#she is fascinating and complex

[loredrinker]

I think about how Mythal convinced Solas to leave the Fade - and why.

She knew he loved the Fade. That he was content there and had no desire to enter the physical world. She didn’t call him because she missed him or longed for their old companionship as spirits, nor was it to experience the world with him.

She pulled him from the Fade because she needed something from him.

That moment defines their dynamic - hierarchical from the start. Commander and soldier, wielder and weapon.

And I think about Matt Rhodes’ art and note from the Black Codex:

“Dwarves tend to the Titans, like helpful bacteria. The spirits begin to envy their form.”

Envy.

If that was the impulse that led Elgar’nan, Mythal and the other Evanuris to take form, then their fall was inevitable.

But Solas, who is no younger?

He took form for another reason entirely.

Devotion.

Elgar’nan was right - Solas was never like them.

And I want to be clear that this isn’t a condemnation of Mythal. If anything, I find her character tragic, complex, and compelling. I believe there was love between them, I believe they were bonded as spirits long before either took form, and I don’t think our human frame of reference can truly grasp what that means. We reach for tidy labels - friend, lover, mentor, rival - because we’re uncomfortable with the unknown. But the Evanuris resist categorization. That’s part of their mystery and why they fascinate me.

Still, whatever existed between Solas and Mythal - once Mythal called Solas in service to her needs, and once Solas (reluctantly) agreed - it was no longer a bond of spiritual equality. I suppose it's why Memories of a Duet is so emotional. It feels like a memory of their harmonic union together in the Fade, when they last saw each other for who they truly were.

And while much of what we understand about their relationship comes through Solas’ memories, it isn’t a memory of Mythal who stands before him in the atonement ending, speaking not as a companion would, but as a queen addressing a subject, formalizing their dynamic: release from service.

[stillgotscars]

so in an interview britt lower gave today, she said that she came up with the idea for helena to struggle to switch on helly’s computer in episode 1. between that and finding out she improvised taking off helly’s heels in episode 6 as a way of reclaiming her sense of autonomy post-body hijacking, i’m just in absolute awe of the way her mind works and of how thoroughly in-touch she is with these two characters traits and their complex inner worlds.

[pidgeony]

what genuinely drives me ever-so-slightly insane every time i see people being like "why doesn't x batfam character kill, that's so hypocritical/ selfish/ whatever reason of them" is when did we ever need a reason *not* to kill??

everyone is justified in not killing. yes, some characters (bruce and cass for example) have very clear reasons (parents died in front of him, killed a man and saw what he felt), and some are less fleshed out or seemingly don't have a reason at all, but that doesn't mean that they are like, obligated to kill (or like/ forgive characters who kill)??? is this not obvious????

they chose this. they are vigilantes held by their own standards and codes and they choose not to kill. they've seen terrible things, tragedy befalls their everyday lives and they wake up and decide: no, life is precious, no, i am going to save lives, not end them, no, i will not be judge, jury, and executioner. if that's not important and significant about the batfam (excluding jason for obv reasons) then i don't know what is.

no, you don't have to agree with their code, but please for the love of all that's holy stop acting like bruce wayne is the worst man to grace the planet because he won't murder criminals or twist tim/ dick/ cass/ anyone basically into some morally gray anti-hero because you don't like their no-kill moral code.

[saffitaffi]

“What if the evil tyrant who likes to kill puppies for fun actually just needed to fall in love with a sweet naive child who redeems them through the power of love and they were actually good the whole ti-“

What if they weren’t, though? What if their life twisted them to the point that they can only love through violence?

What if the narrative doomed them to ever play their role, a role that has already been chosen by forces higher than them?

What if the sweet, gentle character didn’t love them ‘despite their flaws’, or even at all?

Why should they? Especially if it’s a case of kidnapping. ESPECIALLY if they hurt them. Or their friends. Or take away their agency.

What if that strange contradiction of love and hatred in their heart tore them apart and gave them their justified end?

What if they CAN’T be fixed?

What if they don’t WANT to be fixed?

What if we stopped glamorizing abusive relationships and started actually exploring them?

[lostandbackagain]

valkyrie moodboard part 4 🎉🎉🎉

pt. 1 pt. 2 pt. 3

[aingeal98]

Love how Lumon is such a cult that Helena asking if her Father approves of her going back down and the Drummond guy saying "Father encouraged it." could either be a) him being petty, b) the Lumon approved way to refer to the Egan in charge or c) insinuating that he's Helena's brother (potentially a bastard? He looks older than her but she's next in line seemingly)

And we probably won't find out any time soon!

[rexonalapis]

it is very telling that average genshin players cannot comprehend seeing an actual mature, qualified leader that is actually good at taking her job seriously after meeting archons who either is still childish, clowning whimsically, or straight up incompetent.

[sarafangirlart]

Hera would not fucking do that.

[sysig]

Talk yourself into it (Patreon)

[glitter-stained]

I know you probably aren't familiar with the character, but thinking about DC and mental health and John Constantine.

Hellblazer comics lead, magician, con man, seriously messed up life.

I'm pretty sure he's the only (semi) heroic DC character who is explicitly shown with the 'ugly' kind of mental illness, and has spent time in a mental hospital as a patient.

Constantine's backstory involves an exorcism attempt by teenaged Constantine and friends horribly backfiring. What regular people see is Constantine stumbling out of a house full of corpses, holding a little girl's severed arm and babbling frantically about demons and hell.

Obviously he gets railroaded as responsible for all the deaths, and ends up in Ravenscar hospital - basically Arkham in UK, only more tough to escape from.

There's a lot of scenes where he is treated horribly - beaten up by guards, the doctors ignoring his injuries, unnecessary drugging, all that. Everyone feels he deserves it, because as far as they know, he murdered half a dozen people, including a five year old.

Even Constantine, talking in retrospect, feels he deserved all that - though in his case it's because he made a horribly wrong decision while sane, and caused the kid to be dragged to hell.

The actual diagnosis is never stated, but he is clinically insane for at least a while - apparently as the result of the mindbreaking trauma that happened during the botched exorcism.

There's a couple of incidents where he's basically dragged out of the hospital (usually by bad guys) to deal with some magical crisis or the other, all the while protesting that he is not okay, that he needs the meds, needs the hospital.

And when he is released from the hospital to an outpatient program basically for cost cutting than because he was better, he is shown begging to be let back in. A lot of his issues stem from not getting the help when it was needed - and that, given his power, lead to worse decisions and spirals.

There's a lot of fics which have Constantine involved with the Batfamily. Haven't seen one go into the premise, but the potential... His attitude towards Arkham or the Rogues... Towards how mentally ill dangerous criminals are treated, given he himself was in the role of the mentally ill dangerous criminal once...

I am in fact familiar with Constantine's character, rest assured his ass is sitting patiently in my waiting room for when I'm finished with Jason, Cass and probably Mia. Yeah, the waiting room's a little bit crowded btw, we're not taking any admissions for the moment.

[orobanchaceae]

"you were my first boyfriend and amputation :3" oh teen misty you are . something

[screemnch]

You can pry Clara pathologic out of my cold dead hands

[walleeli]

my perhaps most controversial take as a lads player and specifically as an apple girlie is that I fuck SO heavily with Josephine.

[normal-thoughts-official]

I made a post earlier arguing that Higurashi is a horror story about child neglect and the premature loss of childhood, and I'd like to talk a bit about how I think this adds to the horror in Gou and Sotsu

Personally, I felt like Kai felt a lot more like a tragedy/mystery/action combo than psychological horror; I was never really scared, just sad. But Gou? Gou was horrifying to me, and definitely a lot more so to Rika too, and I think a good part of that reason is that in Gou she wasn't just being abandoned, but effectively targeted by the adults that were supposed to protect her

In Gou, while the horror is certainly also in the killings - I felt it was a lot more explicit and gorey than Kai -, it is mostly in the process of retraumatization. In Kai, Rika was more or less used to being killed, and numbed to it. But in Gou, Rika is faced with the horrifying reality that, even after being able to escape, she could be pulled back into the endless loop of trauma; so there was no way to escape that would be meaningful. This is all explicit text, so I won't waste a lot of time going into it. What I want to focus on is that this process adds an even bigger sense of helplessness that is typical to children trapped in abusive situations. Everything that happens is completely outside of their control, there is no escape, and the process happens over and over again. The unique vulnerability of being a child (both physical and social) is mirrored in that process of being trapped then and re-trapped in the killing cycles

Add to that the fact that Rika had gotten to grow up and was suddenly thrust back into helpless childhood, and things get even worse and more explicit in that sense. For a while, she had experienced what it was like to have at least a few more resources to help herself than before. She was not an adult, but she was a teenager, and she had a bigger support network. Then, all of a sudden, she was thrust back into being a child. Having to go back to the childish mannerisms she had left behind, which, as I pointed out in the original post, were always a performance that helped further alienate her; therefore, doubly so once she was able to leave that behind. Her desperation to be sophisticated, to act grown up, to go new places, was a form of rejection of the helplessness of childhood. To her, childhood was explicitly tied to trauma just as much as Hinamizawa was. Being shoved back into childhood was to have all her hard-earned agency stolen from her

Once again, this is explicit text, so I'm going to move on, but the point I'm trying to make here is that, if in Higurashi horror is tied to the loss of childhood, as I argued in the other post, to Rika, the horror is childhood itself. Once again, this is typical in children who endure abuse and neglect; an unsafe childhood only has the worst aspects of being a child - the dependance and weakness - without any of the best ones - the safety net, being taken care of, getting to play and be happy. Therefore, they don't see childhood as a good thing, but as something to escape in order to survive

So when Rika finds herself a(n even younger) child, she is again faced with the horror of having no choice but to rely on adults to take care of her. Which she's never had in the first place, but after the events of Kai, she at least knew some of them who could have helped her escape her terrible fate. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first two people who killed her in a way that made it clear these loops were different from the previous ones were Ooishi and Akasaka, exactly the two that most helped her escape fate in Kai. It really drove home that she had nowhere to turn to

When Satoko injected Rena and Mion, she ended up basically emulating the previous loops, and Rika never even knew it was different from the other times where Keiichi and Shion were the killers. It was when Ooishi killed her that she realized things were different, and, immediately, she decided that she would only go five more loops before she killed herself

And sure, the fact that this is the second time this happens certainly makes it harder to believe there's any getting out of it in a way that matters, but I don't think it's a coincidence that being betrayed by Ooishi is what finally makes her put a cap on how many times she's willing to try. Ooishi was once part of her safety net; one of the adults that helped change the game. Once he was the one who killed her, she was more alone than ever before. But she still had more people to turn to, so she decided she'd try more, at least a little

Then, of course, she was killed by Akasaka

Akasaka being next was just... Awful. Probably the most gut-wrenching death in Higurashi to me. While he couldn't be called a parental figure, he certainly was also the only adult she's ever had to take care of her. He certainly was the only adult she fully trusted. He was the only person, period, that she ever told she knew she was going to die before the final loop in Kai. Akasaka was her only ally, the only one she fully trusted, and the closest she had to a figure she could call a caretaker. So it's no wonder that, after he killed her, Rika stopped even trying at all; she was only counting down to keep her promise to herself, but she was no longer shown trying to change what would happen or making any kind of effort; she was merely counting down and dying again and again without respite. They didn't even bother showing us anything before the killings, because, to Rika, that was just white noise; she was just waiting out for them to happen. To lose Akasaka was to lose her last hope, and that's what makes the Gou deaths so much more horrifying than the Kai ones, because even the little miracles of respite she had before were out of her reach. For the first time, she was completely alone, without anyone at all to trust; and, as a child, if you have no one to trust and help, you simply die

The next ones are, obviously, hand-picked wonderfully (derogatory) by Satoko. Kimiyoshi may have never actually done his job, but he was Rika's legal guardian, and an adult she liked and felt she could speak to, even if she didn't really rely on him. Akane was literally the only present parental figure any of the kids had, and the one who first told them the Sonozakis would help with Satoko and her uncle, too. Keiichi was not an adult, but he was an older kid that she specifically believed was able to defeat fate. It might not have been the first time Keiichi had Hinamizawa Syndrome, but it was the first time he specifically turned against Rika, and that had to have been horrible. And Satoko, obviously, was her best friend, not to mention the only other person who came close to understanding Rika's situation as a child who had to be an adult in practice while still having to act and deal with the vulnerabilities of being a child, and the only one who was, literally speaking, always by her side

I think the fact that Satoko specifically picked adults and the two kids Rika trusted as capable of changing fate (coupled with the aforementioned helplessness caused by not knowing if she could ever truly escape even if she did escape this once) was what made everything work out so fast for Satoko. Altogether, it only took her 8 loops to convince Rika to stay in Hinamizawa. If she hadn't fucked up with the trap situation, Satoko would have probably been the looper to get what she wanted with the least amount of times in history. It took Rika over 100 just to be able to survive. And Satoko got what she wanted after only 8, because she knew exactly what she needed to do to break Rika: make it clear she would get no adults to rely on, and, therefore, would never be able to save herself. Because in Higurashi, the horror is in child neglect, and Satoko created a situation where that would be inescapable

[sahsukay]

anko sketchdump... my pookie #mypookie

[coolattas]

thinking about lucretia adventurezone and grinding my teeth down to the gums because holy fuck dude. holy shit. she was impossibly, horribly young on the starblaster. three hops and a jump from being a fucking baby. the two-sunned planet is devoured by the hunger in the same year that she graduates from high school. she is easily the youngest of the birds, even considering the differing rates of aging amongst the rest of the crew. teenaged astrophysicist, wizard, author, artist, without ties solid enough back home to keep her from the starblaster's maiden voyage. she writes and rewrites every moment she can wring from her memories into enough notebooks that it's damn near arthritis-inducing to step within 50 feet of the stacks upon stacks of field notes, of detailed accounts and gentle, domestic benignity. she loves and she loses and it still can't ever prepare her for the next decade. a century dwarfs the time she spends alone running the bureau, but the sheer magnitude of her loss is incomparable. lucretia learns to live in the stolen century, learns to rely on others, learns to trust and care and laugh and build, create, sacrifice, indulge. she pries these things away from herself in the name of a greater good, to what she believes to be their only hope. she sees the agony they're in, and she inadvertently compounds that anguish when she tries to fix it. she is 18 and 118 when she feeds fisher her journals. she is 30 and 130 and 50 and 150 when taako holds a staff to her chest and counts down like it means anything to her anymore that she dies. maybe it's atonement, but even that sounds far too holy a word to describe it. her brother grips her life in his hands, and she thinks it's only fair that he is the one to soundly smother it at last. the lonely journal-keeper is so young and so impossibly old and she is so, so tired. her family will outlive her by centuries. she will be a fine powder, dust beneath the crust of the planet, long before she believes their forgiveness will ever be known. if that day comes at all. everything she has ever done is soured by a guilt so weighty that she spends every day trying to play damage control with the havoc she feels solely responsible for having wrought. she lives within the confines of dichotomy, of red and blue and good and bad, even when she knows she's lying through her teeth, because its easier to live with herself (it's not) when she justifies it, when everyone else lives and dies by the idea that she got it right. she spends 12 years alone, sitting in the thick of her own grief. she mourns men who are right in front of her face. she sees the way they have changed, so fundamentally, sees the ways her choices have ruined them. 12 years is such a long time to be alone. 12 fucking years. she ages 32 in the same span, shedding decades in wonderland in the blink of an eye, and she knows she's running out of time. she's willing to give up whatever she has left, without question. lucretia loves so fiercely and so unquestionably and still she believes herself to be irredeemably cruel when really she was just so scared, tethered to any sense of hope only by the idea that she was doing right by her family. in a position that no one should have to be in, a situation that virtually no one else could truly understand. she was so young and she suffered so, so much. more than any person should. she is flawed but she is not the monster she convinces herself she has become. lucretia adventurezone they could never make me hate you lets kiss on the mouth ok?