#but to me the parallels make sense!

[earwig5]

it’s kind of crazy that both fallout new Vegas and fallout 4 have the same driving force for the first half of the narrative (find the guy who wronged you and make him pay) but Benny is so much more memorable and narratively interesting than Kellogg.

It’s a matter of a strong character foil versus a weak one, in my opinion.

Benny and the courier are very much alike. They are both ambitious people who are willing to do anything possible to stack the odds in their favour. Honestly, Benny and the courier are the same card, reversed.

The Sole Survivor and Kellogg are also intended to be character foils. The game tries to convince us of this with the scenes in Kellogg’s mind, where we see that he ‘isn’t so different’ from our protagonist after all. But we don’t know anything about Kellogg other than his backstory. How can he parallel the protagonist if we don’t know which traits he has? Which traits the two of them share?

(As a side note, I wish Fallout 4 had touched way more on the ‘Man/Woman Out of Time’ thing. The protagonist being frozen in the past + Kellogg being functionally immortal would’ve been really cool to explore! Especially in the context of grief!)

In the end, I think the reason Benny is a more powerful character foil is that he doesn’t disappear from the world when you kill him. The chairmen can mourn him, House will comment on it, and even NPCs across the Mojave will talk about Benny’s death!

In Kellogg’s case, the protagonist is basically the only person who knows he even existed! Once he’s dead HE’s DEAD! He disappears completely from the narrative! As soon as you leave fort Hagen, the game doesn’t bother looking back.

that’s why Benny is a more haunting force for new Vegas; particularly an independent courier. You are Benny’s legacy because you are what he leaves behind whether he likes it or not. People remember him as the couriers victim. Meanwhile, nobody remembers Kellogg at all. The memory of who Kellogg was dies with you, and you can choose to forget him.

[claraoswalds]

The Girl Who Died // Hell Bent

[iamjackstylerdurden]

shoutout to house md eps that end with a montage of couples and then hilson. maybe patient and their s/o, chase/cameron, lucas/cuddy, and then just. hilson.

[literallyjusttoa]

"Sunny!" you cry, "Why did you draw the entire Trojan royal family from oldest to youngest in two days? That seems wildly unhealthy!"

"hurghhhhhhhh" I reply.

Anyways here's the full family portrait

(Only four of these people survive the Trojan war btw :D)

[sersi]

I grew up in apocalypses, Loki. I've lived through enough of them to know that sometimes it's okay to destroy something. If... If there's a hope you can replace that thing with something better.

[pechagummy]

Pharaoh & 𝓕𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 Pharaoh 🤪

[flea-the-circus]

even if ronance isn’t endgame, i need nancy to have an arc where she chooses her friend. in my head, the only thing that makes sense is nancy choosing robin. not even in the romantic sense (although i would die of happiness if it was), just nancy remembering her choices and not making the same mistakes she made at sixteen.

having nancy go through four seasons of chasing/grieving/fighting for her best friend, only to turn her entire character into a plot device for steve or jonathan, would be the worst possible choice the duffers could make.

[haunted-xander]

Do you think Saix' emotional co-dependence started as a Nobody or did it start as human Isa and just grew to an unhealthy degree?

[dollsinvogue]

Monster High Morticia Addams » Dolce & Gabbana Kiera Rose heels

Monster High Wednesday Addams » Dolce & Gabbana Bette heels

[nelsaqift]

its been over a year i need them out of my cranium. pronto

[cyanmountains]

[inkerii]

So I couldn't help but browse the THG tag bc those books own my whole heart. I actually check it now and again, and it's been interesting see how opinions have changed over the years, especially in regards to Gale and Peeta. Going through the evolution of them as just potential love interests to being far more complex than I could have expected has been a wild ride. Crazy how this reads different than from when I was a preteen.

That said, I wanted to give my unsolicited two cents on my boys, because though I have been enjoying the discussion on Peeta and Gale and what they mean to the story, I also feel like reducing them to Peeta = peace and Gale = war is far too simplistic... and oftentimes unfair to one or both of them.

See, I don't think Peeta and Gale are peace and war/destruction. They're compassion and indignation.

Peeta worries about the other tributes, or their families, or how to repay people like Rue and Thresh for what they did.

Gale is indignation at how the Capitol treats its citizens, it's anger at the injustice of inequality and brutality.

Both are needed in a story like THG. You can't have people like even Peeta not say something like "maybe we're wrong about keeping things quiet in the districts", you can't have him not drop the baby bomb, you can't start a revolution without Gale's indignation at the status quo. At deserving a better life but being denied it, at having your kids be mercilessly killed for literal sport.

However, if you start a rebellion and loose sight of your compassion, you end up no better than the people you're fighting against. Gale wasn't a bad person, imo. His heart was in the right place. He was flawed, yes, but so is everyone in this series. Gale, most importantly, lost sight of the line between fighting for the people he cared about and fighting against the people who hurt him.

Reducing Gale's indignation to just revenge and hatred ignores so much of what he stands for. Who hasn't seen laws passed that dehumanize people, who hasn't been angry and furious when someone is elected who fundamentally hates everything you are, who doesn't think some people need to pay for the atrocities they committed? There's a little bit of Gale in every single one of us - and it's important that it's there, because that's what gives us strength to challenge the status quo and make life better for the future generations.

But. You can't let it take over. You can't loose sight of your compassion or your empathy.

That's where Peeta comes in. Peeta is the voice in your head that worries about how many good lives will be lost when they give themselves up for this cause. Peeta is the worry about the people caught in the crossfire. Peeta is rebuilding when it's over and believing that the next generation will have a better life than your own. Peeta is being kind, even to people who may not deserve it.

And Gale... Gale looses sight of his compassion, and he doesn't realize it until it smacks him in the face when the bombs go off and Prim is gone and he's too far gone. Meanwhile, Peeta advocates for the end of the war even though it means the status quo remains - and regardless of what he believes himself, I don't think Suzanne chose him to say those lines by chance. It means both mindsets have their flaws: too kind and things that shouldn't remain will never be challenged and changed, too angry and you may loose sight of what you're fighting for.

And that's just how Suzanne uses her characters, both of them, all of them. Just look at who is with Katniss depending on the situation:

- Katniss chooses to "rebel" after Gale is brutally whipped. She kisses him.

- Katniss realizes that in order for D12 to rebel, everyone would need to be in on it, and she realizes most of them are not like her, that they're scared and she understands, emphasises with them. Peeta walks by her side.

- Katniss finally does it though, shoots the arrow at the force field, and Peeta is taken from her, it's now Gale by her side.

(You can't start a rebellion without indignation, and sometimes you HAVE to do it or things will never change, regardless of the inevitable pain that will come along.)

- Katniss is righteously angry at the Capitol bombing a hospital full of innocents to make a point. Gale remains there.

- Coin twists people's compassion into an army to fight for her own personal gain. Peeta is hijacked and looses his sense of self.

- Katniss and Gale go to District 2 and even though she tries to be like Peeta, she's still shot- reinforcing Gale's views, the person who was with her during that sequence.

- Katniss is angry at Snow, Katniss goes to the Capitol to kill him. Gale is there.

- Katniss gets in way over her head and realizes she is responsible for the death of most of her squad. She shares the lamb stew with Peeta, and later cleans his wounds.

- Finnick dies and she's at her lowest up until that point and all she wants to do is give up and give in to the anger. She kisses Peeta and begs him to stay with her.

... Claiming that Gale is destruction ignores the fact that he's with Katniss through her own moments of strength. Her desire to change things, to fight back, is as important as her compassion. Mockingjay just brutally shows you what war does to your indignation, to your compassion. How easy it is to cross a line between righteous anger and revenge, or how your sense of empathy and compassion can be manipulated into something monstrous by others, or by all the terrible, brutal, painful things you see.

How easy it is to loose yourself- and that goes for both of them.

Peeta and Gale aren't static characters, they go from representations of sentiments regarding an injust government to what happens to those feelings when an extreme situation such as war breaks out. All of that, by the way, while dealing with this duality themselves, because they are still characters who think and feel and struggle and have flaws of their own- and while I love what they stand for, I've seen too many comments that pin everything into what they mean, that they forget that Peeta and Gale are still people, they aren't perfect metaphors. They're human.

Ultimately, Katniss doesn't really choose peace. She wants peace, yes. But what she chooses is compassion. empathy. hope. There's a time and place for anger at injustice. There's a time when fighting back is the right thing to do. There are even times when you wanna give in to your despair and lash out. But if you want peace, then you have to choose Peeta, because Peeta represents what you need to focus on to achieve that peace. You have to let go of the anger or you won't ever rest. So Gale leaves, and does not come back... And yet, Katniss still has her moments of indignation, of making a stand, even as he goes - she still casts her vote at that meeting, she still shoots Coin. Katniss does not abandon that part of who she is. It's just not her main drive anymore.

So then she goes on to make the choice, every single day, to be compassionate to others. To have hope. To rebuild. Of course she chooses Peeta.

... Idk, man. These boys are so much more than what I see them so often reduced to. They're in all of us. There will be times to stand and fight, and times to show mercy and be kind. We just need to find that balance, as Katniss eventually did.

[catocappuccino]

Khan using his wrench to put Nori out of her misery

Then Uzi using the same wrench to put N "out of his misery" in a not killing but saving life way in the 1st episode do you do you understa

Do you understand what I mean.

[babybells123]

(ASOS, Sansa II)

(ASOS, Jon XII)

[craqueluring]

i want to talk about how the parallel between gideon and bedelia mirrors the parallel between pope nicholas iii and lucifer in dante's inferno

contrapasso: "the divine punishment of a sinner mirrors the sin being punished"

in dante's inferno canto 19, the pilgrim and virgil are in the eighth circle of the inferno where those guilty of simony (corrupt churchmen) are punished. these people (including pope nicholas iii) are eternally, with flaming feet, upside down in baptismal font-like holes. 

their contrapasso is their baptism being perverted in the same way they perverted the church. upside down in holes like baptismal fonts, their feet are "baptized" with fire instead of their heads being baptized with water. 

(left is pope nicholas iii's flaming feet. right is dante and virgil reaching the other side of earth after climbing lucifer's body, where lucifer's legs stick out.)

in mark musa's notes for canto 19, this specific line lit my brain up like fireworks

"in the final canto of the inferno…dante pauses and looks up to see the raised legs of lucifer protruding from the crevice in which he is frozen, like a magnification of the legs of nicholas. just as nicholas defrauded god's church, so lucifer tried to defraud god himself"

(the beginning of gideon and bedelia's contrapasso-esque punishments. i just noticed the same leg is the first to go for both. and theyre both wearing blue. hmmm....)

in november, i made a post connecting gideon and bedelia's fates in hannibal: their limbs being cooked and eaten one by one in front of them. both gideon and bedelia were living lives that were not theirs to live. gideon as the chesapeake ripper, and bedelia as hannibal's companion in italy. so, they both get to see how it feels to (literally) have a part of them, their identity, their lives, taken from them, just as they took those things from another. the divine punishment of a sinner mirrors the sin being punished. 

just like nicholas defrauded god's church,

gideon mocked the chesapeake ripper

so lucifer tried to defraud god himself,

bedelia tried to mock hannibal and will themselves.

[puppyeared]

I love you when we haven’t talked in weeks and months I love you when I have 12 unread messages I love you when im not in the mood to talk. We’re still friends even when we spend time apart