ghostmartyr

[ghostmartyr]

For all the screwed up stuff about to happen and that is happening, and for all the inability to cope with it that's going to follow, let the record show that I just had an evening so good that I want to live forever just to feel that way again.

In right this second, I am so, so happy that I'm alive. Whatever I say after this point, whatever happens, this happened too: I am really, really happy.

[ghostmartyr]

...Okay I lied and Caitlyn is Batman but Batman in his Batman v Superman worst look but also she's Jason Todd and yes I have spent twenty minutes yelling about this on Discord.

[ghostmartyr]

Gonna be real with you folks. Arcane just fucking drop-kicked my psyche as it was coming back to shore. In a fun way, but also... shit, I'm not sure I can actually join the rest of this party. Certain kinds of tragedy are not my friends, and this is that all over.

Fucking sick, though. There's that.

[ghostmartyr]

Give me a miracle, God.

Give Your children a damn miracle. Give us that grace. Please.

[ghostmartyr]

you ruin everything you touch

[ghostmartyr]

The current state of my Three Houses copy from the library:

Golden Deer Playthrough (Complete): Vibing. Normal Classic. Accidentally kill Lorenz in the first battle because can't figure out which button turns back time. Befriending all of my house and stealing Blue Lions kids and finding an OT3 in Ingrid/Dorothea/Felix. Then I can't find any fic for my OT3 because of course. Starting philosophy: making the roleplaying decision that this will be a gay male Byleth route before the internet tells the tragedy of the choices. The game's cowardice leads to the natural runner up of going the selfcest route.

Blue Lions Playthrough (Incomplete): Hard Casual. The Blue Lions will be completely isolated. There will be no recruitments. The pressure will warp them into a codependent unit as their professor concentrates so thoroughly on them that they lose the opportunities of bonds elsewhere. Starting philosophy: romancing Rhea is possibly the most toxic choice available and I will make it happen.

I just spent my entire Golden Deer playthrough wondering why Edelgard being against the church was considered terrible when the bad vibes are so intense. I actively avoided any good interactions with Rhea, and somehow my head still winds up in her lap. Horrifically inappropriate. So help me I am compelled. Pretty sure by most metrics Rhea's a solid 7/10 on evil. This Byleth is going to simp for her and the world will be a worse place for it.

[ghostmartyr]

I don’t really think Ymir went back on anything her arc built up to, I think her goal was to live a life that she could be proud of, and by saving r&b she followed her principles. It’s tragic but that’s the irony of Ymir, she always wanted to be selfish but couldn’t escape her nature of being a good person. Historia on the other hand…yeah her arc is fucking infuriating

I'm breaking my own commitment to not dip my toes into this, because impulse control what impulse control.

Here's my starting point problem with that:

Ymir does not save Reiner and Bertolt.

At best, her actions get them a pat on the head by their oppressors. They continue to live out being child soldiers for a society that considers them devils. Bertolt dies in their service almost immediately after. Reiner is a suicidal mess whose will to live is bound up in other child soldiers he's responsible for.

No one is saved.

That's a fair tragedy, with someone trying to repay a debt only for it to amount to nothing because the cycles they're all caught up in are larger than any one personal act of altruism. Even trying to good can't undo the harm of systemic cruelty. It's a valid plot for a story like this.

Except Ymir is one of the few characters who realizes how fucked the world is. She's a better person than she ever wants to be, because being good gets you jack shit and she knows that -- but she can't help but lend people the hand she was never given. On its face, that makes her a good candidate for a hopeless sacrifice that saves no one.

The core problem is that, again, Ymir knows how fucked the world is.

You’re going to kill yourself, the ultimate act of submission. Is that how much you want to please the people who treated you like a nuisance?! Ymir, Chapter 40

Ymir kills herself for Reiner and Bertolt, providing the people who left her with decades of living a nightmare a weapon.

Doing stupid shit to help Reiner and Bertolt out tracks. If they hadn't shown up, she'd still be in that nightmare, and she killed their friend.

But she specifically kills herself in a way that aids people who violated her, who will continue to abuse Reiner and Bertolt, and continue to launch offensives that put Historia's life at risk. Ymir has the knowledge to understand that she's not saving anyone from anything here.

There are many potential layers of story that could have been approached with this, but the bottom line for me is that Ymir's most solid convictions are all ignored when she goes with Reiner and Bertolt. There are facets you can examine to make it make sense, just as there are all kinds of things you can examine with Historia's reversal of her arc. It's always a tragedy when someone fails their principles so stunningly. It's the Bad End coming as was dreaded.

It's just that the story does not examine any of it. It's taken as a given that Ymir goes through with this, leaving us with Ymir killing herself for people who hate her in order to give Reiner and Bertolt a temporary reprieve that only condemns them to a familiar suffering.

Even then, you could make a case for characters doing stupid things if the story at least admitted that it was a ridiculously bad idea on all fronts. Our protagonist's arc is built on that. Eren makes bad choice after bad choice after bad choice and every character in his vicinity rightly goes "what." Characters can utterly fail the best of themselves and it can still be a compelling story.

With Ymir, there simply is no story. She chooses to die, and it's taken as inevitable that a character who is so anti-fate and so anti-dickheads would die in a way that benefits a "fate" she rejected and a bunch of dickheads.

Ymir kills herself, and it makes Marley happy and saves no one. She knows enough about the world to understand that.

I do not personally think that the story should get credit for tragic irony that amounts to "what if everything went to hell" without actually bothering to come up with a why for everything going to hell.

Eren's a tragic disaster; Ymir's a dropped thread.

[ghostmartyr]

Dignity's overrated, right?

Shout-out to anyone who's had a suicidal spiral over a fictional story.

There's a few versions of this post I might make one day, but right now I think that's the best thing I can say about it.

(But then I kept typing, so you get a cut with a bunch of vulnerable rambling about how a comic book made me want to die enough that I finally got medicated for my psychological disorder. Like and subscribe.)

Because as excruciating as life felt when I wanted to die, the humiliation I felt even inside my own head over the trigger made it difficult to talk about and difficult to process.

I wasted a lot of energy being ashamed of not even having a 'justifiable' reason to kill myself. I continue to waste a lot of energy on the exact type of thinking that landed me there, and even typing this, I'm well aware that the literal last ten times I've wanted to kill myself, fiction was the catalyst. Because of a lot of flawed internal processes, the eleventh time coming up will probably share the love.

It is so easy to get caught up in just... how childish it feels, and discount everything because of that. Except one of the things I'm slowly coming around to is that this is some of the problem. I was very seriously considering sentencing myself to death for reacting badly to fiction, and I get that a "yikes, lol" is pretty much considered the correct response to that.

But I needed something to go right, and I found A Thing, and it didn't go right, and that destroyed what was left of my will to live. And even though I know that I'm one bad day away from that same emotional response kicking in, every time I think about it, there isn't a thought of "I'm glad I didn't kill myself."

It is entirely shame, because I look at myself and what I care about, and my first reaction to having an emotion about it is "you shouldn't feel that, that's an overreaction." Which goes unnoticed when it's a happy silliness like dissolving into ship brain rot, because yeah, it's a silly overreaction to some pixels. Why should I shy away from calling it silly? It is.

I don't think anything anyone said would have helped me back then. Medication came in clutch. But I guess, really thinking about it... We all have heard the "your feelings are valid" words and all the caveats that go with them.

Even if you think your feelings are silly, you are not. Your emotions are worthy of compassion because they're part of you. However you got wherever you are emotionally... Don't dismiss yourself. Meet yourself where you're at.

I wanted to die over a comic book. I love stories enough that they fully have the power to hurt me. That is a dangerous place to be in, and that danger deserves my actual respect.

It's not ideal, but that sense that I was actually in trouble, regardless of the reasons, is what got me back in therapy and got me medicated.

Being ashamed of myself only ever made me lock myself away until I was so alone that I had new reasons to want to die.

And in case I have not made this clear: wanting to die really, really sucks. It's a terrible experience, terrible feeling, and funnily enough I think I would have been much happier without it.

Life is worth living. It really, really is.

I was in a place where a single story could take that belief away.

That isn't silly, it's horrifying.

I am glad I'm alive. A ton of stuff sucks, but I have had so much happiness in the past year alone, and I get to hug my dog every single day if I want to. I am alive, and I want to be, and despite and because of the whole everything about it, I will continue with it.

And I don't really have a conclusion because I was honestly just going to leave it at the first few sentences and go to bed. Some things never change.

[ghostmartyr]

Are you still into aot? I was super into it and followed you a few years ago like 2018-2020-ish and dropped it when the manga ended. Now 3 years later I reread/watched and realized I had everything SO wrong, especially Ymir and Historia. Just interesting to think about.

Afraid not.

...

Yeah that's the best possible answer I have for keeping my dignity vaguely intact. Short version is that I always felt like the series' greatest strength was its character investment -- but then my favorite character was Historia, and it felt like her internal consistency got fucked over in the name of it being awkward if Paradis was fully united. Same with Ymir, honestly. The tragic irony of both of them going back on everything their character arcs built up could be an interesting story.

Except it's barely treated as a footnote, let alone a story. I just deleted a paragraph complaining about it, because that's really the sum. I love Historia and Ymir's arcs. Then everything I loved about them was undone without even the courtesy of making the undoing interesting. It's just a fucked up thing that happened.

There's a lot to love about the series, but I dropped it a few months before the ending. I hear the end of the anime was fun, which I love for people who still love it.

Thanks for the ask. :)

[ghostmartyr]

What do you mean Ingrid gives Dorothea a ring and they only have a B-level support.

[ghostmartyr]

Thought process of recruitments for the Golden Deer House:

Felix: I asked him to help out one month and he was actually really useful and I found the possible implications of him ditching Dimitri really funny.

Cyril: Soft spot for squires.

Ashe and Bernadetta: I wanted to collect the hoodie children.

Ingrid: Felix teases her about food in the monastery and I wanted him to have his friend. Also Ingrid is a classic female knight and that rocks.

Dorothea: Literally just hit the recruit button because I was curious if I could get away with dragging her along through zero effort on my part.

[ghostmartyr]

WIND

[ghostmartyr]

I have started playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses. My library had it, so I figured what the heck.

Thirty hours of gameplay later I think I might have a problem.

[ghostmartyr]

something only i can do

[ghostmartyr]

“i’m afraid i’m a bad person—imogen—“

“—you’re not a bad person”

i kiss her again

[ghostmartyr]

Evil! evil!

[ghostmartyr]

Even if my body should perish, I will still be with you in spirit.