no but essek's abnormal behaviours in the last arc and especially in episode 140 are my roman empire. which is ironic because aeor is something of a roman empire itself. but in all seriousness, it was the episode that made me realise i love essek and his development so much and it kinda summarised it even before caleb's epilogue.
and i mean the "it's not fair" scene specifically. it's like, an epitome of his whole character progression from a person who put An Objectively Important Goal above all else without hesitation to someone who can't help but care for people around even more than his goal, no matter how big and relevant it is.
the mighty nein - and he alongside them - pretty much saved the world and freed an ancient city from thousand-year-long suffering. they defeated nine extremely powerful menacing entities who managed to stay out of everyone's sight for years and were so close to achieving their goal and dooming exandria in the process. they did the impossible and became heroes and somehow, they survived, even though they had bidden farewells a couple of hours ago because they had already understood what they had been facing. and nevertheless. they made it.
and none of them was celebrating.
mighty nein are basically essek's only friends. he knew them to be very unusual people, to put it lightly, loud and stubborn and completely inescapable once they consider you to be one of their own. and they showed him so much kindness and put so much faith in him, they were here playing the most atrocious music ever and digging clay in his backyard for a spell they invented just to help one of theirs and asking him if he could bring them pastries the day after they found out he was lying to them and had started a war. they were chaotic and weird and sometimes unbearable but most importantly they were carrying so much hope with them all this time - a hope they could end the war, a hope they could stop the angel of irons cult, a hope they could get better, a hope he could get better, and now, finally, that they could save their lost friend.
and that hope shattered, just like that, the moments after they'd already made the impossible. they saved so many souls - and then could not get back just that one.
for essek "my intentions were never good they were important" thelyss it just. shouldn't have mattered. they won. it could have been worse. people die and when they die they rarely come back. they should've been happy everyone else barely made it alive.
but for some reason, mighty nein being so defeated after they saved the world exposed him to that overwhelming feeling of injustice and unfairness. and i mean, there were many things essek considered to be unfair, but when i watched his first appearance and his interactions with mighty nein later on til their reunion in aeor arc, i wouldn't dare to guess that one of the things on that list would be something that personal. and personal not even to him.
the thing is, essek didn't even know who that guy was. why mighty nein cared about him so much. he had an idea, i guess, that he was their friend once, or someone in that body was. it was also a person who wanted to unleash a terrifying horrific aberration onto the material plane. it was a person very dedicated to killing essek and his friends - and they still didn't take any pleasure in fighting him. essek didn't feel strongly about lucien or molly, because he never knew them.
i don't think he mourned his death and failed resurrection. he mourned mighty nein's hope, the one they put in him when they had no reason to, the one they offered yasha in the cathedral and the one they kept after the spell for veth failed and the one they carried til the very end because they wanted it to reach molly. they had saved people with this hope. they had saved nations. they had saved the world. but they ended up feeling like it hadn't even been worth anything.
how desperate would it feel, witnessing people who for some reason always saw good in you when they absolutely shouldn't, who made literal miracles out of nothing, who ended wars and fought gods and tricked the hags and freed cities from horrors beyond anyone's comprehension purely because they thought it was the right thing to do and also loved their friends this much, silently crying over a dead body they couldn't bring back to life? how desperate would it feel to realise that with all your knowledge about time you dedicated your life to and threw away any principles for, you can't undo this? no one can. some things are left to fate alone and this time it wasn't kind to them. no matter how much good they did, they still got slapped in the face.
and it was, i think, such a genuine moment of empathy. like, essek is the character who prefers to put up a facade and act distant and self-composed but this time he just. walked away unable to watch this. the could only say to fjord that it wasn't fair. even when he was caught off guard in nicodranas he was able to explain himself and his motives to an extent even though he was a nervous wreck whose extra important plan went to hell the second the only people he cared about appeared. this time he had nothing to elaborate on. it just wasn't fair. it wasn't fair his friends didn't get what they wanted the most. it wasn't fair he couldn't do anything to make it right.
it is such a sad and beautiful and even cathartic scene because it is about person who started a war that destroyed so many lives - and then met this ragtag group of weirdos who saw a lonely stand-offish guy and said "hey, let's be friends!" and didn't even wait for him to answer. he saw them being serious and calculated and he saw them being ridiculous and extremely stupid, he saw their mistrust to outsiders and their loyalty to each other, he made spells with them and paid a visit to their hot tub, he ate their stale pastries and drank their hot chocolate mixed with whiskey, he was welcomed amongst them and in their wonderful home, both in xhorhas before they even found out what he had done and in the tower when they already knew - and then, he saw them mourning their loss, defeated and helpless, and he, a person who believed there were things more important than whole nations, let alone just one life, couldn't help but share the pain they felt. a pure display of compassion from someone who detached himself from it, who didn't believe he could grow into a better person capable of it again, but became one nonetheless without even realising it
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I hate when people are like "I already didn't like xyz so it's not difficult for me to boycott it unlike those loser customers that actually Liked the thing which I could never understand bc I was never a customer uwu" bc like. That literally isn't boycotting lmao. That is just Never Being A Customer In The First Place, which means nothing actually.
Boycotts are primarily about applying pressure (or completely making it impossible to operate) via financial/commercial/economic impact. AKA it's about money and capital.
If you already weren't spending money on a product/franchise/company, then you were already never part of their sales data, and you just doing nothing & making absolutely no change to your daily life and just continuing to not be part of their sales data as normal, has literally no material impact. You were already never a factor. The people who WERE customers & WERE part of the sales data & ARE withdrawing their money from those sales figures actually ARE making a material impact.
"Supporting" something isn't about vibes or thoughts or feelings or you telling your best friend how much you like a thing, "support" in a meaningful sense is specifically material. It is financial. Refusing to continue supporting something means taking the money you were previously spending on it & putting it elsewhere. If you were never spending money, you were never supporting it, and therefore it doesn't make any difference if you continue to not support it. Boycotting is something CUSTOMERS and CONSUMERS do.
SO STOP FUCKING BRAGGING ABOUT IT & STOP MAKING FUN OF PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY ARE BOYCOTTING FOR "EVER LIKING XYZ TO BEGIN WITH" & STOP SPREADING THIS FALSE IDEA OF HOW BOYCOTTING WORKS LMAO sorry for capslocking I remembered I was annoyed
I just hate this low-morale mean-spirited bullshit some people do in the notifs on boycotting info posts where they arbitrarily moralize about something they just don't understand so they can pat themselves on the back for doing literally literally nothing AND inadvertently spreading misinfo in the process. Be quiet. Go do something that matters. There are plenty of posts going around, including from Palestinians themselves, with lists of references for how to help Palestine & other similar causes for people currently in crisis, please please do something For Real instead of boasting online about your fandom superiority complex as if it means anything.
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Now that I'm rewatching The Acolyte I just can't with the fact that Mae is not unhinged enough, I don't see her seeking revenge the way she should and has the right to. Fr, like, the man stabbed your mother in front of you and you still fight him with strength and without losing your mind? I would become feral until that man is dead. Sorry Sol but honestly Mae's been very calm about it like, I would not. And that also makes me think about all the Sol/Mae connection through the force...maybe she felt something too. Maybe she just couldn't get herself to kill him, I don't know. I just now have a lot of empathy and compassion towards her because she really lost it all and when she saw her sister again, Osha looked at her with hatred and disgust that she did not deserved. And I know Osha also did not know it all but imagine it from Mae's perspective. I need to hug her!! Mae was a kid too, and she went through a lot. I'm Mae's #1 defender after all of this, sorry for judging you wrong, babe, I'm with you now, all the way down.
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Fucks me up to think about how Legato's legacy in-universe after his death in Trimax (and presumably Tristamp) is probably gonna be how much he sucked and nothing else....
Like, nobody will like Knives but Vash will be long-lived enough to be able to eventually talk about his good qualities from when he was a child and his quasi-redemption in his last days. But who remembers Legato? Livio and Vash are the only living people with any extended memory of him and neither of them would have anything nice to say (and rightfully so). Neither of them probably knew he was a slave, either—as far as Vash can tell this dude showed up one day and hated his guts, for all he knows he's just another survivor from July! Outside of Knives, Elendira, Legato, and maybe Conrad, I don't think any other character knows his actual life story.
And to add on to that, there's no way of looking up that past either—he had no name or personhood before he was effectively rescued, so who could investigators or reporters or archivists track down for information? The human being that was Legato only existed for as long as he knew Knives, before that he was something to be kept and abused as an object. There's presumably no surviving family they can reliably contact, nobody to really say "yes I knew him, here's what his life was like, here's how we can prevent something like this from happening again".
His entire existence will be reduced down to "a human weapon that was freakishly loyal to public enemy #1" without any reflection on the mechanisms that made him the way he was because there's just no actual knowledge of his life.
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A thing I want to include in the story is something I see lacking in most media I consume, and it's the lack of conection with someone who is supposed to have been present in your life but isn't since the beggining... and it genuinely does not bother you
I understand why the protagonist cares so much about the "lost father/mother", it's a story, it needs conflic and the angst of "why did you leave me? >:(" is a feeling many can conect
But I genuinely won't buy these feelings if the supposed parent NEVER interacted with the protagonist in a formative age. Like is it making sense to anybody what I'm saying? The parent doesn't want to conect day one and shows no interest afterwards(they are not isolated or kidnaped nor dead etc) and the child never knew who they were and grew up fine with the other role models and guardians during their life, why the fuck would they want to personally conect with a stranger besides the "society demands it" aspects of it?
It can generate conflic with the parent who fucked off and now wants to conect but the child doesn't care(and honest to god i want more petty endings, no they don't make up, live with it), or outside conflic that is outraged these two doesn't want to conect
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this is so funny to me okay so the timeline goes
Several years ago in my desperately wanting to be a werewolf phase I looked at like one or two pages of the first chapter of the glass scientists but it had literally just started and hadn't gotten past chapter two and I was. A child. So I ended up like of dropping it
Fast forward several years later...
I'm looking at random tv tropes articles and there's one with a picture of a girl with a skeleton hand
I reverse image search it and one of the suggested images is a panel from chapter one of tgs
flashback.jpg
I binge the entire comic in a single day and buy volume one immediately
edward hyde and associates sink their grubby little paws into my brain
and today I just spend twenty one pounds on a copy of the two main source materials (j&h and frankenstein) and a copy of the jekyll and hyde OBCR and a copy of the original studio cast recording which had to come over the sea from TEXAS
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