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withoutloveitcannotbeseen

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God could have been a speck of dust.

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After all that transpired in that past 12 months, Higurashi had been such a safe place for me. 

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After lightly revisiting Higurashi and realized 3H’s deep lore was kinda sorta dollar store Higurashi I finally acquired a somewhat accurate perspective on how fabulously idiotic Edelgard’s “causes” were.

Just fucking imagine some imbecile intruding into Higurashi-verse and spellt ““you know what your Oyashiro-sama and the Furude clan are the root of all evil just denounce your faith and kill/evict any Furude in sight we’d be fine”.

Lmfao.

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Redshit really hates that Dimitri among all people was heavily implied to actually suffer from a shortened lifespan.

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Which was why that “Ed’s treatment in AG symbolizes the ‘women in fridge’ trope therefore misogynistic and Ed was the prime victim of misogyny in the writing” writeup metaphorically gave me brain tumor and I still feel nauseous thinking about it. Ffs Dimitri & co. were never driven by Edel’s misery in AG and they never even knew about it. It’s not even “loss of a woman’s agency” that drove the plot it was practically “loss of a politician’s agency in exchange for her foe taking charge”. They acted upon mistaking her foe’s agency as her own!

And guess who actually represents women in fridge? Rhea in almost every route in vanilla 3H but sure Edel was the prime victim of narrative misogyny.

easily one of my least favorite phenomena that i've seen on here is seeing a really good post on fandom misogyny and then seen it misapplied so it can be used as more fucking edelgard discourse

"people love guys when they commit fifty war crimes but if a girl is mean once then she's irredeemable" yes! that is a problem! "just like EDELGARD gets hated for being a little mean-" she did a lot more than that and i'd argue it's reducing her agency to say she didn't

or "people love to see a woman's complex backstory and motives and find the nearest guy to project them onto" very good problem! "just like when people give DIMITRI a complex motivation, morally grey stance and tragic backstory when those are EDELGARD's things" i am bashing my head against the wall did any of you even play this game

it's also...telling? how you maybe ever see rhea mentioned for these posts a hundredth as often as edel does, even though she's also subjected to fandom misogyny. which. guys. misogyny applies to older women you don't personally like.

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I feel like at this point I should allow myself to not explain things because it’s been a rather traumatizing experience. It always has been. I need hours if not days to kinda sorta recover from fulfilling a demand to exemplify, justify or prove things so it’s healthier for me to just, not do it. I’d just put this one thing on display and not bother to explain. If you get it you get it. And it mostly only requires basic decency to not deliberately misinterpret whatever intents there.

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Thinking about how Americans often had the worst takes of fictional works. Like two characters would ostensibly share similar ideologies, only that one was a primary victim who came to begrudgingly accept what’s with the system, while the other was in full charge proactively enforcing the system. You could almost bet on it that they’d trash the former only to stan the latter. 

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Jisoo’s “Flower” has to be the most hilarious (yet beautifully sorrowful) song made in this year I absolutely adore it. 

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Picking up procreate again and painted young Rhea on a whim because I could.

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The argument that 3H was much more of a Buddhist tale than a Christian one was practically that its particular worldbuilding deliberately subverted prevalent Christian tropes that made the faith ever intact. There’s little ground for the faith in a more or less Christian paradigm when the supreme creator, the divine retribution, the “original sin”, were either purposely absent from CoS canon or not what they’re believed to be. Meanwhile the Buddhist core of the narrative was pretty much always unscathed, as humans are ignorant as frick and will continue to get caught up in the “cycles” unless they are willing to embrace some sort of enlightenment at last. 

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Dimitri’s “defending the present” makes a whole lot of sense when you come to realize that 3H was partly written as a Buddhist, likely Zen Buddhist tale. It has nothing to do with a presumed “status quo” but consciousness & attention onto the present moment, and proceeding to a future with full awareness of the present in mind. 

I don’t claim to know a lot about Buddhism because I absolutely don’t. But I could just, take a yoga routine/mindfulness session or two and not misinterpret the message on purpose. 

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A part of me wishes that I was never lucid.

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I do feel like one difference between Rhea and Edelgard is that the former’s alleged “paternalism” was only criticized by those whose prevalent culture doesn’t feature paternalism enough at all, hence their criticism is little more than unfounded paranoia because the outcomes are not empirically palpable to them. However to us whose culture or governance we’re subject to largely features paternalism, that we couldn’t make any personal choices without an authority figure bitching in our ears whether such and such is supposedly “good for us”, we would assess Rhea and see that “She’s nothing like it” for her presence and moda operandi being so removed from the collective terror that is our quotidian experience.

Do her actions or beliefs reflect paternalism? Probably, to some extent. But an ideological matchup isn’t enough to entirely denounce someone, and every complex being is going to find a number of their actions aligning with contradictory ideologies. Overall she’s just not thorough enough for us, who saw the catastrophic outcomes of paternalism being comprehensively carried out, she’s not enough to incite much reasonable fear.

On the other hand, “oh she’s such a patriarch” was a pretty common criticism against Edelgard in our local fandom (“patriarch” pretty much reads “emblem of paternalism” in this context, for lack of better translation). Because to many players who’d refuse to buy into our culturally prevalent paternalistic values, just by observing patterns exhibited by Edelgard’s words and deeds, was enough to lightly remind them of their traumas.

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Thinking of how I would stan Takano Miyo made me realize that I don’t despise Edelgard for being the “symbolic Nazi”, I despised her because she, as a human, is mid. 

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Sometimes a fanon interpretation shared by so many people will gaslight you into thinking YOU're not smart enough to understand it when, in reality, no, the collective of a fandom can indeed just be misinterpreting a character beyond parody. It's not you, it's them

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Oh my gosh don’t you know I’m a cabbage?