#pardal rambles

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og: will mcphail

[subjet16]

hard at work organizing this beast of a post (essay?)

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so i think we can agree to some degree that, the carrot is a lie. right?

(Intermezzo spoilers ahead!)

we know Kayne is perfectly capable of keeping his deals, but we also know that he's far more capable (and willing) to Not keeping them. and even of proposing deals that he has no intention of going through with.

Arthur getting Faroe back isn't a real deal. just because he stopped one Faroe among countless from death, doesn't mean that deal won't have consequences. he did say "even try continue being friends", which implies A Lot.

first of, what happened to that universe's Arthur? surely nothing good or stable. who's to say Kayne won't put John inside that Arthur as "a body" for him? and also, Kayne has made it very clear he's got access to all the strings here, he can very easily keep toying with them Just Because, making their lives actual hell.

John and Arthur don't have their divorces over nothing, Shit Happens and it causes them to react poorly due to any number of issues they have in their own noggins, but we've seen that a good number of them have been thanks to Kayne's meddling in some way or another. One could even say that all of S3 happened because of him.

"no matter what I throw at you, you just seem to come out better for it", wasn't it?

but also, we can just as fairly say that the stick is also a lie. sure, Kayne's anger is nothing to scoff at, he's a god given greater power than any god in this universe had any right to after all. BUT, he still needs Arthur. he has very little to gain from impossibly torturing someone who he knows has something Special (plot armor) that keeps him from going under entirely, might even become greater than he can handle because of said torturing.

Arthur is at the end of the day, just a human, but he's also an anomaly that he can't grasp, and Kayne isn't an idiot.

it's all smoke and mirrors, lures and trickery. his hard power is very real, Kayne is an entity of his own caliber, but his soft power, it's all on keeping people on their toes around him and go along with his schemes to keep him appeased. that's what the whole bit with keeping Arthur playing because "he didn't say stop" is, flexing that he can keep Arthur cowed enough to keep doing what he says. and that was also why he proposed that deal for John too, to keep him on thin ice and scrambling over pacifying Arthur rather than let them both scheme over how to one-up him when he isn't looking.

carrot or stick, you dont actually need either. sometimes, the illusions of a gift or a punishment are enough motivators, even if they are lies. Kayne never ends a deal freely, there's always Something More, a twist of the knife that he sprinkles in at the end. he has no intention giving Arthur and John a happily-ever-after, and i also think he has no intention of dooming them to turbo Hell or whatever.

if you ask me, the fact that we don't know what exactly he does plan however, is far more disconcerting and scary.

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okay but. The fact that Yellow, despite it all, was still curious. he still wanted to Understand. "why you, John?", he sounded so confused and baffled (jealous??) by the situation, he still couldn't understand their friendship, their bond and what made it special, what made it worth turning themselves "weak" just to be with each other.

and on relisten of the s3 Yellow episodes, you can still see the questions he made that weren't for manipulation but, genuine curiosity and confusion. his interest in philosophy and poetry and art, what they meant, their purpose for humans. his potential had been there all along, but Arthur was too burdened with his own trauma and preconceptions to see it for what they were.

but more than that, the fact that even with John at the start, he didn't see it. and once John was back, he realised that he held so many preconceptions about him as well. that at that point, he understood John as much as he did Yellow.

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I love how many layers of depth Intermezzo has given us for any relistens of the podcast, but most notably, the recontext of Kayne's response back in The King

he asks Arthur, why are you so special? and Arthur answers as best as he can, and Kayne just, says no. of course we gifured, oh its cus he's The Main Character, that's why. or maybe smth else. and like yes but also, no.

after Intermezzo, we get a taste of the sheer scope of the multiverse at play, and that Arthur's reply is basically applicable to every other Arthur in existence, including himself. in that angle, he's not special to Kayne, vus while Arthur is right about all that, its Not why he's Special. why him from all other Arthurs, gets to get back up and carry on better than all the others.

Arthur is Humanity but, so is all of Arthurs. So why Him? we dont know, Arthur doesn't know and, of course, Kayne doesn't either.

but Kayne has shown some vague to full awareness of the Audience as a concept for a while now. which makes me wonder if, when he asked Arthur, he wanted Us to figure it out. he says, "and if I dont know it, then that leaves one other person", but did he mean Arthur or, Us?

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am I gonna have to make a "Hey, pls remember that the Templars are Canonically Inherently Fascistic and cannot be redeemed as a group" article as well?

cus I feel like some of the fandom forgot about this part of the lore and um, it's starting to seriously concern me.

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i'm about to uno reverse all over a bitch

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hello kiddos! tis my birthday! :D

ive been struggling mentally an awful time this year, which has made me slow down on commissions and thus my finances are slowly unravling before my eyes as i continue to struggle with job hunting. im not in any danger of anything but hey, if anyone want to send some bucks my way so i can treat myself i'd appreciate the gesture <33

as little as 3USD and i can share a beer with my irls at least TvT

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ACverse thoughts of the day: historians if the Assassin-Templar War was common knowledge

literally the most boring topic of study, you show up with a thesis around them, and your teachers roll their eyes so hard they can see their own brains;

"Please, this is a serious institution, do reconsider your topic of study to something more... engaging."

nobody takes them seriously, because primary sources are so bountiful, it's almost embarrassing;

the most intriguing study about the war is the overall lack of splinter factions and infighting;

there are furious debates and speculation on what surely were related factions being assimilated into larger non-related factions, and how the Assassin-Templar dichotomy spread;

many historians look into the records left by both orders to fill in the gaps in their own research;

Abstergo has research fund grants that many try to apply for, and it helps them keep their fingers in any papers being published to tuck away any compromising information;

Abstego being related to the Templars and their very fucked up deeds is fairly well-known, but nobody can do anything about it. think Shell and ExxonMobil bullshit;

some whistleblowers crop up now and again but after the initial outage, not much comes of it. maybe a scapegoat or two get arrested but that's that;

there are conspiracy theorists who think the Assassin-Templar conflict is a hoax, everybody hates them;

historians adore the assassins because 1. they are terrible gossips and 2. they FUCK, and they write a lot, so it's free insider knowledge

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this just in, trying to binge Malevolent was a Bad Call

i will now be staring blankly at a wall for the next 3-5 business days

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bless Harlan for making the transcripts so accessible, cus everytime I see a fake transcript screenshot meme, I lose it WITHOUT FAIL

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anyway, Sphinx au tidbits:

'general fantasy' au but Mediterranean, Desmond is part of a mercenary guild that travel looking for work

his group gets hired to get rid of a sphinx that took over a local temple, but it backfires when Desmond faces it and gets roped into a game of riddles

Desmond and the Sphinx make a deal that he'll keep getting riddles everyday, and for each he solves, the sphinx will spend a day without killing someone

Desmond travels with Becca, Lucy and Shaun. they are less than thrilled by Desmond's temporary solution, but go along for a while since at least people aren't getting eaten and stuff

the more riddles Desmond answers right, the more the Sphinx is amenable to lower stakes, so long as they can keep playing; eventually riddles get sidelined, for the sake of just spending time together

he's the one who nicknames the Sphinx "Clay", since he doesn't have a given name

Desmond at one time tries to bring Clay a meal, to which he gets refused cus "a meal must be earned by my own merit", as in he must beat it in a challenge, be it a riddle or a hunt

inspired by the Dragon's Dogma 2 riddles, at first the riddles are clever answers, but eventually they take a more 'fetch quest' tone, including bringing people and items to the Sphinx as answers

that's how the rest of the group ends up meeting Clay

it goes…. not too well, Lucy and Shaun being very put off by the Sphinx, Rebecca being mildly amused but not exactly at ease

the fact that Desmond managed to sorta befriend the Sphinx is often joked about, if only to cope with the tension

he also starts to realize why Clay took up the temple, given that the entities involved there are far from benevolent (yes it's the Isu), and starving them of attention might make the curses they placed on the land eventually weaken, but first they will get worse

the local village start pressuring the group to fulfill the contract to kill the Sphinx, which Desmond really doesn't want to do for many reasons by then

haven't yet picked a resolution tho lmao

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thinking about the tragedy of Camille tonight........

we first hear of her in the Rosa Estella Opera House garden, a somber statue dedicated to her by Geppetto. next, we hear of her through the Saintess of Mercy statue key.

she was likely a close colleague to Geppetto in the Workshop Union, maybe even an equal. and the way Geppetto dedicates a statue to her in the beating heart of Krat makes me think Camille had a love for artistry, and maybe they were more than just colleagues.

then the next time we hear of Camille, it's on a whole different context. this time, she's a puppet. a maid puppet, back when they were in early designs.

"Her appearance and identity" is an odd phrasing, for an engineer to a maid, so I'm assuming they mean her given name. now, this is early in the creation of puppets, and some lore leads me to believe using Ergo to power them came later in their design. Camille was probably one of the first Ergo-powered puppets.

i got very little to go off on, but from what we've seen in game with Polendina, Pulcinella and P, is that puppets usually gain an ego in response to an emotional external event. their heart literally reaches out and awakens from dormancy. for Camille, i think the baby she saved was Carlo himself, her own son, who's the one she calls for once the alchemists steal her away.

it would make sense for Geppetto to have a history of turning people into puppets prior to Carlo, and for him to have some weird ass priorities. or maybe he thought work on a maid puppet meant she could spend time around Carlo without rising suspicion?

regardless, i also think Geppetto's idea of bringing a puppet to life came from Camille herself. when we investigate the Hotel Krat library, Gemini talks about the story of the mischievous puppet, and that Krat knows of it thanks to one person who loved it more than anyone else.

the fandom pictures that person is Carlo but I doubt it. he's just some guy who spent a lot of time in the Malum District and was as good as any other orphan turned stalker in Krat, he had no influence to stir an entire city about a single story he liked.

but Camille could.

she was an influential figure, enough to be commissioned by alchemists and other workshop workers, close to a master inventor that helped to revolutionize the entire city. and if you go to the Saintess of Mercy statue, it reads:

i don't know about you but "who dreams of a new life" screams of the Pinocchio tale, a wooden puppet seeking to become real. i dare even say that Geppetto started working on puppets solely to bring Camille back, or at least honor her in some way.

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I'm about to act unwise (compile every bit of LoP lore into a cohesive doc)

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can somebody pls prove me wrong, cus every single LoP lore video I've watched so far has gotten something wrong and extrapolated so far because of those wrong things, and it's making me climb up the walls about it

if there's none, I might just go insane and make my own video about it lololol

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looking at lions vs human size comparisons be like.... holy shit y r u so big my dudes.....