#th: grief

[tyrannuspitch]

also thinking about the line "he will make you long for something sweet as pain".

like, on the surface, this is a horrible threat, but also just kind of... standard intimidation stuff. oh OUR torture is actually SO bad that it makes anything else look desirable in comparison and can't be described in the same vocabulary, blah blah blah.

but beyond that... what's literally being said here. is he will make you self-destructive. he will reduce you to a state where self-destruction seems like a relief, and denying it seems like cruelty.

and like... this promise was kept. thanos hunted loki down, and thanos did something worse than directly torturing loki (he made him watch his brother be tortured), and loki went willingly to a brutal death. because between that and the alternative - letting thor suffer and die in his place, in a death that loki would blame himself for, that loki felt he deserved, + which would leave loki entirely alone in the world - loki wouldn't just have accepted death. he would have begged for it. :(

[mayhemspreadingguy]

Someone was sobbing. After a moment, Anakin realized Oh. That's me. And then his knees were buckling and he was heading for the ground. Obi-Wan caught him. "It's all right. I've got you." -K. Miller

[obsob]

beloved!!!

[casualavocados]

Gemini and Fourth are nothing like Atom and Kongthap. When they're together, it's chaotic. They're always messing around with each other. If I had a friend who's been working with me for a long time, I believe the vibes would be similar.

MY LOVE MIX-UP! THAILAND (2024) BTS & Special Ep

[mewklu]

‘not creepy, sweet!’ they said :3

[skunkes]

x

[littencloud9]

//

[luminarai]

Went into the eurovision tag and noped out again SO quickly, people are being so rancid oh my god.

Am I disappointed that käärijä didn’t win? Absolutely! He had the most votes from the public! Is the jury votes always tending towards formulaic and non-offensive pop songs annoying? Obviously! Do I think that the whole thing was a conspiracy or that my disappointment gives me the right to say truly heinous things about loreen? Absolutely not, what the fuck.

[tyrannuspitch]

idk i just really like the version of odin in the alt death scene. i think it's so much better at the "deconstruction" TR was meant to be going for.

so many of odin's status markers are transformed into marks of poverty: long hair and beard unkempt, war-wounds hidden under a dirty bandage instead of a gold eyepatch, clothes layered against the cold instead of armour, a discarded bottle in his hand instead of a drinking horn...

i think it's pretty likely this is representative, in some way, of where asgard started. asgardians are space vikings - pirates, thieves, scavengers. they may have ended up a major imperial power, but it's not hard to imagine that their theft might have started with desperation. asgard itself is stated to be an artificial planet - suggesting that wherever the asgardians originally came from wasn't worth staying.

so at the end of TR, when asgard is reduced to a ragged band of refugees with nothing but a stolen spaceship, it's not a totally new state for them. it's more like they've been reset, maybe even only a few generations back, and given a second chance. i just wish they'd used that to get rid of that damn monarchy.

back to the point - this odin is also an interesting parallel to where thor ends up in EG. it's not entirely clear what's going on with odin's mental state - old age, the effects of loki's magic, manic despair at approaching doom? - but drunkenness is almost certainly on the list. i wonder what odin's relationship to alcohol before that point was... i imagine asgardian drinking culture is umm. Not Great. i don't think either odin or thor, pre-ragnarok, could get away with being (or seem like they are) constantly drunk like EG!thor is, but problem drinking starts a long time before it reaches that stage... tbh i wonder to what extent EG!thor is imitating odin, even as he tells himself he's utterly failed to match up to odin :(

[emotionally-charged-arson]

Character Spotlight: The Chemist (Ayreon's The Source)

Ask and ye shall receive.

In the grand scheme of countless intertwining Ayreon headcanons infesting my brain, I like to have a nice, compact theme to refer back to for each album. Arjen is borderline intentional about not putting themes in his work, but they creep in anyway and you can dig them up and work off of them with a little elbow grease.

For me, The Source is about loss of purpose, which is sort of an overarching theme of the Forever saga anyway, but it shows up on a more intimate level in this album. Especially when you pull traits for characters out of thin air when you're 14 and eventually find a red thread through the lot of them you didn't actually plan for.

I did a really general overview of most of my versions of the Source cast and their whole deal while they're on Alpha. Just a whole mess of science, religion and state all crammed into one, eventually leading to the 'Frame taking over. In some way or another, these people all know each other and support a cause of some sort. When they're forced to leave their home planet, they have to grapple with the fact that their lives there were altogether pointless and figure out how to embrace the sense of rebirth that's a part of the Forever package.

Almost all of their arcs follow the same overall timeline: they had some *thing* they had worked towards for the better part of their lives, it's all ripped away in an instant with Alpha's destruction, and during their time on Starblade, they work their way back up to a new sense of collective self-worth.

There are, however, a few notable outliers. The Captain, The Chemist and TH-1 still have that theme thing going for them at the end, but how they get there is a little different.

So. Chemist. Like I said, pretty much everyone in the cast has an idea of who everyone else is. Not this guy.

Thomas Giles Rogers is an organic chemist with zero personal affiliation with any other character pre-album story. He graduated from the same enormous central university most of them did, but had no interest in tying his research, much less his entire career, to the fate of the planet itself. Not that he was ever offered or cares about politics at all, but still.

His motivations lie on more personal grounds. Giles is prone to stress, nervous breakdowns in academic settings, all that fun stuff. He always has been. His doctoral dissertation and the ten years of his career following it were dedicated to the synthesization of safe alternatives to sensory deprivation drugs. Either supplemental to the process or replacing it entirely. His "big" project for most of that time was an injection meant to temporarily alter the human respiratory system, allowing someone to breathe underwater for therapeutic processes.

The endeavor was a total failure, for all the resources put into it. Giles is forced to abandon the project after years of constantly being denied grants to pursue its production. People not prioritizing what he wants to use it for, his ineffective presentation, him refusing to let people hire him for research to weaponize it, whatever. All that work was for nothing and it takes genuine a toll on him.

It's really just a career slump, but his self-worth is so firmly attached to his perceived academic success that he can't cope. Four years before TDTTWBD, he drops all his research, picks up some entry-level lab tech job and just goes through the motions. No grandiose motivation to save the world like the rest of these yahoos, just surviving.

But anyhow. Russell does his thing, the 'Frame takes over, and one way or another everyone except Giles is crowded in Nils' basement accepting their fate and hopelessly looking for livable planets with no power or digital resources.

Gross oversimplification of Chronicle I, by the way. Russell drags a broken android into the place, Floor shoots Simone's ear off, etc.

The only remotely plausible option is Y, pretty grim given that the surface is uninhabitable and colonization could only occur if everyone somehow grew gills. As Hansi laments when a switch goes off in his brain and he remembers some science expo he went to a few years back, where some guy was presenting prototypes for...pretty much exactly that.

By pure coincidence, Giles is one of Simone's clients, signed onto her private practice she started after quitting her job as the previous president's counselor. She knows where he lives and works, and she and Tommy manage to track him down amidst the literal apocalypse outside (on account of Tommy having no scientific background and pretty much no other use to the group than scavenging for essentials on the surface in this part. Bonus points that he knows how to use a gun and supposedly doesn't care about his own death).

Giles, like a lot of people has basically been hunkered down in his apartment since the 'Frame took power (about three weeks) and is all paranoid and starving when they find him but they find him, take him back and convince him to pick his work back up all the same.

So he's part of the group now, and alternative to everyone else on Starblade who has no point to their lives now, Giles has FAR too much of a point. Using years old notes and limited resources, he has to create the greatest scientific advancement in the history of mankind in the maybe....six months that people onboard are able to live outside of suspended animation. The total extinction of the human race to follow if he fails.

This...does not mix well with

1. his whole self-induced, major-accomplishment based pressure thing since it's a wildly amplified version of it

2. The fact that he killed a woman during Run! Apocalypse! Run! (defending another character but still) and his control to give life and take it away over so many people, existing and prospective, constantly rotating in his brain

3. The more upbeat, hopeful characters unwittingly holding their expectations for their brave new world over him and what Liquid Eternity needs to be to satisfy them

4. Pretty much everyone else involved in the political side of things deliberately ceased contact with friends or family outside the party's inner circle, to prevent distractions or the possibility of blackmail, while they were still on Alpha. That devaluing of personal relationships is what they're conditioned to and this is more the focal point of Tommy, Floor and Tobias' sort of...joint character development situation, but it has an effect on Giles. This much more openly sensitive, emotional guy is surrounded by these jaded assholes who have no sense of the pressure he's feeling in more ways than one. This effect also applies to James (Historian) in a way, and the two actually kind of have a rapport going about it at the end of Chronicle II (syncing up with their little Condemned To Live duet), but the only person who seems to fully get what's happening to Giles is Simone, someone who deliberately separated herself from said jaded political asshole clique and who has prior knowledge of his experiences on account of literally being his therapist.

All in all just. Not having a good time, insisting that he has to do this alone and eventually external assistance from one or more characters being the only thing that solves it.

The other part of this compact theme thing is that our purpose, our humanity, is defined by our relationships and reliance on other people. We need something to strive for in order to feel like a person, and ultimately that 'something' comes down to either the preservation of the self, the other, or of the collective.

Once you resolve that, there is one other thing that defines the human experience and that is death.

Death and a point, a person, to avoid it in the name of. And Liquid Eternity took both of those things away. From there arises stagnation and a lack of purpose with no means of escape, the hallmark of the Forever Race.

-

-

-

(gosh, I wonder if that ties into members of the party forcing away loved ones in the name of their progress even though it was pointless in the end. Or TH-1's self-preservation being their downfall after all the talk of cooperation and acceptance of emotional openness. Who's to say.)

[obsob]

lady amber my beloved

[trainingdummyrabbit]

steps up to the mic again. bloody mary - ladygaga as a pale ending angela song.

[f-rantall]

TW: d3@th

I hate thinking about people who aren’t here anymore. They’re gone. No amount of dreaming can bring them back. I’m sorry.

[isbergillustration]

I didn't intend to make a piece about the homophobic terror attack in Oslo last night, but I have been listening to and watching all the press conferences and I am pretty sure that that is what this is about.

[marinehero]

clipping the LA so i can icon/gif later but they really did make garp that much more,,,,,

[welcome-home-official]

ngl one of the biggest things I hate about character design is adding makeup/eyelashes to female characters when it does not make sense for them, ESPECIALLY when its every female character

and I hate it even more when a character who NORMALLY doesn't wear makeup or has prominent eyelashes is either given those or told to 'add some ____"

JUST posted some art on Uquiz and one of the characters canonically doesn't wear makeup, I gave her her typical bottom lashes she's always drawn with and some dolt was all 'add some eyelashes"