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After reading @99corentine 49th chapter, I thought about a lot of references about Chry's past. There will be spoilers about KFP2, Blue Eye Samurai and the fic GOL HAH DOV, but mind you : if a piece of media isn't enjoyable because you got spoiled, then maybe it isn't well made (unless it's an Agatha Christie but the whole point of her novels was the mystery) so bear with me.

In chapter 49, Chry wants to know about his past after a strange and stressful encounter with Elenwen. He tries to return to the place where he first awoke, one year before the events of this chapter, but without any success. He upset for several things, for his loss of memory of course but also the fact that he might have a family and even a spouse (with his ring at the marriage finger) that didn't go after him.

Firstly, there's the feeling of emptiness and shame about his worthlessness, how he compares himself to Miraak, someone who was important even as a pawn of Hermaeus Mora, when he was just good enough to be left behind by his supposed relatives and be used as a thrall by a cruel man in a foreign country. Chry feels like that all the glory he had in one year, even after killing Alduin, was nothing, like a fraud, that he's just worthless (these thoughts happens just when he has the post prophecy blues, like Teldryn said, so yeah Chry might feel depressed). That his past is was he is at core. Which isn't true but he believes it and that's something a lot of us can relate to (golden child syndrome, school failure, broken dreams, childhood trauma, etc.).

Fortunately, Miraak reminds him that Chry was the one who believed he could be a better version of himself, going to tyrant to leader (even though he still is at the head of a cult lmao), that his actions helped and saved so many people and that he's a great hypocrite for telling others they can be better when he tell himself the contrary.

It reminds us ofc of Paarthunax's iconic wise words "What is better ? To be born good or to overcome your evil nature though great efforts?" But I feel it echoes better to Miraak's case because he was in fact evil and became a bit more grayer thought the story, whereas Chry has forgotten his past and was just lost and miserable. In this case I was reminded of this sentence in Kung Fu Panda 2 : when Po discovers the calcined remains of his childhood village (that he forgot about because of PTSD), he's feeling sad and ashamed that his birth was in bloodshed and suffering, but the soothsayer who saved him says to him "Your story may have not such a happy beginning, but it doesn't make you who you are. It is the rest of your story. Who you choose to be." And that's pretty much Chry's case : he awoke in a place of suffering and when he left, he wanted to have a life of his own and to be greater than what he was before, to be in control. Man the parallels between him and Miraak are even greater ksjsjsks

Then let's return to the family problem. Even better (or worse idk), the spouse problem. If Chry had any family left in the Summerset Isles, they didn't care to go after him when he was gone missing.

There are several theories about why Chry wasn't found, if he ever had relatives : the first thing is that he's of mixed heritage because he has a greater physical strength than all the other altmer altogether and most importantly striking blue eyes ; altmer people don't have blue eyes* and it's a great deal for almost every Alinor citizens to be of pure lineage, so imagine having in your family a very unusual child with characteristics a little bit too close to Nords'. You just want to get rid of it to avoid shame on your family.

(*nota bene : in Skyrim game, altmer people only can have amber, golden or emerald eyes, whereas in ESO you can have them have blue eyes, but we're following Skyrim's logic here)

So if we follow this theory, Chry's supposed family wanted to get rid of this problematic scion, either by banishment... or marriage. A marriage that didn't go well at some point. And that's when I got reminded of Blue Eye Samurai (incredible series on Netflix, go watch it). Some context : in the Edo period (17th century in Japan), we follow the revenge journey of Mizu, a lonely samurai with mixed heritage (a Japanese mother and an unknown white father) with striking blue eyes. These eyes disgraced them because it was considered demonic at this time in Japan (like in ancient Greece, blue eyes were either vulgar or bad omens).

At some point in their story, Mizu finds their mother who they thought died years ago in a fire. She wants them to marry an old samurai who, like them, is a castaway, so they can in some way redeem themselves for their shameful life and at least be a good bride. They get married and although Mizu is a bit reluctant at first (because of how are viewed their eyes), them and the samurai fall in love with each other and have lovely years together as an odd couple. But it falls apart when Mizu wants to show their incredible battle skills to their husband, who gets scared and angry, calling them a monster, because deep down he still had this bias that blue eyes are demonic and bringer of destruction (an onryo). That he only loved Mizu because they were behaving despite their mixed heritage.

He betrays them, bringing mercenaries to kill them and Mizu, deeply hurt and enraged, kills everyone and run away to pursue their revenge of getting rid of the four white men who lives secretly in Japan. But I digress

Maybe something similar happened to Chry, that when he discovered his thu'um, he got shamed by his family/spouse and he went (or ran away) to Skyrim to search for answers or got abandoned here. Maybe we'll know and maybe we won't because there's still almost two chapters left for the fic to be finished and I am not well.

Anyway I had fun doing these parallels! Theories and psychanalyses my beloved.

Mizu my beloved

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Found this drawing I did nearly a year ago before Gol Hah Dov was finished. It just keeps showing up random places in my life so I thought I may as well post it.

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chapter 7 of the gallows and god’s whisper is up

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new miraak, im giving him apocrypha-itis aka fishman upon thee

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Dragonborn telling miraak to go to physical therapy after he got stabbed in the chest and there's a gaping hole there now

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I feel like Miraak would know some version of sign language and uses it regularly

Especially when he mad and can’t get words out and he does it very aggressively, like he Naruto style fast but with a bunch of creative insults in sign

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after so long in apocrypha, i think my miraak really likes all kinds of sensory experiences. flavoursome foods whether sweet or spicy or sour, beautiful sights out in nature, the sound of music, the feel of grass or straight up snow beneath his feet, running his hands through water and over textures like soft fur and embroidered fabric. anything that reminds him that he's real, and that nirn is real

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Miraak Rfbcc version

A Nord preset based on the superb draw from @rfbcc ( originally from @99corentine ) :

Soft Requirements :

_ BnP CoTR Faces

_ Human Hairstyles for CoTR Elves by Karura W. (FLM) + KS Hairdos True Unisex Patch

_ The Eyes of Beauty AI Remastered + CoTR Patch

_ Koralina's Makeup for CoTR (eyeshadow)

_ Koralina's Face Detail for CoTR (bushier brows)

_ Charmers of The Reach Racemenu Warpaints etc... (Makeup)

Preset link :

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Me after any thieves guild member with no more than five voice lines calls me their friend

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BRYNJOLF EVEN WENT OUT TO FIND YOU.

Omg I was important to him! He has time for me! 😍

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Are we really doing the bus arguments again? The vast majority of people who give wheelchair users grief over use of the wheelchair space are not doing so because they have a disability buggy. They’re doing it because they don’t think wheelchair users should have access to public transport if it means they have to spend a moment moving their child’s pram. Believe me, we can tell the difference.

I got on a bus once and asked a couple to please move their buggy to the other side of the bus so I could use the wheelchair space (the only space a wheelchair user can travel in, and with a huge yellow sticker explaining that it’s legally reserved for wheelchair users and anyone else will be asked to move is a wheelchair user needs the space).

I wasn’t even asking them to get off the bus, just to move their child a few feet to the space on the other side of the bus, that was also closer to where they were sitting. Somehow they felt that was unreasonable and yelled at me that I shouldn’t have boarded the bus, and couldn’t I see the space was taken, was I stupid blah blah blah

After that didn’t make me go away, they then tried to pretend like it was never actually their child and said I’d have to ask the “real parents” because they wouldn’t move a baby that “wasn’t theirs”.

Unsurprisingly no one else claims the child (who is very obviously travelling with the yelling couple), so the bus driver has to get involved and say he can’t move the bus with a wheelchair not in the wheelchair space and that if there’s an unaccompanied toddler on the bus then that’s a very serious situation. After the weirdest five minutes ever the couple eventually realise the bus driver is being very serious and no one is moving until this is sorted. So they have to admit that actually it was their child all along and move them to the other side of the bus which takes all of five seconds.

They would literally rather temporarily disown their own child than take five seconds to allow a wheelchair user access to the same public transport they take for granted.

Compare that to another time I got on the bus, went to ask the person in the wheelchair space to move their buggy only to see that the buggy is adapted to carry an oxygen tank (and probably other stuff) and has one of those “my child is disabled, please treat this buggy as a wheelchair” tag on it. I let the parent/ carer know that I didn’t realise it was a disability buggy and hope she has a good day before asking the driver to let me off because there’s already a wheelchair user on board and it’s first come first serve.

Just, please don’t use hypothetical disabled people to invalidate and talk over real disabled people talking about the real issues we face.

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people your whole life: grammar and language are a hard science, there is a right and wrong way to do it and you better learn it!

people who actually study language: so anyway fuck all that noise, language is a mess of variation, there is no right and wrong, grammar means nothing

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https://pin.it/1nktRlTYj

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a sitting platypus

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I honestly gotta wonder if all that many students are using AI or whatever in college. Partially because the hysteria reminds me of the tide pods hysteria. Partially because it reminds me of how fast environmentalism got pushed from a systemic problem (solvable with systemic change) to an individual matter (not solvable at the individual level). Those stories fail a lot of the misinformation checks and balances, especially the ones about "creating a feeling of moral righteousness" and my own personal check of "resist anything using a Kids These Days context."

Basically they sound hinkey and poorly scrutinized.