#HOW HAVE I NOT NOTICED THIS BEFOREEEE

[krakerjaksstuff]

@disastrouscanasta

ok, I'm sure somebody else has said this before but it just clicked for me now.

this scene:

is the precursor to these scenes:

don malarkey is the keeper of the dead. he has been from the very beginning. again and again, he is handed things that the dead have left behind in place of a body.

meehan and evans blew up with their plane. hoob was carted away, to be buried in a mass grave away from the line. skip and penkala were literally obliterated by that mortar. in all instances, there isn't a body to mourn. but there is laundry. there is a luger. there is a piece of a rosary.

and as long as these things exist, donald malarkey will gather them into his hands and he will keep them. because that is all he can have.

[larrythefloridaman]

See I want to learn and understand more about Val's experience with the captain crimson situation too, but the problem is nccts captain crimson pretty much HAS to be a dream construct made up of other people's perceptions of the two of them together, because hes a fusion of crimson and val, and crimson and his hosts dream seperately, and Val is Not In This Dream. His perspective and agency in how other people see him has been excluded Yet Again, this time by Prism making this fucker. We didn't technically get a captain prismatic but we Might As Well Have in terms of narrative function.

And it kind of shows in how the dream cap'n is written, because, having watched season one, Crimson Didnt Act Like That Then. Which to me reflects that his original characterization was heavily overwritten in other character's minds (even crimson's own to an extent, despite the fact he was kinda in a 'I'm gatekeeping my personality from y'all' type phase back then and barely talked to people at first,) as much as it was in canon when crimson 'came out of his shell,' so to speak, and started being a bastard in the open rather than a spooky stoic eldritch presence with a mysteriously mischievous streak as was kind of how it went in season one. And pretty much what we get from the val part of the construct is kinda what you'd expect- people seeing Val's involvement in that as a perfect victim of his own gentlemanly sense of honor gone horribly wrong, that... doesn't really explain why he actually took and honored their bet. "A gentleman keeps his word," is a very pretty and very tragic nothing statement. We've gotten no new information about their partnership from this, except that people percieve val as being so honor driven as to sell his soul.

Theres also the fact that crimson is seemingly depicted as being in control most of the time with this fusion, as opposed to more recent partnerships where he often just. lets people do their own thing until he needs to take the controls to a certain extent? he describes his arrangement with crimsonaut as needing synergy between them to really work, crimson and the people he possesses are generally relationships fueled by shared goals and 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' arrangements, crimson has motive to lie about getting crimson'd being Fun but at least with mach 2 it seems to show true, at least at first.

And it may very well be true that crimson was in control most of the time, season one didn't really do much to distinguish who was in control when until Val was fighting out of it toward the end of 11 and the rare instance of val being open about the ordeal had him saying that he was very controlling (albeit as ive discussed previously, in a conversation comparing him to cupid, which suggests to me it was more of a 'pushing val past his boundaries without noticing' problem than a complete mind control blunt force thing,) and season one treated pretty much everything cap'n crim did as something crim was doing, and synergy could be something he's grown to value as part of these partnerships following the team crimson incident and his time with crimsonaut, but we still can't really know unless we actually get val's unfiltered side of the story and it drives me mad.

Dream captain crimson is a major opportunity in a lot of ways and addressing how people's perceptions of val and crimson differ from the real deal is one of the Big ones but we cant really sink our teeth into that without getting Val in here for real i need it we need it ive been so good ive never asked beforeeee

I wish we saw/hope we see more of crimson and captain crimson interacting in the nccts i think theres so much potential in that, gotta love 'past version of asshole at his worst who thinks his future self is being an idiot pansy bitchass because his future self rightly decided being a snippy cunt 25/7 365 days a year isnt conducive to anything good' vs. 'That same asshole now who's a little better and can see how obnoxious he was being with the perfect clarity of third person perspective and hindsight but is still pretty deep in keeping up the shithead persona' i want to see them biting eachother

But i also think it'd be funny to throw a future crimson who's straight up just doing pretty good in there and get the full karkat experience the dream's already unseated from time why not get silly with it