#complicated truths

[eeternalferret]

I hate when people get on your back about a ship because it's 'toxic' like bro i said they are in love not that they should be.

[inkskinned]

before you know about women, you hear that you do not need to love the man, just that you need to love him through his manhood. which is to say you have seen the future painted in lamb's blood over your eyes - how your mother shoots you a look about your father's inability to cook right. how your aunt holds her wineglass and says i'm gonna kill em. men, right! how your best friend bickers with her boyfriend, how she says i can't help it. i come back to him.

you learn: men are gonna cheat. men aren't going to listen when you're talking, because you're nagging. men think emotions are stupid. they think your life is vapid and your hobbies are embarrassing. men will slam things, but that's because men are allowed to be angry. if you get loud, you're hysterical. if a man gets loud - well, men are animals, men are dogs, men can't control their hands or their eyes or their bodies. they're going to make a snide comment about you in the locker room, about your body, about how you're so fucking annoying. you're going to give him kids, and he will give you the money for the kids, and you're going to be running the house 24/7 - but he gets to relax after a long day, because his job is stressful. the man is on stage, and is a comedian, and says "women!"

and you are supposed to love that. you are supposed to love men through how horrible they are to you - because that's what women do. that's what good women do. wife material. your father even told you once - it'll make sense when you're older. it was like staring down a very lonely tunnel.

it feels like something's caught in your throat, but it's all you know, so. it's okay that you see sex as a necessary tool, a sort of okay-enough ritual to keep him happy, even though he doesn't seem to care about happiness as-applied-to you. it is relationship upkeep. it is kissing him and smiling even though he didn't brush his teeth. it is getting on your knees and looking up and holding back a sigh because he barely holds you as you panic through the night. it's not like the sex is bad and you do like feeling wanted. and besides! he's a man! like... they're another species. you'll never be able to actually communicate, right. he isn't listening.

you just don't get it. you don't feel that sense of i'm gonna climb him like a tree. mostly it just feels fucking exhausting. you play the part perfectly. you smile and nod and are "effortlessly" charming. and it's fine! it's alright! you even love him, if you're looking. you could have good life, and a good family, and perfectly happy.

in the late night you google: am i broken. you google i'm not attracted to my husband. you google i get turned on by books but not by him. you google how to get better in bed.

the first time he yells at you, it almost feels like blankness. like - of course this is happening. this is always how it was going to end up. men get angry, and they yell, and you sit there in silence.

you mention it to your friend - just the once - while you're drunk. she shrugs and says it's like that with me too, i just try to forget and move on. men are always gonna hear what they want to. pick your battles and say sorry even though he's in the wrong. you play solitaire online for a month. you go to your therapist appointment and preach about how you're both so in love.

after all, you have a future to want. nobody lied about it - how many instagram posts say marriage is hard. say real love takes work. say we fight like cats and dogs but the best part is that we always make up. how many of your friends say happy anniversary to the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. if you really loved him - loved yourself too - you'd accept that men are just different from you.

the first time she kisses you, it's on a dare at a party. something large and terrifying whips through your body. you wake up sweating from dreams where her mouth is encrusted with pearls and you pick them off one by one with your teeth. fuck. you sit at the computer and your almost-finished game of sim city. you think about your potential perfect life and your potential future family. you google am i gay quiz with your little hands shaking.

you delete each letter slowly. you don't need to love him. you just need to keep going.

[voltaical-art]

im in agony. a little self indulgent but I think wyll deserves to be told he's loved and have a small breakdown about it

[maddymoreau]

Thinking about how Diavolo’s feelings transcend time and how in the Nightbringer UR+ card Demon Lord’s Castle Tour this conversation happens.

When asked, “Do you wish to see your father?”

Diavolo responds:

“I suppose I do . . .” isn’t the typical reaction to how a child would feel about wanting to see their parent. Especially when said parent has essentially been in a coma for a year.

Along with how Diavolo describe his father.

It makes more sense why when you learn in Lesson 56 how Diavolo was treated by him growing up.

Diavolo can tell when others are lying but is unable to understand his father’s intentions.

Diavolo mentions that he lived a very sheltered life growing up. That from a young age his father never allowed him a chance to talk to anyone outside the castle.

His childhood friend was Mephistopheles. A demon literally RAISED to be his friend. Putting a barrier between the two because Mephistopheles would put Diavolo on a pedestal.

The isolating childhood he experienced riddled with his strict father constantly scolding him.

Despite everything MC is so important to him he wants to see his father again so we can meet.

[dosesofcommonsense]

[uncanny-tranny]

A lot of cis people may not want to hear this, but here goes:

You are going to have more in common with trans people who have a similar gender identity to you than you think. Trans people are reliable narrators of their own experiences, and whether you like it or not, we will have similar or even identical experiences to yours. Cis people don't have a monopoly over their gender or the experiences people have as a result of their gender.

[gayofthefae]

We don't envision season 5 right when we talk because what is that actually gonna be like? This isn't a romcom. Mike finds out about the painting but Will is like throwing up blood and slugs in the corner.

edit: to clarify I wasn't saying "no time for romance" I was saying "it's horror show with raises stakes and angst. Mike will have to figure out how to bring up this truth bomb he discovered when more important things are clearly going on and there aren't the most conversational opportunities". I mean MORE juice, not less.

[velvetwyrme]

doodle based on something that happened to me recently 😔

[arte072]

"Sansa bullied Arya? Oh so you think she's worse than Tywin Lannister, Gregor Clegane and Ramsay Bolton??" is such a hyperbolic, insincere and ultimately non-existent argument. Literally name one person who says this shit with any sort of sincerity, if at all lol

This is up there with "Talking about Arya's importance to the North means you think Jeyne Poole's life doesn't matter!!!" in terms of disningenous talking points.

It's only ever used to shut down any attempts at considering Arya's feelings and well-being when discussing the girls' relationship.

and no offense, but why are 🫵 YOU🫵 equating the acknowledgement of a fictional child's flaws with calling her a war criminal? why are you treating it like that?? 👀👀👀

I mean, this fandom regularly says Arya lacks morality for surviving war zones with violence. They consider her a walking tragedy whose story is about losing her humanity and becoming the ultimate killing machine. Everyday Dany gets called a N@zi Barbie for not abolishing slavery perfectly. But Sansa gets clocked as a mean girl bully in the first book and y'all fall apart at the seams at that?? C'mon now

[misstrashchan]

So. What's the opposite of a sacrifice?

With the final episode looming it's a question we've been turning in our heads, so I wanted to give my best guess/analysis as to what it might be before Jon and Muna come to tear our hearts out in the final episode.

This is the question Hayward asks Paige, and later Carpenter, and it seems to be the underlying thematic statement of the series, in response to Carpenter's exposition in the first episode of the Silt Verses that introduces us to the fundamentals of the world and system they live in:

CARPENTER:

A god must feed.

A god must be fed.

This is a fact agreed upon across every territory in the Peninsula. And so, really, the only difference between the people born to the water and the people born to the land...

...is the precise nature of the sacrifice we need to make.

There is a God for anything in their world as long as there is someone believing in it. But all Gods need human sacrifices. A god must feed. A god must be fed.

These simple rules have been used as fascinating and horrifying metaphors of our modern society, and to explore themes of faith and sacrifice throughout the story.

And so the final question the last season proposes is if we can find a way to make something better, that can exist outside of this ultimately unsustainable exploitative system and the harm it inflicts upon ourselves and the world, when it has come to define so much of the way we live and how we think. And that means figuring out the opposite of a sacrifice, if they want to kill the idea, the lie, that is at the heart of their world.

At first I thought the opposite of a sacrifice, of offering up to the gods, was about killing your gods. Starving them out. Refusing to offer up anything. And that is part of it, I think. I mean it's literally been a repeating mantra of multiple characters this season once they've reached they're breaking points. Violence in revolution as a tool to overthrow oppresive systems is sometimes needed and necessary. But what about after? What kind of future or vision for a better world can there be? There needs to be something at the heart of that movement that isn't just about violence against their opressors, because you then define yourself in relation to them.

This is even illustrated in the Many Below god Paige created having predator and prey emeshed together, a movement defined by their resistance against the predators of the world, the beasts, cannot seperate themselves to meaningfully create a better future that exists outside of that dichotomy. I think Hayward realises that even earlier in S2:

HAYWARD:

There’s a hare in the grass, half-buried and bloodied.

A barn owl has latched onto its back, its talons driving deep into the flesh of the hare.

Both animals are dead.

Familiar black stone veins protrude from the carcass of the victim, twisting like branches, driving upwards into the predator’s skin.

Hare and owl are locked together, inseparably.

The god must have struck just as the prey died.

White crocus is flowering up from the two entwined bodies.

(Unhappily)

And suddenly I begin to feel deeply afraid.

It all makes me think of a dormouse, dead in the dirt, its ribs showing. Of rabbits, teeth chattering, hungering from their cages

I kick dust up over the corpses. Nudge them aside into the long grass so they can’t be seen from the path.

Paige doesn’t need to know about this, I tell myself.

There’s no sense in worrying her. Not yet.

Which then makes sense why he's the one proposing the question of what the opposite of a sacrifice is to Paige (and Carpenter), for this very reason.

I think the answer is pretty simple and yet, like most simple truths in this world, it's forgotten and overlooked or twisted as naïve.

Preservation. The opposite of a sacrifice is preservation. To better explain this let me use an example:

If someone who cared about you tells you you're working too hard at your thankless job, sacrificing your sleep, your time, your personal relationships, your physical and mental wellbeing, far past the point considered sane, they'd tell you to stop. To make sure you take care of yourself. Instead of endlessly feeding yourself into a machine to justify your existence.

Applied to the world of the Silt Verses, it's not just self preservation and caring for yourself. It's about caring for, protecting, and preserving the lives of those around you, that is the ultimate act of rebellion and political warfare, the first steps forward towards a better world. Caring for humanity.

Whenever our characters reach a breaking point of turning against their gods, there's a common thread of wanting to save their fellow man, and realising the inadequacy of a god's ability to do that. Whether that's somebody close to them (like Faulkner and Paige):

Or humanity as a whole (VAL and Shrue):

SHRUE:

Use them, pass them on, do not forget the suffering that keeps the engines of this world turning, forget the name of your god and cherish the name of your neighbour that was swallowed up by it-

Cherish your neighbour. Be kinder to one another.

This can even go back to Carpenter's rejection of the Trawler-Man back in S1, her fury at the fact those she loved had been eaten (her family) and would continue to be eaten (Faulkner).

CARPENTER:

(Yelling to the river)

It's over between us, you twin mouthed prick!

Do you hear me?

Does that stir you from your torpor? Pry the barnacles loose from your sodden ears?

My father and mother were Gregory and Sandra Glass. My grandmother was Adalina Glass. My brother was Em.

They died for you.

Every single one of them died for you and they thought it meant something.

My name is Carpenter. And I am still alive!

I have loved you for so long. I have tried to know you for so, so much longer.

And I'm done with you. Here and now. I'm not laying down my life for you.

I'm not dying, do you hear?

The same breaking point for Faulkner at turning against his parish and finally snapping is the idea of Carpenter being offered as a sacrifice, an offering returned, begging for her to live.

I must clarify this is my own interpretation of the question and themes the story proposes. I'm

I'm not sure we'll actually get a hard answer so much as different characters offering their own answers and us as the audience encouraged to think for ourselves what it might be. I think this is what Hayward's answer might be at least, anyway, because like me he's a corny motherfucker:

If a sacrifice is the idea that the most meaningful and transformative thing you can do is to give up your life, your sense of self, to die, then the opposite of that would be to try to keep on living, and finding meaning and transformation in that, surely?

[akechi-stole-my-heart]

i maintain that the reason goro sucks at cooking is bc he absolutely cannot for the life of him experiment with it. he can follow instructions fine but if there's vague terms or if something says to eyeball it he's completely lost. that, and goro cannot stand having to do multiple things at once and will absolutely burn a building down because he wasn't keeping a close enough eye on the stove. this is what makes akira so good at cooking, on the other hand--he thrives at experimenting and taste testing and the chaos of the kitchen is something he lives for.

HOWEVER. goro is very good at following a step-by-step guide. he is extremely meticulous. he is capable of being precise with measurements. so once he's introduced to it, goro becomes an incredible baker. it even becomes therapeutic, a method of relaxing after a long day. akira hates baking for the same reasons goro loves it, but loves having yummy tasty treats, so baking becomes goro's forte.

unfortunately, being the friend who brings baked goods to every hangout means goro is not escaping the has-a-sweet-tooth allegations anytime soon.

[lilapplesheadcannons]

A-Yuan: Bofu, what causes the wind?

Lan Xichen: The trees sneezing. 🤧

A-Yuan: Bofu, how does the sun rise and set?

Lan Xichen: In the morning, it's warm, so it rises like a hot water balloon, then falls back down when it gets cold in the afternoon. 😊

A-Yuan: How come you know everything, bofu?😲

Lan Xichen: "An Uncle's Handbook to All Possible Questions." They give it for free when you buy a nephew.

.

.

.

A-Yuan: YOU BOUGHT ME?😱😱

[the-muppet-joker]

Would you go to femboy hooters???

Are you asking me as a Catholic or as a Homosexual?

[purgetrooperfox]

not to foxpost on the foxblog but I think we should all talk more about the cognitive dissonance that the GAR, and the Guard specifically, would have to deal with on an ongoing basis. they're brought up and had it drilled into them for a decade straight that the Republic is worth fighting and dying for, that it stands for justice and freedom and [insert patriotic buzzwords here]. they get deployed directly into a slaughter on Geonosis. they get assigned to Jedi who intentionally get them killed. they get assigned to the Guard and listen to Senators treat the war like an abstract, distant concept and the clones like equipment to be manufactured/replaced/disposed of. they're treated as subhuman by civilians. they're slaves in this system that was built up to be a shining star, a perfect example of democracy, the thing they're born to die for.

so what do you get. indoctrinated beliefs versus lived experience. sure, some of them turn (Slick) or desert (Cut), but most of them have to reconcile that conflict without walking away from the army altogether. Dogma is one end of the spectrum, going the route of "my indoctrinated beliefs must be true, so I'll selectively validate parts of my lived experience to align with them and seek out proof of them". Fives is, on Umbara at least, the opposite end, going the route of "my lived experience must be true, so I'll recontextualize my indoctrinated beliefs to match it". the Republic is still worth everything, but maybe we can't trust the Jedi, or the Kaminoans, or the Chancellor.

but the majority of them are going to fall closer to Dogma, otherwise the GAR would stop functioning or try to collectively rebel, right? it's easy to skirt around how deep brainwashing runs and how far people will go to resolve dissonance, but fmngmfng

so you take Fox in the context of Commander of the Guard, and you get "the Republic must still be worth it, so these rules and regs are in place for a reason, and even if they're not then they do work to protect us, and the Senate is doing its best with a bad situation, and the Chancellor wouldn't commit xyz atrocity because he is the Republic" and on and on and on to try to reconcile it all in his poor fucked up brain. how would he carry on with the slog of his job? how could he possibly have the space to wrestle with the contradiction? then the longer you lean into one justification, the deeper it sinks in and reinforces itself

anyway this has been needless over-analysis hour

[g0nta-g0kuhara]

What I find interesting about Kaede is how she’s somewhat deified by her class after her death, because she did have very real flaws, but after her death she becomes a martyr, all flaws and mistakes soothed over to become the embodiment of good and kindness and cooperation, the lie of kaede being perfect becomes the truth by her dead. Leading to the point that by the end she’s not a person really, just an idea, the perfect victim, which plays into a long running theme of idealization being tied to sacrifice present in v3 (tsumugi idolizes the killing game, shuichi and maki eventually idolize Kaito, tenko idolizes himiko, korekiyo idolizes his sister, gonta idolizes everyone else, etc) her promise and words and ideals are a constant presence, while her flaws and mistakes and sometimes hurt she causes are sanded away. The idea of Kaede is totally different then the reality of her, both are kind and want to be good, but ones endlessly patient and sweet who never did anything wrong in her life, while the other is impatient and a bit snappy who struggles with empathy at times even if she is trying to do the right and good thing. Which is INTERESTING. She haunts the narrative, but at the cost of a part of herself.

It’s not talked about in the fandom much but the dead or soon to be dead in v3 are almost all given this untouchable moral impunity about their past by at least one person. While in other games characters, while not believing they should have died, can really struggle to even give half the same absolute forgiveness and moral cleansing to some of their dead, THH and GBD would never have been guilted into almost taking a blackened’s place, and I think it’s so interesting how reverence for the dead, even to at times dangerous extremes, is a common thread in v3. Hell, the one person who really doesn’t get this is Korekiyo, and his execution actively exorcises him, as if to say he is inherently not allowed the same respect or peace in death as the others and his ghost must be destroyed and given no rest to not taint this reverence, so that they don’t have to face his sins and thus potentially face the others sins

Oops I think I went on a tangent

OHH YOU MAKE AN INTERESTING POINT... Youre absolutely right, in previous games you could almost never be guilted into taking the place of a blackened in their execution. I think it might have to do with how the v3s really, truly linger on the deaths of other characters, especially the blackeneds, much more than in previous games. Theyre martyrs to the game which is really important to how the game ends- but it is kind interesting that there is a very specific, even fictionalized idea of these dead characters in the heads of the survivors.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

Also... Post-canon lovesong... If you even care... "Is Sparrow still with Rebecca?" that part is a choose your own adventure babeeey~