#COMPARISON POST ON MAIN

[sorchasolas]

If i had a nickel for everytime an author writes a love triangle between two men and a woman and once the love triangle is resolved the two men are still friends but it just comes off as the two men are madly in love and one of them happens to also really love his wife while being really gay id have two nickels, which isnt alot but its weird i happened twice, right?

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[schrodingerspsycho]

Close enough, welcome back season 1 Legends of Tomorrow

[borgialucrezia]

BORGIA: FAITH & FEAR 3.14 "1507"

[beneathsilverstars]

okay i do have one thing to say about Truth Scrapper. id5 has cited brandon sanderson as a worldbuilding inspiration, and one of his books, warbreaker, features a magic system that has a lot to do with color!

i don't know if id5 has read this book in particular, but if she has, then she probably would have thought about it while creating TS's magic system. though who knows if it was an inspiration or an "oh fuck i better make sure not to be too similar" or both! (but that's only if they've actually read it, which i'm not sure of, bc iirc they've only mentioned the stormlight archive by name — though in my experience anyone who has read that huge series has probably checked out some of bsand's other works as well.)

edit: id5 says she hasn’t read it, lol. tbh now i’m even more curious to see how the magic systems end up comparing…

here's a description of warbreaker's magic system off of the wiki:

All individuals are born with a single Breath, which can be willingly transferred or given away to another individual. A Breath can be thought of as a soul, or as the manifestation of the 'sixth sense'. A person with no Breaths is called a Drab. Drabs find it difficult to perceive color and do not experience the 'sixth sense' or the odd sensation resulting from someone watching one unobserved. The prominent use of magic on Nalthis is called Awakening, and is reliant on the presence of color and verbal Commands given by the magic user, as well as the use of Breath. Heightening - A person that holds multiple Breaths gains certain innate abilities, such as perfect pitch, [perfect color recognition] the ability to sense life, and a resistance to disease. The various amounts of Breath required to obtain these abilities are referred to as Heightenings. Awakening - The use of Breaths to bring inanimate objects to life, draining color from nearby objects. The actions of the Awakened object are dependent on the Command used at the time of Awakening. Breaths used to Awaken an object can usually be recovered by the Awakener, returning the object to normal. Lifeless - Corpses (usually human) that have been Awakened. A technique discovered during the Manywar allowed for the creation of Lifeless with only a single Breath. Since then, Lifeless have been used extensively as laborers and soldiers. Returned - Individuals that return to life after dying, but without any memories of their previous life. Returned have a single divine Breath, which grants them all the innate powers of the Fifth Heightening, as well as other unique powers such as the ability to change their form. A Returned must consume one of their held Breaths every week. If they are forced to consume or give away their divine Breath, they will die.

notably, the world of TS seems to be primarily greyscale but with some saturated objects, which is the opposite of warbreaker's world where most objects have color, which can be drained via magic. unless most of the color in TS has just already been used up...

[gemini-queen42]

I've seen ppl talk abt how its high time Ganondorf gets some gender fuckery, but it's in refference to since we've got a bit of it for both Zelda & Link in games so far [As much as one can ofc w/out actually including anything queer], but I haven't seen anyone mention the fact that Ganondorf is just already so *Primed* for it. Like Real Non-Binary Shenaniganery. He already kinda IS-

Lemme Elaborate:

It is long established that the Gerudo are female only, using males of other races/species to have children- those males never being accepted within Gerudo society and there is only one Male Gerudo every 100 years, who will be their king- which is Ganondorf.

The Gerudo do *Not* have a gender binary.

they have a gender Unary, based upon also having a Unary sex:

Women, females.

[Side note, this also kinda makes them genderless, as there cant be any social constructs of gender when those just apply to everyone, thus just being.. general social constructs. Anyways-]

See, the Gerudo have adopted the *language* Of the gender binary, as it applies to when they interact with the other hyrulian races/species- [Cultural Exchange ! ♡ ] but the actual ideas/"rules" of this gender binary, as social constructs, dont actually *Apply* to the Gerudo [At the very least/especially not Within Their Own & Not Interaction with the other Hyrulian Groups]

So, being a gerudo Man is not the same Gender as being a man in any other hyrulian group.

Because the other groups are working on a binary social constructs.

And the gerudo are Not.

This is not going to come out as succinct as I want but;

Being a gerudo Man is much closer to being in a higher role of religious/spiritual power/authority due to being intersex / nonbinary or Vice Versa - than being a man as we / other hyrulian groups think of it.

Like. It kind of literally *Is* that.

He is outside the Gerudo's main gender structure, he is a special case, places in a special role because of it.

He's non-Unary. Technically every Gerudo is non-binary, but that's also complicated-

Because they kind of have this synchratism thing going on with the rest of Hyrule's ideas of gender, and they both generally connect Gender with Biological Sex, so they share ideas there- and they've certainly blended their ideas of gender together to cohabitate and match things up linguistically- but like. It doesn't feel right to say theyre just.. working under the gender binary everyone else is. Because they're not.

I kind of want to compare it to Two-Spirt & Trans. Like they're understood easily through each other, because theyre kind of the same thing- but like. Also No. And Two-Spirit is very specifically a Native American Identity that is specific to Native American Culture [I'm sorry I don't Currently recall specific tribes the term is tied to its 2am for me as im writing this fjsjdjd]

The difference between Gerudo Gender & Other Hyrulian Genders is kind of like that. Except lacking distinguishing terminology. And like this is a kinda loose comparison and not exact but hopefully it helps you get what I mean?

So like yeah. Obvi the rest of Hyrule does not regard a male gerudo as being a seperate gender from any other man, and the gerudo barely do either- because theyre using the language of the binary, and they've fit him into it, and the rest of hyrule isnt really considering how gerudo gender doesn't work like theirs. So they dont acknowledge it.

And neither does Nintendo lmao

But he IS.

Because what does being a man *mean* in a culture of Only Women?

Not the same as in a culture of two genders.

Because one is an exception, an outlier - and the other is just one of two boxes.

Anyways FUN FACT I have a LoZ au / storyline in which I incorporate and explore all this!!! [I have made no other posts about it yet I'm sorry but PLEASE feel free to ask abt it if you're curious !!! ♡]

Ok thats it thanks for coming to my TEDtalk lmao

[theophagie]

Suppose you had two "childhood friend of the main character with a redemption arc, with complex feelings for such childhood friend"-shaped nickels. And the two nickels made you want to kill yourself

[transjackfairy]

velvet goldmine (1998)/ the man who fell to earth (1976)

[saxandviolins77]

Same character if you're enlightened like me:

[chonkchu]

Artist Pet Peeve: No offence to some art out there but it low-key bugs me when people draw Toothless or even the light fury and the nightlights and they forget to add the secondary wings 😭😭

It’s part of what makes Toothless’ silhouette so gorgeously iconic besides the tail fins 🥺

[peachphernalia]

here’s a question that probably nobody knows the answer to: Who originally named soulwhole duality .

as far as i am Aware duality is/was the most frequented soulwhole ship/duo/whatever name before we more recently started throwing around kaleidoscopes

admittedly i am not as well versed in this fandom’s history as i should be & it was probably Very before my time but i’m unaware of the existence of a true soulwhole warrior before myself & the current circle of kaleidoscopers . so who could it have been ……. was it just that somebody went down the list of ship combinations doing all the names & it stuck because nobody Cared about them enough to fight for anything else or was there a true predecessor to my infatuation ? …. i wonder about it i wonder about it a lot

[yume-fanfare]

long sigh i miss 3rd life. i couldn't possibly persuade you to watch a minecraft rp could i

[funarisjournal]

Kasuga just has to un-tuck her hair and voila! Match~

[loversbones]

before i go.... my last words.... hachiware and chiikawa... they are miwi to me....

also... firegray in the second graphic novel is kind of s3 byler to me... spot the difference challenge..

[atopvisenyashill]

Bro the ppl you stan are so at odds with the other, your level of starkcels are always alicent-sansa stans, which is a shame bc if they open their eyes they'll see the sansa-rhaenyra-catelyn parallels 😔🥀

Messing with my stats fr 😒 (no hate btw, I'm also a sansa-rhaenyra stan)

it GENUINELY causes me pain, and like i get it, the fandom beefs go crazyyyy and i blame both d&d and the shitty way we teach literature analysis in high school for it getting as bad as it has. one of my xwitter moots got into asoiaf thru hotd bc she saw “lesbian undertones & dragons” and got curious & she said the other day never has she been in a fandom as genuinely evil, she was NOT prepared & i would say that’s just xwitter but we’ve ALL seen crazy behavior on every platform & also i can fully acknowledge that i, like many others, have gotten pettier & more quickly annoyed over the years ajsjdj. but my GOD i really do choose the toughest battles for no goddamn reason 😭🤧.

it’s pretty much like a two way split in fandom the way i see it, and i’m speaking in just the most broad, wankified strokes imaginable but -

targnation aka tb/dany(/arya) people who will genuinely honest to god argue that nettles is valyrian & daemon’s daughter bc only valyrians can ride dragons & really disingenuously misunderstand every point you make about how few good options a lot of the people on tg had.

the starkcels, infamous for being staunch jonsa shippers and/or sansa qitn truthers/stans, & they are all hardcore tg-but-usually-specifically-alicent stans. these people never stop BITCHING and NITPICKING, with the worst of it very much directed at being disingenuous about rhaenyra & baela’s motivations, in a very *dakota johnson voice* ellen you know that’s not true, sort of way.

(there’s other radioactive flavors, we don’t need to get into the aegon ii/king jon-or-stannis types on reddit, for instance).

and the problem here is that i call that second group my home bc it is a break off from the Main Branch which is very hostile to jonsa & associated theories, and therefore a lot of the most intensely starkcel people (such as me 😁) congregate there

(which, bizarrely to me, the Main Branch consists of largely tg/dany stans IF they watch the show seriously, if they don’t watch the show well that’s just main branch & it takes a second longer rant to explain that one but all of these groups are very hostile to starkcels & tbf starkcels are incredibly hostile to them aksjd). i Do believe i get the worst of both worlds as i try to exist in multiple subfandoms, altho i’m sure people at other intersections in fandom will disagree (they’re wrong i have it worse).

and this is a fandom just WILDLY HOSTILE to comparisons. u even think the words “sansa & ned are a little similar” and u get tomatoes thrown at you and that’s just her FATHER. i saw a minor meltdown on two different websites bc someone called margaery “the little queen” when “well that’s DAENAERA’S TITLE” brother no character owns a phrase or archetypes, and george’s style is basically just writing the same 12 archetypes that he really enjoys and doing them slightly to the left each time and as someone who loves doing that (there’s so many things to say!!! so many ways it can go if you just tweak one thing!!!!!) this series is crack to me, but if u dare compare two characters that have a different group of stans, even if those characters dead ass have the exact same life on paper, they try to execute you in the town square. so we just ignore the sansa-rhaenyra and rhaenyra-catelyn parallelism even tho it’s very obvious to me, bc it is apparently an insult to george himself to compare two characters he wrote 🤧

anyways sansa-rhaenyra stans of the world unite, there are dozens of us. dozens i tell you!!!!

[lonestarflight]

Size comparison between the Apollo Program F-1 and J-2 engines and an early version of the Space Shuttle Maine Engine.

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