#cue angouleme ‘this whole place is enchanted and weird. we gotta get out of here’

[hanzajesthanza]

every day my heart pours for how much i adore the hansa pretending to be incognito nobility during their stay in beauclair, putting on this masquerade in the court of anna henrietta, having to not only dress but also act and speak the part, dressing up in wonderful fancy garments, being the only ones who know each other’s true identities, teasing each other sarcastically about being ladies and lords…

each suffering from their own specific insecurities…

milva frustrated and afraid, knowing that no matter what she wears, when she opens her mouth to speak people will know she’s not nobility, sealing herself in her quarters even after she’s healed from her rib injury because she doesn’t want to expose the company by simply existing.

cahir pained with the noble court, reminded of his childhood and darn dyffra and family in vicovaro that he’ll never see again, living in a world much like his own, but without the politics of reality which own and command his life.

angoulême at first gleeful to have the opportunity of the con of a lifetime, then wretchedly envious as she knows none of it will ever be really hers, constantly reminded that this is a life she was denied since birth, wondering what it would have been like for her if her mother never abandoned her.

regis effortless at blending in, this being another disguise on top of another on top of another, this being the external world he passes through with ease, but internally in conflict with himself, uneasy and questioning and tearing himself apart philosophically in searching for the meaning of all this.

everyone living in a dream, a beautiful dream as painful as it is fantastical, in love with their surroundings and in fear of themselves, wanting so badly to forget the harshness of reality and live a beautiful dream, but, like continous crashing waves slamming down onto a shipwrecked sailor who holds onto land by just one bloodied hand, refusing to let go to be consumed by the blissful eternal sleep which the ocean would grant them, staying, committing to their realities, which grant them only pain.

in the middle of a blissful land untouched by war, none of them can be truly, truly happy. yes, outside, they’re at ease in their fantasy, but inside, they are marked by the horrors of real life, they can’t relax, they cannot forget themselves even if they wanted to or tried. because it’s not real, none of it is real. none of them fit in with their surroundings, this damned dream-land fairy tale, when they are all themselves, as characters in these books, inversions of fairy tales… they don’t fit in, but they don’t fit in together. they’re all real people surviving in a fake land. though, of course, this ��survival” just looks like a relaxed two-or-three hour long breakfast every morning and a lazy raiding of the kitchens at midnight. as her grace says, another drop, anyone?