#he's so!! fascinating!!

[erstwhilesparrow]

might make a longer post later about more details from the video, but have been thinking especially about how delighted i am at the ways characters are categorizing and drawing lines around things in owen's newest new life ep? careful about the cut; there's spoilers in there.

i think... in other series, or watching videos created by other ccs, if someone monologued at the audience about how they think the mechanics of the world work, i would just take that at face-value and move on? this is a thing people do. minecraft is pretty open-ended -- the things that happen in it and the mechanics players interact with can have many interpretations, and probably the person holding the camera is telling you their interpretation so we have The Intended Way To Understand The Rest Of The Video. or at the very least, those interpretations don't tend to be characterizingly wrong? i'm thinking of pixlriffs in empires season two, who posits a theory in-character about how dreams connect different worlds. i'm thinking about scott literally in his most recent new life video saying to us, "oh, that bolt of lightning must be my light snare, one of my powers." these things tell us more about the world and its mechanics, smoothing over the gap between game and interpretation, than about the people sharing those understandings.

so it's. really really fun to me that owen is playing with that? sparrow newlife is just straight up wrong about a bunch of things, but he also has a really obvious stake in maintaining the distinctions and categorizations he's had in place so far. i'm thinking particularly about how long he goes on insisting that the sculk is good and the warden is bad -- it's something he's been saying some variation on since he first became sculk, and it's also increasingly evident that it's just not true! sure, it's in the warden's mind that he find the otherside and the memories therein, but those flashes of memory are about the sculk spreading. he's been saying himself that the sculk wants to spread! and at the end of the episode, sparrow, despite insisting he's a sculk hybrid, hears scott's heartbeat and literally sniffs him out like a warden. there's not really a perfect separation between sculk and warden even on the level of sparrow's hybrid abilities, but he's so lonely and scared, and he's been so convinced for so long that being a hybrid is the best or only way to be wanted and liked -- he needs the sculk to be benevolent, to have welcomed him into the fold because it wants him just for being him. thinking about his final monologue: he's so deeply hurt that, specifically, the sculk used him! he hasn't been upset about being sculk; he's upset that it didn't ultimately mean anything!

and speaking of self-interested drawing of lines, i'm also delighted that scott in his perspective of this episode's encounter does this thing too? as he runs away from sparrow, he mutters to himself something like, "i don't think [sculk sparrow] is the sparrow i used to know." it's... not completely wild to interpret that as scott telling us the viewers that sculk sparrow is genuinely A Different Entity and that this is something that is now just true about the world, but i like thinking of it as scott, the lightmancer, the character, terrified (that heartbeat sparrow hears is going so fast??) and frantically trying to reconcile the image of sparrow covered in sculk and pulling a knife on him with the pilot he befriended all that time ago. it complicates sparrow in interesting ways! it complicates scott in interesting ways! there's a mismatch, on both sides of this falling out, between who each person thinks the other is, and who that other person actually is, and scott saying this gives us a glimpse of another angle to that mismatch. the sculk is deeply a part of sparrow, yes, and is affecting him, but that well of incredible insecurity in sparrow has been here this whole time. he's always had that tendency to curiosity-cruelty and he's always been holding onto the belief that being a hybrid would make him worth something. this whole encounter is more interesting to me if Yeah, It Is In Fact The Same Guy In There. struggling against something terrible, for sure, but still the same guy! sparrow did that. he burned down those structures. he pointed a crossbow at that villager. he, hurting in a million different ways but still doing it, jumped into scott's head and killed him.

[mynnthia]

was talking with a friend about how some of dunmeshi fаndom misunderstands kabru's initial feelings towards laios.

to sum up kabru's situation via a self-contained modernized metaphor:

kabru is like a guy who lost his entire family in a highly traumatic car accident. years later he joins a discord server and takes note of laios, another server member who seems interesting, so they start chatting. then laios reveals his special interest and favorite movie of all time is David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), and invites kabru to go watch a demolition derby with him

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Dog Meshi.

[astraskylark]

this man's moral compass is probably a roulette wheel

[petrowriting]

the revelation that claudia’s rebirth was such a twisted and horrible moment, with louis dragging her like she was a thing, a stranger who neither of them knew but he kept saying over and over “our daughter, our beautiful little daughter” to lestat, really solidified the way she was never the main character of her own story. she was always an accessory to some or the other of louis’ whims: his guilt, his loneliness, his conflict of being a killer, his rocky relationship with lestat. there was love there, love from both her fathers, but it was never enough. lestat saw her too much as a wretched mirror held up to his own self, and louis was always too steeped in his own feelings to care enough about hers. claudia’s story truly was the greatest tragedy in this tale, treated horribly by every man around her, even her fathers, relentlessly exploited and brutally ignored, always second and never first. the only one who loved her the way she deserved to be loved was madeleine, and the moment she truly had her, her happiness was torn from her. and just before she died, she got to see someone actually choose her in her entirety, not for what she can be but for who she is, and it still wasn’t enough. she still burned alive in the sunlight. the love was there, but it wasn’t enough to save her.

[platoapproved]

armand + a few offhand lines that give some insight into how he thinks (imho)

[yfere]

Not Alastor making sure to first point at Husk with a warning expression before turning back to Charlie for his welcome home. This guy REALLY doesn't want Husk to say shit huh.

And Husk is obviously annoyed as hell (or judgmental? resigned? what is this expression exactly) but he joins the group hug anyway. Never change, Husk.

[koipepo]

That omake of little Kabru not being able to show off his howetown sweets because of Misril gets to me a lot so...

Here's a happier Kabru (and Lairu)

[for-those-who-wait]

Discovering that crocs have modes

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

a couple scribbles i cleaned up. also i think i like drawing him in varying states of distress

[intermundia]

my favorite thing about anakin as a character is the inherent nuance lucas wrote into his story, like he's neither an innocent victim nor an inherently evil monster, he's just some guy put in a series of Situations and ultimately failing the test of his humility and self-control. he was certainly flattered and shaped by the devil, spiraling into something unrecognizable, but he chose to take every step down the pathway to hell. lucas knew he would lose a certain demographic by making him basically a greedy pawn in the larger story, not a righteous betrayed macho badass, but he did it anyway. he made him an awkward romantic and a loyal friend, a generous boy and a brilliant teen. he made sure he had all the positive qualities that meant that he had potential to be so much more than vader, but it was clearly his choice to lie, murder, and fully squander that potential. there are no excuses for what he became, no acceptable reasons to commit mass slaughter. he became an unbelievably selfish and impatient man, reckless and wantonly violent. hayden captured that nuance so well, nobody can match the sweetness of his smile and the absolute horror of his scowl on mustafar. to view him through a single lens as either pure victim of manipulation and (canonically unsupported) emotional neglect, or a creepy evil villain, denies the heart of his story and the weight of his tragedy. he's neither an angel nor a demon, he's both and neither, he's deeply human, a classical tragic hero with a flaw of greed. lucas made a choice with the prequels to tell a story that not everyone wanted to hear, and the result was a character that i think is one of the best of modern pop culture, mostly because he feels to me so very, very ancient and eternal.

[mjulmjul]

Katya / Goncharov

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Actually, the bars aren't so bad anymore.

Think you can fix him? Read about his care instructions over at Tiger Tiger)

[molinaesque]

You know why these boys brought you in? 'Cause I f*cked up a poor, defenseless gang-affiliated organ dealership? Yep. Mm.

[royalarchivist]

Tubbo's grown so much as a DJ these past few weeks, but I gotta say, every time he drops Spanish or Brazilian music into the mix, I lose my damn MIND, this goes so hard 💿🎶

[sharliexth]

to me it is so, so important that the Pale King loves. That the Pale King loved. That we don’t forget that it wasn’t just the Hollow Knight that turned to look to him, but the Pale King who turned to look to the Hollow Knight. His one surviving child.

it is so important to me that he has canonical powers of foresight. Meaning the Hollow Knight’s downfall was at best inevitable and at worst the result of constant denial. Or perhaps, his powers weren’t all that far in the future at all, which begs the question: how late was it until he realized all his efforts were futile?

A universe where the Pale King did not care for his children I find dull. Uninteresting. The story becomes a heartless king who does heartless things. Bland. Expected. I find it so much more compelling to imagine that the Pale King did care. After all, how much could it really mean that there’s “no cost too great” if what he committed cost nothing to him?

I think the guilt of his sealed children ate away at him, much as he tried to keep his mind off of them.

I think he loved the Hollow Knight, much as he tried to make his heart hollow and likewise theirs.

I think as much as he tried, when even the Hollow Knight failed, he fled. The guilt of his children, of the Hollow Knight, of failing his subjects was too great.

The Pale King is noble, wise, selfless. The Pale King is prideful, in denial, cowardly. He is many things but he definitely loved. At least I choose to believe so