#Tower of tears

[tare-otome]

Stillsands - Dunehollow - Las Vegas 4/?

On top of Old Smokey the Eiffel Tower overlooking the ruins of the Bellagio hotel...

Overlooking Las Vegas and Tower of Tears from the southwest...

[sepublic]

Have you ever seen a bubble in the process of freezing?

Very beautiful... Snowflakes like crystalline stars, with ghostly ferns sprouting afoot. Looks just like a snow globe, too! I imagine this is what the Escapees were trapped inside when frozen in magical cryostasis. What delightful gifts for the Queen of Tears’ child, when the wrapping they come in is a treasure in and of itself!

[r2b2grady]

Probably one of the Devil's greatest lies is the image of hope as something fleeting and ephemeral. It ties into the lie that you have to effortlessly feel something for that feeling to be real. Just because I don't feel like there's gravity, or just because I can't see the movement of the floor as the world whirls endlessly through space, doesn't mean that those things aren't there, and the same can be said for things like hope.

Hope isn't just some flighty butterfly, something fragile and wispy. Hope is the woman praying daily at her husband's side in the hospital, waiting for him to wake and wondering if he'll remember her after his head injury.

Hope is the sailor clinging to the helm in the teeth of a gale, riding it out because he hopes and knows that the storm cannot last forever.

Hope is Samwise storming the tower of Cirith Ungol, not knowing whether he can truly overcome the orcs in the tower, but hoping that he can help his Master Frodo in some way at least.

Hope is the last stand of Húrin the Steadfast: holding the gap against the forces of Morgoth in Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, swinging his axe as he and his kinsmen fight to the death to protect the retreat of Turgon and the elves of Gondolin, shouting with each swing, "Aurë entuluva! Day shall come again!"

Hope is not something fleeting, something ephemeral. It can become such, because like any other emotion or feeling, it needs cultivation. But if you cling to it, if you hold it tight, then it will grow. If you let it, hope is a fighter, a shieldwarden, a warrior. Hope is not simple platitudes, but a knowledge that whatever things might feel like, the truth of the matter is different—no matter how hopeless things seem, things will not stay that way.

[khytal]

solitary tear

[milflaszlo]

And, brother, you know what they did? They danced. 📹: @medium-observation

[stardustedknuckles]

I know they had to reset some things for the handful of people starting their loz adventure with Tears of the Kingdom, but if you've played an inordinate amount of Breath of the Wild the beginning plot is fucking hilarious. You and the princess went missing under the castle for an as-yet-unspecified amount of time after seeing your history duplicated in someone else's cave paintings. Half the people you meet back in Hyrule are worried sick about you. Half pretend they have never seen or heard of you. And a handful are literally selling your old clothes. The implication that you two went missing and everyone went "welp. He's not gonna need that stuff for at least a hundred years. But also we have to look for them."

(Hestu is especially funny to me. I've decided he just says that to all the Hylians bc he's faceblind af)

[radaverse]

When the angsty ahh aus meet

+ smol comfort bestie swap

[onaperduamedee]

For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free man (all who try that have proved tiresome), but a technique: I hoped to discover the hinge where our will meets and moves with destiny, and where discipline strengthens, instead of restraining, our nature.

— Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated from the French by Grace Frick

[epicswagdivorceguy1]

thoughts on my tower

[lady-harrowhark]

I promise I’m going somewhere with this but I am currently fixating on how seeing Naberius’s trident knife in the beginning of HtN gives Harrow the Gideon Memory Migraine™, despite no clear connection to Gideon:

Ianthe considered this. She nudged the confection basket hilt of the rapier at her hip aside, and took out a long knife that, again, ran a hot rill of pain down your temporal bone. It was—though you had never bothered to learn—Tern’s main-gauche, his trident knife, a long blade from which two other blades would spring at the press of some hidden mechanism; she flicked that mechanism now, and with a snickt they burst out like a firework, two hard points of gleaming steel. She flicked it again, and the blades went snickt back into their housing.

Is it simply that it’s something from the Canaan House era in general? Or is there more going on? Stick with me here.

One of my pet theories I’ve been harboring since Kiriona’s wounds were revealed is that Harrow herself wounded Gideon after she threw herself on the fence, paralleling Jesus’s side wound from being speared after his crucifixion. They needed to ensure Jesus was truly dead, and presumably Harrow also needed to be well and truly sure that Gideon was dead before proceeding. Ianthe says she put a sword through Naberius’s heart to pin his soul in place for her ascension, and we see his body run through with the sword. Harrow needing to do the same to Gideon would certainly be some very juicy angst fuel.

The other crucial component here is one of my other favorite pet theories: that Harrow knew Gideon’s sword was haunted, likely before even coming to Canaan House. I’ve seen a few people do some more detailed explanations about that, but I’ll do a brief rundown here. 

Harrow says as far back as GtN about the sword “I never liked that cursed thing anyway; I always felt like it was judging me.” After the events of HtN with the River and Canaan House 2.0, we know she has an innate and potentially subconscious talent with spirit magic; it seems likely she was able to sense what was in the sword whether she knew exactly what was going on or not.

In HtN, Guideline #3 in her her pre-lobotomy letters to her post-lobotomy self has several stipulations (wipe it down with arterial blood nightly, coat it in regenerating ash, don’t cut flesh or bone with it) that sound a lot like precautions one would take to keep a soul from hopping out of it.

When discussing the sword with Abigail in Canaan House 2.0, we get some very specific qualifiers around how much information Harrow is able to provide about the sword. Directly before remembering that the sword was Gideon’s we have: “Harrow’s brain, though still a jumble, was no longer a mess in a darkened room. Memory had gifted her a small torch she could light the disarray with.”

After that, she struggles to recall further details, her own brain providing obstacles: “The light was not proving helpful enough: she was, in desperation, kicking over piles of the rubble in her own brain.” In the end, she’s able to tell Abigail: “I hated that damned sword for years. I don’t know why; it just felt strange - rancorous. I cannot deny that I often assumed its edge would be the last thing I saw. I don’t know.”

Circling back to the final battle of GtN, we get my favorite little nugget of support for this: Harrow is described as looking “affrighted” when Gideon tells her to go get her two-hander. I’d initially taken that to mean she was startled (and maybe a bit annoyed) to find out that Gideon had brought it at all, or freaked out at the situation in general. But I’ve begun to wonder if she specifically didn’t want Gideon to bring that sword with her to Canaan House because she knew, or at least suspected, what it contained.

Which brings us to the trident knife. If Harrow needed to fix Gideon’s soul in place by impaling her herself, and she knew there was a malevolent soul in the two-hander that could conceivably hitch a ride in another body that it came into contact with, she would have needed a different tool for the job… Which may very well have been the trident knife. Seeing the weapon she used to mutilate her cavalier’s body with seems like exactly the sort of thing that would bring on one of Harrow’s Gideon-induced headaches, no? It’s also notable that when Harrow sees this knife, it’s directly before Ianthe stabs her through the hand, again analogous to crucifixion wounds. I gotta say, if this holds water, there’s a certain poetry to both Harrow and Gideon receiving versions of the Holy Wounds on the blade of the same knife.

(Edit to add: further theorizing prompted by @camilla-rekt‘s fab addition can be found on this reblog)

[incorrecttowerofgodquotes]

ALL OF TEAM SWEET AND SOUR IS ANIMATED NOW

[tare-otome]

Tower of Tears

Okay okay...enough procrastinating...I've uncovered most of the map at this point....it's time to go in...

[sepublic]

            As I draft out the general ‘idea’ of how the story goes and ends and whatnot… I realize that in a way, the Queen of Tears basically gets away with it all.

         As I’ve said, she’s done this all for her child, all so her child could be happy, find friends who understand, and no longer have reason to cry; At least, not cry out of sadness. And by the end of the day, her kid didn’t come up with this idea to gather a bunch of people and enslave them to their will, that was all the Queen of Tears!

         Now obviously, her child doesn’t question and nevertheless accepts it, and that ultimately doesn’t work out; The Escapees DO escape, as they’ve always done, as they’re known for. But I’m taking a restorative justice approach to this kid, because ultimately they ARE a child and punishing them with more loneliness isn’t going to help… What they need are friends and kindness, who can teach the maturity necessary for the child to recognize where they went wrong, while still asserting they deserve to be happy too.

         So when it’s all said and done, somebody’s gonna step up and offer to adopt the kid, to befriend them, something along those lines. Everyone hates the Queen of Tears for what she’s done, but someone like Trexdis, for example, isn’t willing to punish a child just to prove a point to their parents; She isn’t like Midas’ group of Escapees, after all!

         Trexdis probably would arrange something and/or support it. Talikal is of course aggravated, because they can’t let the Queen of Tears get away with this, but again Trexdis admits she considered that possibility. And obviously the child could help heal any damage and make up for things with their power, too!

         And the Queen of Tears is stunned by the compassion of our protagonists, because they COULD choose to hold a grudge like the Escapees do, and they’d actually be justified. But for the greater good, for the kids, they’ll just have to let this pass, they’ll have to let the Queen of Tears succeed. They could torture her endlessly as retribution, and the Queen of Tears wouldn’t mind, as someone who would gladly submit herself to that torment for her kid to be happy; And if her kid IS happy, then she doesn’t mind continuing to pay the price for something she nevertheless got.

         But as I’ve said, the Queen of Tears dissipates once her kid’s wish is fulfilled, and I imagine there’s a bittersweet farewell she has with her child before that happens. Maybe she does feel one regret, that she couldn’t be here to see them grow up happy and be loved… But knowing they will be, that’s enough for her.

         It’s just. She’s NOT exactly a good person, the Queen of Tears is someone willing to lie and kill callously for her kid, and that isn’t justifiable. But Trexdis would feel hypocritical to call her out for that, because that’s a prioritization she can admittedly relate to. You could argue the Queen of Tears was vindicated, rewarded, for all of her effort, no matter how immoral; Sure, her plan didn’t turn out exactly as she anticipated, but it did lead to a series of events that resulted in her kid finding love.

         Maybe there’s a point to be made that the Queen of Tears caused unnecessary grief, not just for others but even her own kid; She could’ve just… asked for help, instead of forcing people. She was so desperate to make them feel as happy as possible, she basically discounted herself as a means to actually address that loneliness, when it was what she was made for; The Queen of Tears went about this in such a needlessly roundabout manner, is what Trexdis might point out.

         The way the Queen of Tears went about it wasn’t right. And you could argue it’s because of what our protagonists did to fix things, that actually ensured it succeeded; Not the Queen of Tears’ efforts. It’s the reward for the protagonists’ work, that the Queen of Tears just happens to share in. Maybe that’s something she’ll consider, or won’t, because she doesn’t need to and is about to disappear into thin air anyhow. The results are all that matter, right?

         She’s a mixed bag; You could argue her as morally gray, given the selfless attitude she has for her kid, the Queen of Tears’ willingness to die for her child’s happiness. But isn’t it selfish to prioritize that kid over others? But then, the people she originally intended to suffer at her child’s expense were the Escapees, who… weren’t really saints, and are grown adults. And as misguided as she was, the Queen of Tears IS somewhat genuine about the Escapees finding mutual love with her child, too! She’s happy giving up everything for her kid, surely they will be too… It’ll be a happier and more fulfilling, more useful existence and atonement, than their usual course of action.

         I guess a part of it is really up to the reader to decide how to feel; Anger, vindication, reluctant agreement? Justice isn’t always served, things don’t work out perfectly, so maybe there is an element of tragedy in the sense that the Queen of Tears crushed so many for her quest, and ultimately got away with it, got exactly what she wanted. But maybe there is no tragedy, just the painful, yet ultimately freeing, acceptance of restorative justice over the retributive kind.

        The Queen of Tears does so many horrible things, and in the end… She wins. She’s rewarded. She succeeds and has basically no real regrets… Utter girlboss.

[frayed-symphony]

My Linktober 2023 drawings

[radiobarf]

INKTOBER 2023

DAYS 07-12

[titan-fanatic]

After rewatching this episode in honor of its 20th anniversary I can confirm that the future is just as if not even more abysmal than this episode portrayed it to be