i just feel like someone should take one for the team and write the fanfic where miss homotron goes to dragonstone on foot, meets her situationship’s new lover, and immediately goes like blind with jealousy and fury (rhaenyra, as always when alicent’s near, looks and behaves like a very confused kicked puppy)
i just need homotron and saphotron to meet, so the real war can begin
I do think that referring to Essek as irredeemable for regretting his actions only because he was caught and risked losing his friends is both kind of reductive to him as a character and a misunderstanding of the concept of redemption arcs in media.
A person generally isn't changed because you sit them down and hand them a bunch of political theory to read. They change because their circumstances and relationships do. It's like that guy who was deradicalized because he got a bunch of shrimp and started to care for them. It’s our relationships that change us, because they give us not a logical but an emotional reason to do so.
Caleb explicitly says "these people will change you" (or something along that line; I don’t remember the exact quote). Essek, before the m9, didn’t genuinely care about anyone. The people who would die if a war started because of his actions were irrelevant and abstract to him. Caleb, similarly, also started c2 not really caring about others. He had no interest in taking on Ikithon or the Assembly to save others from going through what he did, too preoccupied with his own trauma and his own goals to care. In that sense, he started the campaign in a similar place as Essek post ep. 97: regretful, but too busy wallowing in his own self-loathing to productively do anything to prevent future harm due to his previous actions.
Being with the m9, being reminded of the importance of other people and realizing that they’re capable of caring for them, is what changes Caleb and Essek both. Of course Essek starts out more concerned with losing the nein than with strangers killed in a war. They’re his starting step, the opening through which he realizes that the people hurt by his actions are real, that he cares, that he has the ability to, if not undo his harm, help stop furthering of it.
people act like being intentionally whimsical is inherently more annoying than being intentionally serious but why. suppose my temper is just naturally whimsical.
living for alhaitham's inherent curiosity about kaveh being the catalyst for an odd textual mystery...??
he already read the Very Bad novel in the house of daena before kaveh got hold of it? but then seeing it in their study and knowing kaveh must have checked it out, he... opened it anyway despite already knowing the contents?? 1) because he knew kaveh wouldn't mind, and 2) because he was curious what kaveh thought about it?? considering that he knows kaveh makes annotations in books??
he saw kaveh circle the killer's name in permanent ink, effectively spoiling the novel, no matter how terrible, and joined in by circling a name to create a red herring, but also because he thought circling names was funny <3
he put the book in the same place in the study and didn't say anything to kaveh when kaveh went to return it, and kaveh went about believing alhaitham knew nothing about it, until the quest comes full circle and kaveh returns to alhaitham to tell him the news, only to find out that he and alhaitham were jointly the instigators for the conspiracy.
the quest is THEIR fault!! but.. the conspiracy wouldn't have happened if alhaitham hadn't made the second circle,, so… if he hadn't been curious about something that occupied kaveh's time..., that’s so !!??