#i can't blame either of them

[calexinred]

Sometimes I’m just minding my business and then my brain whispers 'work and playyyy' and I have to physically sit down because the way Agatha said that??? MAMA WAS STARVING.

[malcontentonline]

[dxxtruction]

Louis' "You're boring!" Could mean so many things, but I think what's most apparent about that line is that Armand takes no initiative just for himself. He's not really anybody, because he never goes out and finds himself or gets attached to anyone but Louis. Without Louis as his guide he's literally just sitting on a couch picking lint! That's the thing.

He orbits constantly around what would make Louis happy, and never really fully going what would make me happy? Ultimately that drive to please Louis is what drives him to torturing Daniel, not so much that he'd care to just do it. Ultimately, not giving proper care to Louis is just a way to make sure Louis knows he has to orbit around him as well, with shoving Lestat onto him just that other nail on the coffin. So, even if he fails to figure out how to make Louis happy with him, he still knows what Armand is good for, and better than.

That dependency is what drives Armand's abuse. It really just comes down to that. Armand doesn't even realize how suffocated he is by his own dependency. This is just how life is to him. (It shouldn't be lost either that dependency is a theme considering this episode also deals with addiction).

Daniel's fascinating because he's just so driven to be somebody. He's largely independent, he seeks things because he wants them. It's his drug to poke and prod at all the things that he shouldn't. Daniel's exciting because he lets Louis in to something different, lets him in to all this potential in another person that he can also do the same with for himself. It's a real connection. A two way street. It's easy to tell how Armand can be smothering then because he's never introducing him to anything really new, and most the ways both of them connect are all painful and traumatic. It's never just fun because there's always that layer of that pain. Fun died with Claudia.

50 years on they've gotten to a lot better place, both of them, but it's still that same shit. No seriously, "How is this any different from last time, Louis?"

Well... Because Armand's going to be, at the very least, making one [1] decision only for himself - and that's to hold power over Daniel's life. Fucking sick foreshadowing.

They aren't driving each other to the brink anymore but "The vampire is bored" STILL. Maybe it's even worse, despite being in better places, because Louis' sort of just been defeated by it. (I mean, can he even really leave this either?). He's accepting the dependancy cause he kind of has to. He'd literally ended up letting all the enjoyment be up where he can't reach [The book shelves]. Armand so desperately wants Louis happiness but what really ends up happening is that Louis ends up having to give Armand all his own. He's got no one or anything else to get it from. But like an iPad and an over the top eating ritual. Two extremes of what's just more lint picking.

This whole relationship is one I find just tragic inside and out. You have to just pity it, really. There's ways in which you can find yourself feeling bad for both of them. But you can only really be mad at Armand for any of it. Armand, who isn't even 'free' in any sense, having so little concept of his own independence, but is at the same time so controlling over other's. It's a tragic cycle. It's an infuriating one.

Louis at least has the mind to know when enough is enough. If just needing that extra push to get there. Armand's too scared of it being over to even try.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

yellow fans im sorry but i cannot walk this path with you. he is my sweet baby idiot who i love very much but he very much did not do nothing wrong. some might say, he did virtually Everything wrong,

[lovely-love-angel]

Why does Gregory get shipped with each of his friends but nobody has shipped his friends with each other yet?

I only found one Tony x Ellis post and it technically had Gregory in it too.

I don't think Cassie get's shipped with Tony or Ellis?

I like/respect each ship with Gregory but it makes me also wonder why his friend don't get shipped together.

If you do find a post/made a post, please let me know! ^-^

[sojourner-between-worlds]

.

[thesaintofaquarius]

SO GLAD that you see the potential in aiolia and camus as a duo 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️ we need more fanon content of them

there’s so much to explore on how both get marked as traitors (aiolia being aiolos’ younger sibling and being labelled as a traitor and camus being put in the same category as the trash trio and saga while never actually betraying Athena in the battle of the sanctuary) and that’s just ONE of their similarities I NEED to see more fanon stuff about them 😔

EXACTLY. I love the narrative parallels they have, both with a connection to treason and still maintaining unflinching loyalty till the very end.

Even without the additional materials (the games, other mangas and spin-offs), it's shown that Camus knew something was off with the Pope and the Sanctuary and Aiolos from the start, and you know, him spending more time in Siberia focused on training potential students just makes a whole lot of sense, but I also think that led to his judgement about Aiolia never being clouded.

He never treated Aiolia as anything other than a fellow saint, and though we don't get much personal musings in the Hades Saga about the individual feelings they had because of the impending war being the focus, the way Camus thinks of Aiolia while he's literally beating them to the ground is still very respectful, acknowledging him as someone strong and worthy enough to destroy the three of them if it continued (which. apparently according to episode g, it was not something the other gold saints felt towards aiolia fresh after the betrayal 😭)

They're literally the Head and the Heart duo. Dangerous (and fun) combination when they're together, I think. Also putting Camus, Milo and Aiolia in a trio is really objectively funny to me. As one of the few people who knew about the situation and still respected Aiolos but was unable to do anything about it because otherwise he'd endanger his own position and possibly be condemned by the few people that are close to him and condemn his disciples, I do headcanon that Camus probably kept Aiolia in his peripherals and made sure to check up on him, in his own way (<- episode g backed me up on this because there's a scene where Aiolia literally goes out by himself to fight a titan and everyone's like "he can't do that by himself we need to send someone else to help him" and Shaka or someone goes "someone has already went" and they reveal it's CAMUS. i can't. it's so perfect)

Edit: I forgot to add the parallels of how the Aiolos incident + trauma forced Aiolia to grow up quickly and how Camus, by the virtue of being an Aquarius saint, was expected to act maturely from the start to the point that even Aiolos acknowledges it (in the game. which is so funny to consider because he is referred as a cold man and we know how old the saints were when the incident happened tm)

Sorry for the ramble, can you tell I like Camus and his relationships with the rest of the golds 🫰

[dearmahiru-archive]

i've been having brain worms about mahiru's relationship so i've been rewatching i love you to piece together day sixteen. this feels like a reach but i think a fight might've broken out between them.

first, mahiru boyfriend's house, birdcage, and carousel are all the same location─we know this because each one has the same couch, throw pillows, and table formation.

on day sixteen, mahiru excitedly prepares her boyfriend's favorite meals as a surprise for him. later, when milgram extracts mahiru's mind, we see a table with shattered silverware. then, mahiru fantasizes about her boyfriend coming back to life so they can share food together (notably, only mahiru is fed because when mahiru tries feeding her boyfriend it goes awry.)

though i don't believe her boyfriend was ever physical and broke the dishes, it's possible that he suffered from an eating disorder and responded badly to mahiru's attempts to convince him to eat. this is the reason mahiru's murder is portrayed as feeding him rats that she percieved as a gift to save him from starvation.

we also know that they've fought multiple times from mahiru's t1 song. specifically. theres this very moment in the second teaser where mahiru's screams at her boyfriend, telling him (paraphrased) "don't say you love me if you don't mean it."

which is insane because mahiru is a very forgiving person! she can turn a cheek to someone trying to kill her, laugh off those who trick her, call her stupid to her face, and says she's happy to fight with her boyfriend—lovingly referring to it as their break-up ritual—but saying you love her without any weight behind it? that's what sends mahiru right over the edge.

i think it's possible that mahiru's boyfriend reacted poorly to mahiru's "gift," and tried to console her by saying he loved her which made mahiru's upset, which then escalated into their final fight.

[qcomicsy]

Lately I've only been wishing to grab a comic about my favorite character and just have a genuinely good time reading it.

[shangsclaws]

Sindel and Li Mei were totally sleeping together at some point

[himbeaux-on-ice]

we might lose with dignity this time! dignity would be nice

[statementlou]

another element that is kind of unsettling is the escorts/sex workers thing. nothing wrong with sex workers or paying for them, I just hope Kate knew about it and they had an open relationship/arrangement. grief is already hard enough without that complicating her grief more…I have my own thoughts about Kate but no one deserves to have their partner be unfaithful to them (hoping that’s not what was going on). I know this is small and doesn’t really matter in the context I guess but I’ve been thinking about it

As a former escort, I have definitely been following the role of the sex workers in all of this with extra interest and I keep wanting to have something interesting to say on the subject in response to this... but honestly I guess I don't. My only real take about that aspect is that I wish someone would PAY them, if it was any other kind of outstanding debt it would be paid by the survivors, honestly any other job the family would be wanting to meet them and chat about their loved ones' final hours... But instead they have both been identified and had their names (and details of their lives like how many kids they have etc) put on blast worldwide and STILL NOT PAID! For a FOUR 1/2 HOUR CALL!! As for the rest... the tabloids claim that Kate was shocked and upset by the news, who knows if it's true but if I had to guess I would imagine they had the kind of relationship where that would be the case, so, probably.

EDIT: terrific news, while Liam and Roger seem to have stiffed them, they may have been paid by the hotel (to get them to leave)! (and thus indirectly gotten the money from Liam)... I hope so

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[eddiemunsonsmum]

Just saw this comment on a story posted a month ago.

*cries in Eddie Munson Solo Series no one wanted to read, interact with or request for*

No shade to the person that commented this on their own fic if you recognize it. It's not their fault. I'm not mad at them. More crying in the tags.

[dye-it-rouge-et-noir]

"If you post and do more traditional art that's of finished quality, you can consider that a covert promotion post for your favorite pen company if you put the pen somewhere in the photo to show what pen you used."

You're right.

[natjennie]

anyone else out here a middle child saddled with eldest daughter responsibilities?