#crozier cannot be a father to me if he’s any parental figure it’s a MOTHER

[crazy-god-bunker-jughead]

I don’t really GET Joplittle most of the time because those guys only spoke to one another like twice. But their dynamic from their few interactions in episode 5 is SO interesting to me. They’re joined in their knowledge of Crozier’s alcoholism and are dealing with the repressions of that. But their responses to it are parallel.

In the cabin scene at the beginning of the episode, Little is so visibly pissed off at Crozier, but does his best to shove it down and follows orders. He’s forced to (try and) hide what’s going on from Fitzjames and now is being made to participate in this by getting Crozier whiskey. A man just DIED, and Crozier is back to speaking about drinking a moment later.

Meanwhile, Jopson has been dealing with Crozier’s alcoholism the longest and knows this is the worst it’s ever been. But he’s not angry like Little, he’s mostly concerned for Crozier’s well-being. (That little pause before “two bottles, sir,”…) He’s a good steward first and foremost, though, so he doesn’t comment and gets the whiskey. Crozier noticeably has a much nicer tone with Jopson.

It’s almost like an eldest child v favorite child dynamic. Edward the angry oldest now shouldering the burdens and Jopson the concerned-yet-empathetic favorite child who mom asked to get another beer.

It's so so so juicy. It’s only really a thing in episode five, but it’s fun to extrapolate on that. You could create such an interesting, fucked up bond for them.

[vashhanamichi]

I’m insane and out of my depth but I like to think about different metaphors for the relationship between Harry, Voldemort and Dumbledore. Although the obvious one is Dumbledore as God, Harry as Christ and Voldemort as Satan sometimes they seem to me akin to a mortal family, such are the families in the great Greek tragedies, families whose drama is incensed by the Gods and whose stakes are high enough to affect cities, countries, generations.

I’m thinking about the cursed House of Atreus and this post by the amazing @artemideaddams and these are the bits that I think apply the most to the Dumbledore-Harry-Voldemort triad:

(…) would the family fail, the whole country would fail too. The gods know that.

For Iphigenia to be Clitemnestra's favourite daughter, she need to die first.

She has long known that the only child that could never become their father is the one that will forever be a child. The only one who would have never mourned his death was the one killed by him.

Iphigenia had two moments of glory in her story: when her father killed her, and when her mother avenged her. Being killed, being avenged. Being a pawn to kill or an excuse to kill may not be so different, after all. No one ask for her opinion in both cases.

if Iphigenia would have not be so good, so perfect (…) she would have been free to just BE.

I love characters who are aware of their role in the narrative but cannot stop the narrative from unfolding like Captain Crozier in The Terror. He knows he’s in a tragedy/horror, he knows they’re doomed but he can’t change his fate or the fate of his men.

When Harry realises that he is a Horcrux he occupies a similar state of mind: he knows what genre of story he inhabits. He knows he’s meant to be his world’s Christ. Then all remaining childhood illusions dissolve: he was never meant to live, he was always meant to die. These seventeen years he spent between two of Voldemort’s kisses are but an intermission between acts in an opera. Like most of the famous Arias, Harry is meant to die before the curtain closes. Like Iphigenia as she learns of her role:

we talk about Harry as a “good little soldier” but I think we are mistaken: his obedience is filial. Like a good son, a good daughter. Dumbledore is, in his own words, his last and greatest protector. His last parent figure.

Harry gets to be the perfect child and, thus, the perfect lamb. Dumbledore loves him. And through that love that sacrifice is made greater.

What could ease Artemis’ anger so the winds could sail Agamemnon’s fleet to Troy? What sacred deer? What killing should be done to conquer the Dark Lord?

Not just any wizard, not just any child, not just any son, any daughter — a perfect one, whose unbreakable obedience would have him go to his death willingly. Harry doesn’t run, doesn’t cower. He goes willingly.

Harry is like a child caught in the midst of a nasty divorce. Crushed between Mother (Dumbledore) and Father (Voldemort).

My mother, she killed me,

My father, he ate me

But Voldemort’s role is ambiguous. Dumbledore is a parent figure to him as well — and they’re bitterly disappointed in each other. Let us remember, however, that the House of Atreus is a house of incest. Son-husband Voldemort to mother-wife Dumbledore is everything Harry isn’t. He’d never laid down his life in sacrifice. He’s too much like the unspoken root of Dumbledore’s rot, Grindelwald. Tom Riddle grew up in a way that Harry didn’t, and by growing up he became like Grindelwald, the unspoken Father, the unspoken Husband.

By dying, Harry is perfect. By refusing mortality Tom Riddle is corrupted.

As @artemideaddams puts it, regarding Iphigenia: no one asked her opinion. Harry obeys his mother and is consumed by his father. He is filial to both. He is a lamb to both.

[elegant-etienne]

🌦 LONGING

[Mood: Vienna Teng - Nothing Without You]

It’s the quiet night that breaks me

I cannot stand the sight of this familiar place

It’s the quiet night that breaks me like a dozen paper cuts that only I can trace

Snow fluttering, lit afire by lamplight. Ishgard smells of cold iron, ice and stone.

Etienne makes his way through the Jeweled Crozier down to the Pillars. The sun’s light has guttered out like a candle at the end of its wick. The sky is as purple and painful as a fresh bruise. Etienne knows his breath will sting and freeze if he pulls it in too fast, too much, too hard. The crushing feeling in his lungs - it’s only because of the cold. He breathes and treads carefully in the freshly fallen snow.

In the Brume, a few children are playing, throwing snowballs around with bare hands. Etienne’s fingers curl in aching, icy sympathy. An adult - an older sibling or a particularly young father, he could not guess - calls out to them to come inside before it gets dark. Come inside or a wyvern might eat you. That seems entirely unlikely these days, but it does the trick.

“Where are the mittens Mum knitted you?” the adult scolds them, “You’re really going to be in trouble!”

“Lost ‘em,” the smallest of them says.

“Big trouble.”

All my books are lying useless now,

All my maps will only show me how to lose my way

Later, Etienne will write in his journal, staring out the window at the snow as it piles up, icy and pillow-soft. Big trouble, he’ll think, tapping his cheek with his pen.

They are lucky to have someone to knit them gloves. Perhaps things in Ishgard are improving.

Perhaps the poor dears had enough to eat tonight.

Oh, call my name

You know my name

And in that sound

Everything will change

At the graves of Margeaux Clairemont and Claudinette Clairemont, in Coerthas:

“Sister, Mother, I’m getting married in two weeks’ time. I do wish you could see it. I’ll save some of the flowers, press them - I’ll bring them to you after we come back from the honeymoon. His name is Sizha’to. Yes, a mi’qote. He’s so good, and beautiful, and trusting. He sees me. I don’t know how else to explain it. He sees me, Mother, like you never did. I wish…”

Etienne sits back on his heels, gazing at the humble graves. Their round tops make them look a little bit like a slumped figure, head bowed in prayer or defeat. Claudinette’s is the newer of the two, but it is already starting to wear under the harsh weather. They are modest little grave markers, unpretentious granite. He could only afford Claudinette’s because he took up a collection at the brothel. Margeaux died before he was born. He can probably only spell out her name because he knows it already.

“I’ve looked and looked, but I still can’t find any sign of Adelie out there in the highlands. I don’t know which farm was hers. I would bring her back to all of us if I could. In spite of how you broke up, I’m sure she’d want to be with her family. I don’t like the thought of her being alone out there. I know that none of you are probably still here, and I alone am the one, for some reason who…”

Etienne falls quiet.

“No, of course I’m not crying, Mother. That would ruin my makeup.”

Tell me it won’t always be this hard

I am nothing without you,

But I don’t know who you are

There are so many times Etienne searches the crowd for someone, something he knows he cannot find. He sees it, but only second-hand. It is the light in other people’s eyes when they talk about someone precious to them. My family. My brother. My sister. My husband. My wife. My children. My parents. My village. My clan.

My homeland.

The words and smiles, the quiet, dreamy quality of nostalgic voices, the pride that swells - they overflow like wine zealously pouring into a goblet, spilling onto the table beneath. Etienne does not know the taste of it. He tells himself it might be better not to know since he could not drink it now.

It’s the crowded room that breaks me,

Everyone seems so luminous and strangely young

It’s the crowded room that’s never heard,

No one here can say a word in my native tongue

It is worse at happy occasions or just happy moments at the company house. Etienne grows weathered like those headstones and must mind what he says, lest the full weight of his low-class upbringing make its way into his speech. He hates how easy it is to tell a story with no feeling about it at all. Oh yes, I worked in Gridania last. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m a Duskwight, but I never met my birth parents. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. There are so many elezen in the world, it is difficult to know even where to begin the search. The women who raised me were my real parents, I don’t really care to know. It doesn’t matter anyway.

Of course they all must have their sad stories. Not every memory smells of the sea or sounds of children’s laughter. Surely, they have all borne their tragedies. But their happiness is a little painful, so Etienne retreats.

He makes tea. He listens. He does not have stories like that to tell. His stories are better unspoken. Most days he wishes he could forget them entirely.

I can’t be among them anymore,

I fold myself away before it burns me numb

Later, Etienne will find Sizha’to doing paperwork at his desk in the office. Etienne will bring him a pot of tea, because he knows Sizha’to will need it.

“Lots of people socializing downstairs tonight,” Etienne will say lightly. “It’s so nice when things are lively.”

Sizha’to peers over his glasses as Etienne pours him a cup of tea, plunking four sugar cubes into it. He gives Etienne a plaintive look, and Etienne plunks another cube in.

“Etie….”

“I’m not putting a sixth in. I have to draw the line somewhere. This is good tea, you know. I have my pride.” Etienne says, playing at being offended.

“Are you feeling alright?

Oh, call my name

You know my name

Sizha’to captures his gaze, then his hand.

“…Just a little tired,” Etienne admits. “You know how it gets when there’s so many people talking at once.”

And in your love,

Everything will change

Etienne spends a long time staring into his looking glass before he goes to bed. He slowly removes his make up with an expensive cloth he bought from a purveyor in Ul’dah. Eyes first, then mouth, and the light dusting of powder he wears to keep things even without deliberately covering the scar on his face. He takes great care to observe the length of his lashes, the shape of his eyes, the height of his cheekbones, the size of his nose and the fullness of his lips.

Somewhere in the world, isn’t there a mother with skin this brown singing her children a lullaby?

Somewhere in the world, isn’t there a father with eyes so pale they’re nearly white, reading a bedtime story?

Tell me it won’t always be this hard

I am nothing without you,

But I don’t know who you are

Etienne traces the contour of his mouth with a little balm, presses his lips together.

Most people wouldn’t want to know what their parents’ lips were like, or what they were used for. And yet his ears would not burn to hear such a story.

He crawls into bed with Sizha’to, draping across his lap with a dramatic sigh. Sizha’to requires no explanation, softly rubbing his back.

“I love your hair,” Sizha’to murmurs, combing his fingers carefully through the strands. “So soft.”

“I take good care of it.”

“I know you do. I’ve always loved the color, too. So unique.”

“I suppose it is,” Etienne says stiffly. “At least I think it is. Perhaps somewhere, there is a whole island of people with hair like mine. It doesn’t seem likely, though, from what I do know.”

“An island full of Eties…”

“Perish the thought.”

I am nothing without you,

But I don’t know who you are

“Do you still think about finding them?”

“Hm?” Etienne pretends he doesn’t know what Sizha’to is talking about. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes. He knows the gentle concern Sizha’to must be wearing.

“Your family. The ones you haven’t met.”

“You’re all the family I need,” Etienne says, furrowing his brow. He still doesn’t open his eyes. Sizha’to can hear all the almost-soundless hints he drops without eye contact.

“If you ever wanted to look for them, I’d help you. Our friends would help too.”

“You’re enough. You’re all I need.”

I am nothing without you…