#reading while wandering

[whilereadingandwalking]

First Australian bookstore visit (but not the last). Thanks to Potts Point Bookshop! Your selection is lovely and the shop is so cozy. I walked away with The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper!

[theravenloftwanderers]

Curse of Strahd: The Ravenloft Wanderers (Incorrect quotes 2)

Gather around homies the bedtime story is real juicy.

[po-cky-o-o]

I present a very unnecessary analysis of the scaralumi talk before the big fight

First of all I love the way they both can see through each other. I think often times we overlook how good Lumi is at understanding the feelings of others - mostly because Paimon does most of the talking - but here we can see just how good she is at reading him since (I believe) this is the most she has ever talked in a quest. Scara believes he knows what he wants, but Lumi knows what he needs.

I like how he says this because it is true. We have been proven time and time again how Lumi cares about others, which is why despite her being enemies with Scara she can’t help but empathize with his situation.

But she’s not stupid, there’s where it comes the “almost” part. She is saying that as a way to try and stop his plans, not simply because she is worried about him and he knows that, but he still tries to convince her about him being, even though for a moment it almost sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

Scara then moves on to say how his life has been meaningless up to this point, as if becoming a god is his only purpose and without it he is nothing. So he tried to understand why would Lumi bother going through such “futile errands” of protecting everyone.

But once again Lumi sees through him asking why then would he keep the connection with Haypasia (and consequently with Lumi herself). Even with his answer she is not convinced so he just deflects with his arrogance.

Not to mention how everything he says about Haypasia can also be applied to Lumine, since they both share a connection with him and saw his past. I find it interesting how he was able to sense Lumi and immediately entered her consciousness to observe her

Once again Lumi is able to figure him out and say what she needed to tick him off. He says how bad she is at sewing discord, but he still goes ahead and attacks the fatui calling it an “expression of affection”like he did for Haypasia, putting the two girls on the same wavelength

[aetheternity]

Ok but imagine Scara falling in love with blind bard reader. The first time he meets you it's while he's walking through the forest. He's just aimlessly trudging along when he hears singing and so he stops as he sees you seated on a rock with a lyre tucked between your fingers. He just can't make himself walk as the song you're singing and strumming along to is so.. angelic.

"No need to be shy, come here." You say to him and he quickly realizes you're talking to him. You pat the rock once more when he doesn't come and soon you begin to play again.

"I'm not shy at all." He grumbles parking himself down next to you. You simply smile starting your song from the beginning.

He soon finds himself in this same spot everyday. Everyday he tells you to sing that song that you're always singing and when you tease him he simply says, "Your voice isn't awful, I'll admit that much." After a while he isn't just listening to your music he's bringing you snacks you like, talking with you about your life and even how you lost your sight. He can't quite admit to himself that he wants to grant you your sight again. It's a quick thought that he throws out immediately.

"Hmm Wanderer?" You say when you hear him approach though you don't turn your head.

"You're not singing."

"Dry throat." You admit, coughing a bit for emphasize.

"Hang on I probably have some flower petals in here that can serve for tea." You can't help your smile.

This continued on for some months until the day Wanderer came to find you only to find your lyre placed upon the rock in your stead. As if trained to do so he finds you tied up in an eremite camp. He saves you though he nearly drops you when he sees the cuts along your arms.

"You're blind and you can't fight? How useless."

"Wan-"

"If I hadn't come what would you have done! Huh? Just die there?"

"They said your people had killed many of their people.." You reached out pulling Wanderer's hand into yours. "But I didn't believe them Wanderer.. a soul like yours couldn't do such a thing.."

Wanderer was never happier that he didn't possess a heart otherwise walking away for the last time. The last time he'd ever hear that sweet song of yours might've hurt.

[stardustdiiving]

I would love to hear more about your thoughts regarding Wanderer being trans whenever you find the time to write about it more!

(follow up to this post)

AWESOME. okay. So. This got super long and I keep nitpicking if it clearly says every single thought that goes through my head or not so I’m just going to post it

There’s many interpretations about this headcanon I enjoy, but one particular angle I would find interesting to explore that I’ll pitch here is basically centered on a characterization where Wanderer’s internal relationship with his own transness is very tied with his non-humanness, maybe even more so than his gender.

The appeal of this angle for me is essentially having a character’s queerness tie into genshin’s overarching themes about identity & personhood, especially in regards to the relationship between divinity & humanity—themes that obviously apply to Scaramouche (and also basically every other not human genshin character I can think of that people generally agree are engaging characters)

Scaramouche (which name I use for him is intentional & reflects what era of his life I’m talking about) to me is someone who basically enforces a sense of apathy over his own emotions, especially ones relating to his sense of identity—he seeks godhood in hopes of being able to purge himself clean of experiencing (human) emotions, and therefore the vulnerability & trauma he associates with having them.

Intuitively I can see him feeling a similar conscious apathy about his gender: I see him as viewing gender identity as a “too human” trait and therefore something he’s above, basically—which is really a deeper deflection of his own insecurities with his personhood/identity.

So to Scaramouche, internally, anything about his transition or transness is less about gender and actually far more about his desire to obtain godhood, and this is a mental narrative he really sticks to because it fits in comfortably with his hatred of humans and desire for a purpose/identity for his existence as a non human entity “without a heart”.

If this were a fic I were writing, Scaramouche would undergo a lot of physical/medical transitioning during his time as a Harbringer and he would essentially be narrating & viewing anything gender affirming thing he does as him becoming closer to godhood and further from being human. This would contrast how I’d portray Kabukimono earlier on in his arc—where I imagine Kabukimono took on a lot of social transitions based on observing humans and building a sense for what human things he liked to participate in or mimic.

Kabukimono, in a manner similar to Scaramouche, might sometimes categorize some of his transness as relating to being more of a puppet/nonhuman origin thing than a gender thing, (ie getting gender dysphoria from having long hair but rationalizing it has more to do with not wanting to look like Ei), Kabukimono was more in a position of building towards his transness being a positive thing that affirmed him his sense of personhood & sense of belonging with others. By the time Scaramouche reaches the point of resenting humans, and in turn resenting his own sense of humanity in his arc, he needs to establish all parts of his identity as the farthest thing from human as possible

The irony, however, that I’d highlight in the hypothetical fic of this, is that Scaramouche’s experiences with his transness are narrated as being things no one could ever understand because of how inhuman he is—while in practice you see a lot of his trans experiences are actually pretty common ones many trans people would understand.

So like, Dottore does his canon typical physical experiments/modifications on Scaramouche, and the entire time Scara is undergoing but also gloating the entire time how he’s able to endure this because he’s not as weak as humans are—and this continues when, at Scara’s request, Dottore gives him Evil Mad Scientist Top Surgery, and he’s having this snide internal monologue about how godlike he is because of all the inhuman ways he can physically modify and mold his body to be to his liking, and then suddenly he looks in a mirror and sees himself with a flat chest for the first time and just has… like, a moment of very genuine happiness with feeling more like himself for the first time, and processing all the ways he can exist more comfortably in his body without having to work around dysphoria constantly. He imagines himself existing among humans in these brief thoughts without even realizing it, and the idea is this is written in a way that makes him sound very human—and how he seems happier when he lets himself be.

Meanwhile Dottore in the background is just, very nonchalant about this and makes some bored comment about they ought to not delay more important procedures any further if he wants to ascend to godhood anytime soon. Scaramouche kind of snaps out of it & back into his usual sort of headspace/mindset and kind of sneers at him how this was a far more significant step in ascending to godhood than Dottore could ever understand.

And after he says this he mentally pauses, because he really hadn’t been thinking of it like that before—and then wonders if it was true, because it wasn’t an experiment that made him feel more powerful like the other ones had. What he feels now is something other than more powerful—but there’s not really any other explanation for this reaction. More godly, maybe. It makes him feel not more powerful, but closer to what he wants—which is a god.

So from there my idea is Scaramouche kind of…attributes the joy associated with his top surgery, and other similar major landmarks in his transition, with his pursuit of godhood. It spurs him on to want to be a god even more, because it's solidified in his mind as the one thing he really needs to be himself/truly happy

And then he does finally reach godhood—and is plugged into the Everlasting Lord of Arcane Wisdom’s body, he’s just finds himself feeling disappointed.

He has this minor mental crisis about it where he’s not unsatisfied—he’s more exhilarated than he has ever felt in his entire life, because he feels unspeakably powerful in the way he should be. It /is/ everything he wanted, and he savors the sheer triumph and power of the movement, but it’s just not the same. It’s not enough to make him regret what it took to get here but he’s really frustrated, because he doesn’t feel happy. Which is not an emotion Scaramouche really cares about, but even one thing he wants being somewhat out of his reach when he had hoped to suppress all the unpleasantness of having emotions is deeply unpleasant for him.

I think the next time Scaramouche really feels something close to what he’d been missing is post Inversion of Genesis, after he becomes the Wanderer.

In this narrative I think it would be an extra kick in the face that Dottore had helped him with part of his transition while Scaramouche watches Dottore kill Niwa, where Dottore basically affirms Scara’s dehumanization while Niwa insists on affirming his humanity with his dying breath. There’s the obvious violation violation of realizing someone basically sabotaged your support systems to isolate/alienate you from the world, then manipulated and groomed you into joining the fatui so they could experiment on you for their own satisfaction and intrigue, but he also finds himself grappling with recontextualizing alot of his interactions with Dottore, and coming to this conclusion that Dottore was only ever vaguely interested in Scaramouche’s potential for godhood, and doesn’t care about…this other part of why that was important to Scaramouche as a person. (Which is his transness, basically)

It’s not that he ever believed Dottore cared about him or wasn’t pursuing his own interests, but I think recontextualizing how dehumanizing Dottore’s treatment + view of him is, forces him to really pick apart his transness vs desire for godhood, and realize there’s sort of a distinction between the two he hadn’t been making.

Post IoG I think this line of thinking, along with learning Niwa hadn’t betrayed him making him hate humans much less, lets Wanderer start developing a much healthier relationship with his transness, and also just his entire identity in general. He can reconcile with his own humanity, which lets him reflect on himself more, and I think eventually he can come to an answer on why becoming god wasn’t what he needed to be happy with himself + his gender.

So essentially I’d write present day Wanderer as being more comfortable with his gender than Scaramouche would be. If I were to apply our contemporary English labels/language to his gender I think he’d more or less jsut view himself as a trans guy, but I guess by technicality has a sort of “non binary” gender bc he just doesn’t view himself in terms of human binaries due to being a puppet?? That’s just my own characterization tho. All in all I bend characterizations of characters’ queerness in line with what whatever sort of transformative work I feel like doing so this isn’t even the only way I’d write trans Wanderer. Just usually the one I go off the most when portraying him as a character

[moeblob]

As an artist I literally have the ability to just. Do things. That only I wanna see. And that's giving Partitio cat ears I guess??

Happy Caturday!

[loveableabomination]

Being ace but also being people-pleasing enough that I think I'm not ace cuz I like to make my partner happy...is a mind-fuck.

[firstroseofspring]

b’elanna vs her mother at similar ages, plus some sketches!

[whilereadingandwalking]

Swam in a creek in the middle of a rainforest ✔️

Ate ice cream in flavors I’d never encountered before ✔️

Saw scary spiders but more importantly gorgeous butterflies and the happiest frog ✔️

Thanks, Daintree Rainforest!!

[boommixx]

modern kzsc

[chaotic-aro-incarnate]

I'm curious y'all,

In the case of Fem! WenZhou, do you feel that female!Wen Kexing would refer to herself as,

a) Wife. Because WKX calling himself wife is about his personality and teasing Zishu more than anything else, something that would not change if their genders were swapped

b) Husband. Because WKX calling himself wife is particularly a gender fuckery thing, with him using a female term for himself despite fulfilling several other traditionally masculine things (like being the leader of the ghosts and well, topping), so were his gender swapped, so would the way he fucks around with gender.

[pathetic-gamer]

"I am a phantom of what could be."

[sleeplessdreamer14]

I’m just gonna say it; Moira would make a much better Dr. Frankenstein than Junkrat. If you’ve read Mary Shelley’s book, you know what I mean.

[hannie-dul-set]

if home for the bitchless soobin and star studded baggage soobin met what do u think would happen.

[rodjanikov]

Baudelaire would be soooo disappointed in me, I've traversed the horrors of human existence without drinking a sip of alcohol, smoking a single cigarette, snorting a single gram of opium honestly what kind of Decadent am I

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...