It's honestly wild to me that ToA went through so much trouble to emphasize the fact that Will did not magically fix all of Nico's problems and was explicitly not Nico's only doctor.
Only for TSATS to have Will fix all of Nico's problems and have Nico be entirely reliant on him the entire book and literally helpless without him and LITERALLY have Nico's problems be magically removed.
actually i love it when the characters are all lying. i love it when they all have secrets and none of them trust each other. i love being given clues that solve puzzles i haven't even been presented with yet. i also love it when i get chills watching a scene without even knowing what it means, and when i do know what it means, i get even more chills. i love theorizing and thinking and solving and coming up with possibilities of where a story might be going. i love it and i will do it for free, for fun, for no real reason.
this is a mystery appreciation post!! if you appreciate mysteries and secrets and stories that slowly unravel before you, please interact!!!
I have a question about Milek and Jaskier! Milek says they fought before Jask went missing-what did they fight about? Did Milek say something he shouldn’t have? 👀😢 is there ANGST?
Also does Geralt know Mileks plush friend is called Roach? Because surely that’s a clue that Milek is his…(I love this universe so much)!!🥹❤️❤️❤️
[MASTERPOST] That was the last conversation they had before Milek stormed out - and when he came back, Jaskier was. gone.
The thing is, Jaskier knows what Milek is interested in (and he is not even wrong about that, Milek has an interest in medicine, and helping people, and I think when they met he was Shanis biggest fan) and I think Jaskier is aware that some of the conflict does have its roots in Milek not wanting to leave him, even if they get really heated and ugly in their arguments. Milek shouldn't feel like he has to care for him, or have to protect him and at times I think Jaskier feels quite ashamed, which leads him to being way too unrelenting at times - especially if he thinks he's doing something to protect Milek.
I used to think Steve and Bucky cared for each other so deeply and tragically that their love – even if only viewed as platonic – could not be denied by anyone. Not after Steve spent THREE whole movies, the entire Cap trilogy, proving how much Bucky meant to him over and over and over. Steve was willing to fight for him and die for him in every single movie. I used to think that even if Marvel gave Steve another love interest, even if he died in Endgame, it wouldn’t change or negate how devoted they were to each other. That they would still be friends “til the end of the line.”
Little did I know what awaited me in Endgame was a fate worse than death.
Steve left and in doing so rewrote everything we thought we knew about him and his relationship with Bucky. About who Steve is as a character entirely. It wasn’t just that he abandoned his supposed best friend, who he had been chasing and obsessing over for years. Who was there for him and looked after him ever since they were children. If Steve had left the Bucky he used to know in the 1940s for some love interest and a life without him, it would still be pretty out of character, but I would eventually get over it. 1940s!Bucky was confident, happy, and had family and friends who cared about him. Endgame!Bucky is not that Bucky.
Endgame!Bucky is broken and lost and just now learning how to be a person again. Endgame!Bucky has no friends and no family. Endgame!Bucky just spent the last 70 years of his life going from one fight to another, being brainwashed and tortured and manipulated and abused. Endgame!Bucky is clinging by a thread to the one and only thing he knows and values in this world: Steve.
This is the Bucky that Steve chose to leave.
If Steve was any kind of friend at all – if Steve was truly a hero and the morally upstanding person he’s portrayed as, a person worthy of wielding Mjolnir – he would know these things about Bucky, his best friend since childhood, and at the very least, would refuse to leave his side until Bucky had some sort of support network and seemed well-adjusted enough to handle it. But he doesn’t. Even in their farewell scene when Bucky (looking like a kicked puppy) says to him “I’m gonna miss you” Steve won’t even echo the sentiment. He just says “it’s gonna be okay,” as if he’s aware of the pain Bucky must be in and essentially tells him, “don’t worry, you’ll get over it.” And I’m not even going to get into the terrible way Steve treated his other best friend, Sam, by keeping him completely in the dark about his plans for absolutely no reason and abandoning him as well.
Marvel didn’t just make Steve act out of character in Endgame in an effort to no-homo him and create a ~surprise twist~. They didn’t just make him a bit selfish and a bad friend. They straight up made him a villain, and I will never ever forgive them for it.
When I tell you this meme has been living rent-free in my head for the last week, and then having to edit it to include that I won because Tumblr showed up has been nothing short of a mind fuck for the old Imposter Syndrome.
Thanks, gang. I know it was a fun silly poll, but it means a lot to me 💖
Also, if you’re on Twitter go give Queer Liberation Library a follow. They’re doing good work trying to make it safer and more accessible for LGBTQ+ folks to access queer media across the US.
Ah, True Soul Nere. I’m glad to hear that many people have killed him, and in many different ways LOL During my battle with him he cast Shield of Screams, a spell unique to him that inflicts psychic damage when you hit him with melee, so I just stood like 10 feet away and shot him from there
currently thinking about unreliable narrator saiki kusuo, and the fact that if the manga was written from anyone else's perspective then everyone would see him as a tsundere stalker, borderline yandere..
sometimes people will say “going dark” and then what they’re actually talking about is just people no longer presenting a carefully constructed version of their emotions and experiences.
like. emotional turmoil is not the same as darkness. laudna in this Fictional Universe that has tangibly different stakes wrt to death and killing than our own, is at best like . morally neutral for what she just did like. man has been secretly trying to kill you, and then just tried to do so again, killing him back is a fair choice. and even if i was someone who is excited by delilah’s inability to escape from the narrative, this shit isn’t about delilah. laudna made a choice. if delilah is back or whatever it’s a choice that laudna made because something in that grants her more control than her existing conditions did. this isn’t some Delilah Takes Over, it’s Laudna Expressly Makes The Choice To Call Forth Something within Herself to remedy the lack of control that’s been thrust upon her. if y’all want to Continue to limit Laudna’s agency (as the cr fandom is so, so want to do when a female character makes a choice that isn’t Good according to some weird system of virtue ethics) go ahead.
likewise with orym. little guy is not “going dark” because he has finally made direct action about his emotional turmoil in dealing with a situation which has similarly left him without control and has also placed him in a position where his stalwart conviction towards protecting and honouring those he loves and has lost alike is constantly met with other people he cares for going well.. what if they had a point/we are killing other peoples loved ones/etc. which like . yeah that might be frustrating and in fact might lead him to go, actually, i can’t afford to try and maintain some abject morality where I carry a locket that will literally only provide guilt. orym is completely committed to his beliefs, the locket and what it represents has never been a limit to what he will do, only a reminder of the consequences of what he might cause in those actions. but they Are at war and orym has a billion things on his plate. he can put down the locket. especially when bor’dor is the explicit manifestation of that locket’s symbolism. the subtext rapidly became the text and orym doesn’t need a reminder. it’s there in the fact that team issylra is walking away with two friends, not three.
these are character who have at every turn denied their own emotions in various forms while still being acutely aware of what they deny, whether that awareness was/is fully realized or not. many of laudna’s early convos with ashton show us that there is some awareness to the lighthearted spooky goth girl and how that persona fades when she thinks too much about what has led her and maintained that reality. likewise the entirety of orym’s story thus far is defined by his grief in a very literal sense, it Has extended from that grief to also the commitment he had to the purpose of figuring out the assassination attempt on keyleth but as we have seen, that purpose has fallen apart. paired with the quasi-reopening of his grief that was getting to see will again only to have to turn away, i don’t think there’s a lack of awareness in orym of how much he hurts. but between his actions and 4SD, that hurt tends to get buried under guilt or Responsibility.
and now, finally, both of them have admitted to that Not in the safety of small introspection or one-on-one conversations but with actions that they cannot shy away from or deny. laudna killed bor’dor and orym encouraged her to. and it Is a complex situation but truly I don’t really think it’s a “going dark” one. because they’re not giving into some overhanging Darkness of Morality™, they’re admitting that they are hurt and have long been hurting.
or, y’know, tldr for those who continue to deny laudna and orym agency or fully villainise them for whatever weird reasons . you could listen to laudna and ashton’s conversation that pretty much lays it out explicitly. laudna claims she’s weak for having chosen to kill bor’dor. ashton denies that and affirms instead that, no, she’s hurt.
nothing hurts more than sandy confronting debbie about her abandonment issues, saying there’s always reasons people leave and that everyone in debbie’s family is sick of her and wants to leave her too, and then debbie, looking more small and helpless than she has in several seasons, looking terrified and frozen in a little kid bed surrounded by toys.
something I find especially entertaining about Edward IV's reign is how Scandalous™ it was lol
he married a woman “whose origins broke all established conventions for English queenship” in a secret ceremony without consulting any of his lords and then made it everyone else's problem. he committed regicide, he committed fratricide; he was accused of bastardry, he was accused of bigamy and a 19-year-long sham marriage, he was accused of using necromancy against his subjects, he was accused of being enchanted by witchcraft by both his wife and his mother-in-law (multiple times). his own mother was said to "rule the king as she pleased" in the early years of his reign. he knew he was hot and actively milked it for money. he was vain as fuck: “he was wont to show himself to those who wished to watch him, and he seized any opportunity that the occasion offered of revealing his fine stature to onlookers”. he knew everything about everyone. "he was more favourable than other princes to foreigners". he was “fond of boon companionship, vanities, debauchery, extravagance and sensual enjoyments”; he was "thought to have indulged in his passions and desires too intemperately”; "it was ever feared he was not chaste”. his subjects publicly gossiped about his sex life, his doctors thought he was insane. NOBODY understood how he was still competent despite all this.