silveradept | Sunshine Challenge 2020 #6: Indigo-go-Gadget-electronic-pen! (Reply)

sunshine_challenge is almost through the spectrum, and we have landed upon Indigo.

Indigo is a rich color that is associated with a variety of things including: magic, experience, truth, dignity, virtue, dreams, profanity, inferiority, imagination, luxury, wisdom, spirit, destiny, elegance, intuition.
The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper —W.B. Yeats
What magic have you experienced in your life? Have you come to appreciate it differently as you grow older? What experiences have brought you wisdom?

Please feel free to answer in whichever way comes naturally to you, be it a memory you share or an artwork you create. If you’d like a more specific idea to kick things off: write a letter to your younger self about things you’ve learned that relate to the indigo theme (can also be a character writing to their younger self).

As I have mentioned many a time, it seems wisdom is my dump stat for this life. And not in "a lot of brains but no polish", but in that I can, have, and kept making decisions that were unwise for myself in an attempt to stay in a relationship that, with more experience, I might have recognized as a bad one from the start. And that I will still be paying the effects of for the remainder of my life, even if many of those effects fade away with time. So I'm not sure that I get to qualify as "wise [Z]" to anyone at any point in my life. If I give anyone wisdom, it is probably in the form of "do not the things that I did."

I do get the ability to work a little magic professionally. You can explain the steps and learn what happens by schooling or experience and use sufficently advanced technologies to pull answers and resources out of the seeming ether. Or doing programming for tiny smalls by reading books, singing songs, doing dances, and playing with the toys and each other. There's nothing about it that can't be taught, although I suspect at a certain point my saying that draws the response "Sure, it can be taught, just like medicine can be taught and engineering spacecraft can be taught and the working of the internal combustion engine can be taught, but at a certain point, it's complex enough that the application and understanding of it invokes Clarke's Third Law."

Magic is the kind of thing that I desperately want in the world and can see that it would be a terrible idea for people to have, because people are people when they have power. The concept of spellwork, will-working, and magic in the modern pagan concept (what has been referred to as The Soup What Made Paganism ("The Soup")) is intriguing, but there's something getting in the way of making it a practice, and it might have something to do with The Soup being a a jam flavor choice problem (PDF of Iyengar and Lepper's choices study) and by not having seen enough of any given flavor's ritual and tradition to make anything resembling an informed decision about it. There are books written, sure, but this seems to be one of those things where praxis is more important than doxa (which is the opposite orientation of the religious system I was raised in, which favors doxa over praxis, even if it has enough of a praxis compliment to have constructed entire liturgical years and rituals for most occasions) and, for reasons, public ritual and private ritual are often different things. Finding these things out takes time, of course, and before the virus that makes it exceedingly difficult to do anything in person, I'd still have had to carve out time for that and go have dedication, even if I didn't intend to become a dedicant.

On slightly less heavy matters, there's a different sort of Clarkian magic at work using the distributed network of the Internet and the linked financial system to bring people who are creating things and the people who want to support them financially into the same place. (And then taking a finder's fee for the privilege.) Several different sites exist to provide this service, and I don't even have to strain to get a connection to the color theme here (because there's obvious fandom connections through Kickstarter, Patreon, ko-fi, IndieGoGo, and so on) because of one of the naming conventions of the world of Remnant, the setting of RWBY. Monty's rules for naming characters and teams in RWBY say all names must be colors, be derived from colors, or evoke colors when someone hears the name. Except O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D. himself, of course, even though even he follows the rule to a certain degree. RWBY ran a campaign for Lazer Team where people who wanted to fund the show could, for the appropriate price, have their own character and character design incorporated into the show officially. Since they ran the campaign through IndieGoGo, the team composed of all of these funded characters is N-D-G-O - Indigo.

Team NDGO appeared in one part of one episode on the Vytal Festival Arc and hasn't fully been seen since, which is often what happens to these kinds of characters in creative endeavors. Which can sometimes lead to the question of "Why would someone sink that kind of money into a show just so their characters can appear for half an episode and not even win their battle?" I think the answer to that is the same as "Why would people donate more than $40,000 during a livestream of two married lesbians while they draw She-Ra ideas from the donation pool?" Or "Why would people willingly send food to people they have only met over the internet, on the hopes that the food will get reviewed on their podcast?"

Or even "Why did you commission that fanwork?"

There's magic in fandom, of people coming together because they found something meaningful in a work. The same interconnectedness that makes it possible for someone to be bullied no matter where they go makes it possible for them to find other people who like the things they do and have all sorts of interesting ideas about that stuff together in a space that is their own. (Until it explodes, anyway. Usually because the advertisers are demanding changes to the content.) I didn't get as deeply involved in fandom in the ages where I was supposed to, I suppose, so I'm always going to feel like I'm caught between generations of fandom that have been doing the thing since they were small, too old to be trusted and too young to have experienced a lot of fandom history firsthand, but I can see the magic in there, I can see how finding someone who ships your rarepair or the people who leave positive feedback on your beginning works and encourage you to grow into being a better writer can be a lifeline to an otherwise terrible situation, or can help you get through an important part of your life where everything is changing. And I can appreciate that energy and be fannish and geek out with others, even if I haven't hit that point myself where the fandom has been sustaining when nothing else was. (There's a canon that I owe my life to, but not the fandom that went with it, because I don't necessarily exist on the platforms where that fandom has been really popular.)

And, of course, there's always the indigo plant, and the indigo dye that goes along with it. Which can turn hair a very nice color, or so I'm told.