#metaphorical of course

[awesome-opossum-after-hours]

if you're the lovechild of Stolas and Blitzø and you DON'T have a best friend who's the lovechild of Ozzie and Fizz then what is even the POINT

@theatomicgummybear

[mirroredmemoriez]

I’m lost in the sauce.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Maybe we never had a chance.

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[myapothecarydiary]

Maomao–finally accepts/puts together Jinshi's true identity then proceeds to (continue to) wear his hair stick for the rest of the episode

[pureseasalt]

at woe's hollow straight up jorkin it haha. and by it i mean..... well..... haha... ha.......oh god. oh dear god. oh lord oh dear lord. oh go d forgiv e me

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[rednightmare18]

Sometimes I do think the hyperfocus on religious guilt, especially the hyperfocus on religious guilt pertaining to sexual behavior (with one particular romance taking up 90% of the fandom's concern here), is eclipsing the absolutely fascinating canonical relationship Henry has with God.

Henry's guilt, a complicated tangle of survivor's guilt and moral guilt, is never on clearer display than when he dreams of his parents. This dream is the face of how Henry feels about himself and the sins, moral and divine and cultural, he has committed. It always troubles me when I see people yelling at Henry's parents as if they were really there... and not recognizing this is insight directly into how Henry feels about what happened in KCD2.

Notice that he is deeply caught up on theft and revenge/wrath (even when he argues with his father/i.e. himself in his own defense).

Notice, too, that he has no apology to make about Hans (if romanced). Of even greater interest from a character analysis standpoint, neither of his dream-parents (the voice of his internal guilt and misgivings) spare more than a moment's surprise on it. Henry's mother immediately scolds Henry's father when he expresses surprise; down to the marrow of his dreams, Henry does not seem to feel badly, guilty, or conflicted about romancing Hans at all.

Henry's aversion to touching the dead in kcd1 and kcd2 (particularly when someone he deeply cares about does it) is period-place-typical. It is fascinating how he rationalizes with himself in different contexts and how he justifies or does not justify this.

Henry usually gravitates toward social pariahs out of genuine curiosity first, compassion second; I find this point (blended with the above point) especially interesting in the context of his work with Executioner Hermann from KCD1!

Henry's anger is extraordinary, especially in KCD1, and whether or not Henry comes to understand his anger has immense echoes into the "voice" of his guilt.

Henry has a curiously spotty religious knowledge; this always delights me, as he's had a dash of monk's education and grew up in a town without a church. "Crimbo" is a hilarious line, but in other ways, it is also nicely representative of the half-formed grip he has on religious philosophy.

Henry's furious outbursts of "you call yourself a Christian?" are almost exclusively tied to his outbursts in defense of the defenseless, and this is used as a call to moral shame, especially against militant men. I always think first of his genuinely furious attempt to interject when Kuno deliberately uses civilian women as bait in KCD1.

Henry at times seems incredibly confident in his personal relationship with God. I adore the quest A Sinful Soul for how it showcases this. In a direct prayer the player has limited control over, Henry addresses God as informally as one might address a neighbor he has a minor grievance with. He essentially tells God, "Look, I know what you said about this issue, but I also know that YOU know I'm right this time, so I'm gonna do it my way, cause I know you didn't exactly mean it the way you said it there. Thanks in advance - knew you'd agree with me." Henry believes in a God who makes individual exceptions based on what is moral; he also differentiates what is moral from what is godly, and seems certain that God also draws this distinction for Himself.

Fucking thrilling from a character development standpoint! Fucking thrilling in the breath before the Hussite rebellions.

[houseswife]

infinitely funny that wilson turned vegetarian while house was in prison to show that he’s moving on with his life and is capable of making personal changes that don’t revolve around his boybestfriend situationship but then the MINUTE they reunite he’s like “let’s get dinner! I’m craving MEAT 😋😋’. what kind of symbolism is this. I’m going to say a slur

[felikatze]

okay so anybody wanna think about how all daydream employees wear masks to obscure their identities and how everyone on braun's show including braun himself literally doesn't have a face and how kim soleum and braun have a rigid view of the world as Fiction with inherent rules to how it should and must operate and both of them need to always maintain a collected image to anyone watching and how both of them got thrown into weird situations outside their control and how they both used and manipulated each other because they're afraid of sincerity.

braun viewing everything as a tv show 🤝 kim soleum viewing everything as a horror story

anyways so if one wants to be pedantic it could be argued that braun being confined to the bunny plushie counts as reverse-isekai

[mango-fizz]

parents

[genderqueerpond]

We don't talk enough about the fact that Amelia Pond, s5 Amelia Pond, before the timeline is reset, isn't just a normal orphan. Her parents didn't die, didn't abandon her, and didn't send her away. They never existed in the first place.

And if her parents never existed, then Amelia cannot exist. She is a causal impossibility.

"People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces." A photograph. A face carved into an apple. Yes. Sure.

A child.

Now that's too big, surely.

But that's what she is. She is exactly the same as these things. A trace. An echo of something that could never be, never was, never could have been.

And the universe should never allow it. A whole person, that's just too much. She could not have continued to exist indefinitely, in normal circumstances, after her parents never existed.

In normal circumstances.

Because the Doctor didn't just save her from things coming out of the crack in her wall. He saved her from going into it. And he didn't just save her from the threat of going into it simply because of its vicinity.

No, by arriving when he did, he interrupted a process that was probably already in motion. And then by arriving again only moments later on a cosmic relative timestream (too quickly for the process to complete) and yet in the local relative timestream, years later --- years of a potential future caught midway through the process of rewriting -- he solidified that existence. Amy is a creature from another timeline, caught in amber. The Doctor prevented her from never existing, but only after she could already never exist.

And so, no one around Amelia thinks about it. Neither does she. There's some kind of consciousness block, because if you thought about it, really thought about it, for two seconds you'd realize she cannot exist. And the human mind can't deal with that. So, to protect itself, everyone's brain simply slides off it before ever noticing. They just assume that her existence makes sense, and don't question it, and don't notice what they don't question, that is staring them in the face.

But of course, to some extent they do notice. They can't think it, but they notice subconsciously that there's something they can't think. They notice there's something wrong with her, something uncanny. And they don't like it, and they alienate her even more because of it.

"Does it ever bother you Pond that your life existence doesn't make any sense?"

[whumpchester]

i often think about his elementary school teacher being the first demon/person he recognized before his prom date and his friend + they had so many teachers so this one mustve had a big impact on him and also like. sickening to think about them already following around sam as a child to "keep him on the right path"

[wiinksalot]

i always thought it was interesting (and fitting) that sleepacross chose to associate sayeon with the king piece as opposed to the queen piece.

although you have to kill or capture the king in order to win a game of chess, the king is arguably the weakest piece in the game, only being able to move one square in any direction. in contrast, the queen can move any number of squares in any direction: horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

while the other trainees can create bombs, summon blades from their hands, and literally manipulate their own blood, sayeon is given the ability to turn back time for 20 seconds (and 60 seconds if she tries really hard). her gift is not powerful on it’s own, nor is it the most useful in a combat. some might even consider her to be one of, if not the weakest aberrant among the trainees of her year.

instead, sayeon’s power lies in neither her physical capabilities nor her gift (though she can hold her in a physical fight), but her intelligence, her ability to extract information, manipulate variables (whether it be objects or people) to her advantage, and adapt to her given situation.

so while she isn’t overtly dangerous or strong, she still manages to be quite a formidable opponent.

[spineless-lobster]

I want a shirt that says “HOMER WAS A WOMAN”

[hurglewurm]

me: hm i'd like to do some simple daily comics maybe. about events that happen to me. revel in the mundane, make some art out of it. express how i am feeling !

my hands when i try to express how i am feeling: draw a guy melting off his bones and saying "i'll never make a trombone sing"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Wardrobe Woes

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