A Too-Close Analysis of the Double Exposure Treatments from Duskmourn (2/2)
We return to the Double Exposure cards from Duskmourn! This post will be going over all the cards I didn't talk about in the first part, which is all the legends that don't appear in the main story (not including Altanak, Norin, and Arabella since they're all at uncommon so none of them got Double Exposure printings). Now, because we don't know much about most of these characters, this part will include a lot more educated guesses. Quick shoutout to wotc for posting the "Legends of Duskmourn" article a little bit earlier than they usually do so I have a little bit more to go off of. Away we go!
(Oh, and if you missed Part 1, you can find it here)
Toby, Beastie Befriender-
A creepy Jack-in-the-Box looms behind Toby's profile. Could simply be that kids are afraid of clowns, or perhaps something more? A Jack-in-the-Box is startling, and even though Toby says he has his Beastie friends to protect him, that would not make him immune to a brief startle, would it?
The Mindskinner-
A hand. Who is its owner? Unclear, but the clawed motif on the gloves make it almost look like it belongs to a Razorkin. From the Legends article, the Mindskinner is the fear of Razorkin, and employs a much more gradual and insidious methodology compared to the rest of the nightmares in the House. Based on this double exposure, it seems that not even Razorkin are immune to being targeted by its cruel whims. Plus, the only way to drive off the Mindskinner is to have your glimmer nearby, meaning Razorkin, who've already given themselves in to maddening pain make for easy prey. It might have enough intelligence to find this delightfully ironic, to torture that which first gave it form.
Kona, Rescue Beastie-
Overlaid on Kona’s profile is a set of canine jaws, facing the same direction as her. Two interpretations: one, that the prey instincts that were within whatever animal later mutated into Kona are still active and alive, that she still fears being snatched up by the jaws of some greater creature and devoured. Or, alternatively: those are Kona’s teeth. Beasties are, at the end of the day, as monstrous as anything else in the House, their masks being their attempt to conceal that fact. A beastie knows that if a survivor sees its true face, they will immediately flee in terror. The biggest fear of a Beastie is that its monstrous nature will be revealed, that for all its efforts it will terrify and lose those it seeks to protect. Or worse, that it will be the one to take them away, slipping back into bestial instincts.
The Jolly Balloon Man-
I've spent so fucking long staring at this one trying to figure out what the fuck that even is and I honestly have nothing. A kinda fucked up looking balloon animal? Some kinda I got nothin’. I will say, though, that I think the JBM's rictus grin is a very good demonstration of the way Razorkin have fully fucked up senses of pain/pleasure and such. But yeah I don’t like this one. Pass.
Rip, Spawn Hunter-
A skeletal hand, reaching upwards towards Rip, who has her back turned towards the viewer. Rip used to be a member of the Doorblades, the group of survivors who dedicate themselves to fighting back and eliminating as many of the House’s monsters as possible. Which, we know from the planeswalkers guide, is a group with a very high fatality rate. Turn your attention now to the flavor text on Came Back Wrong and the Duskmourn printing of Pyroclasm. Rip has a practice of burning bodies of those who fell in the line of duty. The skeletal hand is that of one of her former comrades, whose body she had to burn and leave behind. It represents doubt, doubt that she’s doing the right thing by cutting off any chance of grim revival for those who’ve passed, doubt that the human toll of spawn hunting is worth it. No wonder she prefers to work alone.
The Swarmweaver-
Ahh! The Bees! Not the Bees!! A living scarecrow beehive, with a giant bee layered on top. Insects, crawling within its being, beneath its wooden skin and throughout its spindly form. The Swarmweaver is a wickerfolk: maybe in life they feared what they now wholly consist of? Not a huge amount to go off of here- is what I would say if the Legends article didn’t confirm that the Swarmweaver can indeed still feel the corpse bees crawling around beneath its wooden skin, that they are constantly in pain and the only way they have to relieve that is to send the bees to attack others. Do you think they’re still aware enough to feel regret, for sending the source if their pain towards others?
Victor, Valgavoth’s Seneschal-
In front of his face is a moth, symbolizing his total devotion to Valgavoth. In the flavor text for the Special Guests printing of Sacrifice, they describe a ritual where cultists allow their fears to be fully consumed by the house, allowing themselves to be reborn. Victor has apparently undergone this process dozens of times, no trace of his original self remaining. The chain of eye-marks on the moth’s wings connect to Victor’s glasses. His fears are now inseparable from Valgavoth’s being: in a way he has made himself part of the house.
Marvin, Murderous Mimic- Another hand! Now, originally I assumed that this was the hand of the Razorkin who used Marvin as an intimidation tactic and possessed him, but according to the Legends article, Marvin isn’t possessed at all, and merely “quickened” when the Razorkin grabbed him by coincidence. Which is… not what I expected from the Chucky analogue and makes it a lot harder for me to explain what the skeleton hand means. Cool. I do still think the hand might represent a lack of agency, a vague memory of being used as a puppet by whatever ventriloquist originally owned him. Beneath all of Marvin’s psychotic behaviors is the fear that he might still be no better than a puppet after all.
And that’s all folks! I hope you enjoyed this writing exercise and all my philosophical wankery about this silly card game. I’m literally in the middle of my prerelease event so I gotta go now. Also plz read my magic the gathering fanfiction i have a lot of it and crave comments
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complaining here because i dont want to burden my friends but still want to collect validation in the form of little pixel hearts
my moms mental state has gotten so much worse and as a result her hoarding is becoming even worse and even more impossible to tolerate. i have tried to have more sympathy about it and to help her with it, sitting with her while she sorts "a box a day" or even just "one thing a day". ive gently recommended she get a new therapist but all she did was change her horse on the SSRI carousel and start smoking weed. i've linked her articles and books and videos, and when she doesnt look at any of them i try to relay to her in conversation what i learned from them when she bemoans "why am i like this?". none of it matters. she just complains that it's "too overwhelming" and she "can't help it" even though she refuses any help at all.
i know it is a mental disorder. i know it is overwhelming. i know it causes her physical pain to get rid of things and at the same time cripples her with guilt to keep it all. but as of right now all we're trying to get her to do is just rearrange the things so that they aren't turning our house into a fucking obstacle course, and she pushes back on that too. like she doesn't want to even organize the piles AS THEY ARE and condense them because she'd rather be "actually throwing things away and putting things away like a human being!"—the thing that she very specifically CANNOT do.
and if we consolidate it on our own? hooooly christ. she goes on a fucking rampage, slamming doors, screaming/sobbing, throwing shit (her shit. it's all her shit). because it's HER stuff and WE touched it and she feels guilty about all her stuff. she STILL talks about when my sister tidied the spice cabinet, convinced that "she threw everything away!" and that was years ago. (my sister is a different kind of insane and probably DID throw a bunch of shit away, but either way all it did was give my mom ammunition for the rest of her life to never do anything.)
this is long enough already so all i can say is that im disappointed in myself for losing more of my tolerance and sympathy. like at this point the only reason i care is because i have to fucking live here since i havent been able to stay employed or move out yet and my mental health is also incredibly bad. but also my mom's becoming much more intolerant and hateful as a human being, which makes me less inclined to keep trying. like she deliberately brings up incendiary topics (usually politics), whips herself up into a cyclone of hatred (every '-ism' you can think of) while preemptively apologizing for things that she thinks that we think about the politics that she "doesn't like talking about" despite blatantly shifting the conversation to bring them up, then devolves into histrionic crying or yelling at us for something she has imagined. this is almost every day. i know she's my mom so im trying but christ alive
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VENT - I feel like if there was better education around abuse and violence, and abuse and violence prevention, we'd be able to interrogate more how it is so much a community, cultural, and systemic problem, and arguably less of an individual one. This does not dissuade any fault individuals have in creating violence and perpetrating abuse, just so no one's confused here. We have to see that violence and abuse perpetrators do take the responsibility for their actions. Obviously. But to open this up to wider responsibility would lead to far better discussions about wtf was going on at the anti-black lynch trail wrt Armand's complicity and level of fault in it.
Far too many people are unwilling to see that he was not the one to orchestrate or plan this, because they'd rather pin violence and abuse all onto a single individual. (Which is dehumanizing btw, to us even because it implies we've accepted these terms for ourselves as well).
This is an expectation I'm aware just isn't possible though, and Interview!Fandom certainly is not ready to confront this. Not everyone was when it came to the abuse Lestat perpetrated in S1 (those who watched an entirely different show apparently and deny how race played a role in the violence and abuse, throughout just everything not just Lestat). So it's just gonna be me and the handful of others IG. Shout out.
(more to this in OP tags)
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