shorthaltsjester

[shorthaltsjester]

Vax, to you guys, feels a little amazed and confused even, to a degree. [...] He’s lived on a stretched view of time, looking in both directions, and he is feeling that slip away. He doesn’t fully understand what is happening yet and is feeling some of that touch of omniscience fading like when you wake and the dream wafts away.

Dalen's Closet // Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn // Fight for the Bloody Bridge

[shorthaltsjester]

Invalid reasons for why a character should not be redeemed:

They’re too evil! - Redemption has nothing to do with how good or evil you were to begin with.

They don’t deserve it! - Redemption is not something that can be “deserved.”

Their actions are unforgivable! - Redemption has nothing to do with forgiveness.

It’s too late for them to change! - It is only “too late” to choose redemption when a character is dead (unless the scope of the story includes an afterlife in which change is possible).

Valid reasons for why a character should not be redeemed:

It doesn’t fit the themes of the story.

They’re not an important enough character for showing the process of a redemption arc to be worthwhile.

They’re more interesting as a character who isn’t doing the right thing.

It’s more satisfying to let them keep being evil.

It makes it more satisfying when they die.

There’s probably more, but you get the idea.

Remember, redemption is when someone realizes they are wrong, and takes steps to doing the right thing. That is not something that can be “deserved,” it is not something that hinges on forgiveness, and it is not something that it is ever too late for! …Unless the person is dead or something.

[shorthaltsjester]

Path of Totality, Niina Pollari

[shorthaltsjester]

no the POINT is NOT that rio was the first person to ever show agatha love blah blah soft girlfriends battling the trauma of abuse NO

the POINT is that THE PERSONIFICATION OF DEATH saw a human being so DEVOTED to the act of living that they COULD NOT comprehend dying and fell in LOVE with her and that HUMAN BEING saw this entity that NO ONE is meant to survive and and fell in LOVE with her

the POINT is that they EXIST in PERFECT tandem and in COMPLETE contradiction to each other. the POINT, the IRONY, is that they give each other exactly what they need, but must take from each other the only thing they want.

[shorthaltsjester]

I see a lot of posts about how the military targeting poor rural kids is a myth and like. It's not. It's objectively not. I know many people who enlist aren't poor, or they're from military families, but I can tell you that poor kids are absolutely targeted.

I grew up in a poor rural area and we had military recruiters parked in the lunch room year-round. They handed people pamphlets at the doors and challenged kids to sit up and push contests (and sometimes purposely lost, which I think backfired on them). Their biggest sell was "make money and get out of here", which was a bad tactic in a college town with much better options (my school offered classes and work certifications for things like car repair and childcare) and a lot of teens who had no intention of leaving their family farms.

I mentioned to my school guidance counselor ONCE that I would be OPEN to hearing about military financial aid and I was stalked by recruiters for YEARS. They sent mail and emails and they called my mom and they messaged me on Facebook. They followed me to a different school and a different state. At the time, I was already dealing with disability that kept me from being physically active and I probably weighed 105 lb soaking wet.

Like I don't think the majority of military recruits are poor kids anymore, partially because there's more education about the military and partially because there are just more options for teens and young adults, but to claim that they don't deliberately target those kids is objectively untrue.

[shorthaltsjester]

the emotional whiplash of travis almost crying because all his friends were outfitting a powerless fjord with all their extra weapons and magical items to "if you make a comment about my strength, i'll throw you into the lava--" "well, you couldn't"

[shorthaltsjester]

girl shocked to discover that inaction can have consequences too

[shorthaltsjester]

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

[shorthaltsjester]

now that c3 is ending, im looking back and figuring out laudna's arc as a whole. and if i'm remembering it correctly, marisha mentioned that she wanted to create a character that has gotten over and made peace with her trauma, and yet the narrative and the foundations say otherwise, and laudna pretty much became the complete opposite: a character whose most of her actions are so informed by it.

she kinda really regressed from that intention, hasn't she?

not saying it's not a valid type of character development. or that there was supposed to be only ever one specific trauma she can or cannot be over or not.

but it's fascinating in a way to remember that she started off serenely telling her death to orym, and stating that she could smile so happily because "the worst thing that could happen has already happened"...

...to lashing out at orym because of him picking up a sword that had killed her previously.

side tangent, but laudna and orym's dynamic are lowkey one of the more fascinating dynamics out of bell's hells. they may not be the closest, but i definitely find them more interesting than even laudna's closer relationships.

anyway, laudna's story was then concluded with essek's help. and delilah's locked inside laudna for good, and can't even communicate or talk to laudna. officially exiled to the back of laudna's mind, shackled within the valleys of her chest above her heart.

delilah is still in there.

and it feels like a mirror to how laudna started. everything's all fine and dandy, actually! she'll never have problems again.

and so there's that contradiction again. delilah has no power over laudna anymore. and yet, laudna... still kinda defines herself with delilah, from her clothes to the fact that she still can get power from delilah. just like how laudna started the campaign defining herself as the obviously dead woman.

and it makes me question if she has actually ever even changed, or was just broken down to her bare essence for everyone to figure out how she actually works, and rebuild again with some minor upgrades, with no substantial improvement. it feels like she's still stuck, even with the new experiences and connections.

the raven queen said it's possible for her to be alive again. and yet, laudna seemed like she might not even want it.

maybe because she actually has to change. move past the stage of death she has now defined herself in. to actually grow as a person. change, not only with the people she surrounds herself with, but with laudna herself.

would she, though?

[shorthaltsjester]

One aspect of death in narratives that I feel like is worth discussing in light of Campaign 3's finale is that when characters can die and their deaths are felt, it makes the times when they DON'T (or the deaths are reversed) more meaningful.

As an example, Midst as a full work is not shy about killing characters, even important ones (of the three protagonists one explicitly dies and another permanently joins the Fold in a way that makes it clear she's no longer what she was). And so during the finale, Phineas being saved by Lark from a death that was previously shown to be messy and horrific has meaning because the stakes were such that as an audience member watching at the time it very much felt like he could have died there. The fact Lark had previously killed a man just for having information that potentially endangered her also lends weight to her decision now to save one who came within a hair's breadth of actively handing her over to the cult she was running from. If Lark hadn't actively pursued and killed Fuze, her choice to save Phineas wouldn't have reflected her character growth. If Midst has previously shown a reticence to kill important characters (for example, if Saskia had survived her sacrifice to allow the Breach's escape rather than ultimately succumbing), Phineas surviving would have felt like plot armour.

To bring this back to Campaign 3, one of the reasons Vax's return sits so poorly (though to be clear this is not the only reason, others have written excellent pieces on other aspects like this feeling incidental to Vox Machina's AND Bells Hells' actions and how this feels anti-character development for Keyleth) is that it comes at the end of an 8h finale where the world-ending threat is released unto the cosmos without issue and the gods who were in mortal peril all campaign all survive thanks to a plan that emerged at the literal eleventh hour. Ashton's death after sacrificing themself to allow this plan to work was also quickly reversed without the mechanical and roleplaying effort CR has classically required, at the end of a campaign that already had the fewest PC deaths (despite being billed to the players as deadlier). Death in C3's finale has very little meaning (and actions barely have consequences) so Vax returning feels less like an earned win or one bright spot in a changing world and more a symptom of storytelling that seems extremely averse to death as a concept.

[shorthaltsjester]

listen, now that everything is said and done i'm going to say something i've been thinking but not outright saying for the past nearly four years. frankly, imogen and laudna's relationship is a pale shadow of caleb and veth's and if you really sit and think about it, it's outright embarrassing for the former party. it's like if you saw a beautiful piece of art and tried to emulate it and then the only thing you managed to jot down that was the same was the basic shape and you never added any color when the color was the most important part. imogen and laudna's relationship is formed out of almost the exact same origins (troubled mage who needs to keep a distance from regular society joins up with monstrous misfit with a traumatic backstory and become each other's most important person while traveling place-to-place because they keep getting into trouble in cities). the difference is, genuinely, how much more colorful and lived in caleb and veth's story feels. they met in a podunk county jail and worked together to break out of the place, stayed together for practical reasons (straight-up survival) and then out of genuine friendship. they were hobos in the woods together. they cuddled on the side of the roads on cold nights together. they were genuinely each other's sole lifeline because they were the type of people no one in the world cared about in a very real, visceral way. they were also con artists, and sam and liam worked together to come up with an entire booklet of different cons they used to survive, which come into play surprisingly often during the campaign (Modern Literature, famously, but also Mother's Love and Money Pot featured).

comparatively, we know next to nothing about what imogen and laudna's lives looked like after leaving gelvaan, and the Incident™️ that sent them running in the first place remains amorphous and random no matter how many times the story is told or whatever extra details get added. the people of gelvaan found laudna to be a generically threatening presence (because of her fun-scary appearance and/or kooky-fun-scary behavior) and picked up their torches and pitchforks to run her out of town. imogen heard her thoughts and found them so beautiful she nearly killed two of the townspeople she grew up with the defend her and then they fled into the night together. and that's it. what did they do for two entire years after that? i don't know! neither do you. they don't appear to have struggled for money like caleb and veth did, there's no reference to hard-living, no real reference to what jobs they took to stay afloat, no mention of the practical realities of living as homeless nomads, no mention of towns and cities they'd visited and how those places impacted them. nothing. empty. no color. how did their relationship develop? also don't know! they seem to have slotted together perfectly as friends with no conflict for years before slotting together perfectly as lovers while batting aside all attempts at conflict later. done and dusted, that's the relationship, and people have the gall to call caleb and veth's successor relationship 'soulmatism' when it doesn't hold a candle to what the original offered.

which was, to be clear, endless complexity. i can't tell you how to define it, and i don't think the character's themselves could define it if they tried. sam went into the campaign intending to lean into a familial relationship and quickly realized that wasn't the vibe, course-corrected into veth having a crush on caleb--something sam has said developed fairly early in the campaign.* liam went into the relationship not intending to care about her nearly as much as he ended up doing, then spent the early campaign eps grappling with just how suddenly important she was to him, to the point that, in the face of her potentially dying in episode 20, liam says to sam, "do you want to make my character turn evil already?"** both were surprised at how tightly their characters clung to each other, and developed a deeply caring, highly insular dynamic where they were suspicious of outsiders and desperately guarded each other. with full retrospect, both went into the relationship intending to use each other (caleb for general usefulness/protection and veth, obviously, hoping caleb could change her back one day), then found such deep and tender care that they became each other's worlds. for a time. until nott became veth and veth had a husband and it sent their relationship into a tailspin because no matter how you frame the relationship, caleb clearly felt his feelings for her and the way they behaved together stepped over the line of how one should act with a married woman. after that, he is terrified of the idea that he might not have a place in her life and works so hard to create opportunities to insinuate himself into her present and future (teleportation spells so she can travel home quickly and still return to the group, making room for her family in the tower so she can stay with him, offering to tutor luc in magic to stay in her life, etc). veth gets her body and her life back but fears returning home will be lackluster compared to what she's experienced with the group, starts falling out of love with her husband, and has intense extra-martial feelings for caleb that are canonical. their relationship morphs and changes constantly throughout the campaign, and the one thing about their dynamic that never changes is how deeply and truly they love each other. you want to talk about soulmatism? them being the two party members with fake names who's real names share aspects of each other ("Bren" and "Brenatto") both from small-town dwendalian empire who's lives have been deeply impacted by meddling of the cerberus assembly (veth's in adulthood, caleb's in childhood) and who's deepest traumas are respectively fire and water does the trick for me.

so why is one so popular and the other, particularly as a romantic ship, very much is not? it would be obtuse of me not to immediately point to the fact that imogen and laudna are two pretty, skinny white women who claim to have deliciously little agency in their own stories and provide a blank enough canvas that the relationship can be whatever you want it to be. there's a reason there's so many AU fics for them, after all. caleb and veth on the other hand would center first a relationship between the handsome white fandom-popular sadboi and *checks notes* a self-described ugly, unfeminine goblin with deep neuroses and later a short, fat brown woman who also happens to be a young mother from a small country town. popular fandom, tragically, will almost always turn away from dealing with complexity of the latter for the empty calories of the former regardless of the quality gap between the two. if anything, watching the popularity of imogen and laudna's relationship has cemented my opinion that if veth had been different (either a man or a generically attractive white woman or someone more conventionally pretty just in general), widobrave would have been a massively popular ship, and i think it would have been regardless of veth's marriage. people can forgive a lot to write about their two generically attractive favorites getting together. they're a lot less forgiving for an ugly goblin or a fat, brown young mother, though.

tldr: reject modernity, embrace tradition. ship widobrave

*Talks Machina for C2E88, VOD no longer available, but a paraphrase of the quote can be found here **(2:09:30 on the YouTube VOD).

[shorthaltsjester]

so much baby is happening

[shorthaltsjester]

Imogen Temult, Firstborn Daughter of Predathos, Goddess of the End of the Pantheon

she would love abbey by mitski

[shorthaltsjester]

we need to make using chatgpt embarrassing bc sorry it really is. what do you mean you can’t write an email

[shorthaltsjester]

no kids, am i right?

[shorthaltsjester]

fic writers and fan artists be like

[shorthaltsjester]

why is privacy so eroded. I get treated like a nutcase if I say no, I don't want strange companies taking pictures of my home and putting them online for maps or whatever. I don't want to be in the background of your tiktok, and I think it's weirder for you to assume I'm okay with it than it is for me to politely ask you to refilm it so my face isn't in the frame. I don't enjoy handing my employer a list of every online account I have and feeling under surveillance when I'm just shit posting or sharing pictures of my cats or garden harvest. I don't want to hear your private calls on speaker on the bus, esp when the person on the line doesn't know you're broadcasting their words to strangers. I don't want an algorithm guessing what will piss me off the most so I spend more time online, engaging with shit I don't want to see or hear out of outrage. I don't want any of this. it's total ass.