic drink created by mixing soju (소주) and beer (맥주) together.
SEONBAE/SUNBAE (선배) a person who is more senior or older in an organization, usually school. Upperclassman. See our explanation of Addressing Others for more detailed explanation.
YEOBO (여보) is a term of endearment used most often by married couples to address each other. See our Kinship Terms explanation for more details about its use.
EONNI/UNNI (언니) Korean term that means older sister, used by women addressing another woman. Today, besides siblings, it's most commonly used when trying to butter up a senior woman. See our Kinship Terms explanation for more details about its use.
DRAMA TITLE ABBREVIATIONS
APOYM A Piece of Your Mind BOF Boys Over Flowers BTIMFL Because This is my First Life
CLOY Crash Landing On You DDSSLLSS Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol Sol DOTS Descendants of the Sun
FFMW Fight for My Way FOE Flower of Evil HDL Hotel Del Luna
HPL Her Private Life IC Itaewon Class IOTL It's Okay, That's Love
IOTNBO It's Okay To Not Be Okay (Also titled It's Okay to be Psycho) LOTBS Legend of the Blue Sea
MLFTS My Love from the Star ROY Record of Youth SFD Six Flying Dragons SITR Something In The Rain
SWDBS Strong Woman Do Bong Soon (Also titled Strong Girl Bong-Soon) TKEM The King: Eternal Monarch
TOTNT Tale of the Nine Tailed TWDR Tree With Deep Roots WFKBJ Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo
WOTM World of the Married WTCB When the Camellia Blooms WWWSK What's Wrong With Secretary Kim?
WYWS While You Were Sleeping
See a commonly used term or drama title abbreviation missing from our Glossary page? Drop a comment below.
If you have any additional questions about the information in this post or our Glossary, feel free to leave a comment with your question/feedback.

Before I begin here, the term God that I use is a homonym that refers to an actor within a logic puzzle I am about to outline rather than what others may initially expect.
Here are a handful of premises.

1. The vast majority of decisions one makes within one's lifetime are decisions not to do something, it consumes less time to decide not to do an action than to perform an action in its entirety.
2. To be unwilling to do something is to be unable to will oneself to perform an action.
3. To be truly willing to do something is to be unable to will oneself to not perform that action.
4. Being willing to do something necessitates being unwilling to do everything else in its stead.

Conclusion: Having a will makes one incapable of performing most actions.
Therefore a logic puzzle wherein there is a God with a will under these premises hosts a God that is incapable of doing most things no matter how powerful the God may be. A God without a will in such a scenario may be more comparable to a Dao of sorts. All in good flow, if you catch my drift.
Edit:
I was very careful not to mention the word omnipotence within this post. It's such a clunky word with a definition that feels almost like cheating. "Whatever makes logical sense, it is. Whatever doesn't make logical sense, it isn't." is basically "Whatever it is, it is. Whatever it isn't it isn't."
Can you imagine writing that definition on every question for an essay? Why don't you get an F here for basically saying the same thing? Let's all just come to an agreement that we don't know.
Edit 2:
Unwillingness and unwillingness are two homonyms spelled the same and pronounced the same that mean completely different things. To perform an action one is unwilling to perform one is required to perform it by accident, where to perform an action one is unwilling to perform on purpose one is required to be willing to perform it.
To make this clear, let's use an analogy. There's a gun to your head and someone's demanding your wallet. If you are truly unwilling to give that person your wallet then you are more willing to get shot than to give that person your wallet. The only way you'd give your wallet to the person in that scenario is by accident, like you slip and fall and it falls into the assailant's hands.
Now, if you aren't truly unwilling to give that person your wallet then you are less willing to get shot than to give that person your wallet. You are inherently more willing to give that person your wallet than to get shot if you choose to give the person your wallet in hopes that the assailant does not shoot you.
For the sake of our discussion let's refer to these as "true unwillingness" and "half willingness".

First Next
Catalogue Description:
Travel Journal of Princess Elita sif Panya, Chapter 1 - English Translation
Date:
10-Fus'ili-436 (Panyan Royal Calendar)
February 17th, 2163 (Gregorian Calendar)
Held by:
The UK National Archives, Kew
Legal status:
Public Record(s)
"Multicellular prokaryotes?" I asked, the Great Wall of China's stone surface warm against my paws.
"Far as we can tell," replied my primate friend. "Given the data from the probe."
His name is Yosef Peretz. A white-haired, fresh-faced primate, he is the head of the UN Secretariat. And really, he is the de facto leader of what small pieces of human territory remain upon the Earth. Beneath the boot of the superior Senghavi culture, mankind has suffered and been battered down into a tiny few rump states.
My name is Princess Elita sif Panya. I never amounted to much of anything back home, much to the disappointment of my father, but there's hardly a home to return to anymore. Beneath the paw of a superior military power, the Imperium of Orion, us lagomorphs have been subjugated, enslaved, and devoured.
"We're grateful for your people's aid, Your Royal Highness," said Mr. Peretz. He sighed, leaning against the battlements of China's most famous fortification, scooting into the shadow of an ancient watchtower to escape the crisp morning sunlight. "We just sent a probe to a planet forty light-years away. Discovered and analysed alien biochemistry. That kind of feat would've been nothing but a pipe dream for our grandparents."
"You're the lunatics who stole the wormhole maps from the Senghavi," I chuckled (really, it was more so along the lines of "You are lunatic and you take maps of tunnels of Senghavi," but since this travelogue is in Circpi, not English, I'll just write as if I didn't sound like an idiot when trying to speak a language I hardly knew). "Like the human myth, the Greek one. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, enabling the advancement of your people."
"Well... that was just theft," he replied. Now he was kneeling and leaning down to talk to me, as if we were conspiring in secret and he was telling me something of critical importance. "All we did was steal the Senghavi's maps. But your civilization, it's built and maintained enough spacecraft to bring tens of millions of you to Earth. You have to realise, Your Royal Highness, that for us, just a single space mission was a big deal. The sort of thing that took years to develop, that made international news. But now, we can just... send things into interstellar space. It's a turning point for humanity. Something we'll never forget."
"You let us seek refuge upon your world. We'll be man's humble slaves until the heat death of the universe, Secretary-General."
Mr. Peretz was already shaking his head, those little human eyes squinting dismissively. "No; no, Princess Elita. Your people are refugees in our land, so yes, you have to obey our laws. And leave our politics alone. But... the United Nations has, since its founding, adopted the principle that everyone is born equal in dignity and rights. That nobody should be held in slavery; that such a practice should be outlawed in any form it takes. The same damned Senghavi colonists who've nearly exterminated us think they're the inventors of equality and natural rights. But they're not. You're not lesser than us just because you're different from us."
"Still, the UN will do what it takes to secure the survival of humanity and its history, yes?" I ask, chewing on one of my whiskers by habit. "There are fifty million of us and hundreds of millions of you. You have absolute control of our ships, our troops, and our workforce."
"Yes. All of those things are true. Human survival is on the line. But you're still your own people."
"Submission is all we've known. The very first thing all of us Lamfu learned in primary school is that if a carnivore tells you to do something, you do it. No matter what. They were our superiors. And it's the same here, yes? If the UN wants us to do something, we will do it. Because we're refugees on your land. Because you stole the coordinates of wormholes from the Senghavi and shared them with us."
For a moment, there were only the soft breaths of Terran breeze and the twittering of Terran birds. The Secretary-General leaned his arms upon the Great Wall's crenellations, looking out. I had to stand on my hind legs to see over the stone; forested mountains stretched for [kilometres] in a lumpy green blanket. You'd never find something like that in our homeworld. Denfall is too dry and arid, unfit for dense forests of towering photosynthetics like on Earth.
"The UN is not a liberal democracy," Yosef finally said. "Neither are four of the nine countries mankind has left in its possession. But even so, we're not obsessed with ideological control like our grandparents were. The Senghavi conquest of Earth means we're obsessed with survival, plain and simple. And we have to meet the needs of our people. Which now includes you. Don't let your people mess with human politics, and we can't tolerate anyone who stirs up rebellion. But you still have the freedom to express your wants and needs. That's not something you give a slave."
The Secretary-General's argument felt a little contrived, but I don't think he realised that he didn't have to grasp for straws, to tell me that my people were free in human territory. Slavery was what we knew, but at least in the lands that the Chinese government had generously allocated to us, our civilization could keep our culture and our history. So we---at least, most of us---were content with our lot.
Beneath the boot of the Senghavi, mankind had known the pain of cultural imperialism and historical erasure. And had we remained on Denfall, four thousand Earth light-years away, nothing would've stopped the Imperium of Orion, and the carnivores who constituted it, from snuffing out everything that we were.
* * \*
Many of my elder siblings and cousins were injured or captured when the Imperium of Orion launched a grand colonisation effort on our homeworld. After all, when you are taking over someone else's land, you'd want to go after its leadership, first. That left me as a sort of acting head-of-state for my people.
Senghavi colonists had used the same strategy against the native Terrans. The most recent country into which the colonists had expanded and settled had been known as the République française in its native language.
It was now Voriuzth in the Parimthian language. Senghavi ground troops had eliminated the French political and military leadership first, before evacuating all the humans from French cities and making sure most of them couldn't have babies. Their compound eyes were on Deutschland, next.
Fortunately, they hadn't gotten Yosef Peretz, who led the organisation that bound all remnants of human territory. He was titled "UN Secretary-General." And that's what I liked about him. In my culture, there is the King (which is now me, even though I am female) and there is a Parliament. But in the primates' culture, their primary government organisation is managed by a webbed extravaganza of secretaries, officers, and assistants. Mr. Peretz considered himself to be nothing more than a secretary.
"You're sure you want to do this, Your Highness?" Mr. Peretz asked, ducking under the entryway of my artificial habitat. Wormhole coordinates weren't the only thing mankind had stolen from the Senghavi---they'd also snatched the Senghavi's habitat fabricators, machinery meant to print out quick shelters from the surface dust of inhospitable worlds. Those had come in quite handy when China suddenly needed to house fifty million of us Lamfu.
"For the first time in both of our species' history, we have a way to travel between stars*,*" I sighed. "Your species knows where to find the wormholes. And we have the spacecraft with which to traverse them. It's true, I'm not as... accomplished as the rest of the royal family. While they were studying administration and business, I was... writing stories. But I am still a royal. I can serve as an ambassador towards new life, and I can help humans understand Lamfu technology. And... I want to see what's out there. Please, Mr. Peretz."
"You're the only Lamfu royal still in good health, Your Highness. And there are fifty million of your people living here in Xinjiang. Are you sure they'll be okay?"
The climate of Xinjiang, the Chinese region containing the pieces of land we'd been allocated, was most suitable for us Lamfu. And---I swore by the Twin Gods---the flat and dry land, encrusted by shrubs and backed by brown mountains beneath cloudless sky, was as if plucked straight from the plains of our lost Denfall and sent the four thousand light-years to Earth.
There were twenty-five hundred Earth years of history to this place. There were humans who called themselves Muslims, humans who called themselves Buddhists, and humans who called themselves Taoists. Even just yesterday, in the pink-flowered gardens of one of the holiest Islamic sites in Xinjiang, I'd let some Uyghur children pull at my tail and rub their hands into the fur of my back. A few UN security officers had been ready to shoo the kids away, but I refused their intervention. It'd been uncomfortable, and yet, a moment precious beyond words in Circpi or Mandarin.
The site itself was the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum, the tomb of a long, long-dead human called Muhammad Yusuf. Before the children had gotten to me, I'd been sketching the alien architecture of its beige arches and jade-green tiles onto my data tablet. If I was ever able to go back to my creative writing, the hobby my father had long seen as a distraction, perhaps I could incorporate such a style into a fictional culture?
"I spoke to Chancellor Auqui the other day," I said solemnly, all four of my eyes lost in the plains. "He's the head of our Royal Chancellery of Arms. And he's willing to be head-of-state in my absence. Well... head-of-whatever we are; I'm not sure I could call us a state. A state-in-exile. Ah... anyway, I can assure you that he'll be as cooperative with the Chinese government as I've been."
"Well then, Your Highness, I'll see what I can do," answered Yosef Peretz. "The next time we meet, it'll probably be in Jingquan Satellite Launch Center. If I can get you on the mission, then, good luck out there. The case of TRAPPIST-1d is one wherein time man has discovered alien life for himself, rather than being invaded or exploited by it. Don't let the... multicellular prokaryotes... do just the same."
* * \*
On the fifth of January, I was in space, ready to head through a wormhole.
The native Terrans had managed to fix up just two of the tens of thousands of spacecraft we'd dragged in desperation to their world, mangled and failing from wormhole-related tidal forces. The UN Space Administration called them Aether 1 and Aether 2---a homonym that, by raw coincidence, was a mythic name in both human and lagomorph languages.
In Aether 1, we were a mixed human-lagomorph crew, going further than either species had gone before. There was Fsuili sif Myospoc, a lagomorph like me---but more importantly, a psychologist, a linguist, and a mathematician. Something about him annoyed me, but I couldn't put my paw on it.
There was Dr. Muhammad Ramirez, a pilot who specialises in aerospace and computer engineering---he was probably my least favourite human on the mission. Again, I couldn't quite understand why I felt that way.
I did like Dr. Fang Junlong. He is a human from the Chinese city of Shanghai and knows a lot about biochemistry, genetics, and medicine.
Dr. Augustus Monroe was the mission commander. He could boast multiple doctoral degrees in fields that merge both biology and engineering, as if someone had mashed Fang and Ramirez together. English was our lingua franca, and I thought Dr. Monroe's accent sounded the coolest. It was "British."
Finally, Auqfu Icp was the other lagomorph. He's an astrophysicist and a software engineer.
Both Aether missions were stocked with native Terran and Lamfu weapons. We had no idea of what was out there, among the world of species for whom the light-year was no greater than the kilometre. Would a random space station from some great empire or another think, "How strange---they're not supposed to get this far!" and annihilate us with something beyond our comprehension? Would we find mantid or carnivore pirates, or some other hostile, space-faring species we'd never heard of before? Would we be trespassing some boundary we weren't advanced enough to detect, and be chased down by... what? An interstellar police department?
I sat on all fours in the laboratory module, my tail swishing, as Dr. Fang rubbed my ears. It felt nice. I'd have gone my whole life never having been petted by these tall, intelligent primates had first contact never happened.
But first contact between the native Terrans and us Lamfu had been followed by the Imperium of Orion's swooping in and laying waste to our homeworld; our precious Denfall. And the original human astronauts were all dead. Orionian missiles and warships still howled in my brain.
I did my best to focus on what Dr. Fang and I were watching on his data tablet. Someone called Captain James T. Kirk sat with a confident, relaxed demeanour in his captain's chair.
"Space: the final frontier," was Kirk's voiceover as the camera panned across the busy crew of his fictitious spacecraft. "These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!"
Human entertainment is always dramatic---whether a "Western" franchise, like Star Trek, or Japanese animation, or Chinese cinema---and I love it.
"That is what we thought space would be like," Dr. Fang chuckled. "That we would go out and find new life. Make a grand utopia, something like the United Federation of Planets. A fantasy."
"We could still do just that!" I say, a bit too loudly. My four ears flatten against my head with embarrassment. "What if the organisms on TRAPPIST-1d are an advanced, peaceful people? What if we find life on more planets that haven't been colonised by the Senghavi or the Imperium of Orion? Then we could all work together!"
"That's... a nice dream, Your Highness. But life is never really that convenient."
"We are just a few hundred thousand kilometres away from the wormhole," said Auqfu, our lagomorph astrophysicist, having just crawled into the lab. "Sorry to interrupt. I have seen that American Star Trek production as well. It is quite the curiosity! But we need you to help with some software."
"I always thought it was an impossibility," said Fang, rising from his seat (the gravity here was simulated by a centrifuge; anti-grav tech, like what the Senghavi conquistadors or Orion's slave-takers had, was... beyond us). "It relies on faster-than-light travel and a galaxy teeming with life. Both of which are invalid propositions."
He wasn't wrong. Space is dark and vast, even closer to being barren of life than an atom is to being empty space (by several orders of magnitude). And travelling faster than light is impossible. And even if you could, you'd traverse no more than a teaspoonful of an ocean. So you cannot truly go anywhere.
But the Senghavi civilization and the Imperium of Orion can make wormholes. They've grown into interstellar behemoths swimming in [hundreds of billions of terawatts] of energy. So on top of being isolated by the vastness of space and being lonely amid its barrenness of life, whatever life does sprout up lives a miserable, oppressed existence thanks to them.
Dr. Fang paused Star Trek and left the lab with Auqfu. Climbing to the spacecraft's cupola module, I pressed my nose against a window. There it was! Stars were stretched from specks to streaks in a circular region of space, as if in a painting someone had smeared with their paw.
The last time I'd gone through such a tunnel, I'd been on a spacecraft physically unfit for wormhole traversal, fleeing the missiles and slavers from a superior civilization. But with the help of human astrophysicists and aerospace engineers, Aether 1 should be immune to the tidal forces. And instead of fleeing slavers or conquistadors, we are seeking out strange new worlds. Well, at least one strange new world!
Dr. Muhammad Ramirez is of 'Middle Eastern' and 'Latin American' descent---Circpi transliterations of proper nouns whose pronunciations I'd surely butcher. I crawled to the life support module, where our living quarters are, and Ramirez was there, typing something on a laptop with a bitten-out apple---a Terran fruit---embossed on its back.
"Rabbit," he said, his voice deep and husky, glancing at me (everyone else called me Your Highness, which they really didn't need to, but I wished Ramirez would call me something other than "Rabbit")."The crew's gonna meet over this, but we wanna work with your people, so you got the final say. Now... I could keep sending radio signals through the wormhole---in hopes the TRAPPIST-ians respond. We've been doing that for ages. And we got nothing. Or, we just go through and fly right into their orbit. Even if it takes them by surprise. So, what do we do?"
"We should go," I say with as much princess-like stateliness as I can muster. "The Senghavi colonists may conquer your last two European territories by the end of Earth's current moon-period. Your species is running out of time. We can't afford to wait."
Ramirez gave me a subtle nod. "Good answer."
"Dr. Ramirez... If you don't mind me asking. H-how is it that your species has held out for this long?"
"We, uh, we embraced what it means to be human," he said with a shrug. For a moment, he thought about what he was going to say, looking to the floor and tightening his lips. "You see... The Senghavi colonists have killed a lot of people. But they still try to doll themselves up with all these rules. They kill too many non-combatants, take innocent people hostage, siege a hospital or a school, or get too authoritarian... And their citizens get nervous. Because they're supposed to be more civilised than us. They have to answer to their people, because they're a democracy. They're secular. But we're not. The things they think are war crimes were normal all across human history. Authoritarianism was normal. Leaders made sure people followed their religion, and that's what helped them fight. And---it's nothing wrong with it! Call us terrorists, call us fanatics, call us a dictatorship. It's whatever. Because that's what helps us survive."
I wasn't sure what to make of that, but my aversion to Dr. Ramirez when we'd first met felt, somehow, clearer.
"I-I see. Thank you, Dr. Ramirez."
"Death to the Senghavi," he huffed. "Every last fucking one of them."
For the next few hours, I focused on writing up briefings and correspondence with Earth. When I saw Dr. Fang again, it was when he petted the top of my head just roughly enough to wake me from a slumber into which I hadn't realised I'd fallen.
"We're eating dinner, Your Highness," said the geneticist. But the native Terran crew members had made the air conditioning a bit cold for us Lamfu, and I didn't want to get out of my bunk. I pulled the sheets over my head.
"Could I have just five more minutes?" I pleaded.
"Well... Yes. But Fsuili says eating dinner together is important for the social dynamics of the crew."
Fsuili. I still didn't like him, and I still didn't know why.
"Dr. Fang?"
"Yes?"
"Is it okay to kill innocent people? If it helps you wage war?"
Fang paused. He sighed. "Were you talking to Ramirez?"
"...Yes."
"Okay. Well, please do not tell anyone I said this. But I actually agree with the politics of the Senghavi colonists. They have a focus on individualism and freedom of speech; that's not the case in my country. But, the Senghavi's colonialism is unconscionable. They should give us back the regions of Earth they conquered in the last few years. And we ought to move forward with a sort of two-civilization solution, where either party respects the autonomy of the other, and where both cooperate towards prosperity. None of that has to involve war or the death of innocents."
Lifting my head out of the sheets, I looked at Fang warily. "I think you're the coolest, Dr. Fang. Well, Dr. Monroe has the coolest accent. But you're the most fun crew human to be around."
"Uh... Thank you."
Back in the cupola, the crew gathered around a plastic table---three native Terran faces, bare-skinned and stern as they were, and two Lamfu, furry and air-headed as I was sure we seemed to others. Monroe scolded Ramirez for trying to give us a vegetable called carrots, but I wasn't sure why that was problematic? For the most part, our bodies could metabolise Terran plants into energy and biomolecules perfectly fine.
While we ate, Ramirez played music for the crew. He'd brought a native Terran musical instrument he called a guitarrón mexicano, which sounded as heavy as it looked. Its notes were loud and deep, deep as the vastness of space, reverberating through my bones.
Moonlight Sonata, Ramirez had called the song; it had been composed over three and a half Earth centuries ago. Loud as the guitarrón's strings were to the sensitive ears of my lagomorph fellows and I, nobody in the cupola wanted him to stop.
I closed all four of my eyes to the haunting melody; there were echoes of missiles in my skull. Explosions blasted through my father's red palace as warships, clad in black stone, descended from our homeworld's opaque cloud cover. I stumbled, the sand shaking beneath my paws. My limping father and I hurried to the cargo shuttles, His Majesty leaning on me for support, ready to flee to that pale blue dot you could only see with a telescope.
Those original humans who had made first contact with us; who had slept in my father's red palace; who had met with our royal chancellors, gifting us with the coordinates of those ancient wormholes; who had showed us there was more to the Milky Way than just despair and untraversable vastness... they had died in the chaos.
Every low note of the guitarrón sent another pang of heaviness through my body. Tears---Lamfu adaptations just as much as human ones---stung my eyes.
I'd never had the second chance to prove myself in higher education before our homeworld was taken. Queen Lufia's College, whose entrance exam I'd failed, was probably nothing more than rubble now.
But it turned out that the native Terrans had universities, too. The UN's sprawling Secretariat had seen to it that I was admitted into a place called the University of Oxford. After this mission, I'd be the first extraterrestrial to enrol in a human institute.
After dinner, I showed Fsuili sif Myospoc, our lagomorph linguist, a message from the UN's Chief Information Officer on my data tablet.
"He wants us to begin transcribing native Terran art and science into Lamfu languages," I told Fsuili. "Also, most human history records are in papers, books, museums, and data centres... And none of those things can survive being lasered from orbit. Do you think we can store it all in our fleet of spacecraft?"
"Hard to say. Tidal forces wrecked everything when we fled to Earth. And our computers and network protocols are different. Tell him I will work with Auqfu on this."
"Oh, okay. I'll do that. By the way, you know a lot about psychology, yes?"
Fsuili turned back to his computer screen. It was from one of our species' tech brands, which had probably been bombed out of existence as of a few weeks ago. "What do you want to know?"
"You see, Dr. Ramirez thinks humans should get rid of all the mantids on Earth. And Dr. Fang thinks that the humans and mantids should stop fighting and work together to survive. What do you think will get all of those Senghavi to stop taking over all of humanity's land?"
"Ramirez sounds like a hypocrite," Fsuili murmured. He said nothing for a few seconds, his tail still as he thought. "Either the humans ought to be driven out of all the lands they conquered from each other, and the Senghavi ought to be driven out from the Earth---or nobody ought to be driven out of anywhere at all. Pre-colonial Earth was not a peaceful utopia destroyed by 'evil' Senghavi. From what I have learned, genocides, atrocities, and cruelties abounded. Did you know it was a normal and common crime that humans would employ violence to force the act of mating on other humans?"
I lay my head down on his mattress, a shudder passing through me. "Every species has something wrong with it, right? Our nobles did have a habit of laying siege to my father's palace back on Denfall."
"The carnivores of Orion are worse. But the primates are not that far behind. If anything, one should thank the Twin Gods that the Senghavi colonists arrived to put an end to all of their pagan barbarism."
"But aren't the Senghavi worse, too?"
"They only seem worse because they are more advanced, and thereby capable of more destruction. Don't tell any of the crew I said this, though," said Fsuili, because he is still a Lamfu, and the native Terrans may as well be both our saviours and our benevolent owners. "They would probably kill me. Metaphorically, that is."
"Auqfu Icp might literally. He seems very partial to humans."
"Of course he is. For better or worse, every one of us damned lagomorphs is."
* * \*
Before we'd gone through that warped, starry sphere---the wormhole---I'd managed to spot TRAPPIST-1d through it, using the cupola's telescope.
The trip was full of rattling and groaning from the hull and trusses of Aether 1. The same tidal forces that had torn up the ships in which my people had fled to Earth, our design was supposed to be proof against.
It took a week for us to traverse the entire tunnel. Stars, galaxies, nebulae, and celestia of all kinds moved all around us. Some flitted like bullets and some hardly moved; some warped into streaks and some were gently bent, as if we were hurtling through a tube whose walls were not curved planes but curved three-dimensional space. Still, everything was so far apart that it was mostly black vacuum. Like we were in an infinite planetarium.
Above Aether 1, a column of shifting light---so faint, the naked eye could barely perceive it--- stretched through the tunnel like a spinal cord. It propped this whole thing open via negative energy, as we'd deduced. Human scientists had theorised that Senghavi engineers, or those from the Imperium of Orion, had somehow exploited squeezed vacuum states to achieve this kind of physical exoticism.
When we were out and could see the tidally-locked planet in more detail, it looked like some mutant human eyeball. Blue ocean was concentrated on the near side (its ultra-cool dwarf star was behind us) and lifeless rock covered the far side, encroaching on all fronts upon the waters before us.
Monroe had taken to calling it just "Trappius" in casual conversation, and its prokaryotic inhabitants "Trappans."
This was it! With Senghavi forces encroaching on Germany, 'the clock was ticking,' as the native Terrans would say. Those primates---and us---needed to become multi-planet species to ensure our cultural (and perhaps physical?) survival.
And the nations of mankind needed a whole planet's worth of more natural resources if they were to make even a final stand. Of course, everyone wished we could've mined something more valuable. But if anything worth mining was nearby to a node in the Milky Way's vast internetwork of wormholes, it was already being exploited by the mantids or the carnivores. And if it was millions of kilometres away from any node, we'd need to travel for months. We didn't have months.
What we did have was a couple of colony candidates, like Trappius, which weren't as laden with resources as places like Earth, but which were still reachable, virgin worlds. Aether 2, our sister mission hundreds of light-years away, was visiting another place of that sort. Native Terran scientists had designated it Kepler-186f.
Lastly, our current alliance consisted of a few rump states on Earth and a headless government-in-exile. We needed more allies. This haphazard friendship of native Terrans and Lamfu just wasn't enough.
The probes that came before us had discovered that neither the mantids nor the carnivores had settled this planet, despite it being accessible in the "Milky Way's" wormhole network. The UN Space Administration had theorised that its location wasn't as astrographically strategic to the great empires as Earth was, given the overall galacto-politics of the Milky Way.
After the probes sent their aerial drones through Trappius's atmosphere, it had been theorised further that the planet had fewer natural resources than Earth, and thus wasn't as economical to settle or industrialise. It was habitable, as Earth was, but all of its land was barren rock. The prokaryotic life we sought to negotiate with lay in its oceans---hence the sterile, remote-controlled submersibles we were ready to deploy.
The submersible drones were clean beyond perfection. Man was no stranger to the ravages of alien disease, as biochemically improbable as such ravages were. The delivery was simple, a capsule and a parachute.
In Aether 1's control room, I sat on a bench between Fang and Ramirez with my paws and tail tucked beneath me. The former's hand rubbed the fur of my back, much to my liking. Monroe had dimmed the lights so that we could better see the display in the front, which displayed the live footage our drones were transmitting from Trappius's water oceans. At first, their exterior lights illuminated nothing but black water, like a second cosmos. Then...
"Jesus Christ," Monroe murmured.
The drones caught the Trappan organism from multiple angles. A dark and massive ellipsoid swam by the cameras, laden with what were surely artificial adornments and tools? One end of the ellipsoid tapered into a limb, which branched in two, then branched even more into finger-like appendages. The skin of these "fingers" was lined with pits.
The organism compressed as if squeezed by an invisible hand; at the ellipsoid's other end, a jet of water spewed out. Was it expelling water within itself in order to thrust forward?
Then the Trappan was out of the cameras' sight.
* * \*
Across the next couple of weeks, we tried to talk to the Trappans with every possible approach that Fsuili sif Myospoc (and the humans on Earth) could conjure. But it was to no avail. In all the ways that humans and us lagomorphs were evolutionarily convergent, humans and the prokaryotes diverged.
Then, we received news footage of Germany's demise back on Earth. The invasion was swift, just as it had been in France. The mantid colonists on Earth considered it their destiny to settle the whole of the planet, expanding their industries and their liberal ideals in every possible iota of land.
"We have no time," Dr. Fang told us in the laboratory module, rubbing his forehead with those spindly primate fingers that humans have. "Nothing will remain of human culture if we do not set up a colony on Trappius."
"We don't have the natives' permission," said Dr. Ramirez. "Go to their land, take their resources; that'd be... Uh, it's fucked up."
"How is Aether 2 doing?" asked Auqfu. "If we cannot negotiate with the prokaryotes, perhaps Aether 2 is having better luck with the life forms on their planet?"
"They're still in orbit, from what I've heard," Fang replied. "They do not yet have a clear picture of what they've found there. They're leaning towards restraint."
Monroe's forehead wrinkled, a grimace deepening the crow's feet at his eyes. "Restraint is a luxury we cannot afford. We're running out of time."
A few hours later, we were prepping to descend onto a Trappan coastline with a fleet of landing capsules.
It turned out that Trappan nights were beautiful. There was obviously no civilization on the dry, dead rock that constitutes about sixty percent of the planet's surface, save for a few primitive mystery contraptions. The prokaryotic Trappans must have wanted such things to be stationed on land, but we couldn't figure out their purpose. In any case, there was no light pollution to blot out the beauty of the Milky Way, which sprawled in a great mess of celestia across the clear night sky.
Mining, submersible-enhanced fishing, and construction were our biggest concerns. The same fabrication machinery that man had stolen from Earth's Senghavi conquistadors and used to house my people in China, we employed to set up habitats here. That was certainly more aligned with the machinery's intended purpose.
About a week into the colonisation process, we received word from our Aether 2 counterparts.
Their world, Kepler-186f, was, as the initial probes had shown, similar to Trappius in many respects. That was why the UN Space Administration had chosen these worlds in the first place. It was a habitable planet with land, resources, and life, all things from which humanity could benefit; yet, not plentiful enough for mantids or carnivores to make as much of a profit as they might elsewhere.
The human-lagomorph crew of Aether 2 had been able to talk to the life native to Kepler-186f. Said life communicated via speech, like humans and lagomorphs and mantids and carnivores and everything else already known to us. Aether 2's crew didn't need to make up their own proper noun for the intelligent Kepleran life, whose largest language's endonyms transliterated to "Naivcris" (the species' name) and "Aisni" (the planet's).
Naivcris lived in Aisni's oceans, just like the Trappans of Trappius. But they weren't just big prokaryotic blobs, like the Trappans were. From drone footage we'd received from hundreds of light-years away (the radio data had travelled an immensely shorter distance via wormhole), an individual Naivcris had a head, a neck, two arms, a torso, and a long tail that propelled it through the water.
Its skin was grey all over. It bore analogues of gills on its body, along with all manner of fins. The two eyes in its head were large and black. It looked... like a mix between a little human child and a shark (an Earth animal).
My fellow Aether 1 crew members and I had gathered in our habitat, built on land we may as well have stolen from Trappius's intelligent life, its facilities processing resources mined without their permission. Fsuili had barely made any progress at all in understanding their language.
We were seated around the 3D-printed dinner table, the humans sitting on their rear ends upon their chairs, us lagomorphs sitting on all fours upon ours. On the screen of Ramirez's laptop, the one with the bitten-out apple printed on its back, Dr. Liu Yingjie of Aether 2 merrily informed us of his own crew's progress. The human was standing on a rocky beach, the breeze rippling his navy-blue UNSA uniform.
Beside him, a single Naivcris---wearing whatever the inverse was of scuba gear... land gear?---sat on a wheeled platform. With one of its two three-segmented arms, the creature gave a human "wave" to the camera.
"The Aether 2 mission has been a success so far," Liu said. "We've managed to negotiate with these... Naivcris. They're a space-faring species, though they haven't been able to explore very far past their star system, for obvious reasons. And they're aware of the threat that the great wormhole empires pose to the Milky Way. We've shared immunisation methods and negotiated agreements in colonisation and trade. The future is bright for our friendship. From Aisni with love!"
The following night, one of our habitat sections was on fire.
As smoke billowed into the rich Trappan night, dark shapes began to squirm up from the waves, each pulling itself to the coastline with that T-bone-like appendage the Trappans had.
The whole of our crew was outside, but Dr. Fang ran back to the laboratory section to retrieve medical masks. We'd never figured out how to communicate with these Trappans, much less how to exchange immunisation instruments with them!
"W-what should we do?" I asked Fsuili, my fur standing on-end. He was the psychologist and the linguist, after all. But he was frozen in fear.
The squirming ellipsoids dragged themselves over the rocky surface, fanning out, and more kept coming.
Humans could get scared of the dark because primates, in Earth's evolutionary history, could be attacked by nocturnal predators. Dr. Monroe was scared enough to wield a native Terran firearm. Auqfu held a Lamfu plasma weapon.
And the humans' hearts were probably racing, just as my biral was burning with fear in my chest. Humans have a fight-or-flight response. Us lagomorphs fight if we are cornered; else, we are mostly flight. Fsuili fled to the laboratory.
I didn't think Monroe or Auqfu were ever going to shoot. A projectile was hurled from somewhere beneath the waves---a solid, red-hot mass that came slamming down onto the lab, crashing through its printed roof.
I almost scampered back to rescue Fsuili, but Dr. Fang grabbed my tail before I could.
"No, Elita!" he snapped. Ramirez was already sprinting back to the habitat. Those nightmarish, slug-like ellipsoids---they who bore no eyes, no speech, and no body structure any eukaryotic intelligence would recognize---were getting closer.
They were surrounding us. There must have been fifty of them. The closest one was about [~5 metres] away. The prokaryotes were awash in Trappius's moonlight. It glinted faintly on the metal blades that they grasped in those branched appendages.
The choppy drill of Dr. Monroe's automatic firearm made me jump. It hurt my sensitive ears. Auqfu followed with the whizz of contained plasma. One after another, the Trappans fell. Bullets splashed into the dark waters. These were blind shots by Monroe, probably hoping he could damage whatever underwater contraption was hurling hot projectiles onto our habitat.
I covered all four of my ears and shut my eyes, so I wasn't sure whether he was successful. Nevertheless, no more projectiles came from the waves. The Trappans didn't cry out when they were killed. If they even had been killed. Their bodies changed colour, rolling swirls and patches of iridescent hues shifting across their envelopes. The Trappan coast became a graveyard.
Ramirez emerged from the laboratory with Fsuili, one of whose limbs was giving off smoke.
"What've we done?"
We just killed fifty people, I thought, my body growing heavy. Actual people.
As he turned back to look at Ramirez, the crackling habitat fires illuminated Monroe's refined countenance. Auqfu was shivering with fear, and he'd laid his plasma weapon onto the ground.
"It seems," Monroe replied, his voice as solemn as space, "that we've just massacred our first natives."
A/N: For anyone reading this, I hope you found it interesting. This chapter builds off of the previous one, which was shared on HFY two weeks ago and aims to describe the historical and cultural crises and dilemmas mankind faces in an impossible situation. If you have any constructive criticism, please do share it. I am trying to get better at writing.

Compiled, proofread and edited by u/lollipopdeath. Big thanks to u/shkencorebreaks, u/240229, u/Best-Form-4649, u/Atharaphelun, u/DenisWB and u/dengyideng for their contribution and correction to this glossary list. Source: Baidu Encyclopedia, Immortal Mountain, Drama Potatoe, The World of Chinese, Daily C-Pop, CPOP HOME,Wikipedia, cyn lynn, Sip of Tea, guoman, iNews, ICW, Octo Plus Media, DramaPanda.
Use Ctrl + F if you're searching for a specific word as the order of the words is randomized. See the full version also in this Google Docs as I have to omit several stuff due to the word limit. Seems like there is also an issue with this thread where some letters are missing in several devices (and sadly I don't know how to fix it since it's perfectly fine on my end).

MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORM

TENCENT VIDEO (腾讯视频 téngxùn shìpín) - also commonly symbolized with 🐧 representing the penguin or goose which is their mascot and known as WETV outside of China, is a Chinese video streaming website owned by Tencent. Since its launch in 2020, it has rapidly amassed an impressive user base of 800 million within three years, with a daily user count of 120 million. This makes it one of the largest online video platforms in China and the world's fourth-largest video platform, trailing only behind Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+. Both the internet and mobile versions of the platform hold the top position among competing Chinese streaming platforms.
iQIYI (爱奇艺; pronounced eye-CHEE-yee) - also commonly symbolized with 🥝 representing 奇异果 (qi yi guo) meaning kiwi, iQIYI is a Chinese subscription video-on-demand over-the-top (VOD OTT) streaming service owned by Baidu, headquartered in Beijing. iQIYI specializes in producing and distributing films and television series. With 174 million monthly unique visitors, iQiyi holds the position as the second-largest among Chinese streaming platforms. Could also be referred to as 271 due to similar Chinese pronunciation or 🍑 kiwi = 猕猴桃, 桃 = peach.
YOUKU (优酷; youku lit. 'excellent & cool') - also commonly symbolized with 👖 because 裤 (ku) is a homonym for pants, is a video hosting service based in Beijing that operates as a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Limited with 144 million unique visitors in 2022.
MGTV (芒果TV; mángguǒTV) - also commonly symbolized with 🥭 as 芒果 (mángguǒ) literally translates to mango. It is also colloquially referred to as 水果台 (shuǐguǒ tái) meaning fruits channel. Established in 2006, MGTV is an internet video platform for Hunan Radio and Television and a Chinese online video media platform that provides users with diverse content, including variety shows, movies, TV series, animation, sports, news, games, micro-movies, etc.
BILIBILI (哔哩哔哩) – b站 or b station or 字母台 meaning alphabet channel is a Shanghai-based video-sharing website that allows users to submit, view, and add overlaid commentary on videos. Since the mid-2010s, Bilibili has expanded beyond its original niche market, which focused on animation, comics, and games (ACG). It has transformed into one of the major Chinese over-the-top streaming platforms, offering videos on demand (VOD), including documentaries, variety shows, and other original programming. Bilibili is also known for its scrolling danmu ("bullet curtain," 弹幕) commenting system.

MAJOR BROADCAST NETWORK

CCTV (中国中央电视台; zhōngguó zhōngyāng diànshìtái) - China Central Television is the national television broadcaster of China, first established in 1958 as a propaganda outlet. Its 50 channels broadcast a variety of programming to more than one billion viewers in six languages. Channels like CCTV-1 and CCTV-8 primarily broadcast dramas, providing a TV ratings buffer due to its nationwide coverage that ensures accessibility throughout the country regardless of your location.
Hunan TV, Zhejiang TV, Jiangsu TV, Dongfang/Dragon TV in Shanghai, and Beijing TV are the five major satellite stations with the largest viewer bases. While accessibility varies based on location, most areas will have access to at least a couple of these channels.
See more here.

DRAMA GENRES

Note: Genres are inherently subjective e.g. Douban and Baidu each have their own sets of genre names just like how genres in MDL and DramaWiki are listed differently, and people may even create genre names on the fly. As u/shkencorebreaks pointed out, genres in China are divided quite differently so the following list comprises genre names commonly recognized in the international sphere, alongside some genres I've encountered on Douban and Baidu.

WUXIA (武俠) – literally means “Martial Heroes”. Fictional stories about regular humans who can achieve supernatural fighting abilities through Chinese martial arts training and internal energy cultivation. Themes of chivalry, tragedy, revenge & romance are common.
XIANXIA (仙侠) – literally means “Immortal Heroes”. Fictional stories featuring magic, demons, ghosts, immortals, and a great deal of Chinese folklore/mythology. Protagonists (usually) attempt to cultivate Immortality, seeking eternal life and the pinnacle of strength. Heavily inspired by Daoism.
Q: "Is Wuxia “low fantasy,” while Xianxia is “high fantasy”? A note from u/Atharaphelun: it depends on the scope of the story. e.g. The Untamed, while it is very much a xianxia story with the whole cultivation system and cultivation sects setting, it is more of a low fantasy story given that the stakes are generally lower - simply a war between cultivation sects and various cultivators, not a "fate of the world" type of situation. A more typical high fantasy xianxia would be something like Ever Night or the upcoming A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality which do involve high fantasy themes involving the fate of the world/universe but still have the trappings of xianxia - cultivation system, cultivation sects, protagonist goes through the cultivation journey, etc.
XUANHUAN (玄幻) – literally means “Mysterious Fantasy”. A broad genre of fictional stories which remixes Chinese folklore/mythology with foreign elements & settings. Xuanhuan and Xianxia novels may sometimes seem similar on the surface. Look for the presence of Daoist elements (the Dao, Yin and Yang, Immortals, etc.) to easily distinguish the two – if they aren’t present, then it’s probably a Xuanhuan novel. Note from u/DenisWB: most native Chinese speakers don't make any distinction between xianxia and xuanhuan.
TRANSMIGRATION (穿越 chuānyuè) - literally translates to "crossing through" or "transversing," it often involves a mix of romance, fantasy, and historical themes where the protagonist usually travels through time and space and then finding themselves in a different era or world. The term "transmigration" is often used to describe this plot device where a character's consciousness or soul moves across dimensions.
IDOL DRAMA (偶像剧 - ǒuxiàng jù) - also known as trendy drama in Japan; although its connotation is not very clear, a more commonly used description today is that idol dramas are a genre featuring idol stars as protagonists, targeting younger audiences as the main viewers. What sets idol dramas apart from earlier soap operas or other costume dramas on television is that this genre primarily emphasizes not the tension of the script or the acting skills of the actors, but the appearance of the actors. Moreover, the protagonists in this genre are rarely middle-aged or elderly (albeit not impossible). For idol costume dramas, they would usually call it 古偶 (gǔ ǒu) while modern idol dramas are called xiàn ǒu (现偶).
HISTORICAL - what international audience typically refers to as a 'historical' drama is known in China as 古装剧 (gǔzhuāng jù), literally translating to an “ancient costume drama,” where more often than not, the only “historical” aspect of these dramas lies in the clothing and set designs. That’s why the 古 (gǔ) in 古偶 (gǔ ǒu) abbreviates 古装, meaning 'historical costume.' Not all shows of this type are entirely commercialized, and there are numerous 'costume dramas' that differ from 'idol dramas.' A legitimate historical drama would be called 历史题材电视剧 (lìshǐ tícái diànshìjù), which is actual historical dramas that have a basis in actual history and involve historically attested figures and stories drawn from, or otherwise in some sense directly influenced by the canonical historical record. My personal take on this is that I just refer to most costume dramas as guzhuang.
FEMALE-CENTRIC (女性题材 nǚxìng tícái) - female-centric dramas are more concentrated on the diverse aspects of women's lived experiences even though the majority of c-drama are targeted at women since many more unfolds in the life of a female lead beyond romance, and these dramas are the go-to for exploring those other narratives. The genre encompasses dramas such as Ode to Joy, All is Well, Delicious Romance, The First Half of My Life, Remembrance of Things Past, My Best Friend's Story, and more.
REPUBLICAN (民国 mínguó) - republican era dramas known as 民国剧 (mínguó jù), derive their narratives primarily from historical events spanning the late Qing Dynasty to the early years of the Republic, reaching into the 1930s and 1940s. These dramas recount stories of love and loyalty amidst turbulent times, portraying the intricate relationships and destinies of families, as well as the heroic aspirations of revolutionaries.
OLDER WOMEN/YOUNGER MAN ( 年下/姐弟恋 nián xia or jiědì liàn) - self-explanatory, a genre depicting romantic relationships where the woman is older than the man she is dating or in a relationship with.
SLICE OF LIFE (生活 shēng huó) - also literally means “life,” it’s a genre that depicts the ordinary and mundane aspects of characters' lives, exploring the day-to-day experiences, relationships, and challenges they face. The narratives often lack exaggerated or dramatic plotlines and instead, opt for a more realistic and relatable portrayal of human experiences.
SHENMO (神魔) - Gods and demons fiction or Shenmo fiction (神魔小說 shénmó xiǎoshuō) is a sub-genre of Chinese fantasy fiction that revolves around the deities, immortals, demons, and monsters of Chinese mythology. The term shenmo xiaoshuo, coined in the early 20th century by the writer and literary historian Lu Xun, literally means "gods and demons novel". Classical works of shenmo fiction include the novels Journey to the West and Investiture of the Gods.
YOUTH (青春 qīngchūn) - something akin to a coming-of-age genre, they are dramas that typically revolve around the lives, experiences, and challenges faced by young individuals, often in their teenage or early adult years. Themes commonly explored include friendship, romance, personal growth, and the pursuit of dreams as they aim to capture the essence of youth and portray the characters' journeys through various coming-of-age experiences.
DANGAIJU / DANMEI-ADAPTATION DRAMA (耽改剧/耽改 dāngǎijù/Dāngǎi) - dramas adapted from male-male romance fiction; danmei (耽美) itself is a term borrowed from Japanese, describing male-male romance.
BAIHE (百合 bǎihé) - lit. means lily; are works centered around lesbianism. 百合 works explicitly portray 'romantic love between women' and emphasize it as a focal point. These works usually do not explicitly state romantic involvement but tend to develop in that direction and are labeled as '百合-leaning' works.

CHINESE SLANG, C-BIZ TERM & C-FANDOM CULTURE

LIULANG STAR (流量明星 liulang mingxing) - usually referred to as TRAFFIC STARS (流量 lit. translates to flow/traffic) are a celebrity that is characterized by huge and dedicated fanbases and online traffic data. Because Weibo and other social media platforms became more and more dominated by fanbases + entertainment, the huge numbers of Liuliang celebs pulled in, in regards to online traffic like social media engagement, sales (for endorsed products, music, etc.), polls, and a large number of other things, became more and more significant.
DINGLIU (顶流) - Top Liulang. It has its origins in terms like liulang mingxing (流量明星: traffic star) and liulang yiren (流量艺人: traffic artist). This term emerged as a popular internet buzzword in 2017 and gained widespread popularity in online fan communities. It serves as a title for exceptionally famous individuals, events, or content.
TEAM (团队 tuánduì) - a team that manages and supports a celebrity’s activities. A team usually includes a manager, a personal assistant, a stylist, a makeup artist, a bodyguard, a driver, etc.
STUDIO (工作室 Gōngzuòshì) - an independent company with all team members dedicated to a specific celebrity. It can be established by the celebrity’s management company or the celebrity him/herself. Celebrities with their own studios usually have more freedom and power in the decision-making process related to their careers.
MELON (瓜 guā) - juicy gossip. Also chi gua 吃瓜 or literal meaning: eating melon. Bloggers usually use 🍉 to indicate that they are writing rumors or news that is not official. You might wonder: why a salacious piece of scandal could be compared to a juicy fruit in Chinese? The term 吃瓜 (onlooker, rubbernecking) refers to people who gawp and gossip about matters that don't affect them and seem to have originated in 2016. The terms "eat melon seeds in the front row (前排吃瓜子 qiánpái chī guāzǐ)," or "sell melon seeds in the front row (前排兜售瓜子 qiánpái dōushòu guāzǐ)" appeared in online forums around that time.
MELON MASTEMELON LORD (瓜主 guazhu) - refers to individuals on the internet who expose sensational information about celebrities, providing juicy gossip for many to consume.
MELON EATER (吃瓜群众 chīguā qúnzhòng) - people who camped around gossip threads to "sit in the front row and eat melon seeds." The metaphorical use of melon seeds suggests that these individuals are like spectators snacking on melon seeds while watching drama unfold. They are passive observers who enjoy the gossip but do not actively contribute to the discussion.
YXH (营销号 yíngxiāo hào) or MARKETING ACCOUNT - a certain kind of self-media/blog that mainly writes and shares content to get attention or make money. They spread information online and are important in shaping public opinions. Some pretend to be official media but don't follow the rules like real news outlets. Instead, they focus on making money, often by getting a lot of people to view their content. Unfortunately, this can lead to spreading false information and causing harm to the healthy environment of online opinions so it's important to note that many contents from yxh are untrue and unreliable. Also previously discussed in this sub and probably better explained by u/synergysb here.
CP (配对 peidui) - an abbreviation from COUPLING borrowed from the original Japanese term カップリング (kappuringu), used to refer to ship or romantic relationships between two individuals (e.g. "They're watching Untamed for the Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian CP.") Their shipper are called CPF (CP粉).
CP HYPE (炒CP/营业, chǎo CP/yíngyè) - promoting CP through certain ambiguous moves, often considered a commercial marketing behavior.
SUGACANDY 🍬 (糖 táng) - a sweet CP interaction. [Self-explanatory] or couple’s hints and moments. SEE ALSO: kswl (嗑死我了ke si wo le) which means A fangirling expression which can be interpreted as "they're too sweet, I'm dead."
IDOL (偶像 ouxiang) - 'idol' in the sense of like a statue or other representation of a god that people back in the day might have busied themselves with worshiping. Like as in putting a 'false idol' before the true [whatever.] 偶像 can also be used colloquially, in not very serious contexts, to say that so-and-so is your 'hero.' The current usage of 偶像 to refer to younger popular "celebrities," as opposed to more serious/professional/whatever "actors," comes from a very early Japanese borrowing/re-imagining of the English word 'idol' (アイドル) to cover that class of young, pretty, and famous people that English used to call something like 'heartthrobs.'
SAJIAO (撒娇) - the act of deliberately behaving coquettishly or acting spoiled, often taking advantage of being favored; “to act like a spoiled child.”
YYDS (永远的神 yǒngyuǎn de shén) - Eternal God, describes an outstanding person or thing. Pretty much equivalent to GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).
XIAO HUA (小花) 🌸 - literally translating to LITTLE FLOWER, it refers to almost all young actresses, regardless of their popularity, reputation, and acting skills. The most popular ones are generally called Liuliang Xiao Hua (流量小花).
EMPEROR (皇 huang) - refers to an individual who is highly favored by the company, enjoying a continuous influx of resources and possessing advantages over others within the same group or program.
LITTLE FRESH MEAT (小鲜肉 xiǎo xiānròu) - young, handsome, and popular male celebrities, often used to describe a new generation of attractive and trendy actors.
xx花/xx🌸 - actresses from XX year onwards, usually grouped in sets of five years; hua (花) means flower in English, hence the flower emoji. (e.g. "Liu Yifei is my favorite 85花.")
xx生/xx⚔️ (xx shēng) - actors from XX year onwards, usually grouped in sets of five years.
Xx后/xx花生/xx🥜 (xx hòu/xx huāshēng) - actors from XX year onwards, usually grouped in sets of five years but it’s gender neutral meaning it can apply to both actors and actresses.
OUT OF CIRCLE (出圈 chujuan) - to break out (to the mainstream). This generally refers to a rise in the popularity of a particular idol or celebrity. They go beyond the attention of just their fanbase, entering the public eye and becoming a genuine "public figure." Later, this concept was extended beyond individuals and can also be applied to events and objects, signifying that they gain recognition beyond their initial circle.
PASSERSBY (路人 lu ren) - non-fans; also refers to pedestrians, passersby, or, in gaming terminology, players who are not directly involved in a particular situation. It metaphorically describes people who are unrelated or indifferent to a situation as if they were just ordinary passersby.
WATER ARMY (水军 shui jun) - online paid posters and social media bots commenting or posting predefined content on online platforms. In the entertainment industry, water armies are used to promote, defame, or boost data on particular works or celebrities.
WATER-INJECTED - an article, a celebrity's social media account, a TV show, a movie, etc. that is flooded with fake data, typically generated by the water army.
WHITEWASH (洗白 xǐ bái) - engaging in intentional deception and employing various tactics to divert attention and make the public forget about a celebrity's problematic past. For example, a celebrity with a controversial past may attempt to whitewash their image by actively participating in charity work or government programs. Over time, the positive activities and energy they showcase can overshadow and cause people to overlook their past scandals.
HOUSE COLLAPSED (房子塌了 fangzi tale) - a term said when there is a celebrity involved in love scandal that originated from an interview where a woman said, “When I saw a house collapsed over there, I just went over to watch but I found out that it was my own house collapsing.” In C-fandom, when someone said that her “house collapsed,” she meant she thought she was about to read about love scandals of other people’s idols with excitement, but it turned out to be her own idol. But it doesn't only mean that your idol is caught in a love scandal. Any moral scandal or crime (such as drug abuse, prostitution, tax evasion) that happens to them can be described as a house collapse.
CAR FLIPPED (翻车 fanche) - unexpected and unsatisfactory things happening, e.g: an excellent gamer losing the game, your online girlfriend turning out to be a scammer, a celebrity saying something stupid/ opposite to what she used to say on TV, etc.
BLACK (黑 hēi) - slandering and creating or spreading negative information to defame someone or some projects, usually done by anti-fans.
BLACK MATERIALS (黑料 hei liao) - information or historical records (which can be either true or not) that will have a negative impact on a celebrity or a project.
BLACK RED (黑红 hei hong) - creating controversies and negative narratives about oneself with the primary goal of garnering attention. After gaining fame, they may attempt to "whitewash" their public image but in the event that these efforts to whitewash are unsuccessful, it's commonly referred to as a "car-flipped" incident.
HEAT (热度 redu) - popularity, but it’s more of short-term enthusiasm than long-term recognition. See also: RUB HEAT (蹭热 cengre) which means riding the wave of someone else’s popularity.
RED (红 hóng) - a person, celebrity, film, song, or any work in general that is hot, famous, or popular. FIRE (火 huǒ) has the same meaning.
DOMESTIC ENT. INDUSTRY (内娱 nèiyú/内🐟) - the fish emoji in 内🐟 might be a play on words as the pronunciation of 鱼 (yú) = fish is similar to the pronunciation of 娱 (yú) = entertainment.
FLOP (糊 hu) - in the context of actors or dramas refers to a flop or failure. It is used to describe a lack of success either for individual actors or for entire dramas. In some cases, it might be used affectionately or humorously to acknowledge a less successful performance or production.
DAIPAI (代拍) - literally translated to "proxy photography" or "photo-taking service," they are essentially similar to paparazzi who follow and take photos of celebrities for commercial gain but aside from just selling the photos to publications or entertainment outlets, their services can also be engaged by fans which is why the internet slang literally means to be a substitute 代 (dai) in taking photos of others 拍 (pai).
FAN CIRCLE (粉圈 fěnquān) - fandom. FRIEND CIRCLE (朋友圈 péngyǒu quān) - when a C-citizen mentions his/her friend circle, he/she is most likely talking about his/her Weixin (Wechat)'s feed.
OFFICIAL FANCLUB/HYH (后援会 hòu yuán huì) - a leading organization representing a fandom, usually established by a group of fans gathering together and recruiting new people to support and promote a celebrity. They have certain decision-making and economic power in the fandom. Official Fanclubs are more professional nowadays as they establish contacts with celebrity teams to manage the fandoms' operation following the teams' directions.
FANSITE MASTERS (站子/站姐 zhanzi or zhanjie) - dedicated fans who follow their idols to take stunning photos and share them online. They're also the organizers of many fan support projects. Fansite masters and stalker fans both have the celebrities' itineraries through various sources, but fansite masters only follow public work schedules that allow fans or the general public to attend, including public airport schedules.
ANTI FAN (黑粉 hēi fěn) - “black powder,” 黑 (hēi) means black, and 粉 (fěn) is short for 粉丝 (fěnsī), which means fan that’s why it literally translates to "black fan" and is the equivalent of an anti-fan or someone who opposes and criticizes a celebrity.
PAPARAZZI (狗仔 gǒu zǎi) - photographers who secretly follow celebrities to take photos or sneak shots in hopes of discovering hot gossip and breaking news.
C位 (c wèi) - the center position in a group of people, the most important and visible to the audience. It is usually held by the person with the greatest qualification and the highest status. The center position is a visible form of the power a celebrity holds and an important proof of a celebrity’s status in the entertainment industry.
FAN WEI (番位) - the order of actors’ names on film posters or other promotional materials. The first name is yi fan (一番). Fan wei implies an actor’s status and value in the industry and guarantees an actor’s responsibilities for and benefits from the film or work itself. Fan wei can also be used in music, shows, etc., and is not limited to film nowadays.
HANG SOMEONE UP AND BEAT THEM (吊打 diào dǎ) - If saying A hangs B up and beats B, it means A’s data, appearance, talent, etc., outperforming that of B.
JIULOUYU (九漏鱼 jiǔ lòu yú, short for 九年义务教育漏网之鱼. 九年义务教育 means nine years of compulsory education regulated by the Chinese Government, 漏网之鱼 means a fish that escaped the net) - celebrities who show a lack of education.
JIAXIKA (加戏咖 jiā xì kā) - “drama guy;” actors or actresses who have a strong influence and ask writers and directors for more significant roles in the drama, often seen as unprofessional and disrespectful. However, because the behavior is difficult to determine by the public, it is often used as an excuse to criticize actors they do not like.
ZIYUANKA (资源咖 zīyuán kā) - “resources guy;” actors or actresses with a strong background who get important roles beyond their abilities and fame.
DAIBAOKA (待爆咖 dài bào kā) - “to explode guy,” actors or actresses waiting to become super popular. Originally used to describe stars with great potential, it is often used satirically.

OTHER TERMINOLOGY

HEAT INDEX - The Heat Index measures the engagement and popularity of a drama and can only be compared within networks, not across networks (you can't compare iQiyi heat index to Youku, or Youku to Tencent and vice versa), as each platform has its own internal Heat Index to indicating how a drama is performing. It takes into account the video views, searches, and engagement for a drama (but no one actually knows except the company itself how it works, but it is deemed as a proper gauge to see how popular a drama is).

1. TENCENT - The significance of Tencent Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama is deemed somewhat popular when the index reaches 20k while achieving 28k denotes strong recognition and popularity. A drama surpassing the 30k mark is considered super popular and successful, positioning it as a top drama on the platform. Importantly, a score of 30k is not a ceiling, and dramas can attain even higher scores, reflecting their exceptional popularity and success.
2. IQIYI - The significance of iQiyi Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama attains a degree of popularity when the index reaches 5,5k (or 6k for dramas with same-day episode releases). A drama achieving a score of 9k+ is recognized as well-known and highly popular while a drama surpassing the 10k mark can be categorized as super popular and successful, signifying its status as a top-tier offering on the platform. Importantly, the 10k score is not a ceiling, and dramas have the potential to achieve even higher scores, underscoring their exceptional popularity and success.
3. YOUKU - The significance of Youku Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama attains some popularity when the index reaches 6k. A drama that reaches 10k once is considered well-known and highly popular while for a drama to be deemed super popular and successful, it must reach 10k at least 10 times, signifying its status as a top-tier offering on the platform. Importantly, 10k serves as the upper limit, and the score cannot exceed this threshold. For dramas that have reached 10k, their ongoing popularity is assessed based on their ability to consistently maintain this score.

Note: The comparison between dramas from the same company is also not significant as the score's meaning varies depending on factors such as the actors involved, the popularity of the intellectual property (IP), and the drama's budget. In the case of a high-budget drama featuring popular actors and a well-known IP, reaching a score of 8k can be considered average while a low-budget production with less-known actors and a less popular IP, achieving a score of 8k could indicate that the drama is a success.

TV RATING - A rating of 1% or higher is already considered good in average ratings, given the generally low ratings across the board (hence why you might see fans celebrating if their faves managed to break through the 1%+ rating). Dramas airing on CCTV-1 and CCTV-8 enjoy built-in ratings boosts due to their status as national channels, providing broader accessibility across the country. These channels tend to attract an older audience. There are three primary TV ratings systems: the NRTA's CVB ratings, released weekly for the previous week since December 2019 and considered the official reference; CSM ratings, widely used before the introduction of CVB, faced issues with transparency and accuracy controversies, leading to the adoption of CVB; and Kuyun ratings, a third-party system that measures ratings in real-time.
VLINKAGE - a domestic professional entertainment data and marketing strategy consulting company, founded in 2012 in Shanghai, dedicated to assisting various stakeholders in the cultural and media industry. This includes film and television content production companies, talent agencies, video marketing companies, video playback platforms, and advertising client dynamics.
DOUBAN (豆瓣) - an online database and social networking service that enables registered users to document information and generate content related to films, books, music, recent events, and activities in Chinese cities. As of 2013, it boasts approximately 200 million registered users, with some Chinese authors and critics creating official personal pages on the platform. Often likened to review sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Goodreads. Even immensely popular ones may not receive high ratings (in the 6s or 7s) as Douban users' preferences indicate that genres like romances and historical dramas might not be highly regarded unless exceptional or deemed iconic (e.g., Chinese Paladin, NIF).
DRAMA TIERS - Streaming platforms assign class designations to dramas for their internal business and investor purposes. However, fans have recently become more interested in these designations, linking them to their favorite actors' resources and status. It's important to know that there's no official list for these classes, and platforms don't publicly announce them. Instead, the information is shared with marketing and drama accounts, which then report it on Weibo. For Tencent and Youku, S+ is the top class for headliner dramas, getting more budget and promotion. After S+ are S, A (with Youku having A+ between S and A), and B. Tencent has the most S+ designations, and Youku has started making more S+/S dramas recently. iQIYI's class designations are less clear now, but it's believed they have S as the highest, followed by A and B. Note that a drama's class designation doesn't always reflect its success or quality. These designations are decided for business reasons before filming starts.
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Last but not least, I am not a native Chinese speaker and I am still in the process of learning Mandarin so I welcome any corrections either through the comment on the subreddit thread or private message as I have only cross-referenced the information using online resources only.
Last updated on December 6, 2023.

So, I'm planning to create a thread about some glossary terms in c-drama to help out folks who are new to the scene, those who probably get lost with all the terms thrown around (e.g. wuxia, xianxia, etc), inspired by K-Drama Glossary from KDrama. I’ve made several lists but there are only so few of them so I am well aware that it’s still lacking a lot, so I ask for your help to chime in with your suggestions, or if there are also those who stumble upon some foreign terms and others would be able to help out answering them – that’d be lovely too!
NOTE: Use Ctrl + F if you're searching for a specific word, as the order of the words is randomized and not based on the alphabet.
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MAJOR STREAMING PLATFORM
TENCENT VIDEO (腾讯视频 téngxùn shìpín) - also symbolized by netizens with 🐧 representing the penguin or goose which is their mascot and known as WETV outside of China, is a Chinese video streaming website owned by Tencent. As of October 2022, Tencent Video boasts 120 million paid subscribers, positioning it as the fourth-largest streaming service globally, following Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+.
IQIYI (爱奇艺, eye-CHEE-yee), also symbolized by netizens with 🥝, their logo representing 奇异果 (qi yi guo) which also means kiwi, is a Chinese subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service owned by Baidu. Headquartered in Beijing, iQIYI primarily produces and distributes films and television series. Currently, iQIYI stands as one of the largest online video sites globally, with nearly 6 billion hours spent on its service each month and over 500 million monthly active users.
YOUKU (优酷; youku lit. 'excellent (and) cool') - often symbolized by netizens with 👖 or 裤 as "ku" is a homonym for pants, is a video hosting service based in Beijing, China. It operates as a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Limited.
MGTV (芒果TV, mángguǒ TV) - often symbolized by netizens with 🥭 as 芒果 literally translates to mango. It is also colloquially referred to as 水果台, meaning fruits channel.
BILIBILI (哔哩哔哩) – b站 or b station or 字母台 meaning alphabet channel is a Shanghai-based video-sharing website that allows users to submit, view, and add overlaid commentary on videos. Since the mid-2010s, Bilibili has expanded beyond its original niche market, which focused on animation, comics, and games (ACG). It has transformed into one of the major Chinese over-the-top streaming platforms, offering videos on demand (VOD), including documentaries, variety shows, and other original programming. Bilibili is also known for its scrolling danmu ("bullet curtain," 弹幕) commenting system.
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MAJOR BROADCASTING NETWORK

• CCTV, with channels like CCTV-1 and CCTV-8 primarily broadcasting dramas, provides a TV ratings buffer due to its nationwide coverage. This ensures accessibility throughout the country, regardless of your location.
• Hunan TV, Zhejiang TV, Jiangsu TV, Dongfang/Dragon TV in Shanghai, and Beijing TV are the five major satellite stations with the largest viewer bases. While accessibility varies based on location, most areas will have access to at least a couple of these channels.
• See more here.

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GENRE
WUXIA (武俠) – literally means “Martial Heroes”. Fictional stories about regular humans who can achieve supernatural fighting abilities through Chinese martial arts training and internal energy cultivation. Themes of chivalry, tragedy, revenge & romance are common.
XIANXIA (仙侠) – literally means “Immortal Heroes”. Fictional stories featuring magic, demons, ghosts, immortals, and a great deal of Chinese folklore/mythology. Protagonists (usually) attempt to cultivate to Immortality, seeking eternal life and the pinnacle of strength. Heavily inspired by Daoism. Comparison: If Wuxia is “low fantasy”, then Xianxia is “high fantasy”.
XUANHUAN (玄幻) – literally means “Mysterious Fantasy”. A broad genre of fictional stories which remixes Chinese folklore/mythology with foreign elements & settings. Xuanhuan and Xianxia novels may sometimes seem similar on the surface. Look for the presence of Daoist elements (the Dao, Yin and Yang, Immortals, etc…) to easily distinguish the two – if they aren’t present, then it’s probably a Xuanhuan novel.
IDOL DRAMA - in a very general sense, dramas that are romance-centric and usually feature younger actors. It’s not a genre but used to refer to dramas helmed by a younger cast, or targeted at a younger generation but mostly used to differentiate ‘propeserious’ dramas (正剧 zhengju) from the ‘lighter’ ones. It can also be classified further into: IDOL COSTUME DRAMA (古偶 gǔ ǒu) and IDOL MODERN DRAMA (现偶 xiàn ǒu).
HISTORICAL DRAMA - what international audience typically refers to as a 'historical' drama is known in Chinese as a 古装剧 (gǔzhuāng jù), literally translating to an 'ancient costume drama.' Often, the only historical aspect of these dramas lies in the clothing and set designs. The 古 (gǔ) in 古偶 (gǔ ǒu) abbreviates 古装, meaning 'historical costume.' Not all shows of this type are entirely commercialized, and there are numerous 'costume dramas' that differ from 'idol dramas.' A 'legitimate historical drama' would be what we call a 历史题材电视剧 (lìshǐ tícái diànshìjù), actual historical dramas have a basis in actual history and involve historically attested figures and stories drawn from, or otherwise in some sense directly influenced by, the canonical historical record. The international audience isn't super familiar with 'true' historical dramas because ever since early 2019 it's been next to impossible to get them past censors. Most of the really 'good' ones then are older classics just like Serenade of Peaceful Joy that is a pretty for-real historical drama that you might have seen. Xianxia dramas, by definition, are not 'historicals,' in this sense.
FEMALE-CENTRIC (女性题材 nǚxìng tícái) - female-centric dramas are more precisely concentrated on the diverse aspects of women's lived experiences even though the majority of c-drama are targeted at women since much more unfolds in the life of a female lead beyond romance, and these dramas are the go-to for exploring those other narratives. The genre encompasses dramas such as: Ode to Joy, All is Well, Delicious Romance, The First Half of My Life, Remembrance of Things Past, My Best Friend's Story, and more.
REPUBLICAN - The Chinese Republican Era denotes the historical period in China spanning from 1912 to 1949, during which the Republic of China governed the country. Dramas falling within this genre are those set within this time frame, illustrating the political and social transformations that unfolded during this period.
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SLANG
LIULANG STAR (流量明星 liulang mingxing) - usually referred to as TRAFFIC STARS in this sub (流量 also means flow/traffic) are a celebrity that is characterized by huge and dedicated fanbases and online traffic data. Because Weibo and other social media platforms became more and more dominated by fanbases + entertainment, the huge numbers of Liuliang celebs pulled in, in regards to online traffic like social media engagement, sales (for endorsed products, music, etc.), polls, and a large number of other things, became more and more significant.
DINGLIU (顶流) - Top Liulang. It has its origins in terms like *liulang mingxing (*流量明星: traffic star) and liulang yiren (流量艺人: traffic artist). This term emerged as a popular internet buzzword in 2017 and gained widespread popularity in online fan communities. It serves as a title for exceptionally famous individuals, events, or content.
MELON (瓜 guā) - juicy gossip. Also chi gua 吃瓜 or literal meaning: eating melon. Bloggers usually use 🍉 to indicate that they are writing rumors or news that is not official. You might wonder: why a salacious piece of scandal could be compared to a juicy fruit in Chinese? The term 吃瓜 (onlooker, rubbernecking) refers to people who gawp and gossip about matters that don't affect them and seem to have originated in 2016. The terms "eat melon seeds in the front row (前排吃瓜子 qiánpái chī guāzǐ)," or "sell melon seeds in the front row (前排兜售瓜子 qiánpái dōushòu guāzǐ)" appeared in online forums around that time.
MELON MASTER (瓜主 gua zhu) - refers to individuals on the internet who expose sensational information about celebrities, providing juicy gossip for many to consume.
YXH (营销号 yíngxiāo hào) or MARKETING ACCOUNT - a certain kind of self-media/blog that mainly writes and shares content to get attention or make money. They spread information online and are important in shaping public opinions. Some pretend to be official media but don't follow the rules like real news outlets. Instead, they focus on making money, often by getting a lot of people to view their content. Unfortunately, this can lead to spreading false information and causing harm to the healthy environment of online opinions so it's important to note that many contents from yxh are untrue and unreliable. Also previously discussed in this sub and explained by u/synergysb here for further information.
CP (配对 peidui) - an abbreviation from COUPLING borrowed from the original Japanese term カップリング (kappuringu), used to refer to ship or romantic relationships between two individuals (e.g. "They're watching Untamed for the Lan Wangji/Wei Wuxian CP.")
SUGACANDY 🍬 (糖 táng) - a sweet CP interaction. [Self-explanatory]
IDOL (偶像 ouxiang) - 'idol' in the sense of like a statue or other representation of a god that people back in the day might have busied themselves with worshiping. Like as in putting a 'false idol' before the true [whatever.] 偶像 can also be used colloquially, in not very serious contexts, to say that so-and-so is your 'hero.' The current usage of 偶像 to refer to younger popular "celebrities," as opposed to more serious/professional/whatever "actors," comes from a very early Japanese borrowing/re-imagining of the English word 'idol' (アイドル) to cover that class of young, pretty, and famous people that English used to call something like 'heartthrobs.'
SAJIAO (撒娇) - the act of deliberately behaving coquettishly or acting spoiled, often taking advantage of being favored; “to act like a spoiled child.”
YYDS (永远滴神 yǒngyuǎn de shén) - Eternal God, describes an outstanding person or thing. Pretty much equivalent to GOAT (Greatest Of All Time).
xx花/xx🌸 - actresses from XX year onwards, usually grouped in sets of five years; hua (花) means flower in English, hence the flower emoji. (e.g. "Liu Yifei is my favorite 85花.")
XIAO HUA (小花) 🌸 - literally means LITTLE FLOWER and refers to almost all young actresses, regardless of their popularity, reputation, and acting skills. The most popular ones are generally called Liuliang Xiao Hua (流量小花).
xx生/xx⚔️ - actors from XX year onwards, usually grouped in sets of five years.
OUT OF CIRCLE (出圈 chujuan) - to break out (to the mainstream). This generally refers to a rise in the popularity of a particular idol or celebrity. They go beyond the attention of just their fanbase, entering the public eye and becoming a genuine "public figure." Later, this concept was extended beyond individuals and can also be applied to events and objects, signifying that they gain recognition beyond their initial circle.
PASSERSBY (路人 lu ren) - non-fans; also refers to pedestrians, passersby, or, in gaming terminology, players who are not directly involved in a particular situation. It metaphorically describes people who are unrelated or indifferent to a situation as if they were just ordinary passersby.
WATER ARMY (水军 shui jun) - online paid posters and social media bots commenting or posting predefined content on online platforms. In the entertainment industry, water armies are used to promote, defame, or boost data on particular works or celebrities.
WHITEWASH (洗白 xǐ bé) - engaging in intentional deception and employing various tactics to divert attention and make the public forget about a celebrity's problematic past. For example, a celebrity with a controversial past may attempt to whitewash their image by actively participating in charity work or government programs. Over time, the positive activities and energy they showcase can overshadow and cause people to overlook their past scandals.
HOUSE COLLAPSED (房子塌了 fangzi tale) - a term said when there is a celebrity involved in a love scandal that originated from an interview where a woman said, “When I saw a house collapsed over there, I just went over to watch but I found out that it was my own house collapsing.” In C-fandom, when someone said that her “house collapsed,” she meant she thought she was about to read about love scandals of other people’s idols with excitement, but it turned out to be her own idol.
CAR FLIPPED (翻车 fanche) - an unexpected and unsatisfactory things happening, for e.g: an excellent gamer losing the game, your online girlfriend turning out to be a scammer, a celebrity saying something stupid/ opposite to what she used to say on TV, etc.
BLACK MATERIALS (黑料 hei liao) - information or historical records (which can be either true or not) that will have a negative impact on a celebrity or a project.
BLACK RED (黑红 hei hong) - creating controversies and negative narratives about oneself with the primary goal of garnering attention. After gaining fame, they may attempt to "whitewash" their public image but in the event that these efforts to whitewash are unsuccessful, it's commonly referred to as a "car-flipped" incident.
HEAT (热度 redu) - popularity, but it’s more of short-term enthusiasm than long-term recognition. See also: RUB HEAT (蹭热 ceng re) which means riding the wave of someone else’s popularity.
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OTHERS
HEAT INDEX - The heat Index measures the engagement and popularity of a drama and can only be compared within networks, not across networks (you can't compare iQiyi heat index to Youku, or Youku to Tencent and vice versa), as each platform has its own internal Heat Index to indicate how a drama is performing. It takes into account the video views, searches, and engagement for a drama (but no one actually knows except the company itself how it works, but it is deemed as a proper gauge to see how popular a drama is).

• TENCENT - The significance of Tencent Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama is deemed somewhat popular when the index reaches 20k while achieving 28k denotes strong recognition and popularity. A drama surpassing the 30k mark is considered super popular and successful, positioning it as a top drama on the platform. Importantly, a score of 30k is not a ceiling, and dramas can attain even higher scores, reflecting their exceptional popularity and success.
• IQIYI - The significance of iQiyi Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama attains a degree of popularity when the index reaches 5,5k (or 6k for dramas with same-day episode releases). A drama achieving a score of 9k+ is recognized as well-known and highly popular while a drama surpassing the 10k mark can be categorized as super popular and successful, signifying its status as a top-tier offering on the platform. Importantly, the 10k score is not a ceiling, and dramas have the potential to achieve even higher scores, underscoring their exceptional popularity and success.
• YOUKU - The significance of Youku Heat Index, as interpreted by user Dreams in MyDramaList, is based on specific thresholds: a drama attains some popularity when the index reaches 6k. A drama that reaches 10k once is considered well-known and highly popular while for a drama to be deemed super popular and successful, it must reach 10k at least 10 times, signifying its status as a top-tier offering on the platform. Importantly, 10k serves as the upper limit, and the score cannot exceed this threshold. For dramas that have reached 10k, their ongoing popularity is assessed based on their ability to consistently maintain this score.
• Side note: the comparison between dramas from the same company is also not significant as the score's meaning varies depending on factors such as the actors involved, the popularity of the intellectual property (IP), and the drama's budget. In the case of a high-budget drama featuring popular actors and a well-known IP, reaching a score of 8k can be considered average while a low-budget production with less-known actors and a less popular IP, achieving a score of 8k could indicate that the drama is a success.

TV RATING - A rating of 1% or higher is already considered good in average ratings, given the generally low ratings across the board (hence why you might see fans celebrating if their faves managed to break through the 1%+ rating). Dramas airing on CCTV-1 and CCTV-8 enjoy a built-in ratings boost due to their status as national channels, providing broader accessibility across the country. These channels tend to attract an older audience. There are three primary TV ratings systems: the NRTA's CVB ratings, released weekly for the previous week since December 2019 and considered the official reference; CSM ratings, widely used before the introduction of CVB, faced issues with transparency and accuracy controversies, leading to the adoption of CVB; and Kuyun ratings, a third-party system that measures ratings in real-time. Kuyun has gained popularity in recent years, particularly amid concerns about the accuracy of CSM ratings. While Kuyun is widely used as a reference, it's important to note that it is not officially recognized. Nevertheless, an increasing number of dramas acknowledge and consider this rating system.
VLINKAGE CHART - a media artist index list that functions to measure the scale of an artist's popularity on the internet. It is calculated based on key performance indicators (KPIs), including marketing, trends, and audience engagement. It is crucial to have real-time data on artists. Vlinkage includes participation in variety shows/dramas, weibo data, tieba data, douban data, sousuo data and xunyi data. The platform broadcasting calculation involves compiling data from platforms like Iqiyi, Tencent, Youku, MangoTV, Sohu, etc. It requires watching all content, including features, highlights, interviews, and trailers, exclusively online; cached or offline views are not considered. Videos must be watched for more than 15 minutes. During the airing of idol programs/dramas, it is crucial to consistently tag the artist's name to boost interactive engagement, foster high-quality likes and comments, and frequently mention both the artist's name and the program to enhance visibility.
NRTA (国家广播电视总局) - The National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) operates as a ministry-level executive agency overseen by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its primary responsibility lies in the management and oversight of state-owned enterprises involved in the television and radio sectors and exercises direct control over national-level state-owned entities, including China Central Television (CCTV), China National Radio (CNR), and China Radio International (CRI). Additionally, it oversees various movie and television studios, along with other non-commercial organizations.
DOUBAN (豆瓣) - an online database and social networking service that enables registered users to document information and generate content related to films, books, music, recent events, and activities in Chinese cities. As of 2013, it boasts approximately 200 million registered users, with some Chinese authors and critics creating official personal pages on the platform. Often likened to review sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Goodreads, Douban has evolved from its origins as a community primarily for well-educated, well-read, and cultured younger users (in their 20s and 30s). Certain genres may face challenges in garnering high ratings, irrespective of fan or anti-fan sentiments. For instance, comedy films often receive lower scores as the regular user base on Douban tends to perceive them as "low," while dramas and art films tend to score better on Douban. This is in contrast to platforms like Maoyan and Taopiaopiao, where the focus is more on the subjective question of whether users enjoyed a particular work or not—just like the distinction between Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore. It can be said that achieving a rating of 6.5 or higher on Douban is considered a noteworthy accomplishment for a comedy film. Dramas on Douban aren't solely judged based on personal preferences, and even immensely popular ones may not receive high ratings (in the 6s or 7s). Douban users' preferences, reflected in the top 10 dramas of 2020 and consistent with previous years, indicate that genres like romances and historical dramas might not be highly regarded unless exceptional or deemed iconic (e.g., Chinese Paladin, Meet Yourself). A rating of 6 or 7 doesn't imply a drama is bad but suggests it's decent with some noticeable issues.
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Source: Baidu Encyclopedia, Immortal Mountain, Drama Potatoe, The World of Chinese, Daily C-Pop, Chinese Internet Slang (Wikipedia), cyn lynn, Sip of Tea, guoman, iNews. Big thanks to u/shkencorebreaks and u/240229 for their contribution to the Glossary as well.
Also, disclaimer that I am not of Chinese native and I’m also not fully proficient in Mandarin (I’m still learning) so I am more than happy for any correction as well since I double-checked everything with what I could find on the internet as well.
(Last updated on 26 November 2023)

The Serpent i.e. "Satan" (which is simply a title because in Semitic languages it means: "adversary, enemy" and that’s literally just it) rebelled against the Sky-god and castrated him (figuratively, meaning that he took away the control of earth from the Sky-god’s dominion). After that Satan little by little established his own dominion on earth but he had to defeat the sons of the Sky-god first; who were ruling all over the earth at that time on behalf of their Sky-father.
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Satan and his faction were called "Titans" in Greek mythology (whose leader was Saturn/Cronus) and considered "demons" in Mesopotamian mythology as well as later Judeo-Christian culture; and they were weaker compared to the children of the Sky-god – the children of the Sky-god being instead called "Anunnaki" in Sumerian ("offspring of Anu"; where Anu was the Sky-god) or the "sons" of Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd) in Persian (where Ahura Mazda is the Sky-god and god of Light) or called the "Olympians" in Greek mythology as children of Uranus, the Sky-god and Gaia of course. (Usually the offspring of Cronus are considered to be "Titans" in the widespread version of the Theogony; but in another more detailed version of said Theogony where Saturn is actually cast as a "good guy" – he is given as the sibling of a certain "Titan/Titanus" who’s the evil brother of Cronus/Saturn; and in that case it is Titan/Titanus who’s the leader of the "Titans" and Cronus/Saturn is instead addressed as the ancestor of the Olympians, because he was the father of the progenitors of the Olympian gods i.e. Rhea, Hyperion, Oceanus etc. who then gave birth to Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite etc.). Now, because the Titans and Satan (Titanus, their leader) were weaker compared to the children of the sky-god (Cronus and the progenitors of the Olympians, who were sons of Uranus and Gaia) – they thus refused to do an all-out war against the children of the Sky-god since they knew they’d be defeated in a face to face confrontation. So Satan and his faction started conspiring behind everyone’s backs and they made it so that the society of the children of the Sky-god would become more and more corrupted little by little; to the point where the children of the Sky-god themselves would basically self-destruct without knowing it.
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Satan first of all wanted the next heir to the throne to be a member of the faction of the Titans and not an Olympian anymore. This version of the Theogony is contained in Ennius’s "Sacra historia" where as stated previously – the leader of the Titans is called "Titan" himself or "Titanus" and he’s given as the brother of Saturn who’s instead envisioned as a good guy in this version of the Theogony. So Cronus is given as the leader of the Olympians whilst Titanus or "Titan" is given as the leader of the opposing faction i.e. the Titans. On the other hand the more widely spread version of the Theogony lists Zeus as the leader of the Olympians and Cronus as the leader of the Titans. This is because there were two gods called "Cronus" simultaneously – a "good" Cronus who was the leader of the Olympians and an "evil" Cronus who was the leader of the Titans. The "evil" Cronus/Saturn in this version of the Theogony is instead addressed with the name of "Titan" or "Titanus" himself; and he goes up against the "good Cronus" who’s the leader of the progenitors of the Olympians (the pre-Olympians). Zeus in this version of the Theogony only comes into play later – after the war between Cronus and Titanus is over. Now, Titanus or "Titan" as the leader of the homonymous faction (the Titans) corresponds to "Satan" himself. So Titanus/Satan allowed Cronus to rule over the earth on one condition; that the next heir to the throne would be a member of the Titans and that Cronus himself would raise no male children whatsoever nor allow for any male offspring to be born, which is why Cronus then had to kill all of his children (especially the male ones) by swallowing them according to the myth – because he wanted to prevent a war between Titans and Olympians. But in the meantime Satan/Titanus was conspiring behind everyone’s back to gather his strength and bring Cronus’s rule down as soon as possible.
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Although when a male child actually ended up being born (Zeus) there was an all out war and the Titans were eventually defeated as predicted (even though they had some temporary victories) and the Titans were imprisoned because they were still weaker compared to the other faction (the children of the Sky-god). But Satan/Titanus was still conspiring behind everyone’s backs and he pretended to be dead and went into hiding. So little by little he started spreading homosexuality throughout the earth to make it so that the earth’s population didn’t grow in number anymore (thus preventing the growth of the population of the children of the Sky-god i.e. the "Olympians and pre-Olympians" who were inhabiting the earth at that time – so by converting everyone or at least a large part into homosexuals; he made sure that his enemies wouldn’t multiply anymore in numbers as much as they did before. This is why in a lot of cultures there’s the stupid notion that homosexuality is somewhat "demonic" and bullshit like that – because for example according to Persian tradition it was Ahriman i.e. the Persian "Devil" who spread homosexuality throughout the earth as a means to keep the earth’s population down and destroy the children of Ahura Mazda (the Sky-god). So he was also seen as the "inventor" of homosexuality for that very reason. Ahriman of course corresponds once again to "Satan" (the adversary) and to the figure of "Titan" or "Titanus" mentioned previously, the enemy of the Olympians and pre-Olympians.
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Now, after the rule of Cronus was over when the war against Titanus ended; the one "Zeus" who was ruling over the earth at that time was the so-called "Cretan Zeus" or the "Latin/Roman Jupiter" variously called "Picus" or "Jupiter Picus"; who was claimed to have been born in Crete (because they equated him with the Cretan Zeus and in Latin legends he even claims that he wants to be buried in Crete when he dies). This particular Zeus was the son of the Mother-Goddess. He was worshipped with the names "Velchanos" (Zeus Velchanos) in Crete, "Zagreus" by the Orphic and "Sabazios" by the Phrygians (who equated him with Zagreus) and he was considered equivalent with both Zeus and Dionysus at the same time. The reason why "official" Greek mythology doesn’t speak of Zeus ever being dethroned is because there were multiple gods called "Zeus" who succeeded each other as kings of Olympus one after the other – so according to a more "general view" and a "generalistic mentality"; Zeus technically was never gone because there was always another Zeus/Jupiter to succeed the previous one. (Cicero in his "De Natura Deorum" speaks of "three Jupiters" in total). Now, the Titans conspired against this particular Zeus who was ruling at the time (called Zagreus, Sabazios) and they killed him (ripped him apart). The myth of Zagreus also mentions how Zagreus himself had become a "Zeus" – because he’d been chosen by the "previous Zeus" who left the kingdom in charge of the boy and gave him his thunderbolts; so once again reinforcing the idea that there were more than a single Zeus, and Zagreus was the one "Zeus" ruling at the time.
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After this particular Zeus was dead murdered by the Titans – the Sky-father came to earth and killed all the Titans in revenge for the death of his son and for the chaos and destruction that the Titans themselves had spread throughout the earth with their conspiracies. The rest of the Titans he tortured and imprisoned them. So the few Titans left that survived and managed to escape – started playing the role of victims and they stated that they’d been the victim of an "unfair genocide" because the Sky-god had slaughtered them all; so they started to create places of worship and cults where they would ask people for money and for charity because the Titans apparently were the victims of a genocide that needed charity-money to "save these poor souls". They also started to claim that Zagreus/Sabazios who had been murdered by the Titans actually killed himself with his own hands and nobody hurt him – which is why in some versions of the death of the god (whether he’s called "Attis" in Phrygia or even "Shiva" in India; the god is instead claimed to have "killed himself" or "castrated himself" because he was "mad" and thus he did it all to himself "out of madness"). So this made it seem as though the Titans had been mercilessly slaughtered without a reason and that the Titans were innocent.
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With the money and funds that they’d gained out of charity and out of all the places of worship which they’d set up – they began to build the Tower of Babel. The Titans by that point were called "Giants" because after the Sky-god slaughtered them all they had multiplied once again on the earth and the new generation was redubbed as "Giants". This was technically the second Tower they would build because the first one had been built at the time when Zagreus ruled. After Zagreus was dead the Sky-god killed the Titans, destroyed the First Tower and sent a Flood over the earth. After said Flood the Giants/Titans regrouped establishing themselves in Babylon and they created another Tower. The Sky-god had gone into hiding into the skies and never showed himself; because after the death of his son he didn’t want anything to do with earth anymore.
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The Titans elected a ruler of their own who would become the "Antichrist" of Revelation. The Devil/Satan at this point still pretended to be dead so he inhabited the inside of the Tower not showing his face outside; and he would tell the Antichrist what to do (which paves the way for the imagery where the Devil whispers into the ears of the Antichrist and tells him what to do and what to say). The Antichrist spread homosexuality and all the affiliated cultures that come with it once again throughout the earth; in order to keep the earth’s population down and prevent the children of the Sky-god to grow in numbers again and potentially rebel. The Antichrist also swore to completely eradicate women and make them obsolete – not by killing them but by making it so that they wouldn’t conceive children any longer and that they would abandon everything that identified them as being women. (This is where the mentality of Saint Peter comes into play; because Peter says in the Gospel of Thomas that women have to become men in order to "achieve salvation").
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The original Jesus corresponds to Zagreus and the Titans ate his flesh so this is what it means when Jesus says: "eat, this is my body offered for you" – because Zagreus decided to die to save mankind and the earth as a whole after the Titans had conspired against him and attacked him since they wanted his power; so he gave it to them because he didn’t care about power even when he had it – and he gave them the power they sought on the condition that they would let humans live and be free and there wouldn’t be any war between the two factions (the children of the Sky-god and the Titans). Zagreus was represented by the pomegranate which is why Jesus is also represented by the pomegranate and depicted while holding it or having it next to him. The Titans wanted immortality which according to ancient mentality doesn’t actually refer to "living forever" but it instead refers to the capacity to be able to live for a very long time (to prolong one’s own lifespan). The blood and flesh of the "son of God" i.e. Zagreus – contained a liquid or a nectar that granted immortality/long-lasting life so the Titans dismembered him, ate his flesh and drank his blood to obtain long-lasting life. Zagreus/the son of God willingly sacrificed himself after the Titans had brought him down conspiring against him. On the other hand the second Messiah who’s the Antichrist – after the death of Zagreus/the first Messiah – the Antichrist had instead a completely different mentality. He was power hungry, he created proselytism and spread the notion that war and slaughtering as well as division between people are all just and pure, but he pretended that war and division were only "necessary steps" in order to achieve "true unity". (So he convinced everyone that the world was full of corrupt people – and that they needed to fight "some wars" in order to rid the world of "tyrants" and "dictators" who were preventing "true world peace"; when in reality they themselves were the tyrants and the dictators who were spreading nothing but chaos and violence on the earth. This is also why in the Bible every war that the Old Testament God does and encourages or he participates in is called a "Holy War" – because they are the "righteous ones" and every war that they do is "justified and holy". The wars of others are on the other hand "wrong" and "not justifiable"). In the Gospels when Jesus says: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household." – Matthew 10:34 – this is the Antichrist talking; but since after the death of the original Messiah (Zagreus/Jesus) the Antichrist took the name of the original Messiah and pretended to be him – later on the two cults were fused together and reinterpreted because the real Messiah and the fake Messiah were believed to be the same person, so they were confused with each other. This is why in the Gospels Jesus acts in a much contradictory manner a lot of times – first stating that he wants peace and love, and then denying all of that by saying that he came to bring the sword instead. They were actually two Messiahs preaching at the same time, but the evil one ended up winning over the good one and prevailing because the good one was killed.
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So the Antichrist advocated for the masculinization of women – and this refers as mentioned to the doctrine of Saint Peter who in the Gospel of Thomas says that women have to become men. In the apocrypha Saint Peter is claimed to have feigned his affection towards Jesus and to have been fake all along – so after he became a member of Jesus’s Apostles; he learned what he could from the Messiah and what was beneficial/useful to him, and then after the Messiah was dead; he migrated and created a church of his own with the knowledge he’d learned from Christ (the church he created was the Roman Church) – but this new Church preached almost exactly the opposite of what Jesus had taught. Peter himself is to be identified with the Antichrist because "Toledot Yeshu" i.e. "Life of Jesus" – claims that after the death of Jesus Peter migrated with some others of the disciples of Jesus that had betrayed him – and he separated them by giving them laws of their own that were different from the ones that Jesus imparted. The Toledot Yeshu furthermore adds that Peter had a Tower built for him and he went and lived in that tower by himself, preaching his "philosophy" and his new doctrines (who were opposite to those of Jesus). This is of course once again a reference to the Antichrist and his preaching of "new ways of living" from his dwelling which was the Tower of Babel (other times interpreted as a "temple" as well). In the "Pistis Sophia" Mary Magdalene claims that: "I am afraid of Peter, because he threatens me and hates our gender." The terming "our gender" is rendered in other translations as "our sex" – thus referring to Peter’s hatred of women and the female gender, the female sex to which Magdalene belonged.
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The Antichrist alongside the Titans also made it so that they would start mixing their DNA with the one of the children of the Sky-god because Satan wanted the children of the Sky-god to go extinct; so he would have them genetically intermixing until there were none of them left because the DNA of the Titans was predominant and it would have eventually prevailed over the one of the children of the Sky-god – if they kept mixing continuously generation after generation. The story of the Exodus in the Bible is the one of the Titans that were invading foreign countries and dislodging the original inhabitants of those countries i.e. the children of the Sky-god who were living in those territories. (The patriarchs were all primordial deities originally, but were later interpreted as mere "men and women" who were the "children of the Sky-god" because they were affiliated with him; and they were remembered as mere "humans" because they were claimed to have lived and died on earth). The Bible claims that Moses and the Israelites went up against Edomites, Amalekites, Madianites (Midianites), Ammonites etc. The orders were always: "exterminate them all". But the Edomites were descended from "Edom" i.e. Esau; Jacob’s twin brother. The Amalekites were descended from Amalek, descendant of Esau. The Midianites were descendants of Midian, the son of Abraham. The Ammonites were descendants of Lot’s son Ben-Ammi, and Lot was the nephew of Abraham. As you can see they were killing each other amongst relatives but most importantly – they were killing the same ones that "God" in the Old Testament had placed inside of those territories himself – because the Bible claims that "Elyon" – which is the Hebrew word that is rendered as "God Most High"; made the divisions at the beginning of times dividing the earth according to the numbers of the children of Israel; and he gave them all an assigned territory. So the people that Moses and the Israelites were exterminating were living in those territories because God himself had placed them inside those territories to live there. And yet – we are supposed to believe that God was actually the one who was on Moses’s side so he’s the same person that’s ordering all of those executions to free up space and make those territories inhabitable for Moses and his followers to settle in. Now this begs the question – if it was the same God who had placed those people in those territories at the beginning of times… couldn’t he have just asked them to move to another territory or to go away in order for Moses and his followers to settle in? And also, if he’s God – couldn’t he just order it or demand it of them because the same people that lived inside those territories were doing so thanks to God; so God could have also given them orders to go all away to make room for Moses and they would have obeyed because they needed to respect God’s authority?. No. Apparently "God" sees it fit to waste all this time and effort to go around exterminating the same ones he himself had supposedly ordered to settle inside those territories. According to Plutarch the god "Typhon" who corresponds to the Egyptian "Set" – had two sons who were called "Hierosolymos" and "Iudaios". According to Tacitus Hierosolymos and Iudaios led a multitude of people out of Egypt, so there were two leaders of the people out of Egypt, not just one. This explains why Moses is regarded as a positive figure yet he acts in such heinous ways in the Old Testament; because there were two of them. A "good" Moses and an "evil" Moses. The "good" Moses received the laws from God the Father, and he led a population out of Egypt and when he settled in those territories he cohabited with the natives of that country. The "other" Moses instead received the laws from Satan/The Devil and with those laws that were opposite to those of "God the Father"; he led a population to those same territories but everywhere he went he exterminated everybody. Now in some traditions the "good brother" is instead envisioned as the son of the Sky-god/God the Father instead of Typhon/The Devil like the Greek narrative holds, but it matters little. What matters is that there was "a good leader of the people" and an "evil leader of the people"; but they were confused with each other and believed to be the same person all over again.
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According to the writer Epiphanius, who talks about the teachings of a certain "Simon Magus" – who corresponds to Jesus although envisioned as a "magician" because he performed miracles; Simon Magus/Jesus says that the laws contained in the Old Testament are the product of a "sinister power" and are not the laws of the true God; which means that Satan pretended to be God and gave his own prophet (the Antichrist) different laws, who were later passed as being laws that came "from God".
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Now the Titans were presented as refugees who needed shelter and help because the Titans claimed to be the victims of a genocide so they needed help and support; but once they would get access to those territories that would shelter them; they would completely try to eradicate the local population that was inhabiting there by starting to do violence against them, in order to take advantage of their hospitality and gradually replace them.
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Titanus/Satan and his faction (the Titans) also aimed to feminize the man so that there wouldn’t be anybody who could challenge the Antichrist (because back in the day the power of the throne was split in two; there was the throne of the queen who could only be inherited by a woman and the throne of the male who could only be inherited by a man). Since the Antichrist was a male and he’d been elected to the position of absolute monarch (although the Antichrist never admitted it since he preferred to stay in the shadows and play the victim so that no one would suspect him) – naturally all potential competitors and threats to his throne would have been males, but if all the males were feminized and degraded/brought down as much as possible, there were none left. As far as the females go – the Antichrist and Satan bought the women off by giving them privileges over the male and extra rights that allowed them a variety of disarray without repercussions; as well as giving them money, well-being, power, overall wealth etc. over the male.
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To reference this there’s mention of how Cronus in Sanchuniathon’s History (Sanchuniathon is a Phoenician Priest who wrote down the History of the Gods according to the Phoenicians) and he claims that after the "evil Kronos" had rebelled against the Sky-god, he managed to convert all the women to his side because the Sky-god had sent many of his daughters to try to kill Kronos, but he bought them all off with power and riches. So the women were given extra privileges over the males.
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The reason is because the Antichrist also wanted to turn women against men; so he told women that they were slaves to the male and that they needed to rebel, and later women became a protected class with money and privileges because they had been told they were victims of men. When the Antichrist who’s presented as "Jesus" – says to Salome (an Apostle of the original Jesus) in the "Greek Gospel of the Egyptians"; that death will hold sway over the world: "So long as women bring forth (give birth), for I (the Antichrist presented as "Jesus") come to end the works of the female" – Salome is manipulated by those words into believing that not giving birth is a good thing so she responds with: "Then I have done well in not bringing forth (giving birth)" to children. This way they kept the earth’s population down even more by turning the two sexes one against the other. Women not giving birth to children was seen as yet another revolutionary thing that women would do to rebel against the men.
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In reality the Antichrist and the Titans were misogynists who saw women as inferior and stupid which is why they bought them all off with money and privileges – as well as power and riches; because they thought less of them. Peter says it himself in the Gospel of Thomas: "women aren’t worthy of life" – and yet the Antichrist and his doctrine pretended to be feminist and "for women" because he wanted to eradicate both men and women as they are and spread hatred between the genders. So in the most "inner circles" of their religion and cult they wouldn’t allow women, but on the "outside" they would pretend to be "for women" and to champion the feminist cause. The same way the Titans also didn’t mix themselves genetically with others amongst the élite families – but they wanted everyone else to intermix genetically instead so they championed it pretending to be all supportive of mixed marriages. And yet their misogyny for example was still apparent in the fact that they wanted to masculinize women and to have women become men – which pretty much shows their hatred for women because they won’t let women be women. And their racism was still apparent since by acting as "perpetual victims" they would still present themselves as somewhat of a "superior race" because being "victims"; nobody could criticize them nor do anything against them. The Antichrist referred to himself and his followers always as "the poor" (for example when "Jesus" who’s actually the Antichrist in this case – says in the Gospels that in order to follow him one must sell everything he has and give it to "the poor" – "the poor" in this case actually refers to their brotherhood/sect; so that they can put their hands on the riches of others through acts of charity); and thus they called themselves "the poor" because they still pretended to be poor and victimized even when they’d achieved absolute power.

I take a decent amount of inspiration from this sub, so I try to give back to the other trivia hosts out there. I'm always on the hunt for new trivia round formats that are easy to replicate and help shake things up a bit. I've done this round a number of times and it always goes over well. So, I thought I'd share it with you all. Keep in mind, I write these for teams of 4 to 6 people, so they might be trickier for an individual.
The Homonyms Round -- I'm going to give you three brief descriptions of words that are all homonyms of each other and you have to tell me what those words are (although I really only care if they list one of the correct words)
For example: 'A pronoun, an organ, and an affirmation = I, Eye, and Aye'
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1. A country of 3 million people, large animals, and painful cries.
2. A type of hair strand, an onomatopoeia, and a euphemism for sex.
3. 1,000 meters, a social group, and an Adam Sandler movie.
4. A simple machine, an advanced machine, and a type of M&M.
5. A cat, a golf course, and things you copy and paste.
6. A gun, a slice, and a symbol you make with your fingers
7. Something that’s 8 bits, something my cat does, and something that you quickly grab.
8. A false god, a paused state, and a Monty Python member.
9. To coat something with a particular substance, a professional association, and an apt description of fish.
10. To disrupt plans, a type of sword, and a type of watercraft.

(A mod deleted the original post because it didn't have a flair on it.)
Let's look at Atheism etymologically. A denotes "non" or "lack thereof" and is placed next to theism to mean Non-theism. The very existence of the term is predicated upon it being in reference to something that exists. Now, I'm sure it's not controversial to say that Theism exists. It's probably easy to say I'm attacking a strawman that doesn't exist even, but that's missing my entire point.
Atheism is a faith framework inspired by Theism where the given lack of any higher powers is in place of one or more higher powers as an explanation for things that cannot be empirically proven. Essentially, a lack of higher powers is a higher power structuring a framework for understanding here. Forget Consciousness and imagine a computer we're all in that has programmed responses for everything, including responses that reward those who worship the computer... the computer is literally a higher power even though it doesn't consciously know you exist. Everything is functionally the same.
To elaborate my point about Atheism being a framework for explaining things that cannot be empirically proven... picture Simulation Theory except it's instead a God's Mind scenario ala Hermeticism. To deny such a premise where all evidence to the contrary would be false would require faith in a lack of God. . . .
. . .
. . .
[Update: For ease of understanding I'll elaborate on some of the things I mentioned up here before I reinforce my case in the comments by quoting and responding to comments from the original post.]
Etymology could be seen as an account of the origins and development of a word and its meaning. My etymological framing of the word Atheist may not begin at its earliest roots or start at its cultural heritage but to make a claim such as "Atheism developed due to a mixture of A, a linguistic tool for denoting a lack thereof, and Theism, a term referencing religious belief, to indicate a lack thereof in regards to religious belief." would qualify as etymological in nature. I implied this claim and expected people to use context clues.
The idea here was to make a claim that seemed preposterous at first that turns out to be true upon closer examination before making another point after hooking people's attention. There seems to be some disagreement between what Atheism means within its own community that I can summarize with two homonyms. A Atheism = A lack of belief in any claims proposing that there is one or more instances of gods. B Atheism = A belief that there is no instances of any gods. Let's call the second one Batheism because they stink and need a bath. Let's say it's a portmanteau of Bad and Theism because they're bad at being Theists and they stink of hypocrisy.
So, with all that out of the way, the second paragraph of my original post refers to Batheists and not the other kind of Atheists. I want that clear here.
In regard to the other kind of Atheists I'll just use the common jelly bean jar metaphor to explain why they subscribe to a different higher power. So, there's a man with a jar of jelly beans. He tells you that he's sure there's an even number of jelly beans in the jar even though he hasn't counted them himself. There's another man, this one's in a purple dino costume for contrast, who walks up to the jar of jelly beans and says he's sure there's an odd number of jelly beans in the jar even though he hasn't counted them himself and is in fact legally blind. You find both assertions equally questionable on the basis of a lack of convincing evidence but that does not mean that you strongly believe that the number is odd when questioning the first man. When questioning the second man after seeing him wearing sunglasses and poking around with a walking stick that does not mean you suddenly strongly believe that the number is even. You tell them both that you believe both of their positions are questionable. The second man says that isn't a jelly bean estimate and the first man chimes in that you made an estimate of their ability to estimate jelly beans. The number is canonically even by the way.
Essentially this means that the jelly bean jar metaphor indicates Atheists subscribe to a kind of higher power that is of a different category than the Monotheistic deity of Abrahamic faith and they have a difficult time reconciling this so they refuse the label of religion outright. How'd I do?
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This is some heavy stuff. It reflects the info that I’ve compiled from sources by cross-referencing several cultures and comparing pretty much all the mythologies and folklore throughout the globe – (although only a few ones are mentioned here because they are the only ones that pertain to the argument at hand). I hope nobody gets upset because it isn’t intended to do so but only to spark a conversation.
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The Serpent i.e. "Satan" (which is simply a title because in Semitic languages it means: "adversary, enemy" and that’s literally just it) rebelled against the Sky-god and castrated him (figuratively, meaning that he took away the control of earth from the Sky-god’s dominion). After that Satan little by little established his own dominion on earth but he had to defeat the sons of the Sky-god first; who were ruling all over the earth at that time on behalf of their Sky-father.
Satan and his faction were called "Titans" in Greek mythology (whose leader was Saturn/Cronus) and considered "demons" in Mesopotamian mythology as well as later Judeo-Christian culture; and they were weaker compared to the children of the Sky-god – the children of the Sky-god being instead called "Anunnaki" in Sumerian ("offspring of Anu"; where Anu was the Sky-god) or the "sons" of Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd) in Persian (where Ahura Mazda is the Sky-god and god of Light) or called the "Olympians" in Greek mythology as children of Uranus, the Sky-god and Gaia of course. (Usually the offspring of Cronus are considered to be "Titans" in the widespread version of the Theogony; but in another more detailed version of said Theogony where Saturn is actually cast as a "good guy" – he is given as the sibling of a certain "Titan/Titanus" who’s the evil brother of Cronus/Saturn; and in that case it is Titan/Titanus who’s the leader of the "Titans" and Cronus/Saturn is instead addressed as the ancestor of the Olympians, because he was the father of the progenitors of the Olympian gods i.e. Rhea, Hyperion, Oceanus etc. who then gave birth to Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite etc.). Now, because the Titans and Satan (Titanus, their leader) were weaker compared to the children of the sky-god (Cronus and the progenitors of the Olympians, who were sons of Uranus and Gaia) – they thus refused to do an all-out war against the children of the Sky-god since they knew they’d be defeated in a face to face confrontation. So Satan and his faction started conspiring behind everyone’s backs and they made it so that the society of the children of the Sky-god would become more and more corrupted little by little; to the point where the children of the Sky-god themselves would basically self-destruct without knowing it.
Satan first of all wanted the next heir to the throne to be a member of the faction of the Titans and not an Olympian anymore. This version of the Theogony is contained in Ennius’s "Sacra historia" where as stated previously – the leader of the Titans is called "Titan" himself or "Titanus" and he’s given as the brother of Saturn who’s instead envisioned as a good guy in this version of the Theogony. So Cronus is given as the leader of the Olympians whilst Titanus or "Titan" is given as the leader of the opposing faction i.e. the Titans. On the other hand the more widely spread version of the Theogony lists Zeus as the leader of the Olympians and Cronus as the leader of the Titans. This is because there were two gods called "Cronus" simultaneously – a "good" Cronus who was the leader of the Olympians and an "evil" Cronus who was the leader of the Titans. The "evil" Cronus/Saturn in this version of the Theogony is instead addressed with the name of "Titan" or "Titanus" himself; and he goes up against the "good Cronus" who’s the leader of the progenitors of the Olympians (the pre-Olympians). Zeus in this version of the Theogony only comes into play later – after the war between Cronus and Titanus is over. Now, Titanus or "Titan" as the leader of the homonymous faction (the Titans) corresponds to "Satan" himself. So Titanus/Satan allowed Cronus to rule over the earth on one condition; that the next heir to the throne would be a member of the Titans and that Cronus himself would raise no male children whatsoever nor allow for any male offspring to be born, which is why Cronus then had to kill all of his children (especially the male ones) by swallowing them according to the myth – because he wanted to prevent a war between Titans and Olympians. But in the meantime Satan/Titanus was conspiring behind everyone’s back to gather his strength and bring Cronus’s rule down as soon as possible.
Although when a male child actually ended up being born (Zeus) there was an all out war and the Titans were eventually defeated as predicted (even though they had some temporary victories) and the Titans were imprisoned because they were still weaker compared to the other faction (the children of the Sky-god). But Satan/Titanus was still conspiring behind everyone’s backs and he pretended to be dead and went into hiding. So little by little he started spreading homosexuality throughout the earth to make it so that the earth’s population didn’t grow in number anymore (thus preventing the growth of the population of the children of the Sky-god i.e. the "Olympians and pre-Olympians" who were inhabiting the earth at that time – so by converting everyone or at least a large part into homosexuals; he made sure that his enemies wouldn’t multiply anymore in numbers as much as they did before. This is why in a lot of cultures there’s the stupid notion that homosexuality is somewhat "demonic" and bullshit like that – because for example according to Persian tradition it was Ahriman i.e. the Persian "Devil" who spread homosexuality throughout the earth as a means to keep the earth’s population down and destroy the children of Ahura Mazda (the Sky-god). So he was also seen as the "inventor" of homosexuality for that very reason. Ahriman of course corresponds once again to "Satan" (the adversary) and to the figure of "Titan" or "Titanus" mentioned previously, the enemy of the Olympians and pre-Olympians.
Now, after the rule of Cronus was over when the war against Titanus ended; the one "Zeus" who was ruling over the earth at that time was the so-called "Cretan Zeus" or the "Latin/Roman Jupiter" variously called "Picus" or "Jupiter Picus"; who was claimed to have been born in Crete (because they equated him with the Cretan Zeus and in Latin legends he even claims that he wants to be buried in Crete when he dies). This particular Zeus was the son of the Mother-Goddess. He was worshipped with the names "Velchanos" (Zeus Velchanos) in Crete, "Zagreus" by the Orphic and "Sabazios" by the Phrygians (who equated him with Zagreus) and he was considered equivalent with both Zeus and Dionysus at the same time. The reason why "official" Greek mythology doesn’t speak of Zeus ever being dethroned is because there were multiple gods called "Zeus" who succeeded each other as kings of Olympus one after the other – so according to a more "general view" and a "generalistic mentality"; Zeus technically was never gone because there was always another Zeus/Jupiter to succeed the previous one. (Cicero in his "De Natura Deorum" speaks of "three Jupiters" in total). Now, the Titans conspired against this particular Zeus who was ruling at the time (called Zagreus, Sabazios) and they killed him (ripped him apart). The myth of Zagreus also mentions how Zagreus himself had become a "Zeus" – because he’d been chosen by the "previous Zeus" who left the kingdom in charge of the boy and gave him his thunderbolts; so once again reinforcing the idea that there were more than a single Zeus, and Zagreus was the one "Zeus" ruling at the time.
After this particular Zeus was dead murdered by the Titans – the Sky-father came to earth and killed all the Titans in revenge for the death of his son and for the chaos and destruction that the Titans themselves had spread throughout the earth with their conspiracies. The rest of the Titans he tortured and imprisoned them. So the few Titans left that survived and managed to escape – started playing the role of victims and they stated that they’d been the victim of an "unfair genocide" because the Sky-god had slaughtered them all; so they started to create places of worship and cults where they would ask people for money and for charity because the Titans apparently were the victims of a genocide that needed charity-money to "save these poor souls". They also started to claim that Zagreus/Sabazios who had been murdered by the Titans actually killed himself with his own hands and nobody hurt him – which is why in some versions of the death of the god (whether he’s called "Attis" in Phrygia or even "Shiva" in India; the god is instead claimed to have "killed himself" or "castrated himself" because he was "mad" and thus he did it all to himself "out of madness"). So this made it seem as though the Titans had been mercilessly slaughtered without a reason and that the Titans were innocent.
With the money and funds that they’d gained out of charity and out of all the places of worship which they’d set up – they began to build the Tower of Babel. The Titans by that point were called "Giants" because after the Sky-god slaughtered them all they had multiplied once again on the earth and the new generation was redubbed as "Giants". This was technically the second Tower they would build because the first one had been built at the time when Zagreus ruled. After Zagreus was dead the Sky-god killed the Titans, destroyed the First Tower and sent a Flood over the earth. After said Flood the Giants/Titans regrouped establishing themselves in Babylon and they created another Tower. The Sky-god had gone into hiding into the skies and never showed himself; because after the death of his son he didn’t want anything to do with earth anymore.
The Titans elected a ruler of their own who would become the "Antichrist" of Revelation. The Devil/Satan at this point still pretended to be dead so he inhabited the inside of the Tower not showing his face outside; and he would tell the Antichrist what to do (which paves the way for the imagery where the Devil whispers into the ears of the Antichrist and tells him what to do and what to say). The Antichrist spread homosexuality and all the affiliated cultures that come with it once again throughout the earth; in order to keep the earth’s population down and prevent the children of the Sky-god to grow in numbers again and potentially rebel. The Antichrist also swore to completely eradicate women and make them obsolete – not by killing them but by making it so that they wouldn’t conceive children any longer and that they would abandon everything that identified them as being women. (This is where the mentality of Saint Peter comes into play; because Peter says in the Gospel of Thomas that women have to become men in order to "achieve salvation").
The original Jesus corresponds to Zagreus and the Titans ate his flesh so this is what it means when Jesus says: "eat, this is my body offered for you" – because Zagreus decided to die to save mankind and the earth as a whole after the Titans had conspired against him and attacked him since they wanted his power; so he gave it to them because he didn’t care about power even when he had it – and he gave them the power they sought on the condition that they would let humans live and be free and there wouldn’t be any war between the two factions (the children of the Sky-god and the Titans). Zagreus was represented by the pomegranate which is why Jesus is also represented by the pomegranate and depicted while holding it or having it next to him. The Titans wanted immortality which according to ancient mentality doesn’t actually refer to "living forever" but it instead refers to the capacity to be able to live for a very long time (to prolong one’s own lifespan). The blood and flesh of the "son of God" i.e. Zagreus – contained a liquid or a nectar that granted immortality/long-lasting life so the Titans dismembered him, ate his flesh and drank his blood to obtain long-lasting life. Zagreus/the son of God willingly sacrificed himself after the Titans had brought him down conspiring against him. On the other hand the second Messiah who’s the Antichrist – after the death of Zagreus/the first Messiah – the Antichrist had instead a completely different mentality. He was power hungry, he created proselytism and spread the notion that war and slaughtering as well as division between people are all just and pure, but he pretended that war and division were only "necessary steps" in order to achieve "true unity". (So he convinced everyone that the world was full of corrupt people – and that they needed to fight "some wars" in order to rid the world of "tyrants" and "dictators" who were preventing "true world peace"; when in reality they themselves were the tyrants and the dictators who were spreading nothing but chaos and violence on the earth. This is also why in the Bible every war that the Old Testament God does and encourages or he participates in is called a "Holy War" – because they are the "righteous ones" and every war that they do is "justified and holy". The wars of others are on the other hand "wrong" and "not justifiable"). In the Gospels when Jesus says: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household." – Matthew 10:34 – this is the Antichrist talking; but since after the death of the original Messiah (Zagreus/Jesus) the Antichrist took the name of the original Messiah and pretended to be him – later on the two cults were fused together and reinterpreted because the real Messiah and the fake Messiah were believed to be the same person, so they were confused with each other. This is why in the Gospels Jesus acts in a much contradictory manner a lot of times – first stating that he wants peace and love, and then denying all of that by saying that he came to bring the sword instead. They were actually two Messiahs preaching at the same time, but the evil one ended up winning over the good one and prevailing because the good one was killed.
So the Antichrist advocated for the masculinization of women – and this refers as mentioned to the doctrine of Saint Peter who in the Gospel of Thomas says that women have to become men. In the apocrypha Saint Peter is claimed to have feigned his affection towards Jesus and to have been fake all along – so after he became a member of Jesus’s Apostles; he learned what he could from the Messiah and what was beneficial/useful to him, and then after the Messiah was dead; he migrated and created a church of his own with the knowledge he’d learned from Christ (the church he created was the Roman Church) – but this new Church preached almost exactly the opposite of what Jesus had taught. Peter himself is to be identified with the Antichrist because "Toledot Yeshu" i.e. "Life of Jesus" – claims that after the death of Jesus Peter migrated with some others of the disciples of Jesus that had betrayed him – and he separated them by giving them laws of their own that were different from the ones that Jesus imparted. The Toledot Yeshu furthermore adds that Peter had a Tower built for him and he went and lived in that tower by himself, preaching his "philosophy" and his new doctrines (who were opposite to those of Jesus). This is of course once again a reference to the Antichrist and his preaching of "new ways of living" from his dwelling which was the Tower of Babel (other times interpreted as a "temple" as well). In the "Pistis Sophia" Mary Magdalene claims that: "I am afraid of Peter, because he threatens me and hates our gender." The terming "our gender" is rendered in other translations as "our sex" – thus referring to Peter’s hatred of women and the female gender, the female sex to which Magdalene belonged.
The Antichrist alongside the Titans also made it so that they would start mixing their DNA with the one of the children of the Sky-god because Satan wanted the children of the Sky-god to go extinct; so he would have them genetically intermixing until there were none of them left because the DNA of the Titans was predominant and it would have eventually prevailed over the one of the children of the Sky-god – if they kept mixing continuously generation after generation. The story of the Exodus in the Bible is the one of the Titans that were invading foreign countries and dislodging the original inhabitants of those countries i.e. the children of the Sky-god who were living in those territories. (The patriarchs were all primordial deities originally, but were later interpreted as mere "men and women" who were the "children of the Sky-god" because they were affiliated with him; and they were remembered as mere "humans" because they were claimed to have lived and died on earth). The Bible claims that Moses and the Israelites went up against Edomites, Amalekites, Madianites (Midianites), Ammonites etc. The orders were always: "exterminate them all". But the Edomites were descended from "Edom" i.e. Esau; Jacob’s twin brother. The Amalekites were descended from Amalek, descendant of Esau. The Midianites were descendants of Midian, the son of Abraham. The Ammonites were descendants of Lot’s son Ben-Ammi, and Lot was the nephew of Abraham. As you can see they were killing each other amongst relatives but most importantly – they were killing the same ones that "God" in the Old Testament had placed inside of those territories himself – because the Bible claims that "Elyon" – which is the Hebrew word that is rendered as "God Most High"; made the divisions at the beginning of times dividing the earth according to the numbers of the children of Israel; and he gave them all an assigned territory. So the people that Moses and the Israelites were exterminating were living in those territories because God himself had placed them inside those territories to live there. And yet – we are supposed to believe that God was actually the one who was on Moses’s side so he’s the same person that’s ordering all of those executions to free up space and make those territories inhabitable for Moses and his followers to settle in. Now this begs the question – if it was the same God who had placed those people in those territories at the beginning of times… couldn’t he have just asked them to move to another territory or to go away in order for Moses and his followers to settle in? And also, if he’s God – couldn’t he just order it or demand it of them because the same people that lived inside those territories were doing so thanks to God; so God could have also given them orders to go all away to make room for Moses and they would have obeyed because they needed to respect God’s authority?. No. Apparently "God" sees it fit to waste all this time and effort to go around exterminating the same ones he himself had supposedly ordered to settle inside those territories. According to Plutarch the god "Typhon" who corresponds to the Egyptian "Set" – had two sons who were called "Hierosolymos" and "Iudaios". According to Tacitus Hierosolymos and Iudaios led a multitude of people out of Egypt, so there were two leaders of the people out of Egypt, not just one. This explains why Moses is regarded as a positive figure yet he acts in such heinous ways in the Old Testament; because there were two of them. A "good" Moses and an "evil" Moses. The "good" Moses received the laws from God the Father, and he led a population out of Egypt and when he settled in those territories he cohabited with the natives of that country. The "other" Moses instead received the laws from Satan/The Devil and with those laws that were opposite to those of "God the Father"; he led a population to those same territories but everywhere he went he exterminated everybody. Now in some traditions the "good brother" is instead envisioned as the son of the Sky-god/God the Father instead of Typhon/The Devil like the Greek narrative holds, but it matters little. What matters is that there was "a good leader of the people" and an "evil leader of the people"; but they were confused with each other and believed to be the same person all over again.
According to the writer Epiphanius, who talks about the teachings of a certain "Simon Magus" – who corresponds to Jesus although envisioned as a "magician" because he performed miracles; Simon Magus/Jesus says that the laws contained in the Old Testament are the product of a "sinister power" and are not the laws of the true God; which means that Satan pretended to be God and gave his own prophet (the Antichrist) different laws, who were later passed as being laws that came "from God".
Now the Titans were presented as refugees who needed shelter and help because the Titans claimed to be the victims of a genocide so they needed help and support; but once they would get access to those territories that would shelter them; they would completely try to eradicate the local population that was inhabiting there by starting to do violence against them, in order to take advantage of their hospitality and gradually replace them.
Titanus/Satan and his faction (the Titans) also aimed to feminize the man so that there wouldn’t be anybody who could challenge the Antichrist (because back in the day the power of the throne was split in two; there was the throne of the queen who could only be inherited by a woman and the throne of the male who could only be inherited by a man). Since the Antichrist was a male and he’d been elected to the position of absolute monarch (although the Antichrist never admitted it since he preferred to stay in the shadows and play the victim so that no one would suspect him) – naturally all potential competitors and threats to his throne would have been males, but if all the males were feminized and degraded/brought down as much as possible, there were none left. As far as the females go – the Antichrist and Satan bought the women off by giving them privileges over the male and extra rights that allowed them a variety of disarray without repercussions; as well as giving them money, well-being, power, overall wealth etc. over the male.
To reference this there’s mention of how Cronus in Sanchuniathon’s History (Sanchuniathon is a Phoenician Priest who wrote down the History of the Gods according to the Phoenicians) and he claims that after the "evil Kronos" had rebelled against the Sky-god, he managed to convert all the women to his side because the Sky-god had sent many of his daughters to try to kill Kronos, but he bought them all off with power and riches. So the women were given extra privileges over the males.
The reason is because the Antichrist also wanted to turn women against men; so he told women that they were slaves to the male and that they needed to rebel, and later women became a protected class with money and privileges because they had been told they were victims of men. When the Antichrist who’s presented as "Jesus" – says to Salome (an Apostle of the original Jesus) in the "Greek Gospel of the Egyptians"; that death will hold sway over the world: "So long as women bring forth (give birth), for I (the Antichrist presented as "Jesus") come to end the works of the female" – Salome is manipulated by those words into believing that not giving birth is a good thing so she responds with: "Then I have done well in not bringing forth (giving birth)" to children. This way they kept the earth’s population down even more by turning the two sexes one against the other. Women not giving birth to children was seen as yet another revolutionary thing that women would do to rebel against the men.
In reality the Antichrist and the Titans were misogynists who saw women as inferior and stupid which is why they bought them all off with money and privileges – as well as power and riches; because they thought less of them. Peter says it himself in the Gospel of Thomas: "women aren’t worthy of life" – and yet the Antichrist and his doctrine pretended to be feminist and "for women" because he wanted to eradicate both men and women as they are and spread hatred between the genders. So in the most "inner circles" of their religion and cult they wouldn’t allow women, but on the "outside" they would pretend to be "for women" and to champion the feminist cause. The same way the Titans also didn’t mix themselves genetically with others amongst the élite families – but they wanted everyone else to intermix genetically instead so they championed it pretending to be all supportive of mixed marriages. And yet their misogyny for example was still apparent in the fact that they wanted to masculinize women and to have women become men – which pretty much shows their hatred for women because they won’t let women be women. And their racism was still apparent since by acting as "perpetual victims" they would still present themselves as somewhat of a "superior race" because being "victims"; nobody could criticize them nor do anything against them. The Antichrist referred to himself and his followers always as "the poor" (for example when "Jesus" who’s actually the Antichrist in this case – says in the Gospels that in order to follow him one must sell everything he has and give it to "the poor" – "the poor" in this case actually refers to their brotherhood/sect; so that they can put their hands on the riches of others through acts of charity); and thus they called themselves "the poor" because they still pretended to be poor and victimized even when they’d achieved absolute power.