#(THIS IS ALL I COULD EVER HOPE FOR A MORE)

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

you open my Super Important Documents and its just pictures of charles xavier

[mouse-fantoms]

If ya’ll think I’m not crying like a baby about this then let me inform you 😭😅

[licorishh]

so uhhh happy valentine's day i suppose !!

shoves this in your face and runs away

so. uh. yyyyyeah. when i said i liked all interpretations of their dynamic equally i uh. i lied. and to be totally and completely and 100% honest with you it speaks volumes to the state of the internet that i have been legitimately afraid to say that like i've genuinely been debating and turning it over in my head and arguing with myself about it for days because i don't want people frickin' YELLING at me and telling me to off myself because i like a dadgum fictional ship but it's valentine's and my friend has been hyping up the crap outta me so i'm past the point of having a reasonable excuse to chicken out (and i know myself and if i don't do it today then i likely won't do it at all)

anyway words actually cannot express how obsessed i am with post-o66 aus in which they stay together (largely because i so completely refuse to believe they'd be willing to split up after THAT, ESPECIALLY that soon) so yeah shoutout to the softest fluffiest gut-punch-iest pair in the galaxy to whom everything bad has happened but who stay silly despite the horrors

[teethkid67]

NO ONE'S AROUND TO HELP - A DISCDUO WEBWEAVE

aka HAPPY @mcythorrorgiftexchange , @cryingtulips !!!!!! ive done a few web weaves before but this is my first time posting one ..... i hope u like it .... i decided to go for theming around the prison break & the whole "welcome home"/return to exile . i know you didnt want art for your gift but i couldnt resist drawing something , so the central (?) piece of tommy digging up the axe of piece was custom for this web weave !!

in order of appearance:

It's Not a Fashion Statement, It's a Deathwish by My Chemical Romance / Pandora's Vault Blueprints by camruna, sourced from The DSMP Wiki / lordmisery, 2020 / Untitled (Cave) by Marten Lange, 2012 / sketches of exile by @rainsteas / November 28 2021 from the DreamSMP Transcript Project / Hem of the Fray by Sorry / frame from after all, this is what you deserve by @arginnit / YOU LOOKING FOR SOMETHING :)? by @teethkid67 / Wolf in Sheep's Clothing by Set It Off / welcome home by @cellularmatter / The Silence of the Lambs / fog by Sara Ann, 2009 / Baltimore by Sorry

[yudol-skorbi]

and what if i go insane

[nabaath-areng]

I have this one "OC" that does not yet have a name that I've drawn several times for a couple years. I was thinking that if I tried making them in FFXIV that I'd use elezen as a base... but then I remembered what other race have their near exact hairstyle... and now I'm like damn... I played myself...

[mikhailoism]

“I just want you to know that I see you… I know you’re hurting, and I’m here for you, and I love you.”

maybobby moment based on one of my favorite fics, all I love so dearly by @blossom--of--snow !!

[halfbaked00q]

Im soooo weak to when Bond is like casually being used or exploited at his expense for some ostensible Greater Good except the situation doesn't HAVE to come to that, not really, and he's so inured and even numb to it that he barely pays it any mind; meanwhile, Q absolutely minds and is very indignant on his behalf and works overtime to like either try to avert or forestall the situation before it gets to the point where Bond has to dig his own claws into more of his soft underbelly to offer up on the sacrificial alter of politics of all tawdry things, or to manufacture a way in which he does the needless "needful" so as to spare Bond at least one unnecessary additional wound upon his psyche.

bonus if Bond finds out and maybe after being angry or indignant about it - I don't need you to do my job for me, Q, this is what I'm here to do - and either Q tells him/lets slip or he deduces that like, this isn't Q thinking he can't get the job done, this is Q finding him precious and worthy of protecting, and like. he's just very in awe of that and does in fact feel very safe and cherished within the cradle of his Quartermaster's regard

[wundrousarts]

I have discovered a Nevermoor rarepair to entertain for once: Meredith Darling/Bertram Crow. Does anyone else see the vision🧍

[wortsandall]

had the realization that i only care about jason and a lesser extent damian. the rest could have the most interesting, most controversial comic run of their lives and i wouldnt give a fuck.

they could all die and stay dead forever and i would barely notice. they could be packaged in all my favorite headcanons and tropes and i still wouldn't spare them a second glance

[tapestryundone]

when the god was made in the image of a man who infiltrated the mind of said god and in doing so made himself intertwined with the form that god took while also being the cause of that form creating a infinite feedback loop of what caused the god and his creator to evoke the very image of the death the creator feared through the form of an animal representing that concept, and the god has faint, undeniably human characteristics given to him by his creator while his creator retained none of it. fuck

[kitkat13001]

so in other news i think i will in fact be taking a break <3

[satans-knitwear]

GUYYYYYYYS I MIGHT BE MEETING A LITTLE BABY PUPPY DOG TOMORROW.

[moeblob]

She's so wonderful, I love my daughter.

[sluckythewizard]

YOU JUST HƎARD IT FROM [HIS MOUTH] FOR SURƎ!!!