He cannot be the same man unfollowing mason greenwood and firing jordan green within days of the accusation coming out lol now that its liam he suddenly deems everything ok it seems
I'm sorry if you don't see a difference between how you treat a celebrity you don't know who repeatedly brutally raped and beat their partner while threatening their life, or an employee who serially engaged in predatory premeditated grooming and rape of multiple minors VS how you deal with a situation with a friend who, yes, committed emotional partner abuse, both by being clueless about the impact of their actions and by directly manipulating and pressuring their partner.
But I don't actually think the solution to a friend doing problematic things is necessarily to say "ah well, we had a nice run but you're dead to me now" rather than attempt to help them be better (which can in fact look like/ mean supporting them) although yes, I am aware that in that I differ from the bulk of people driving online discourse culture.
We don't know for a fact that that's what Louis does! But we don't know it isn't either, and I personally do feel that there might be grounds for hope that the man who unfollowed Mason Greenwood and fired Jordan Green and tried again and again to singlehandedly put Anthony Russell in a better place, as well as various other people in his personal life struggling with addiction issues, including Liam himself for years now, might in fact care and have something to say to his friend about it all (over the last months and years one assumes, since unlike us he's had a front row seat to this whole situation all along).
And yeah, about that... you do know that Louis has to have known about all this since long before yesterday right? And yet the suggestion seems to be that it becoming public knowledge should be the breaking point... like in the named situations above, them becoming public was relevant because he found out at the same time as us! If I believed Louis knew what JG was doing and that he only fired him because we found out I would NOT be here, yk? But no way is that the situation here, like hell I assume him and Liam were on the phone for hours at a time with Liam drunkenly freaking out like I can't raise a fucking kid! So I told her... blah blah blah... etc.
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The Risen King and his Tactician
In my previous post about Risen King Chrom, I talked largely about who and what he is. What I didn’t touch on was questions of why and how; the reasons for his existence and the means by which he’s controlled. So that’s what I’m tackling today.
Naturally, this means an examination of Grima’s thoughts on the matter. It's not a purely tactical decision on their part.
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The first reason I could think of for why Grima would make a Risen out of Chrom was that it was an act of tactical cruelty aimed at their enemies. Nothing kills hope and morale in the enemy troops quite like making the shambling corpse of their exalt attack them! But while that’s almost certainly part of the point... It doesn’t explain why RK Chrom’s mind is intact. You can get that effect for a lot cheaper by bringing him back as a garden variety Risen with no sentience to speak of.
After reading the Forging Bonds supports, I initially thought part of the point was to be cruel to Chrom. They’re being sarcastic. They’re taunting him with his dead friends and torturing him by making him slaughter his people. That motivation would explain why he’s still mentally present—if the aim is to torture a foolish idealist son of Naga, it would hardly be satisfying if he weren’t actually there to be tortured.
But I think the main reason I read things that way is due to Heroes’ visual limitation of only having one portrait per character. They can’t adjust a character’s facial expression to better convey tone, which means that wherever tone is ambiguous in the text, the words are coloured by the expression of that one portrait. Since m!Grima’s portrait has that malevolent little smile, we interpret him as sarcastic or taunting and ignore the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the words are genuine.
Read those supports again, and this time ignore the portrait art.
Grima’s phrasing is never blunt. They couch all these hard truths about the situation in these long, indirect statements that soften them. They never bring up a point unless Chrom, in his panic and denial, brings it up first. They even play along with his delirium at first! None of the content of what they’re saying, absolutely none of it, is actually comforting; but the intent to comfort is there in the phrasing. It’s not “Robin is dead”; it’s “Robin is gone, lost, but I am here.” It’s not “Your friends are dead, and now they’re my pawns”; it’s “I know your friends are precious to you; don’t worry, I can bring them back, and you can lead them just like before.”
And they also lie about who killed Chrom. “Who stole your life, you might ask? It was I, with none other than the Fell Dragon Grima, within me.” It’s a bit convoluted, but it sounds like they’re trying to avoid implying it was Robin. But these supports aren’t a timeline where the details of Chrom’s death are unknown; we know he died at the Dragon’s Table fighting Validar, and his very obvious fatal wound is the same spot Robin stabs him at the Dragon’s Table in the premonition from Awakening. The spot that Robin stabs him, under Validar's control. If I were to speculate, I’d say it sounds like Grima is trying to preserve the memory of who Robin was. Spare Chrom the reality that it was his other half that killed him.
And the thing is, Grima has no reason to attempt to speak kindly to Chrom or to absolve Robin of blame... unless Grima remembers enough about being Robin to still care about Chrom. Regardless of how you interpret the nature of the connection between Robin and Grima, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Robin’s memories and emotions are part of Grima in some way, and influence their actions.
Why does Grima bring Chrom back from the dead? Because Grima never chose to kill the man they loved, and now that they’re a god again, they have the power to undo it.
But! We know that Grima is capable of true resurrection. They bring Validar completely back to life in the main timeline, living body and intact soul, when they aren’t even at full power. So if Grima cares that much, why not bring Chrom back as a living person?
The answer to that one is simple: because there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Chrom would ever willingly participate in their apocalypse. What good would it do to bring him back only to have to kill him again? The fact that they don’t want to bear him being gone is what has them raising him in the first damned place. Grima needs him to be on their side... So they force him to be. They remake him as a Risen; a being bound to as dark a role as they are, and by definition, something they can control.
And here’s where we get to that how question. While Risen are naturally controllable through dark magic, there’s never been a Risen with a will before, and certainly not one with the blood of a different divine dragon. And given Validar’s actions, Grima is acutely aware of the fact that holy blood creates the possibility of control by another. Which means Naga might try something. They needed to counter that possibility.
Look at Risen King Chrom again and count the holy brands. It’s not just Naga’s anymore; he bears the brand of the defile too. At first I thought it might be attached to his sword, but I enlisted the help of a much healthier Chrom to check, and...
...no, the brand is absolutely attached to RK Chrom’s hand.
Grima covered all their bases. They minimized any chance that Chrom’s willpower or Naga’s meddling could interfere by making a blood pact with him as a second means of control.
Channelled dear old dad a little with that one.
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So why does Risen King Chrom exist? Because Grima still loves Chrom. Or to be more precise... he exists because Grima loves what Chrom represents.
He’s the idea of companionship. A symbol of the brief moment that Grima was Robin, and was happy. And they love that idea so dearly that they can’t let it die. They bring Chrom back—but they don’t bring him back as he was, they remove his ability to choose and then force him into something that has the shape of their former relationship and none of the heart of it. Grima is still the tactician, and Chrom is still the exalt, and they’re marching to war with the Shepherds like they always do. They’re together like they always were. Right? Grima is acting out a hollow facsimile of a different life, and Chrom is trapped in a nightmare he can’t escape from.
What’s worse is I think Grima knows it’s cruel to keep him around like this. But they’re too rigid in their own beliefs to stop what they’re doing, and too selfish and lonely to let him go. And I think some part of them takes comfort in the fact that they’ve broken Chrom of his ability to hope, too. If even he can’t keep fighting the tide of fate, there really was nothing they could do to avoid this. (Nevermind the fact that they rigged the game so he couldn’t fight even if he wanted to.)
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Can't vote for Biden and his vicious and cruel destruction of title ix. Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it, and it's not like I can vote for them because they also hate women just in different ways. Shat on by the left, shat on by the right, women are in an awful situation
i'm posting this so we can all deconstruct what a far right psyop ask looks like.
on first read, this looks like someone who wishes they could be confident in voting blue but they're bummed by the democrats in office. targets title ix for their ire but doesn't really explain, perhaps assuming i'm out of touch and will just react instead of doing my due diligence (bad bet: i'm an attorney). uses over the top dramatic language like "vicious." they equate the left and right as being identical and indicates they won't be voting for either, with the implication that i shouldn't either, but goes on to blame the dems specifically for...something.
look at the very specific way they've couched this sentence:
Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it,
i'm not meant to fight them on this. i'm meant to be embarrassed to be voting blue in november, i'm meant to blame democrats for abandoning some law, and i'm meant to recognize the right as upholding it.
title ix, if you didn't know, bans sex-based discrimination in schools and education. when someone tells you about democrats destroying title ix, that someone is a TERF.
and TERFs largely have aligned with the conservative hard right. I'll link a few articles at the bottom with detailed explainers, but for right here it's enough to say that TERFs want the far right to win because the far right is voting with them on their single issue, which is the destruction of trans rights and the ouster of trans and gnc women from public spaces. TERFs have marched with the Proud Boys. TERFs have partnered with anti-lgbtq groups to advance their anti-trans agenda. they will throw every other issue under the bus repeatedly if their anti-trans agenda wins.
and, importantly, the far right recognizes that TERFs are a tool they can use to destablize the left. the far right knows that as long as they will align with TERFs on this single issue, which they will because they too want to enforce the gender binary and traditional gender roles, TERFs will vote for and with them regardless of every single other issue. not only that, but the far right knows TERFs are a modern movement that's gained traction in social media spaces over the last several years, and they are relying on TERFs to send asks like this one to infiltrate spaces like tumblr and twitter and tiktok to encourage would-be blue voters not to vote because they want the far right to win.
this is a psyop. this is, whether formalized or not, a psychological operation intended to discourage voting in and among the left.
don't fall prey. vote blue in november.
I like this one because they have this great graph that specifically points out the link between TERFism, the far right, and disinformation attempts like the ask above.
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