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war's a nasty business

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accused 17th-century English or English colonial witches in a certain subset of modern pseudo-feminist fiction: I'm a girlboss who can read, unlike other women! I live apart from the community and use herbs to basically invent modern medicine! my views align perfectly with many modern progressive talking points! also I wear my hair down because I'm a ~free spirit~

actual accused 17th-century English or English colonial witches: I'm homeless and mentally ill and my community just kind of wants me gone. or I'm Jewish or Romani. or maybe I have property that someone else wants. I could have strong opinions but that's usually not enough to attract witchcraft charges on its own unless the community is REALLY in a mess. I might even be an unpopular MAN who someone has an interpersonal squabble with, although statistically I am more likely to be a woman (unlike in Scandinavia, where the reverse is true)

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Remember to stay hydrated!

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I can't stop drawing my beloved sir Hynek! Tarot card for KCD-ask

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Some devilish sketches

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early 13th century mood

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last two, janosh is a hemulen and adder is a mymble :o)

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it is so important that you are a little bit ugly. please get comfortable with having unplucked eyebrows and nonexistent jawlines and wrinkles. let your blue hair grow out into an uneven pale green and your clothes be old and mend them and modify them until they’re unique to you. wear lipstick which doesnt compliment your skintone and mismatched outfits which went out of fashion 5 years ago. be a little bit too loud and a little bit too passionate and as weird as you can be because oh my god there is nothing more disturbing to me than perfection. beauty is manufactured and sold to us and you need to realise that you are a fucking animal to live a joyful life I am so serious. you cant obsess over aesthetics forever please just live messily and make your body your home however you please.

if you dont do it for you, do it for all the teenagers who will see u in the street and know that they are not obligated to be attractive

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To the abyss where you should go

This is the another version of my istenry commission, designed as kind of tarot looking. Please do not use without permission, thank you <3

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I want to talk about Erik. Recently, I keep seeing “Erik doesn’t deserve to be redeemed!” alongside “You can just like Erik as a character and not feel like he needs to be redeemed!” And I just have to say, as always, people can enjoy the characters and game as they please (and those are totally valid opinions!), but there is nothing wrong with the fact that people LOVE a redemption story.

I’m not here to claim that Erik’s actions are justifiable ones. Leading the pogrom in the Jewish quarter is a truly despicable act. Killing that dog? Horrifying. But, my question in response is this: are Henry’s actions truly justifiable?

I know there are folks who very much see Henry’s story as one that is “morally just”…but is that just because we are experiencing it through his eyes? The game is set up for you to kill a LOT of people. I just finished a “0 civilian kill” playthrough of KCD2 and let me tell you, the game does not make it an easy thing to do. You can read more of my thoughts on THAT here. I bring that up because it’s absurd to think that Henry’s hands are at all clean (like Erik appropriately points out before their duel). While playing this game, it’s so easy to think “oh, I had to do that because I picked the right side!” But does brutality ever have a right side?

This question is relevant to the point I want to make here: I believe people love redemption stories because we love complex characters. We understand and experience our own complexity, so experiencing stories about multi-faceted individuals makes them seem more real and alive. I think that’s why we all love Henry so much. So, yes, Erik is a ruthless and violent character, but that is not the only thing the story shows him to be.

Erik wouldn’t work as a narrative foil to Henry if he was fully unsympathetic. And to me, Erik’s story has much more tragedy to it than Henry’s. Like Henry, he lost his family and his home, but we don’t get much sense what his life was truly like before that point. Was Erik manipulated by Istvan into thinking it was for the best that he killed his parents? Or was his life truly unhappy before Istvan? We have no reliable source on this subject. But regardless, he did not find the type of community, friendship, and (ultimately) family that Henry did after his traumatic loss. Erik had 1) Istvan, and 2) the life that Istvan built for him and molded him into living. So of course losing the man that his life grew to revolve around sends him fully over the edge.

I think the potential of a redemption story for Erik is appealing to people because behind the violence and rage and ruthlessness, we are shown glimmers of this hurt and traumatized young man who loses everything twice over. He is full of genuine concern, urgency and care when he liberates Istvan from the dungeon in Nebakov. We get to experience a quiet moment of tenderness when he says goodbye to Istvan at Trosky. And, ultimately, it is grief from the loss of Istvan that sends him into his deepest point of rage and desperation. The raw emotion in the scene where he learns of Istvan’s death makes it one of the most powerful in the game, in my opinion (and Jim High’s mocap and VA performance in this game is truly exceptional).

In the duel against Henry, he expresses “He meant the world to me!” about Istvan, which is more than Henry ever really explicitly gets from Istvan about Erik. These moments humanize Erik and provide these fleeting glimpses of the love, devotion, and (ultimately) grief within him, which all add more nuance and depth to his character. Additionally, when Henry can remind him that Istvan killed his parents, there is an undertone of desperation and denial that leads me to believe he has some awareness and honesty within himself about Istvan and the nature of their relationship.

I feel the desire for redemption for Erik is invested in those moments of humanity laid bare.

Is Erik too far gone for redemption? Perhaps. But could those glimmers of humanity finally break through to that boy in him that is so clearly capable of love and grief? Perhaps. People also seem to forget there are many paths to redemption. It doesn’t have to be some schlocky, half-cooked way for Erik to join forces with Henry. To cite two incredibly obvious examples from other popular works of fiction - both Boromir from Lord of the Rings and Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader from Star Wars were only redeemed in death, but that made their respective redemptions feel no less satisfying or unearned despite previous evils committed by those characters. Redemption isn’t about ignoring, erasing, or excusing past behavior. It’s about the multi-faceted nature of humans, and the way we love to believe that it’s never too late to change.

Erik will never be Henry. People aren’t necessarily trying to make him into Henry. That’s not the point. The desire for redemption is one that is rejecting a certain cynicism about humanity as well as a strict good/evil dichotomy within people, which I don’t think is a bad thing.

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like moon, like sun

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Is this not literally them…

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ourgh discworld is still so good

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Salamander, the 258th Known One.

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Knight on thy lap

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