#now I’m just going to proofread any future posts with that optic & figure out some efficient tag to say

[liesmyth]

Anyway fwiw the asks in my inbox got me to Think About It (to myself) and articulate (in private) why I feel very differently about Cytherea than I do about Dulcinea, or other characters who are suffering from illnesses in ways that are... more mundane. I like Cytherea a lot as a character but I like her in the same way I like Alecto; they’re both very inhuman to me. IDK how else to put it besides: Dulcinea is a sick person. Cytherea is a walking body horror trope. There are a lot of layers to her character and her entire arc is basically a murder suicide mission with a flirty detour, and I think there’s a lot more to her actions and her choices than needs to be unearthed - it’s been years since I first read GtN but I’m still spinning her motivations in my mind trying to make sense of her etc.

She’s a person with layers but she’s also a literal walking biological bomb, and I think that’s very much a deliberate narrative choice on TM’s part, to take something that is common (illness) and bring it to its most grotesque extremes (illness frozen in time that can be manipulated by your enemies against you, etc with a touch of the Terminator thrown in). To me, it’s familiar in the way many chilling horror tropes have relatively mundane roots, but I really can’t see it as a normal or relatable illness in the same way I can’t see stuff like necromancers’ reproductive issues o their extreme fragility as 1:1 to real life counterparts. (And I think that if you that’s a very valid interpretation, but frankly it’s not fair to expect everyone should do so)