#Narrative that itself contributes in killing him!!

[comicaurora]

Do you think ethics are just an attempt at being a healthier form of selfish?

In one of your Detail Diatribes where Batman confronts Catwoman and tries to stop her from killing Falcone, you highlighted the fact that his reasoning was not to protect her father, but to try and save her. Ever since, some very strange ideas about the nature of selfishness and selflessness have been rattling around my head.

It only started coming into focus when I tried to put into words why it was a bad thing that D-16 killed Sentinel Prime. My best answer right now is because it made D-16 into Megatron. Orion wasn't trying to save Sentinel, he was trying to protect the cybertronian people. Maybe if Orion focused more on saving D-16, they wouldn't have lost their friendship and all of Cybertron would be better for it. Of course, in the end, Megatron was the deciding factor in making himself, caring more about his pride than his current identity, but this highlights a strange selfish quirk in sustainable selfless behavior.

If you are purely selfless you suffer from spending more of yourself than you have to give. If you're too selfish you can't maintain the human connections that are a requirement for being a complete and healthy person. It leaves the best options as being selfless to make your environment an easier one for you to live in. Where your actions for others are repaid by the selflessness from your community. Or, being selfish with your charity. Taking care of what you care about because their well being positively contributes to your own.

To be fair, the opening sentence now looks like an incomplete thought. It probably should be asking if you think ethics is just an attempt at being a more healthy form of selfish and selfless. Really, just asking if ethics is meant to make you better at being a person, which seems like a question that can answer itself. Still, it feels like an important insight to highlight that to be ethical isn’t about how much of your own life you're willing to sacrifice. It's hard to be a good person when you're not a person anymore.

This is a fascinatingly deep question, and I'm very tickled that our two touchpoints in it are a transforming robot tank and Batman.

My personal opinion is that ethics and morals are not reflections of some universal truth of Justice and Goodness, as they are often framed, but are instead best-practice guidelines on how to function in the big, messy world without causing undue suffering to yourself and others. A facet of this is determining, case by case, how much you need to prioritize yourself vs how much you can afford to help others - in the framing you've proposed, selfishness vs selflessness.

Taking the specific examples we're focusing on - two cases where someone attempts to prevent a revenge killing for the benefit, not of the victim, but of the avenger - I think they reflect this worldview, that the killing is not seen as some innately universally-judged evil act that must be prevented for its own sake, but that the act of killing will harm the killer in a way the person trying to stop them doesn't want to see.

For Catwoman, committing premeditated murder wouldn't solve any of her problems in any way that arresting Falcone and having him legally unraveled would. It'd just park a first degree murder charge on someone who'd up til this point only dealt with petty larceny, and it would potentially weigh her down with misery and regret as she grappled with the trauma of taking a life.

For Megatron, killing Sentinel Prime wasn't a bad action because he deserved to live. They just spent that whole fight scene tearing through enemies. They're warriors on track to spend the next four million years killing each other; the whole "taking a life" ship has already sailed. The problem is that Sentinel is a symbol and a structural part of the political narrative in the founding of the next stage of Cybertron's society. If the first thing the new regime does is bloodily avenge itself on the face of the old regime for the personal wrongs it did them, that proves that the only thing they care about is personal satisfaction of their individual desires - just like Sentinel. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. If they can instead take a step back, think of the good of Cybertron as a whole, enforce a rule of law and a fair system of justice that applies equally to everyone, even on someone they personally loathe, that would signify integrity and credibility and the hallmark of wise, just and fair leadership capable of setting aside personal feelings for the greater good. It's not about Sentinel; it's about whether the satisfaction of killing him is worth the price of enforcing forever that personal vendettas are more important than the well-being of the people of Cybertron. Which makes it really obvious which one Megatron is going to pick.

My hottest take, and I mean this very genuinely, is that most of the human perception of what constitutes goodness and justice is one thousand percent based on vibes, and is extremely susceptible to narrative reframing. We see an unsympathetic victim (Sentinel Prime, Falcone) who has gleefully caused suffering to innocent people (so judged because they are framed sympathetically, not because we've actually enumerated their lifelong actions to determine they've never done anything wrong) and we feel (feel) that it would be right and just for them to suffer consequences (emphasis on suffer) because that would balance the scales on this vibes equation and that would make us feel like justice had been served. Would this suffering lead to any material good? Not inherently. Would it heal the victims? Not usually. Would it remove the source of the problem? Categorically not, what with how negative reinforcement works (or rather does not work.) It also wouldn't do anything about the other people empowered by the same system to be just as shitty in just as many ways that just happen to be offscreen from our POV. But it feels fair. So what is justice, if it reduces down to "I want them to hurt for the hurt they've caused me"? If it can be sated with a spectacle or distracted by a long nap and a good joke to let the feeling fade? What purpose does this justice serve if it is devoted wholly to the satiation of a bone-deep chordate-brain hunger for Retributive Violence rather than towards actually ensuring that the lives of those harmed are healed and supported and built up again after being broken down? (This is the entire core character arc in The Batman, btw, I'm not just monologuing for no reason here. He calls himself Vengeance for a reason, and the reason is he's doing Batman wrong)

That feeling - that white-hot burning core of Righteous Fury - is the unexamined heart of many systems of morality that focus, not on doing good, but on exacting satisfying retribution on Bad People Who Deserve It, categorized as People Who I Can Hurt Without Feeling Bad Myself. It's a very tempting concept for people who have suffered at others' hands. That feeling, that powerful instinctual understanding of "that's unfair," is incredibly strong. In my opinion, most systems of ethics are built, not around relitigating what is Good and what is Bad per se, but in trying to shape and curb that bone-deep, unbelievably powerful desire to rend the flesh from the bones of your tormenters.

But I mentioned that feeling is susceptible to narrative reframing. This is, as I understand it, a huge part of lawyering. Tell the story of what happened using true events and adding no falsehoods, but highlight the parts that make it feel like your client is the one who is being treated unfairly. They're not an unsympathetic wrongdoer who you can punish without personal moral stain - they're a loving spouse, a parent of three adorable children, they have a really cute puppy, they donate to charity, they're a wonderful conversationalist, a kind friend, etc etc. All those things can also be true of people who do terrible things, but thinking about them defuses that White Hot Core by making us sympathize with the sympathetic parts of them.

This is incredibly well-understood in fiction. It's the whole reason the tropes Kick The Dog and Pet The Dog exist. When you want the audience to root for a character's destruction, leave aside any of their potential quiet moments of sympathy - their tragic backstory, their cute pet, their adorable relationship with their mom - and instead show them going out of their way to commit some minor act of petty cruelty, say Kicking The Dog. The audience will infer that this badness is 24/7 and they have no reason to curb their enthusiasm for Righteous Vengeance. But if the writer wants the audience to see a spark of good in them, to sympathize, to believe they can be redeemed, they'll highlight one of those small moments of charming kindness, and allow them to Pet The Dog instead.

Neither of these acts, in the grand scale, have any bearing on the morality of this person's actions. A pet dog doesn't counterbalance a razed village; a kicked dog doesn't negate a generous contribution to the local soup kitchen. Goodness and badness is not a linear scale added or subtracted to by opposing deeds. BUT showing them to an audience reframes them narratively, and THAT is what shapes the judgment of the White Hot Burning Core. In the space of fiction, this form of bottom-shelf emotional manipulation is one of the cleanest ways to get the audience to root for the messy destruction of what is ostensibly, in the universe of the fiction, a wholly complex and living person who definitely has reasons for everything they've done, even ones that could be framed sympathetically when shown.

Meanwhile, in the real world, ethics are an attempt to judge what is best in a given situation without trusting the White Hot Burning Core to make the call, no matter how compelling "but it would feel really good though" might seem. They try to give someone perspective, context, other priorities to consider. The White Hot Burning Core might want you to rip someone's arms off for driving slow when you've got important places to be, but Ethics can present a number of compelling reasons not to do that - even if it's just "ripping their arms off will definitely make me even more late." And yes, this can be a balance of Selfishness Vs Selflessness. You are one of the people whose wellbeing ethics is designed to make you prioritize improving even if it feels weird, and when all other things are equal, your own health and happiness can be the deciding factor. In a world with an overarching Moral Force that weighs the goodness of your soul by sifting through every grain of action and intent seeking negativity to punish you for, absolute selflessness to the point of self destruction would still probably be seen as Morally Wrong, simply because the universe is a better place with you in it trying your best.

Anyway, if doing the right thing was simple, easy and painless, we probably wouldn't have so many thousands of years of arguing about what it looks like. Good luck out there everybody 👍

[skaldish]

Alright folks. Here it is, my theory of what Ragnarok actually represents. It is very messy and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to actually convey my understanding clearly like I try with most things, because genuinely this is shit I would write a doctorate-level thesis on.

But we're going to try anyway.

So. After doing a lot to try to replicate animistic thinking, as well as taking a VERY deep read of the Norse myths, my theory is that Ragnarok is specifically allegory for societal collapse—the "end of the world" imagery and such is meant to convey what this feels like.

Recall what Odin says in Grimnismal. It goes something like this, since I can't be arsed to find the exact quote:

Huginn and Muninn fly over the world every day; while I fear Huginn ("thought") may not return, I fear Muninn's ("memory's") absence most.

When a society collapses, so does it's memory. It loses its technology, its methodologies, its paradigms, and everything it has learned about the world up to that point. Gone. Entire chapters of history erased.

What causes societal collapse is not always a conquering force, but is oftentimes the result of circumstances that a society orchestrates for itself. Think Rome.

People who have gone through societal collapse will probably develop an invested interest in figuring out how to prevent it entirely, so they don't have to start society all over again.

It's one thing to preserve the memory of "things collapsed and here's why" using a story. But it's another thing to do what apparently the Norse people did, which is cultivate a methodology for cognitively hardening their own society against collapse, using stories as a way to do it.

Like...I'm not kidding when I say they legitimately knew how the human mind works, and then built an entire system of stories and narratives that intentionally support the mind's freedom, cultivation, and agency. I can only convey a fraction of how this works in this post because the rest requires a deep-dive into behavioral psychology and neurological development.

All the tales leading to Ragnarok demonstrate various instances where the gods choose to follow their own agendas at the expense of the real people and forces in the world. All of these little things contribute to the magnitude of the event that is Ragnarok.

The tales represent these transgressions using allegories rather than literal events. This is because these stories were designed for children, who don't process information through a prefrontal cortex like we do as adults. They don't have them yet. But this gives kids an intuitive understanding for how circumstances of collapse feel, so they can recognize them in all their forms.

Loki is an allegory for the mischief we feel as children, and for the behaviors we demonstrate before we get to the age where we start valuing cooperation. In the myths, every time Loki causes mischief in ways that creates problems, the gods get mad at him and threaten Loki's life until he fixes his mess. Loki eventually becomes vindictive, kills Baldr in a jealous fit, and then is punished by being bound and buried beneath the ground, only to fight against the gods in Ragnarok.

The surface-level takeaway is a lesson in parenting: If we punish kids for their mischief, they're going to become vindictive adults, and these adults are going to have it out for the rest of society because they've been disenfranchised.

But it doesn't just end here. Consider how we punish ourselves for our own sense of mischief, beating ourselves up for having "problematic" thoughts and trying to bind and bury those thoughts in the depths of our mind.

These thoughts come from a place our mind known as the limbic system, which is focused on avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, and—most importantly—does not understand the world or make decisions using logic and reason, but in terms of what feels enjoyable and what doesn't.

We tend to call this system our inner child.

When we punish our inner child, that child starts doing exactly what Loki does and resorts to malicious and petty tricks. We can hold this behavior at bay until something causes us to "snap" (like Jörmungandr's tail does) and out comes the malice of the disenfranchised inner child, which creates a terrible cascade of social consequences for us.

Now, if we were to listen to these stories as kids, we would naturally be very upset whenever Loki was threatened of punished, because we think out of the limbic system at that age and Loki is meant to represent us—specifically, the state of being a kid. We would see what comes to pass, with Loki being imprisoned and fighting the gods against Ragnarok, and it would become clear to us that there's consequences for punishing mischief AND also causing too much of it.

Now I don't know about you, but I was very motivated by a sense of justice as a kid. Hearing Loki's arc would have inspired me to learn how to be friends with my sense of mischief while also learning to use it in ways that were cooperative and social, because this would have been how I could right the wrong I felt was done to Loki. It would also mean my own limbic system will not fight against me in the future, but be a modality of thought I can always access. (This is the beauty of the way the Norse myths are crafted; they are designed to instill knowledge of the world using mechanisms that reinforce one's own sense of agency and competency, so rather than being told the moral of this tale, it sets me up to run right into the conclusion it wants me to draw, but in a way that makes me feel smart and therefore inspires me to value it.)

The binding of Fenrir serves a similar allegory. When we become explosively angry in the way that Fenrir represents, it consumes our wisemind the same way Fenrir consumes Odin during Ragnarok. But this only happens if we bind Fenrir/our anger. By demonizing this nature of ours simply for existing, it will not only refuse to listen to us, but also turn against us. Remember that Fenrir was willing to socialize and cooperate with the gods before his betrayal.

(Honestly, I believe this is why ulfheiðnar existed the way they did. Even though the animalistic rage of ulfheiðnar was too terrible for domestic society, it was not demonized, but instead given a social function. People would learn to understand and partner with their own sense of rage, and I'm guessing this is also how they were able to keep their sense of reason and priorities straight even while going berserk from psychoactives.)

These two examples serve to illustrate how societal collapse stems from binding or punishing our own natures. But also fearing our own nature as mortals factors into it.

For example, Naglfar. This is a ship constructed of dead people's fingernails, and its completion is part of what signals the beginning of Ragnarok. But as the story goes, we can delay Naglfar's construction by trimming the nails of the dead before we bury them.

Naglfar represents "neglect for the dead," and this is significant because the act of no longer viewing the dead as people is sort of like the canary in the coal mine for no longer view each other as people...and no longer seeing people as people is what defines Ragnarok.

A society is at peace when its people have no fear of death, and having no fear of death comes only by incorporating death as a normal and familiar part of life, just like we do with birth. Our relationship with death is a litmus test for our relationship with our own humanity—if we fear the dead and cannot see them as human beings, then we are always going to fear a part of our own humanity, and be at war with it. The simple act of keeping the nails of the dead well-groomed because it stalls Naglfar's construction was a way to remind people why such a simple act was profoundly important.

And these are just the things that I can think of off the top of my head that are the most obvious examples. There are—and I shit you not—multitudes of these things laced within the Norse myths.

(I haven't even gotten to the part about how the Norse creation myth uses what the womb feels like to characterize it. Telling this story to very little children helps them establish a sense of familiarity, belonging, and secure attachment with the entire world from the get-go. If they learn the world is everything they've already experienced, then their bodies will never be afraid of it, because nothing about it will feel unknown or unknowable. Like, how fucking dope can you get.)

So here's where we get to the really dense irony of all this: Why we don't pick up on all these nuances as Westerners and have so far missed this entirely.

It is for two reasons.

The first is because our society values the things that the Norse people identified as contributing to societal collapse—namely, the act of conquering/competing against other forces and conquering/competing against our own natures. The transgressions of the Aesir are not things we register as problematic because to us they're normal.

The second is that we don't think animistically. The way we are taught to convey, interpret, and transmit information is designed PURELY by and for the prefrontal cortex, with neglect to everything else (if you ever wonder why Americans look weird in how we behave, this is why). But because we only prioritize communicating this way, we're missing out on all the context added within the Norse myths. These myths function the same way Old Norse kennings did, in that they are designed to speak to ALL areas of the brain at once and in tandem, but if we only engage with it using one part of the brain, we're only going to get a small piece of the picture and the rest is going to look weird.

(Little experiment for you: Try to logic something out in your mind or think through a complex problem without using words or sentences to do it. Use any other kind of thought-process besides language. I promise you that not only is this possible, but it yields a completely different kind of experience and conclusion than you might otherwise reach.)

Honestly, I don't even think Snorri himself fully understood what he was looking at when he was recording the Norse myths. I think he was just writing them down according to how they were told, word-for-word. But his cluelessness is our good fortune now, because he not only preserved the cultural stories, but also what I consider an entire cognitive technology.

And every time I look at it, I can't help but think about the generations of people who sat around the fire in the dead of winter, weaving, crafting, and figuring out better ways to fortify their society, raise kids so they became fine and truly fearless people, and conserve information. This is, as far as I'm concerned, real magic.

They knew some shit.

[angstyhikka]

Critical review on Carved and Modeled - Wittebane collaborative album - The Owl House by @a-magpie-in-gravesfield

On the day of the premiere, the four horsemen of the apocalypse (that’s me, @lasymit, @tuumcleander and @levshany) sat down with jokes and banter to watch the hour-long musical album. The project is impressively high-quality for fandom work, and the sheer amount of effort put into it commands respect. There were a few songs we especially liked, which deserve special mention.

A Dark Beginning, depicting the execution of Caleb and Philip’s parents, was dark and atmospheric—the music perfectly matched the tone of the narrative. 

Witch Hunters, a song about hypocrisy, nailed the emotional weight, particularly the lines about how their parents “lost the game” they’re now forced to play. 

I Can Be Your Friend! was also great—it perfectly captured the character’s energy and was dynamic as hell. The concept of Philip meeting the Collector in the in-between realm when he first crosses worlds is genuinely interesting. Too bad their relationship isn’t explored further. 

Curse is absolutely magnificent—from the voice acting to the body horror atmosphere, it’s our favorite track.

Disclaimer

First off, we deeply respect Magpie for their dedication, enthusiasm, and the high-quality merch—clearly the result of painstaking work, with carefully chosen materials and lovingly crafted designs. We also appreciate their attentiveness to every customer and the monumental effort poured into this project!

What follows is serious criticism and our raw reactions. If you’re part of the project, loved the album, and are sensitive to critique, please stop reading here. Otherwise, we’re open to discussion—just keep it civil. We’ve done our best to make this critique constructive and not hurtful (we kept some cursing and CAPS for humor, because otherwise it would be a boring long read). Our goal isn’t to offend but to voice our perspective.

We disagree with Magpie’s interpretation and feel it’s important to say so, especially since this project is massive, gaining traction fast, and some fans are calling it "100% canon" and "better than canon". The fandom’s response has been overwhelmingly positive, likely because this is one of the biggest fan projects of its kind, made with contributions from so many people. Philip’s fans are proud that our fandom can produce something this ambitious.

But in our view, much of this fan-made story contradicts canon or works worse than the original series. Below, we’ll break it down.

Analysis

A Dark Beginning – Tragedy for tragedy’s sake. The music nails the vibe, but the uncle character could’ve been anyone—this song exists solely to hang Caleb and Philip’s parents. This plot point only matters until the second song and then vanishes.

Witch Hunters – The song itself works well as a follow-up to the previous track’s buildup. But despite expectations, the brothers’ conflict with society’s beliefs goes nowhere. Caleb briefly mentions being tired of pretending to be a witch hunter, then it’s dropped. This tension could’ve resurfaced when Philip decides to kill all the witches, but his motivation there is shaky too.

Daydreaming – Caleb dreams of a better life. But it’s unclear what’s weighing him down—everything around him looks rosy, romantic, and peaceful. The lyrics spell out his struggles, but visually, he’s just chilling and daydreaming. We don’t feel his pain.

Distance – Caleb tells Evelyn he wants to leave Philip behind… but also loves him. Why not just take the kid with them? Philip, a literal child with no malice or grudge against Evelyn, watches them sadly from afar. What’s the conflict here?

Struggling Light, Only For A Few Days – No real motivation or tension in Caleb’s decision to abandon Philip. Author tries to parallel Caleb and Luz, but it doesn’t work—Philip is a minor, and Caleb is almost an adult responsible for him. Again, why couldn’t they take Philip with them? Even if Caleb’s tired of parenting, we don’t see any emotional breakdown—just whining. Evelyn supports Caleb but doesn’t push back. She’s just… there.

They could’ve had her egg him on, making Philip resent them both, leading Caleb to make a rash, impulsive choice to leave without Philip. Or shown Caleb blaming Philip for all his problems. But none of that happens, so his motivation falls flat.

The Other Side – Caleb feels zero guilt, which is infuriating. He writes letters he never sends and even smiles while doing it! There’s no explanation for why he can’t return. Maybe the portal couldn’t reopen? Not a word about that. It feels less like he’s chasing a dream and more like he’s just oblivious, acting like a selfish ass with no self-awareness.

Were They Right? – Philip’s suffering again, somehow blaming himself. He’s not allowed to show negative traits. Where’s the betrayal brewing if he never saw the note? Why doesn’t he blame Evelyn? He and Caleb don’t even have one conversation in the whole album—not even before their fight.

Now Philip starts believing the witch hunters were right, that Caleb was enchanted… but nothing leads him to this. He just changes his mind over time. No trigger.

If Philip already thinks Caleb was enchanted, why doesn’t he act on it when they meet? Why not grab him and run? Instead, he kills him. Seems like he realizes Caleb wasn’t enchanted after all but keeps lying to himself. Except the lie’s so weak it doesn’t even convince him, so his real resentment spills out, and he kills Caleb. So is the delusion there or not? If it is, why doesn’t it work? If not, why include it?

If he believes in the enchantment, why not attack Evelyn, the supposed enchanter? If he’s just comforting himself, he could’ve picked a better lie. Why even chase Caleb if he doesn’t believe he was taken by force? Why is he so easily swayed that he kills Caleb on sight?

Cover Up – Over a piece of paper, they’re ready to burn him without trial. The story desperately lacks the systemic oppression that would’ve shaped Philip into who he is. The villagers’ vengeance feels half-baked, but at least the momentum’s engaging.

Finally, we get Philip’s motivation to find his brother.

I Can Be Your Friend! – A high-energy, dynamic song that perfectly fits the Collector’s vibe. Nothing concrete happens—it’s just Philip and the Collector vibing in the in-between. Fun stuff. Too bad the Collector disappears afterward.

Where Is Home? – The first murder feels unearned, and Philip has zero reaction. The description calls it an accident—let it be so—but killing someone point-blank over apples? Really?

WHERE DID THAT DOOR COME FROM SO FAST? WHAT DID HE MAKE IT FROM? DID HE JUST FIND A PORTAL IN THE BUSHES?

Has He Forgotten? – Cavelyn ex machina, resentment with no setup. Philip’s moping again. Earlier, he thought "maybe he was enchanted," now he’s suddenly certain it’s magic and leans into the delusion. The lyrics are too on-the-nose, the tone clashes with the visuals, and the pacing’s off. His motivation needed time to develop—this is a pivotal moment, but it’s rushed.

It feels like Philip just pulls out a knife out of nowhere. The song seems to frame it as a crime of passion, but he’s eerily calm when making the decision. Psychopathy fits Philip, but you can’t have it both ways—here he’s cold and calculating, in the next song he’s rage-fueled and impulsive. Which is it?

Murder – Caleb’s "I’ll always be there for you" rings hollow when he never even tried to return. This ties back to Caleb’s weak motivation—he’s completely oblivious to the consequences of his actions. Screw the note! He should’ve known it wouldn’t explain or justify anything, even if Philip read it.

We can’t tell who Philip’s attacking—Evelyn’s not in frame. If it’s Caleb, WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING WITH HIS BACK TURNED? Why stab him? Is he angry? Trying to "break the spell"? Maybe the "spell" is a metaphor for his (unshown) resentment.

How did he spiral like this? No buildup except one mention in Were They Right?. Philip seemed to want Caleb back, but then he kills him because… he’s mad? Hurt? A fucking idiot? Does he genuinely believe Caleb was enchanted? The framing’s so vague we’re not even sure if we missed hints or if they just weren’t there.

WHERE THE FUCK WAS EVELYN THIS WHOLE TIME?

The lyrics say "SOUL IS TORN APART," but Philip’s face is stone-cold, like everything’s going according to plan. Delusions need REASONS, CONFLICT—they don’t just pop up. The emotional core is missing. Instead, we get "depression in my mind, misery in my behind", with none of the doubt that should be there after KILLING THE PERSON HE LOVED MOST.

The Door – Why doesn’t Evelyn, knowing where Philip is, try to kill him? Why is HE so calm, thinking logically AFTER MURDERING CALEB—the most traumatic event of his life? WHERE’S THE BREAKDOWN? THE SHOCK? THE DESPAIR? This should’ve shattered him—horror, tilt, depression. He should’ve cycled through grief and gotten stuck on denial, fueling his future canon actions.

This needed its own song because the dissonance between event and reaction is jarring. You could argue psychopathy, but even psychopaths aren’t usually this detached. Even for them, core motivation has to come from somewhere emotional.

There’s so much fanart of Philip losing his mind digging up Caleb’s body, but here he’s just… lonely. Sticking to canon here undermines Philip’s motivation, especially for his future arc. It’s flat. Pathetic. Frustrating.

The audience can’t connect Philip’s emotions to his choices because the initial conflict was undercooked. Now the story doesn’t work. Caleb’s role in Philip’s life feels interchangeable—it could’ve been anyone. This breaks the Grimwalkers’ concept—if he just needed someone, why not make it literally anyone else?

Why does he want to kill all witches? Over Caleb? But he seems to give zero shits about Caleb to dedicate 300 years to this crusade.

Canon Hollow Mind pictures don’t fit the narrative and feel illogical. If you’re using them as a foundation, the story should’ve been different.

What Now? – Evelyn leaves him in her world… WHY??? So he can genocide her people? "Let’s lock the maniac who murdered my child’s father in a room with my entire species"—BRILLIANT plan. Her reasoning—"I won’t let you hurt anyone else"—HOW does hiding the portal stop him, dumbass? Why not execute him publicly?

Philip wants to kill all witches so his people will "forgive" him. How he reached this conclusion is unclear. Is it guilt over Caleb’s death (which we never saw)? Who knows.

Later, he claims he’s "protecting" humanity from witches luring them with magic, like Caleb. COOL. Then why the earlier motivation? Why the contradictions? Is this his delusion or bad storytelling? Since it’s not clear at first glance, it feels like the latter.

He does express doubt—saying he’ll "believe the lie" to avoid pain—which is a great angle, but it’s buried under noise (like Evelyn’s portal door).

And, by the way, why didn’t he kill Evelyn? Their conflict has no resolution. He kills Caleb but ignores her, even though he blames her and all witches for this mess.

He wonders if Caleb was enchanted… but he already killed him over it. This doubt should’ve come before the murder.

So he makes Grimwalkers to "prove" Caleb wouldn’t betray him without magic? And because he’s terrified of forgetting Caleb’s face? But earlier, his motives were different. It’s a mess. Does he want revenge? To "save" Caleb? To protect humanity? Too much for one song—pick a lane.

Grimwalkers – He’s not deluding himself anymore. He knows killing Caleb was wrong. So why keep making Grimwalkers? The song implies he’s addicted, afraid to forget Caleb. But without the delusion, where’s the guilt? Why does he regret killing Caleb but not the Grimwalkers?

Again, Philip’s murders are treated with bizarre indifference—no reason, no emotion, in lyrics or visuals.

This song’s motivation isn’t bad, but it clashes with his inconsistent behavior earlier. The overall message still falters.

CURSE – ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS. NO JOKE. WE’VE BEEN REPLAYING THIS ON LOOP. Best song in the album. The visuals sync perfectly with the music—his madness is on full display. THIS is Philip. Deranged, obsessed, desperate, agonizing under crushing guilt.

It echoes Transformation from Jekyll & Hyde, taking the best elements we’ve always associated with Philip. The whispering sends chills—his torment crawls under your skin. The vocal delivery masterfully conveys his fractured mind, pulling the audience into the horror. Priceless.

Why does it work? Because it’s a self-contained vibe—no narrative, just atmosphere. And the atmosphere is perfect.

The Titan's Will – Just canon events retold Hollow Mind, with no added depth. This song adds nothing. Cut it, and nothing changes.

Mask Of Gold – The lyrics mention "all the lives that were lost," but no kill besides Caleb’s was justified. Even Caleb’s death felt rushed. Philip rarely seems troubled by any of it—we see hints in CURSE (guilt) and Grimwalkers (doubt).

Which "lives" is he mourning? If it’s Caleb and his own, that’d make sense. But he shows no remorse for anyone else. The tragedy falls flat.

The tone doesn’t match what Philip should feel. The lyrics don’t fit the context.

It’d be more effective to show his melancholy creeping through his imperial routine—how, despite his busyness, intrusive thoughts break through his denial.

What we see—him indulging in sadness—would’ve destroyed him over 400 years. If this happened often, he’d be dead. He survives on hatred and denial, especially before the Day of Unity. He’s too busy to sit around staring at a world he despises.

Conclusion

We need to say why this post exists: It hurts to see Philip treated like this. This character means a lot to us—we’ve spent ages analyzing his motives and psyche. Seeing a project that glosses over both claim canonicity is disheartening.

This was meant to "fix" canon (where everything’s bad), but it fails just as hard by clinging to canon while creating new plotholes.

It ignores historical context that should’ve shaped Philip’s trauma and worldview, flattening his character.

There’s not one scene fully dedicated to his emotional pain—the core of his character. No standout moment focusing on his psychological damage—unlike CURSE, which highlights his physical agony and guilt.

We don’t want this project to become the "definitive" fandom interpretation. Canon left gaps in Philip’s backstory and motives, letting fans theorize and adding depth. But this album’s story leaves no room for interpretation. It offers half-baked "solutions" that raise more questions than they answer.

The attempts to patch canon’s holes clash with character motivations, making them shallow and their actions nonsensical. They’re hard to believe.

To understand their motives, we had to rewatch the album ON MUTE because the songs’ moods often clash with the events, distracting from the story. On first watch, we missed key details—there was no emphasis. We thought there was no improvement over canon. The album wants to tell a story, but its structure gets in the way.

We rewatched it twice and wrote this review to dig deeper. We did find some compelling ideas about Philip’s motivation, but it was as exhausting as dissecting the original show.

Magpie, if you’re reading this, we truly hope this critique doesn’t hurt you. Its goal is to offer constructive feedback on character writing. Whether you take it or leave it is entirely up to you.

Thanks for reading.

[struggling-jpg]

Thoughts About the Potential Underlying Hidden Tragedy of Yanqing and Jing Yuan

that isn't just the "Yanqing will have to kill Jing Yuan eventually" red flags.

A relatively longer-ish post so thank you for bearing with me if you choose to do so!

I'd already been thinking about this whole mess of thoughts for a long while now, and so have other people, but the urge to write this came from a comment I saw on a post that mentioned how Yanqing had lost to "Jing Yuan's ghosts" and overall how it contributes to the dynamic of them being mentor/mentee + father/son. While the narrative seems to be leading to "Yanqing having to strike down a Mara-stricken Jing Yuan," there's just enough weird points that stick out to the point some alternative outcomes for Yanqing and Jing Yuan's fates to play out.

And while I anticipate HSR to follow that most expected point, I feel like there's enough there that could lead to a subversion or something more likely than that, an additional twist to the knife alongside the expected point.

Jing Yuan's Flaws as a Mentor and Father-Figure:

While most of us love the family fluff, I'm pretty sure we can all acknowledge the issues in Jing Yuan's approach and decisions in regards to Yanqing. Yeah, this is a fictional space game story where it's likely they aren't going to delve into the consequences of having someone as young as Yanqing be a soldier, there seems to be something there regardless. Like the brushes with death that he has and how we see him have to worry about the Xianzhou's security as a teen due to having a higher position in a military force. This is all set up for more of a coming-of-age type narrative for him, which HSR has done amazingly so far, but there are a lot of chances for this to explore something darker.

Among official media, the one time I could even remember the term "father" being used in relation to Jing Yuan is in Yanqing's official Character Introduction graphic:

Another notable thing that we see here is how we do have moments where Yanqing expresses thoughts and questions about his own origins and birth parents. The fact that even here, he wonders if the general is hiding something from him, sets off some alarm bells in my head. But he then brushes that off because he's always been with the General and Jing Yuan accepts him for who he is (which under the theory that Yanqing originates/is connected to the Abundace adds a whole heavy layer (this will be discussed in a later section)).

Yanqing does something similar in his texts:

As Huaiyan says to Jing Yuan:

"Yanqing can understand your concerns."

Alongside Yanqing generally being a considerate and polite boy, it can possibly be said that his eagerness to share Jing Yuan's burdens not only stems from his own gratitude towards him but possibly also Jing Yuan's distance.

As in, Jing Yuan doesn't really express his feelings so blatantly, and what we can clearly tell from when Yanqing first met "Jing Yuan's ghosts," neither does he speak much about his past too on a personal level. In Jingliu's quest, Yanqing says that Jing Yuan simply told him to forget everything he saw that day.

For Jing Yuan, the loss of the quintet is a grief that feels fresh in his heart, especially with echoes of them running around him. This is in the description for "Animated Short: A Flash":

(Will also talk about this in a different section)

While Yanqing learns about his General's past in a more direct manner (aka the people involved), it's sad how avoidant Jing Yuan is at times. While he's never been a upfront person, especially in the case of solving problems, I wonder if HSR would go as far as to show the negative side of that in terms of raising and teaching Yanqing.

History Repeats Itself (Sometimes It Don't Need A Reason):

+ the Jingliu parallels

Following up on that last image, Jing Yuan, especially in A Flash, has that whole "history repeating itself" thing going on for Jing Yuan. It points to Yanqing having to take down Jing Yuan but it also comes with a lot of its own possibilities and meanings.

It's blatant that Yanqing parallels Jingliu to an unsettling degree. Anyone who personally knows Jingliu and meets Yanqing sees her in him. Jingliu probably sees herself in him as well. Beyond powers and passion for the sword, her Myriad Celestia trailer shows that her principles before getting struck with Mara were the same as his. But it took her losing her dear friends in such a cruel and brutal manner (alongside how long she'd been alive) for all of that to fall out and form the version of her we see today.

And while it seems that Yanqing is deviating from Jingliu's due to the teachings he's learning, especially with Jing Yuan's effort, I feel like there's still a chance for things to go so wrong and mess with that. Yukong's line about him strikes me as concerning:

"A sword will vibrate and beg to be unsheathed if it is unused for too long... Once unsheathed, it will either paint the battlefield in blood, or break itself in the process..."

Even though I don't think HSR will go down a route of tragedy with Yanqing, like say, he gets Mara struck somehow or killed because that's not how Hoyo's writing has fully gone for playable characters (Misha and Gallagher aside in terms of death). Even in the most despairing parts for Hoyo's games, they're usually outlined and tinged with hope in one way or another. It's just that with what's been presented, there's got to be more here than meets the eye.

Yanqing's Origins - The Breaking Point:

From what we've been given, I think the number one thing that would have the potential of shaking Yanqing's entire sense of his life and the reality he lives in is learning where he comes from. Where he actually comes from has been a strange mystery since the beginning, how Jing Yuan getting him being recorded in the military annals of all places.

As shown from the screenshots of Yanqing's texts, he doesn't know and tries to brush it off because he's happy with Jing Yuan now. The choice to have this aspect here leaves a lot to ruminate on. What is Jing Yuan hiding? And if he really is witholding information, does he ever intend to tell Yanqing? If he doesn't and Yanqing finds out, how will it play out? And even if he does mean to tell him, depending on the severity, how will Yanqing take it?

It's why the theory that Yanqing is connected to the Abundance, possibly even coming from it directly, is as harrowing as it is.

With his arc in mind, will his development be enough to sustain him when he does find out the truth? If he finds out sooner than he should, will he be able to rise above it? And what of Jing Yuan? If confronted with a situation that's outside of his control again, what will he do and how will he react?

The potential in that scenario is so fascinating to me, because we can all anticipate the absolute gut punch that Yanqing killing his master would be. It fits Hoyo's writing style of something so sad but having a hopeful end for the future type beat. But the idea of that being twisted, that expectation being flipped on its head, could be so agonizing. It's not a narrative we see too often explored, at least in my experience, so maybe that's why I'm brainrotting over it so much lol.

[artbyblastweave]

One interesting thing about Caesar which I basically never see anybody talk about, right, is that his father was killed by raiders. I understand why nobody talks about it, because he's the world's biggest asshole, and the game itself only addresses it in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line. But it's notable to me because it's basically the textbook example of a Freudian excuse, and in a lesser game likely would have been played up as such. His father gets killed by raiders in the NCR heartland, and fifty years later he's built an empire standing opposite the NCR that's noted for having basically eliminated raiding as a concept within its borders (part-and-parcel with the rest of the oppression.)

This is never directly presented as a contributing factor to Why He's Like That. It isn't presented as the fulfilment of some oath he swore on his murdered father's grave. In fact, it's almost the inverse- you only find out about this when he briefly mentions it as part of the extremely curated, self-aggrandizing backstory that he's giving you as part of an extended sales pitch. It's a curt mention- something that happened, an explanatory factor in how he and his mother wound up in the care of the Followers. A figure he has to account for in telling you his life story, because as an outsider you aren't going to fall for the "Son of Mars" routine. But not something terribly important besides that. Not something with a place in the mythology. Definitely not a loss or absence that's meaningfully impacted him in any way going forward, because the Mighty Caeser is of course totally above such petty concerns.

That digression aside, the point is this- it's comically easy to imagine the version of this story that leveraged these exact backstory details, unchanged, to paint a picture of Caesar as a brooding antihero, making the both-sidesing rampant in the fandom textual. There's probably some Conan-style grim-and-gritty sword-and-sorcery rise-of-a-king epics out there you could seamlessly slot him in as the protagonist of (the man himself reads Grognak comics.) There are the bones of an unironic self-satisfied ultramasculine power fantasy rattling around in there, the shrewd modern man who uses strength, guile and modernity to dominate his lessers, a hard-man-making-hard-choices, the whole process a masturbatory tract in favor of whatever ideology the infallible Great Man Protagonist chooses to embody. This is a kind of story, in science fiction, more often than not a grotesque one. And it's clearly the kind of story Caeser thinks he's the protagonist of. But Hank Morgan this fucker is not. And I'm intensely grateful that the narrative refuses to let him get away with pretending that he is. At the end of the day his army is wearing football gear.

[bibibbon]

something that i can’t stand when it comes to this fandom is that basically no one can wrap their head around the fact that a victim can also be an abuser.

yes, rei was physically and emotionally abused by endeavor. yes, she was literally sold to him.

but she also just completely checked out and left fuyumi to pick up the slack.

yes, it’s not her fault that the abuse caused her to shut down, but as a result of that she neglected her children.

after she left fuyumi had to raise her brothers and become the woman of the house.

again, at the end of the day the root cause of the abuse is endeavor, but rei had checked out even before dabi's death.

it’s not victim blaming to point out the fact that rei neglected her kids. victim blaming would be saying that the abuse she suffered was her fault.

sometimes this fandom can be so fucking braindead. it’s always black and white, good or bad, hero or villain.

there is not a soul on this earth who is 100% a pure and good person.

all might, knowing full well what one for all contained and the massive responsibility that came with it. including an old wrinkly guy who will stop at nothing to take it, to a child and then proceed to not tell the aforementioned child what he was getting himself into. he with held crucial information because he knew that if he told izuku everything there was a chance he wouldn’t take it.

on the flip side, no one is 100% evil.

dabi cares deeply for the league, even though he doesn’t show it. shigaraki is literally the only person he will take orders from. some people may think he showed everyone hawks killing twice just for more ammo against the hero's. but thats not true at all. he cared about twice, and he wanted the world to know who he was. he wanted the hero’s to know that twice was human.

again i’m fucking rambling but i just hate how this fandom can be allergic to nuance and critical thinking.

I do think that many people do want a simple answer because at the end of the day it's easy to root for the good guys and boo the bad guys. There's also the fact that the narrative itself does sometimes struggle in creating a proper grey space morally.

Take for example the abuse victims in MHA. A lot of them are straight up innocent perfect heroes victims like izuku (who can never feel resentment in the narrative) and shoto while the others are straight up villains like Dabi and shigaraki. There's no in between with these characters and it's annoying. I remember talking with @mikeellee she has her saying of Shigaraki being the dark deku which honestly after that chapter where izuku comes into contact with a evil version of himself makes more sense.

I do agree with you in the sense that no one is 100% good or evil and in a way almost everyone is a victim to hero society. All might did willingly give a quirk that has a big responsibility to a naive quirkless child and all might is a bad mentor. However, at the same time all might is also a victim to a society he contributed to creating which is honestly so ironic and I wish horikoshi would explore these aspects of all mights character yet he doesn't and just gave us iron might (I dont like iron might tbh).

Also I love the fact that you brought up Rei himura and honestly Iam a big advocate for giving rei a redemption arc since it would of been more interesting and it would actually make sense to give her one than giving enji todoroki one. Rei was a victim and yes motherhood is difficult especially with the fact that she was abused and stripped of autonomy or agency but she also wasn't the best mother and that's something she does recognise in the narrative. My main problem however, is that the narrative doesn't allow her to fully engage with the family and she doesn't do much about it. Yes she apologises to both shoto and touya but what about her other children?!?! What about fuyumi who had to take on the role of a mother and shoulder a huge family burden? What about natsou who was also neglected?!?!. I say by giving rei himura a redemption arc the series can do so much that being actually involving the entire todoroki family into this, having more introduction to the hospital arc that may connect both touya and Rei and you can also have Rei make a connection with genten as @nyc3 suggested.

However, this also applies to the flip side. Characters like twice, shigaraki and Dabi aren't completely evil. Yes they have done bad things, yes they are bad people but they are also victims of the hero system and hero society. I do think that the leauge is a bit underdeveloped and I did definitely want more development between Dabi and shigaraki's while frenemies fiasco going on.

In the end I do think that almost every fandom may be allergic to nuance in one way or another. I do actually mean this because I remember seeing people try and say that Eren Yeager is completely good while some tried saying that he is completely evil but in reality he is complex and layered. You really can't put a definitive label on the aot characters because they all did their fair share of good and bad things and that's what makes them well written and enjoyable.

[emblemxeno]

Honestly, the thing I hear so much of on Reddit FE is how much more "consistent" 3H is than Fates and how bad Fates's story is, and I'm like... when? Fates is infinitely more consistent in regards to its theming and consistency with how the characters' motivations clash with each other, while 3H feels inconsistent as hell! Fates wanted you to be curious enough to dig beyond a surface level and understand the whole picture! 3H didn't even expect people to play beyond their chosen route! Fates wants people to be willing to understand beyond their world and empathize with the other side, 3H wants to feed you a specific fantasy that it never challenges, subverts or breaks out of fear of incuring the wrath of people so emotionally immature they see any kind of portrayal as them not winning for the right inputs as a failure on the game's part than their ability to read into context.

This is something that, especially in hindsight, really bugs me with Odovakar. I'm done thinking about him for the most part, but one of his biggest capstones was that Fates told you one thing yet showed you another, like that was one of the biggest sins of the work. When... the dissonance was intentional in a way that actually interconnected between various snippets and details to construct a bigger picture, it never wasted a single line of dialogue to illustrates how fucked up the situation with the Nohrian royal family was! The siblings and their dead kin were forced into a death game and only four survived, with the good King Garon being warped from a reasonable figure into a twisted revenant with dementia who's not even a character so much Anankos impersonating as him! Everything in Fates's economy of details expects you to be paying attention and looking into things enough to get the full picture, and so many people are so bad at media literacy with games that they just cannot comprehend the story telling them something if it isn't spoonfed directly addressing the player! It's INFURIATING!

It's not a failure of Fates, it's a failure of people's willingness to use their imaginations and infer what's going on with the story and its world beyond what's being explicitly said using visual and detail clues for the full picture, this is what they literally teach in media literacy classes! And what do you think pisses me off the most? The storyline of two kingdoms full of good people being engaged in a pointless war where the Avatar has to side with one family of his or the other or risk everyone he loved dying, or a story that coddles and never challenges the notion the player has that they're always correct and justified in what they do even as we see blatant contradictions in the narrative just from subtext alone? 3H gives a comforting lie that's well explained, Fates gives an awful truth it expects you to get. And in a killing blow for any kind of comprehensive media analysis and what ruins my faith in the "hardcore" FE fandom, they choose the comforting lie because it's "executed" better... even when it really isn't, it just presents itself in a way that's more superficially appealing to people. They see the forced, unskippable scenes of your classmates talking about things where they really do not have any purpose in contributing to the scene other than the game shoving them into cutscenes and reminding you of their depths without having to do any interaction, then they see the mentions of pointless lore fluffings for things that don't matter, they soypog, and then they leave.

FE has always been about the humanity, love and emotions of the soldiers you control and learning to understand them better through social interaction and the camaraderie that overcomes hatred. It's always been about love, empathy and kickass swords. 3H is about so antithetical to the heart and soul of the series that I'd legitimately be less mad if it was its own series than trying to make FE into something it never was, but the hardcore fans want it to be, because I sincerely think they don't actually like this series, they just like the feeling of winning and being rewarded for the "correct" inputs as if FE isn't fundamentally a subjective experience in terms of gameplay and RNG and it being one of the most "use whoever" RPGs in existence. Unfortunately, those same fans are so belligerent and smug they basically control all forms of discussion in pretty much every dedicated FE fandom that isn't Tumblr, Mastodon or AO3. I've spent years of my life feeling isolated and shut out despite wanting to gush about this series to other people, only to be told I wasn't "admitting" Fates was somehow bad or that I had bad taste or whatever. It's insane how ass-backwards the fandom is, and 3H's cynical pandering to the group so terminally uncurious they refuse to actually see beyond their perspective and understand the world they play in being so dominant and toxic and centralizing is something I will never forgive that game for.

I don't think that it's where FE is destined to head. Intelligent Systems clearly gets the heart and soul of the franchise, and they have been at odds with the hardcore fandom in that respect almost ever since the start of Awakening. There's a reason why IntSys wasn't happy how popular 3H turned out to be, and that's because it's so against the core of their spirit ethos that I fell in love with. And if that ends up being the direction the series takes, I will never in posterity enjoy another FE ever again, especially when these hardcore fans represent so few among them compared to the majority of people who pick up and play these games.

Consistently awful maybe, OHHHHH GOTTEM

But being serious for a second, you're right. 3H at it's core is inconsistent, deliberately so at that. There one connecting theme of that game is "we have differing ideals" which is a fancy way of saying there isn't anything else.

Differing ideals is good for minor character subplots. It's the pathos behind the entire Camus/Tragic Loyal General archetype. But IMO it's not at all substantial when looked at with further scrutiny, because then you realize the game isn't saying anything. Your main character is a silent self insert whose main goal is supporting the actual main character in 3 of the 4 routes, all of them being dedicated to muddying any kind of moral, social, or logical coherence.

You're fighting Edelgard but she's not that bad! But also the other three factions are against her so we need a contrived excuse for why they aren't working together. And also we can't have Rhea be active in the plot anymore because that'd require quicker turn arounds on our mystery plotlines. And also we need to legitimize Edelgard's points on the church sometimes and never comment on the elephant in the room that she's invading two other nations because I guess that doesn't actually fucking matter.

Like, see where I'm heading? All of this stuff should be salient but it's treated as something to brush aside because there isn't a core to follow anywhere!

Fates had a core, mostly because Corrin was written with great intent and his character was crucial to the message of the game, that endless war and violence is foundationally nonsensical and destructive, and it should not be the norm.

There's an entire small country in Fates where it's so rock solid on anti-warring policy, that the two major countries respect it! Like, Izumo is a blip in Fates' overall narrative linearly speaking, but its autonomy is given more respect than any fucking major nation in Fodlan. The ELEMENTAL TRIBES have more respect given to them than Faerghus or Leicester.

3H's plot is essentially intricate character moments stuck together by extremely logically inconsistent and morally questionable chewing gum found in the gutter. And the character moments aren't even that much better than what was found in previous games!

And I agree, 3H's plot is kind of antithetical to FE as a whole. Which isn't to say that I'm scornful to anything that tries to be different, but it's the fact that 3H sacrifices cohesion and the basics of persuasive/captivating storytelling that irks me.

I'll never understand how people are so enthralled, because to me, characters having neat backstories backed up by well written prose does not make up for the glaring issues everywhere else. In fact, it only makes it seem worse than it might actually be.

[qm-vox]

Ancient Evil Survives - Liches In D&D

(Art of Vox-Tan by Domochevsky. Yeah I used my avatar for the lich article, my hubris is without limit and there is not weapon you can turn against me that I will not eroticize.)

Liches are one of the most iconic D&D antagonists. They are arguably more famous than copyrighted monsters like the Beholder (whose spread into fantasy in general has been greatly hindered by, uh, litigation), more representative of D&D's "brand" than fucking dragons, and more used as antagonists than any other "kind" of single-entity monster with the possible exception of vampires. Liches are also, appropriately, old, first appearing in known genocide enthusiast Gary Gygax's home games, except they're also even older than that, with true roots in the sword-and-sorcery stories that greatly influenced Dave Arneson and Gygax. The image of an ancient, moldering spellcaster, gone insane with the passage of time and possessed of power lost to memory, is appropriately eternal. Liches lurk in the dark places of every setting, steeped in their own malevolence, traps that spring shut upon the unwary, the unprepared, the weak, and the arrogant.

This article's title is sourced from, of all things, the build confirmation of the Lich from Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos. It would not be possible without the research contributions of Afroakuma, my eternal partner in these endeavors, as well as Matt Daley, gralamin [sic], @criticaldiplomacyfail, DragoonWraith, Nekoincardine, and Vhaidara. It needs content warnings for child murder (yeah, we're starting there), insanity, loss of the self, possession, normal murder, desecration of dead bodies, touching on sexual assault (related to the possession), mind control, and violence, just, so much violence.

One final note on terminology. The word 'phylactery' is generally used to describe the vessel that guards a lich's soul, without which they cannot return to unholy life. I will be using 'reliquary' in its place. It is entirely possible that known incompetent Gary Gygax chose a word he thought sounded cool to describe this, but given that Gary fucking Gygax was also a known fanboy of both the Crusades and fucking genocide, I am not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on using a word strongly associated with Judaism for his evil spellcasters that literally kill babies. If you have some objections to this, then in my usual spirit of debate I invite you to go fuck yourself. This is not a point upon which I am entertaining debate, nor am I available to be persuaded upon this score.

Now, without further ado...

Beasts of the Sword Logic - Liches Through the Ages

Liches are nearly as old as D&D itself; they appeared both before and after BECMI, became entrenched during AD&D 2e, and have only become more used, more iconic, and more entrenched ever since, especially as early in 5e's life cycle known videogame voice actor Matt Mercer centered the first campaign of Critical Role on his depiction of the ascension of Vecna on Exandria. Their specific details have changed remarkably little through the editions of D&D, but their deployment and narrative role has changed quite a bit, and they have influenced works beyond D&D that have hit far larger audiences who then absorbed expectations about liches that were first set up by Arneson and Gygax. So let's play the oldies, shall we?

Pappy Badtimes - OD&D <--> 1e Liches - Liches showed up early in D&D. As best as Afroakuma can discover, the first lich was actually what would later be called a demilich, an enchanted skull left behind (more on this later) by the entity which would later be named Acerak, in the Tomb of Horrors. In that particular infamous adventure, the lich functions as a sort of trap, in which the PCs have their souls stolen before getting their asses beat into the ground should they be stupid enough to disturb the lich. This would become something of an ongoing theme; the second-ever lich, and the first one to be named, is a gentleman called Asberdies who lurks behind an illusory wall in the side area of a dungeon and attacks if he senses spellcasters. Man opens with time stop, this is just a trap that Kills You. Asberdies begins the tradition of liches as you understand them today, which were initially presented with the following description:

("LICHES: These skeletal monsters are of magical origin, each Lich formerly being a very powerful Magic-User or Magic-User/Cleric in life, and now alive only by means of great spells and will because of being in some way disturbed. A Lich ranges from 12th level upwards, typically being 18th level of Magic-Use. They are able to employ whatever spells are usable at their appropriate level, and in addition their touch causes paralyzation [sic], no saving throw. The mere sigh of a Lich will send creatures below 5th level fleeing in fear.")

This depiction of the lich is almost certainly from the story Sword of the Sorcerer, part of the Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman series by Gardener Francis Fox. D&D was strongly influenced by this genre and we know Gygax read it; further, this story is where we get the use of the Old English word 'lich' (itself derived from a nearly identical Proto-Germanic word), which was used to mean 'dead body' and can be found in archaic phrasing such as 'lichyard'. This depiction plays all the later hits - incredible magical power, a frightful presence, paralysis (albeit not by touch), and is distinct for sharing the basically-a-trap nature of the "inactive" lich. Our man here would really like to just chill out being mostly dead, and awakens to answer social obligations to other magicians, a thing he doesn't like doing but has enough honor and courtesy to do anyway.

However, there is notably something missing from this depiction of the lich and its successor in BECMI. I don't blame you if you haven't spotted what's gone, since I gave so little description to begin with - it's their fucking reliquaries. This iconic, some might say essential, component of the lich was not part of its first two iterations, three if we wanna count Acerak as a separate one (him being a demilich and all). The reasons for this are pretty simple and easy to point at; those incarnations of D&D were much closer to a skirmish game, hewing towards their roots in wargaming, and as a result a need for recurring enemies or recurring villains was pretty low. And if you wanted your lich to show up again, well, it's already a powerful Magic-User, dude can just cast teleport like a normal Magic-User, problem solved, right? This attitude was influenced by D&D's roots in wargaming communities, to be sure, but it was also heavily influenced by tournament play which used to be a thing. I've touched on it lightly in some other articles but legit folks used to go to like, tournaments with cash prizes and scoring systems, and as a general rule being the last man standing, slaying enemies, and getting treasure got you a good score. When you might end up being in the same module multiple times in one night as a result - this is also where the random tables come in, by the by, to add an element of difference to each run, an aspect which would go on to define a game called Rogue you might have heard of - you just really do not care why the lich is there. You care that he TPKs the party and you're not winning a thousand dollars.

The BECMI version of the lich was broadly similar. It continued the idea of the lich as an essentially passive force ("A lich is not normally found wandering, but instead remains in or near a very well-defended lair.") while explicitly enhancing certain aspects that were, previously, kinda logical extensions but not official. For instance, the BECMI lich explicitly carries around "4-5 magical items in case of trouble" which the DM is instructed to select, rather than roll for. These liches are noted to have 1-2 spells permanently cast on themselves ("most often detect invisible or fly) and to keep their lairs well-stocked with minions, but joining the party here temporarily and only coming back sorta in 5e is a summoning table, which enables the lich to call other powerful undead to defend itself - including vampires that may themselves be Magic-Users or Clerics! Here we have the lich not only as a sort of trap (although, yeah, they're still that) but as a genuine boss fight, the culmination of a dungeon or a dangerous entity from which to flee in an exciting action sequence.

In the edition generally thought of as 1e, we finally get the reliquary. This lich actually pre-dates the use of the word 'phylactery'; indeed, their reliquary has no formal name, and is instead referred to in Dragon Magazine as the object they will "jar" into via the spell magic jar, which will be a formal pre-requisite of lichdom from here through 2e until affairs change again in 3.0. Now, for those of you joining me from D&D 5e as your first edition of D&D, I need to introduce a concept here; a lich's reliquary did not sustain them on its own back in the day. Instead, for this version of the lich, they required access to their own corpse in order to return to life, and it had to be close to their reliquary. If they didn't have access to their corpse, another would do, but those corpses got saving throws to resist being taken over by the lich, and the lich could only return in a "wightish" form with greatly reduced abilities - potentially, even without spellcasting - essentially meaning they had to go on a corpse run like a damn MMO character. Now, this is where I need to interrupt myself to introduce another concept here.

You see, turning into a lich doesn't turn you into a lich.

Becoming a lich is a multi-stage process. In the first stage, one drinks the potion I've been alluding to above; this "prepares" you for lichdom. Later on in 2nd edition, this stage of lichdom - where you are prepared but not actually dead - will be named 'lichnee'. Now, to be clear, you are on a bit of a fucking clock at this point. Your body is not healthy or pleasant to be in and you sure did chug a shitload of arsenic and magical poison alongside, and I do not hesitate to repeat this, several quarts of human blood, you really just went for the forbidden lean. After, I cannot stress this enough, after you drink the potion, then you create your reliquary ("the object the lich will "jar" into [via magic jar]") using a slightly modified version of the magic item crafting rules. Notable here is that "no charm will make the lich candidate reveal where his jar is!" and that planar boundaries and imprisonment cannot stop the lich-to-be from returning to its reliquary upon its first death. So you're a lich once you die, right? Wrong.

The lich-to-be's life force returns to their reliquary upon their first death. At this point, the ideal situation is that the lich-to-be's original corpse is within 90 feet of their reliquary, and they can possess it and become a lich at last. If this is not possible, any corpse that has been dead no longer than exactly 30 days ("from a mouse to a kirin") will sort of do, causing the lich to rise with "no more than four hit dice" and, if the corpse could cast spells in life, the ability to cast up to 4th level spells. The trick here is, the corpse gets a saving throw, which, if it succeeds, prevents the lich from possessing that corpse forever; only their own corpse can be subjected to repeat attempts. No eligible corpses within 90 feet? Sucks to suck bone boy, welcome to imprisonment within your reliquary, please enjoy slowly pickling in your own madness, unable to communicate with the outside world, while your mutilated soul degrades and you end up in the afterlife anyway! What an excellent decision has been made here.

If, if, there is a corpse in range that fails its saving throw and the lich possesses it, they must track down their original body - in whatever state it's in - and then EAT THEIR OWN CORPSE, at which point they slowly change form into a corpse-like version of their original self over the course of about a week, and are, at last, a lich. Given all the risks and rigamarole involved, most people who aspire to lichdom quite smartly kill themselves (thereby possessing their own corpse and skipping the transformation) after their preparations are made rather than risk having to go on a fetch quest for their fucking bodily autonomy.

Mind you, every time they return to the reliquary they gotta do the fetch quest anyway. And it does get worse; these 1e liches cannot gain experience points. They cannot level up. They cannot change which spells they have memorized. Furthermore, reducing them to 0 or less hit points fully destroys the lich! Like! Instantly! They just fucking die! The most they use their reliquary for is the ability to return to it on their turn as their whole turn, at which point they're on the fetch quest again and they lose one (1) whole character level with all that entails.

Being a lich in 1e fuckin' sucked y'all.

That said, the news isn't all bad. The lich's reliquary was shockingly protected, being unable to be located by means less than an actual god, standing incarnate in the world, within 100 fucking miles of the reliquary, casting the spell locate object. Further, all pieces of the lich's corpse "emanate locate object with an unlimited range", though actually getting to them is still the lich's problem to solve. While "teleporting" to your reliquary (see: yeeting your soul into your fucking jar) costs you a level and leaves your original corpse on the floor where you gotta go find it and eat it again, no force can gainsay that teleportation - you'll always live to die another day, unless you've managed to fuck up enough that you were first level again to begin with. Which, while we're here, wild to contemplate that one might encounter and have to somehow deal with a degraded lich well below its former power level! That is not a thing that happens any more!

Which seems like a good time to segue into what fighting spellcasters in general, and not just liches, was like. 'Cause, y'all 5e folks? You have not the faintest comprehension of how good you have it. Much like the lich I am, permit me to discard my mask of human courtesy and become an old man yelling at the youngbloods; that whole 'concentration spell' thing you're used to? That's new. That's extremely new. 11 years old in the canon of D&D, that's nothing, that's a flash in the fucking pan. You roll up on a lich any time before the release of D&D 4e (or in Pathfinder 1e, which hews to 3.5) and that bony mother fucker is coated in buffs and defenses, unironically he just wakes up every day or detects the living and they do this with no edits other than the spell names. Take them by surprise? They cast time stop and then do that anyway. So they have a lot of defenses, right, okay, surely the pain train stops there IT DOES NOT; these liches (and, again, all spellcasters) don't have concentration slots for offense either. That lich casts wall of stone? That's an instant, permanent wall of stone forever, which you cannot dispel and must instead deal with for the entire fight. Lich casts banishment? Sucks to suck bitch, you're out of the fight and the lich is gonna do that again to someone else next turn. Control effects like Evard's black tentacles are set-and-forget, spells like flesh to stone are permanent save-or-die effects, and this is on top of any damage-dealing spells the lich might want to cast, you know, for fun, and their magical items, which they own and use. A lich by itself is a powerful solo encounter that could easily be the culminating boss fight of an entire campaign, and uh, it's not going to be alone for long. That summon table and the various summon spells have some thoughts about whether or not this fight comes with adds (the thoughts are "yes, yes it does"), and by Nerull those adds are gonna suck for you. The lich is already evil and its soul is already kept from the afterlife, what's a demon or fifty between friends at that point? And, not to leave this unsaid, if you can't completely destroy the lich before its turn comes up, it goes back to its reliquary and you get to do this again. Easier, every time, sure, but how lucky did you get the first time? How lucky are you feeling next time?

"Alright Vox," I hear you saying. "This is when you open a quote with dialogue from a strawman reader and reveal that there's another layer you haven't even talked about yet." And to this I reply: fool, I'm saving that for later in the article! This is when we talk about what these early depictions of liches contributed to lichdom, and uh, well, not to say the obvious thing but: lichdom. Lichdom is what they contributed. Every iconic piece of lichdom starts here, and while the bits change, their presence never truly does. These early liches very much favored a sort of inactivity, in which the lich is basically minding its own business and you personally stick your dick in this toaster, either on accident or, for many adventurers, on purpose. Not to leave this on the table at all, liches as villains were essentially absent at this stage. The first villainous lich was introduced already wholly destroyed, in fact, and was relevant only as backstory for powerful artifacts that he left behind before the final annihilation of his soul. You might have heard of him - he was this greasy little shit going by the name Vecna? I'll leave you to chew on that while we move on.

Once More, With No Feelings - AD&D 2e - AD&D 2e barely changed the lich at all from the 1e model, and why would it? There were, however, some refinements. The exact process of enchanting a reliquary changed, the recipe for the lichdom potion changed (including a titanically awful specific requirement which, for my sanity and yours, I will both not explain and presume to be an editorial mistake), nothing major there. Newly major, however, is that any corpse a lich possesses is the lich; the "wightish body" is gone, as is the lich losing power as it returns to its reliquary. Getting even worse, the lich now returns instead of being destroyed when reduced to zero hit points - you gotta track the box down, and you can't wear the lich down over many successive victories. On top of that, the passive defenses of the lich, the things it gets from being a lich at all, have a longer and more robust set of immunities, including immunity to many kinds of weapon attacks. Notable here, however, is that it costs 1 level to become a lich at all. Also notable is that the reliquary can take any form, so long as it is made of inorganic material and prepared properly via magic. This idea, that the reliquary can be literally anything, will be carried forward into all forms of the lich hereafter. That said, the reliquary also lost its incredible passive defenses, and now requires that the cautious lich actively take steps to protect it while also keeping it near a supply of recently dead corpses.

However, where AD&D 2e differs from its predecessors is a greater interest in liches from both the adventures and the novels, setting books, and other such materials. Nearly every famous lich in D&D gets their start here; Vecna becomes the lichgod and eventually God of Secrets, Larloch enters the canon of The Forgotten Realms at this time, Azalin makes a splash into Ravenloft as the immortal fascist dictator of his own Domain, alhoons (mind flayer liches) become a big deal, dracoliches enter the canon for the first time (more on them later). Many of these liches are still classically inactive, but a few regularly interact with the living in one way or another, and so here we have our first villainous liches, motherfuckers who want something and believe they can have it and enjoy it while being undead. They are, you see, wrong about this, and that's the joke that would be much funnier if it weren't for all these stacking corpses. They still weren't employed that way a lot in adventures, still being used as traps or incidental encounters, but the prior activity of these inactive liches is now a much more important element, and one players can potentially use to avoid a fight, acquire a dubious ally, or even attempt to outwit the ancient spellcaster. The Forgotten Realms was and will continue to be notable in the arena of lichdom because of the background element of Netheril. Now, you may have heard of Netheril while playing hit CRPG Baldur's Gate 3, but I wanna stress here that back when those jackoffs were flying the peaks of mountains around and doing doughnuts in the parking lots of the gods, your pappy and mine Jergal, LORD OF THE END OF EVERYTHING, was god of death, hatred, tyranny, murder, the hunt, fascism, cannibalism, the dead themselves, and even more. The Netherese rightly took one look at that guy and went 'I must never die' and just shat out an infinite supply of undead spellcasters whom you can plop into any adventure at any time for any reason. Add one to your game. Hell, add five! There's plenty to go around!

I Feed On My Own Fire; None May Harm Me - D&D 3.5 - My hat to Abbadon (Kill Six Billion Demons & Lancer) for the quote; it was too good for this not to steal.

Finally, a lich I can just give you a link to! First we need to talk a bit about some design technology from 3.5; you may notice "lich is an acquired template" in there. What's a template? How do you acquire one? The short version is that templates, at first, helped formalize a great deal of monsters or monster-adjacent things that a player could become, which could be used for diverse villains/antagonists, or both. Liches, certainly, but also half-fiends, celestial creatures (ex. a bear but from the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia), werewolves, etc, etc, etc. To make a creature or character with a template, you make a normal version of that creature, then modify it in the ways laid down by the template. In the case of liches, this meant that the Dungeon Master made a spellcaster as if they were making a player character (this being 3.5, mirror matches were a common and accepted action; the idea was that players and enemies used nearly the same rules, though Terms And Conditions Fucking Apply to that statement), and once they were happy with that character they would apply the effects of the lich template, which would change things.

So, what changes, what benefits is lichdom giving this person? Ignore the reliquary entry at the end, we're getting there. On the lich page that I linked you can see that the lich has kept its deathly, paralyzing touch, though now it deals negative energy damage (necrotic damage is the closest idea for you 5e kids). It has its fear aura, it resists Turn Undead, and any weapon damage not dealt by a magical bludgeoning weapon is reduced by 15 points before any other resistances, such as from spells. Additionally they're immune to cold damage, immune to electrical damage, immune to hostile shapeshifting, and immune to mind-affecting attacks (so no charm, no suggestion, no hold person, no mind-affecting illusions, nothing, all attacks on the lich's mind fail automatically). Pretty sick, right? Oh, but dear reader, we're not fucking done. Take a gander at the laundry list of immunities provided by the undead type for me. You see all that shit? Good, so do I, and it's fucking terrifying. Rogues can't Sneak Attack a lich, critical hits do nothing to it, it can't be turned to stone, level drained, or have its mind or body weakened in any way. Nearly everything you normally use to make a caster stop operating is off the fucking table, forcing you to have an actual-ass wizard duel with this ancient evil - and just like 1e and 2e, he is very, very able to stack buffs, engage on his own terms, escape whenever he feels like it, summon as many adds as he pleases, use all his magical items and, oh right, killing the lich doesn't weaken or hinder it in nearly any way.

You can scroll down to the reliquary entry now.

When you kill a lich in 3.5, it simply reappears near its reliquary in 1d10 days. No corpses, no range limit, no needs of any kind. It loses any items that were on the body you killed, for obvious reasons, and while that's not nothing it's definitely not enough; the lich is gonna be back with its full complement of spells, any items it keeps in its lair, and some serious beef. Your only way out of this is to either convince the lich to cease its attack on you and/or your bloodline and/or your entire lineage of teaching and/or your nation and/or your species, or to pierce the defenses around its reliquary, find the thing, and destroy it. And then, if you're unlucky, you also have to fight the lich again - destroying the reliquary doesn't kill a lich currently in a body, just traps it in the current body and makes it vulnerable to destruction, and now you're on a clock to stop it from building a new reliquary and, oh yeah, it's definitely not being talked out of fighting you now. Good luck fuckers.

Also new to 3.5, and continued in Pathfinder (though swiftly abandoned by 4e and 5e) is the idea that any spellcaster, not merely wizards and clerics, could become a lich. To become a lich you need to be able to take the Craft Wondrous Item feat (available once you have a caster level of 3 or higher), "be able to cast spells", and have a personal caster level of 11 or higher. What's a caster level? It's a sort of derived score that represents how good you are at the fundamentals of magic, and which determines several things about how your spells interact with other spells, the power scaling of your spells, as well as certain options a character can or cannot take. So, who all qualifies under that? Well, the list includes, but is very much not limited to: bards, clerics, druids, paladins (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order and then taking the Blackguard prestige class), rangers (via Practiced Spellcaster or Sword of the Arcane Order), wizards, sorcerers, members of the assassin prestige class (via Practiced Spellcaster), beguilers, warmages, healers, hexblades (via Practiced Spellcaster), duskblades, shugenja, wu jen, warmages, warlocks (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), spellthieves (via Practiced Spellcaster), factotums (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), shamans, artificers (via Precocious Apprentice or Magical Training), the NPC class adept, and that's not even getting into building a lich that dives deep into prestige classes that can make them even weirder than me speed rapping a bunch of character classes you've never fucking heard of.

And lest this go unsaid, while the full flower of lichly variety never bloomed, they were, indeed, extremely varied in their official publishing. Not just in adventures or as NPCs, though yes, liches in 3.5 got wild, but in terms of player support! You might, for instance, be going "a druid lich sounds like a contradiction", but the supplement Libris Mortis published options specifically for undead druids (and they were metal as hell). Bard liches were published as campaign villains, and that's not even touching the lich-like but not-lich antagonists such as the Worm-That-Walks. While the sovereignty, the full flower of the Sword Logic, of these liches is one of their greatest thematic and mechanical strengths, I very much do not want to undersell the sheer variety of them. If the DM has an idea for a lich, they can probably make that lich! The only real limit is that only "humanoids" can become liches, so no like, giant liches, no gnoll liches, no hag liches, none of that, and while in some senses that's a bit of an absurdity and a loss it is in keeping with the prior, iconic forms of lichdom. It's not as if D&D doesn't have a history of creating special liches that other people don't get - balenorns and dracoliches come to mind here - easily justifying a different tradition of lichdom for other peoples. Mind you, at that point you're doing homebrew, which means you're doing the designers' job for them, but, well, welcome to D&D. The designers haven't been doing their jobs since the 1970s. Expect more on these topics in a later section.

Drank The Kool-Aid By The Jug - D&D 4e - We return, once again, to the most honest edition of D&D. Like with most things, 4e had a divide between liches as monsters, and liches as player characters. On the monster end, lich was a template (this is gonna keep coming up) that could be applied to any monster of 11th level or higher with an Intelligence of 13 or higher that is able to cast a ritual calling upon Orcus, Demon Prince of the Undead. You might notice those requirements are very open, and indeed 4e took that shit and ran with it, introducing in its lore and adventures dracoliches, an aboleth lich, dryad liches, and new varieties of lich such as the void lich from the Far Realms. These liches had an aura of necrotic damage, regeneration that was shut down by radiant damage, the ability to add or substitute necrotic damage for other kinds of damage, and of course they return from their reliquary within 1d10 days. Due to 4e being 4e, the defenses of these reliquaries was far less insane than in older editions, and the liches themselves, while terrifying tactical encounters, are not the beasts of ruin and woe that they once were in comparison to other monsters or PCs. Hell, 4e let you fight Vecna and kill him, far more easily than any previous incarnation of Vecna except the 1e one that came pre-dead for you.

On the player end we have the Archlich Epic Destiny. I'ma post a screenshot of it here, and then summarize it. I don't know how to do image descriptions on this fucking hellsite and even if I did I'm not transcribing the whole fucking thing, my apologies in advance.

Archlich is an Epic Destiny, a path your character can take towards the end of their career. While it is technically only open to arcane casters, multiclassing in 4e means that it's very easy for a caster of any other kind to become an archlich. It plays a lot of the hits! You have a reliquary that sustains you (and even rescues your items when you die, a first and last for liches), you gain some undead resistances, you can deny death once a day, get your spells back, and radiate a deathly aura that you control so that it doesn't hurt your friends. Put like this it doesn't sound terribly impressive, but honestly for 4e, this is a rock solid choice both in narrative and mechanical terms; narratively, the idea behind Archlich is that you have been seeking a means to sustain yourself that is not controlled by Orcus, and you finally found it, permitting you to finish the great business of your life in safety and then retire as a sort of guardian of the world, becoming a recurring NPC for all future campaigns.

D&D 4e runs sideways with the sheer variety of 3.5's liches; the idea of liches having incredibly varied "class features" is all but gone, but in exchange lichdom is now anyone's game, provided you're stupid enough to look at Orcus and think, "would" or you're a player character smart enough to look at Orcus and think, "this guy is bitch made". The ease and simplicity of adding the lich template to a monster in 4e can't be beat, not before or since, but where this vision is weak, it's weak due to 4e's own weaknesses - a certain genericness to the setting, a de-emphasis on player characters and monsters as members of the living world, and a general weakness in the arena of non-combat roleplaying. So...I guess we need to talk about Pathfinder.

Majoring In Necromancy And World Domination - Pathfinder 1e - So the thing about liches qua liches in Pathfinder is that they're just the 3.5 liches. Mostly. Note there that "any living creature" that can create the reliquary can become a lich, which kicks down the last of 3.5's closed doors and opens lichdom up to anything that might be interested, which Pathfinder certainly ran with - among other things, named liches in Pathfinder include a cyclops and a hag. By this move, Pathfinder elegantly combines the strengths of the 3.5 lich with the strengths of the 4e lich and creates an arena of lichdom which players intuitively understood to already be the case but which was, in fact, not the case; I am handing Paizo a rare unqualified W on this one. But since the mechanics are nearly identical, we must then ask the question: what is the lore on liches in Pathfinder's only setting, Golarion?

Differing vastly from all prior liches, and all current liches after it, PF 1e and PF 2e both posit that lichdom does not have a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, every spellcaster who seeks to become a lich must research and perform a ritual that will only work for them uniquely. This isn't a case of like, reality only has so many slots for lichdom so you can't repeat someone else's ritual; instead, it balances on the idea that because every soul is unique, you require unique tools and surgeries to mutilate your own soul enough to become a lich. You can get the help of someone who has already become a lich but the base problem is still irreducible; it's less learning how to become a lich and more getting your PhD in necromancy, essentially. Though every ritual is unique, all are quite fucking evil; the least collateral damage of the canonical lich rituals involved torturing 13 dryads to death and the body count & atrocities only go up from there. Strangely for Paizo, no dead children on the canonical list except by implication (the massacre of an entire city), which is oddly restrained for them and a rather distinct difference from liches at AD&D 2e and backwards.

This, then, is the great strength of Paizo's liches, which welds them to their role in Golarion. Not only is each lich unique, but the kind of people who become liches must be willing and able to pro-actively harm others, and therefore have some goal beyond lichdom which requires it. These liches are motivated actors in the world, each one a particular villain who needs to be fucking dealt with and whose schemes will unleash atrocity, corruption, and harm on a staggering scale. That this makes lichdom of ironically limited utility to them is engaged upon, and worth engaging with! They have become beasts of the Sword Logic and then discarded nearly every advantage gained thereby, putting themselves into conflict with "lesser" beings that motivates those beings to find their one weakness and attack them through it. The end result is extremely striking and potentially unique and involved campaign villains, though here Paizo fumbles the ball a bit; its liches are rarely deployed as long-term antagonists in its adventures, instead used as a problem within a specific section. Meet the lich, fight the lich, find the reliquary, done - they're sidequests, essentially. But the potential, especially for the big-ticket liches who get their names in the articles and sourcebooks? Oh, it's there. Yet again, rare Paizo W, as much as I physically loathe saying it.

Holes In The World - D&D 5e - 5e's liches retain the fiendish connection from 4e, though while it is "often" Orcus, it doesn't have to be. This means that these are all people who made a fantastically bad choice for themselves specifically who are on the hook to an evil power. I'm not gonna lie, I despise this aspect, the more because it conflicts internally with what 5e says liches are like - sitting in tombs like the liches of old, rarely emerging when reminded of memories of life, and otherwise not bothering people. Like, I dunno about you, but if I am a demon lord I'm not letting my pet 18th level wizard sit in a hole doing nothing. That man has work to do.

So, what are liches aside from slaves to demons? Well. For the first time, they're Wizards Specifically, that is a new thing 5e did that I also don't like. 5e would later attempt to solve for this problem by introducing creatures like the Deathlock as cognate to like, Death Knights, but I'll be real, I consider this an error and I am not pleased or enthused by Tumblr posts out here trying to make a lich equivalent for every base class. Their actual statistics and abilities fall in line with classic lichdom, albeit downgraded; they are now resistant to cold, lightning, and necrotic damage, they retain their classical immunities (with their damage resistance being upgraded to all non-magical weapons), they have a paralyzing touch, they're 18th level spellcasters off the Wizard list. New to the lich is being a Legendary creature, giving the lich a pool of actions it can use at the end of other people's turns, including a terrifying gaze (same idea as the fear aura, but it works on any one person at a time), an AoE necrotic blast, and just spamming even more fucking spells at you. Getting better, liches also have Lair Actions, making facing them within their dominions even harder, including the wild-ass ability to bond with a victim and force them to share half the damage the lich takes. Cruel! I love it! Rejuvenating from their reliquary is once again 1d10 days, no corpses required, and I honestly do not anticipate this changing in official lich stat blocks any time soon.

Ecologically, these liches are the least sovereign they have ever been. To sustain their undeath they must regularly capture people with the imprisonment spell, sending the victim into their reliquary where their soul is devoured over the course of 24 hours. As fates go, it's horrific, but it also means that the difference between a lich and a wight with a spellbook becomes even smaller; Peepaw is hungee, and if he doesn't get his snacc he dies. This further conflicts with the written role of liches as sitting in the bottom of dungeons, which, I wish I could be surprised, but I can't. 5e's early writing had a lot of...this, really, which I am extremely willing to lay at the feet of Jeremy Crawford (managing editor). The buck stopped at your desk, Jeremy, the fuck were you doing? Meditating on the dreams of twink supremacy you would bless 5.5 with? Like I'm not complaining about the twink supremacy I just wanna know why you had to do my grandpa this dirty. Small, but perhaps worthy of note, is that these liches build their reliquaries first, then take the vile lich potion that contains the soul of a sacrifice. The 'lichnee' concept is well and truly gone here; the forbidden lean just fucking kills you immediately, at which point you become a lich. Which. Mood. Send me some of that immortal sorcerer HRT, I'm tired of this fleshly bullshit.

So, what does D&D 5e bring to the table of lichdom? A boss fight. For all the terror and power of older depictions of liches, they are, ultimately, quite similar to fighting any given spellcaster - just tougher and you get to do it again and again until you smash his collector's edition Dune theater cup. If you wanted to sell them as unique and dramatic that was entirely on you, the DM, to paint a picture with your words and do the goofy voices. This is no longer solely on you; the addition of Legendary Actions and Lair Actions really cannot be over-stated in terms of how well they make the lich fight feel unique and dramatic, how they bring out long-standing but little used abilities (the paralyzing touch in particular hasn't been rolled as an attack on purpose in the entire history of lichdom until 5e), how they sell the idea of a lich's place of power and make a potentially final confrontation in the lair in which it keeps its reliquary a desperate all-or-nothing fight. That isn't to say that you should run liches solo with no backup, the action economy does not respect the laws of dramatics, but it makes the lich the absolute centerpiece of the fight, especially as it interrupts the flow of combat to bring forth fresh horrors upon would-be heroes and turns the tide with its powerful magics. This design technology is worth stealing for any depiction of lichdom you care to hold forth on, and I heartily endorse doing so.

Hell Is Full - Pathfinder 2e - There's not a lot new to cover here in terms of NPC liches; the ecology and mechanics of lichdom are basically unchanged since PF 1e. They're still unique beings, still motivated to scheme against and assault the living, still up to schemes to take over and/or destroy the world, all that jazz. There's just this one thing. This one little thing going on. Barely even worth talking about. Tiny thing.

Player characters can become liches in Pathfinder 2nd edition. I would like to personally invite James Jacobs to huff my nuts. Man threw a bitch fit about people wanting to play undead characters for all of PF 1e and all of Starfinder and he finally had a real adult tell him that he sucks and can fuck off. Oh glory FUCKING be!

For a player character to become a lich, they need to take the Lich Dedication Feat. This requires them to be able to cast 6th level or higher spells via spell slots, to craft a soul cage (quick aside, I did not suddenly pick a different word than 'reliquary' - the Paizo writing team abandoned 'phylactery' in favor of 'soul cage', a move I heartily approve of), and to complete their unique ritual of lichdom. In exchange they get a host of benefits for being undead and for being a lich, albeit slightly nerfed for game balance reasons. I understand the logic - player characters and enemies have different roles in a campaign, and therefore different design needs and concerns - but it does create a ludonarrative friction where like, you as a lich will always be a secret second lesser kind of lich that isn't quite as resilient as a 'real' lich. To be clear, this isn't a D&D 4e situation where there's a non-evil path to lichdom, this option is only open to absolute mother fuckers, but, y'know, those can be PCs sometimes? It's fine? I am here for it, and I am eating.

Notable here on the ecological end for both PC and NPC liches is that a lich deprived of its soul cage is not immediately destroyed, but does begin to degrade and will eventually become a demilich, losing much of its power. As long as the soul cage is intact, the lich revives within 1d10 days as has become normal, no need for further input. However, all undead in Pathfinder 2e, liches very much included, have an "undead hunger", a hollow place in their ontology which they need to fill with something. For wights it's souls, for ghouls it's flesh, and for liches it's...knowledge. Peepaw has a serious book addiction and if he doesn't get his fix he's attacking the kingdom so he can snort the entire bibliography of Fabio. More seriously, this is also the kind of thing that compels these liches to go on adventures, to conduct magical experiments, to engage in classic cartoon villain behavior (ex. "it will be interesting to learn your pain threshold"), and the like. I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, it means that the average lich has reasons to not be a sovereign thing, and therefore to participate in the living world. On the other hand, it means that the average lich has compelling reasons to not be a sovereign thing, damaging the thematic resonance of them as beasts of the Sword Logic that need nothing and no one, and yet are galled, needled, aggravated by their single weakness into realizing that they are not, in fact, perfect and removed from the real reality they foolishly thought to escape. More on this idea later.

Wearing Their Parents' Clothes - Warcraft - Surprise motherfuckers! I'm not going to stay here, or return here, but given the significant interchange between D&D and Warcraft, and the way World of Warcraft influences fantasy gaming - doubtless many 5e players started in WoW well before 5e even released in 2014 - it felt intellectually dishonest to leave them out of the conversation. My hat is off to my friend Drake for additional lore here, though my primary focus is on liches circa the events of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos and Warcraft 3: the Frozen Throne.

So, what are Azerothian liches? They are the specific creation of the Lich King, and the majority of them began their lives as orcs. Well. I say "began their lives", but the thing is, the timeline between the invention of the lich and the present is less than 20 years. Orc liches are, statistically speaking, at their oldest Your Grandpa, and human liches are even younger! Hidden lore revealed by the Lich King taught them spells of frost and cold, and as undead spellcasters they favor magic that kills, decays, and blights, but at the end of the day these dudes like, just finished grad school and turned into fucking bones. World of Warcraft would later introduce reliquaries for its liches, which feature in raid fights against them, as well as expanding their skill set to fold in the abilities of the Necromancer generic unit from Warcraft 3, but man, I really cannot stress this to you enough. Your average lich on Azeroth has been a bone dude for 10 years or less, and 'or less' is winning that fight by a lot.

So, what does Blizzard do with the incredible, mind-boggling youth of liches and undead culture in general? Nothing. Fucking nothing. If you tilt your head and squint the wild-ass decisions of the Forsaken (themselves extremely traumatized by their murders and subsequent undeath) could be blamed on their youth but honestly I am not about to be out here giving Blizzard that much credit. There is a huge well of untapped potential here! Lichdom was the consequence of a literal invading army of literal, actual demons! It was taught and spread by a dude who worshiped a suit of armor in a frozen throne that ran the undead as a loose hivemind! Undead as an idea are barely older, first introduced by the invading orcs during their war against Lorderon and the Alliance, and people were still grappling with that when the Lich King decided to play his funny prank with the granaries. And aside from the temporal horror of being invaded by your own dead loved ones...we don't...get a lot about this. And that's a bit of a let-down to me. What do the survivors of Lordaeron think about these incredible changes to their understanding of the magical world? What is it the temples in Stormwind preach about the unexpected discovery that their holy magic is particularly effective against the undead? What does that mean to the Forsaken? What compels someone to attend Scholomance? I dunno. There's a lot of potential here, and it's potential you could maybe bring out in your own depictions if you have an interest in portraying liches not as an ancient evil, but as a new technology whose motion is only now beginning to blight the world.

For All The Marbles - D&D 5.5 - Mark your fuckin' calendars y'all, 5.5 hard swapped to 'spirit jar' over 'phylactery', calling itself all the way back to the original 'jar' terminology and finally doing a really basic 'don't be a dick' move. It also comes with a sample table of jars for your lich that honestly has some pretty metal ideas, with my personal favorites being 'the first magical item the lich ever created' and 'the skull of the lich's mentor'. Our liches here are arcane casters and specifically wizards (with a special rule that lets them attune to magical items as if they were wizards for prereq purposes), who utilize a variety of powerful spells that evidence 5.5's newly-focused concern on verisilimitude; your 5.5 lich comes locked and loaded with detect thoughts, prestidigitation, scrying, and, within her lair, unlimited uses of clairvoyance per day - all spells that influence the lich as a boss fight not at all, but which give them remarkable versatility as NPCs and sell them as forward-thinking, ancient spellcasters.

That said, the actual boss fight(s) are fucking terrifying. Rolling in at CR 21 as of the standard stat blocks, these liches have returned to their ancient D&D origins as unholy terrors whose mere presence is a sign that you have done fucked up. They remain resistant or immune to many forms of magical damage in addition to having counterspell and shield once per round, unlimited times per day. Additionally, liches in 5.5 have Truesight out to 120 feet, rendering them de facto immune to illusions and other forms of high-level stealth in addition to the aforementioned information-gathering spells that mean the lich has a very high chance to know what you do and what you're about before you ever breach her sanctum. Get into melee? The Deathly Teleport legendary action says no, but the lich can also stay in melee and use her new Multiattack option to paralyze 3 people in a single turn 'cause fuck you - oh, and then she teleports out at the end of your (paralyzed) turn. Also in the legendary action toolchest for the lich is off-turn fear, scattering the party unless they've specifically defended themselves, and finally Disrupt Life as the lich's second-strongest but most consistent blast, laying down 9d6 Necrotic within 20 feet of the lich once per round, every round. Don't let her wear you down - the lich has power word: kill prepped once a day and she's itching to use it, and for those situations where you're out of range there but she might want to gamble anyway finger of death is also locked and loaded.

Oh, and one last thing. One last little thing. Hardly bears mentioning at all. Permit me to quote Page 196 of the 2025 Monster Manual for you: "Inevitable Siphon. Whenever a Humanoid dies within 1 mile of the lair, its soul is immediately consumed by the lich. A Humanoids whose soul is consumed this way can be brought back to life only by a true resurrection or wish spell."

This fight is for all the marbles. Don't fuck it up.

So, what did 5.5 write for the narrative end of liches? They didn't, thanks for attending.

Okay, no, I can't do that to you, as funny as it would be. Unfortunately it's not entirely a joke; almost all of the lich's entry is spent describing their aesthetics and giving potential candidates for their lairs, but very little is spent on who becomes a lich, how, why, or why liches are solely arcane casters. The situation here is so fucking dire that no explanations or theories are even given for why the lich is devouring souls. This, broadly, is a weakness of the 5.5 Monster Manual in general, which provides a very light overview of uh, everything, alluding to older lore but attempting to keep itself lightweight and moving forward, but for an edition of D&D that is for the first time in literal decades most concerned with the player characters being real things in the game world, it's bizarre that the NPCs just kinda fucking aren't. Additionally, it inherits 5.0's weaknesses in this arena - PCs cannot become liches, and liches have lost the breadth of origin that they had even back in their original incarnations where they could also be Clerics. Any attempt to reinstall such things is going to be a lot of effort on the part of the DM and/or play group.

Now that we've journeyed deep into the crypts of Full and Complete Context, I can write the actual article! Will I make that joke every time? Don't you already know the answer to that?

The Lords Of Shrouds - Liches In The World

This section is going to deal in the various ways liches exist in the world of the game; who becomes a lich (and why), the psychological and ethical effects of lichdom, the advantages and obstacles of lichdom, and varieties of the lich that have been published through the ages, along with a brief refutation of undead that are kinda lich-like, but ultimately are not liches. Let's start this off right, shall we?

Taste The Kiss Of Death - Becoming A Lich

So you may have noticed some shade being thrown at liches up above. Some of them, like the early liches, seem almost nakedly not worth the cost; others, like the 4e and 5e liches, involve sticking your dick in a blender and praying that the demon who owns the blender keeps it on a low setting (they won't). So why become a lich? What is so appealing about this idea that presumably very intelligent, wise, charismatic, or all three, people keep making this choice? Walk with me.

My Constancy Assured - The first, most obvious, and most alluring aspect of lichdom is that it halts and in many senses negates one's failing body in a way that is nearly unique amongst the undead. Liches do not have an animus, the negative energy equivalent of a soul; instead, they use their own soul. They mutilate it, yes, they harm themselves, but they don't die in a metaphysical sense, and they are not overwritten the way vampires are or replaced the way wights are. To be a lich is to ensure continuation of the self, and to be destroyed as a lich is no worse than dying already would have been since, you know, you were evil in the first place and therefore at least a little fucked (terms and conditions apply). But permit me to step outside metaphysical concerns and call in a targeted airstrike on my own position and, based on my circle of friends and mutuals, also yours.

To be a lich is to have a body that stops failing you.

That degenerative spine condition that's afflicted you with chronic pain your entire life and made the simple act of walking down the street an unbearable trial? It's gone. That leg which healed badly after a childhood injury, it doesn't hurt any more, and it bears up your weight. Your Parkinsons is cured. Blind eyes see once more, your cataracts cleansed by the tincture of death. Chemical imbalances that lead to depression are lifted as you become a thing that no longer uses a brain to think, giving you a clarity of mind represented in the many editions that give liches bonuses to their mental ability scores upon transforming. Nerve disorders, gone, paraplegia cured with one sip of the forbidden tonic. Never again will you need crutches, or a wheelchair, or a cane, never again will you have to ask someone else to fetch something for you from within your own home, never again will you have to so much as don a pair of glasses. You have remade yourself within death's fires and emerged as something whole, freed of the shackles of flesh that was ill-made for you and lifted high, so high, above the agonies of life.

Compared to this, being free of physical needs seems almost petty, but it's not nothing. A lich does not need to eat, or drink, or sleep, or breathe. All of the frailties of a mortal form are removed from them, freeing them to pursue their interests and desires without pause, to chase their thoughts without interruption, to work and experiment and seek their leisure as they so wish. The base act of existence no longer costs you money, or labor, or time. You are sovereign in yourself, freed, at long last, from having to ask and to answer for your own life.

A World Of Toys - To be a lich, sovereign in yourself, is also to be at a remove from society, from the living world, to be above it and aside from it, able to observe from the outside. If you have something within it that you treasure, you may now devote your time to its upkeep and constancy as you so wish, far more safely than you ever could as a living thing. What does it mean to you that you might lose this body delving into a deadly dungeon so that you can fund your son's inheritance or donate to the orphanage that once sheltered you? It's just a body. It's probably not even yours. Sacred places can be kept up, through labor or, later, through servants. You can read every book that catches your fancy, and many more besides, experience any culture you so choose, learn whatever languages you wish, travel to other realities, walk along the sea floor and witness what no mortal thing can even imagine. For classic liches, being undead isn't even an obstacle to enjoying the succulent pleasures of life; through magic jar, the lich can possess the willing (or the unwilling, let's be real, you killed 1-4 people just to get here, what do you care) and remember the rush of life through their bodies. Vampires, the mewling things, are so romanticized for their ability to fuck, for the eroticism of feeding, but a lich can taste a new dish, walk in the sun, feel a raging river, bask in a storm, take a lover, even bleed and die, all at no danger to itself. And when life grows wearisome, their volunteer or victim gets control of their body back, assuming it's intact, and the lich returns to its work and its passions satiated.

And the lich does all of these things from a position of supreme safety. Even a scraping mage who spent their last clipped copper simply to become a lich is now in a position to create and defend their hidden lair. Even without access to powerful magics such as move earth, your body is stronger than ever, more resilient than the living ever could be, and you feel neither pain nor weariness. You can dig your tomb with your bare hands if you have to, or even just if you feel like it, and design it until it fits the precise image in your mind. This done, you can defend, conceal, and customize it however you wish! Perhaps it might start a bit bare-bones if you aren't skilled in magically creating objects or physically creating them, but you'd be surprised what tedious work people will pay money for that even the most incompetent wizard can get done. Sign on for a few years as a lumberjack, cloaked in illusions; take bounties on monsters or to cull overpopulations of animals. Make lace and crash the fucking market like Christopher Paolini is writing you, who cares, it'll even itself out. Once you have money, which will never vanish down your belly or into medicine bottles, you can pay for higher-quality work or, for the truly forward-thinking, people to train you how to do that work yourself. You, and you alone, dictate the terms on which you engage with the living world, and few are those who could even detect you. Fewer still, those who can gainsay you.

My Works, Completed - Much hay is made over liches having access to dark and forbidden knowledge. It's not wholly inaccurate; lichdom is, in fact, dark and forbidden knowledge, after all, and further the relative safety and surety of lichdom changes the game when it comes to, say, rolling a demon and pillaging his library while your minions beat the shit out of him. For those inclined towards taboo knowledge and secret power, lichdom positions one well to seek it, and for those with the foresight to not rob demons, it gives one a strong basis for more peaceful negotiations. However, this is far from the only opportunity to continue one's work.

To be a lich is to have time. Endless time, with which to pursue the things which speak to your soul. Many are the lich-priests who essentially exist to manage a theocracy, to preserve holy rites, or to teach ancient lore - indeed, the benevolent balenorns are often created to do precisely this! A lich can make for an excellent guardian of a sacred place or a vista of untouched beauty, a benefactor to a family, culture, or faith. The research a lich commits to can, and often does, advance the understanding of magic in the world, and nothing compels the lich to advance only cruel and evil magics (indeed, many liches end up as unsung innovators of magical creation simply to avoid having to leave their lairs). If a mortal lifetime is not enough to truly understand your gods, why not take two? Twenty? Two thousand? When an immortal who has wronged you would have outlived the mortal you were, how delicious will revenge be when they realize that your constancy lies assured? As a lich, you will never die with the works of your life unfinished. Even something so daunting as writing the complete history of the fallen empire from which you once hailed is simply a matter of patience and ink. Behold a reach that can never exceed your grasp.

We Cannot Be Not!People - Consequences Of Lichdom

Quote sourced from the Celt, from her discussions of Glitch: A Story Of The Not by Doctor Jenna Moran.

It's not all upsides. Afroakuma stated, during our discussions on the topic of lichdom and while he was sourcing the information for the earliest liches, that "all forms of immortality are self-mutilation of some stripe". So too is it with liches. Many are under the impression that they understand the cost; they can draw the diagrams of their souls and detail each cut that will let them fit into a reliquary. They have ideas for their defenses and secrets well before they ever brew the potion that will transform them. An inability to be openly themselves amongst their own people or nearly any other? Lichdom appeals most to the lost and the lonely, this seems hardly like a cost at all.

But there is no escape from being a real thing in the real reality. No escape but a true death, in any event. The following section deals in the consequences of lichdom and common reactions to them.

Entropy & Alienation - Okay. This is gonna be a big ask from me, the writer, to you, the reader. I am on my hands and knees begging you to journey with me to a mental world that the majority of you would otherwise dismiss out of hand, and I need you to consider it soberly. Okay? Please. For me.

Turning into an 80s metal album cover is not the plan going into lichdom, nor is it generally considered a feature or a positive by prospective or, indeed, current liches.

While exceptions exist (and have been published), lichdom is mainly a blueblood's kinda game, either through having old money or, y'know, lots of new money (say, from being an adventurer). Though a certain amount of misanthropy and disregard for other people, outright arrogance even, is significant amongst those who seek out lichdom, they're not like...wizards in a box who only care about wizard things? They have status, they have hobbies, they have social, political, or military obligations and the accolades earned thereby. Even in 5e, the most narratively confused of all liches, it is noted that most liches are dressed in "rich, though rotting, garments". These are people who see themselves as having great dignity, making a choice for their own well-being or research or ambitions, and quite a few go to great lengths to preserve that dignity. The lich may well arrange for a contingent gentle repose on their own corpse to preserve it during the transformation process, and magic makes it easy to mend, repair, sustain, and even replace their garments. A simple prestidigitation, which costs negligible or even no daily resources depending on edition, can keep your regal fashion intact as if brand-new for the entirety of your undeath.

So why do they rot?

Few liches understand what they're getting into when they assure their own constancy. Removed from mortal needs they are also removed from all the little things the living use to understand the passing of time. A lich who sits down to have a serious think about something will never need to use the bathroom, eat a meal, scratch an itch. Its bones won't get sore, and its eyes will never grow weary. The classic image of a lich simply sitting in a throne doing nothing until adventurers cross its eyeline (and sometimes not even then if they're willing to neither bother nor rob the lich) isn't like, undeath afflicting the lich with lassitude, that motherfucker is just real deep on some magical equations and has been since before your species lived on this continent. But you know what does run out and require one to bestir oneself to fix? Preservation spells. Enchantments to renew one's dead flesh. Perhaps the lich spends decades, even centuries, making an effort anyway, but at a certain point, why bother? You never leave your tomb, your only visitors are tresspassers, and illusions are so much more convenient if you need to go outside for some reason. Your rotting body doesn't hurt you, and at some point in the war between dignity & self-respect on one side vs. ambition & annoyance on the other, ambition and annoyance win. In that moment, the lich loses something it may well never get back, or even understand that it has lost. They let their flesh decay, they write in their tomes while mold and mushrooms blossom in blackened organs, they start burning up bits of muscle that fall onto the ground rather than restoring their body, and eventually they become the undead beasts others expect them to be. Why bother? Why care? It's only a body.

It's probably not even yours.

The Madness Of Ages - Liches are not, usually, insane. I want to stress this. If they are, generally they were dealing with some shit to begin with, and do not experience new forms of madness or trauma merely for being liches. However, there comes a time when the isolation and apathy of lichdom stands in well for a dangerous disconnect with reality, and much like their rotting garments it is the result of neglect. When was the last time the lich left its tomb? Learned a new language? Checked in on the state of the world? When this undead sorcerer begins speaking to you in the tongues of devils it is rarely because he is so steeped in evil that he refuses to use Common, it's because the last time he knew "Common" it was called Netherese and people were still building cities on flying mountain peaks. Its conception of manners and courtesy is equally ancient, and its understanding of geography may misunderstand the shape of the coasts, the locations of cities, and whether or not there's a mountain range there. The madness of ages only serves to further isolate the lich, as time spent correcting these problems is time not sitting in their chair having a nice high-quality train of thought, and as the living become a bother and pursuing the pleasures of life through possessed victims becomes boring the internal incentives to do so dry up. Liches are not mad, and yet in their ossified sanity they are more dangerous, more unpredictable, than madmen could ever be.

Banality & Futility - Young liches die a lot, either incidentally or permanently. These are the liches still putting in an effort, whose business with the world involves those who are still living. They may have grand ambitions to take over a nation, petty revenge they are prosecuting, or simply be bellied up on their own constancy and unable to understand that their sovereignty is a lie they told to themselves. This is the most common form of the "active" lich, a dude who isn't even one (1) full elf lifetime old who, after displaying the cold arrogance to sacrifice the lives of others in order to sustain his own, believes he is entitled to power or, worse, that his reign would be beneficial for the simpering, lesser people blessed by his boot upon their necks. Here's the thing.

What is it that even the most vile, depraved lich uses power for?

No, really, I'm asking. Are they going to...build a huge harem of concubines? That seems like a non-starter. Build a gigantic palace to their own glory that they could never, ever, use as their actual lair because it's too obvious a target? Take time away from their research and contemplations to govern - and if they did, to what end? You got to this position by not giving a shit about other people in the first place, to their detriment, and now you cannot so much as lounge in a couch being fed grapes by topless elves unless you kidnap someone else to use their body to do it with. The ambitions of these young liches are self-defeating, a form of denial-meets-temper-tantrum about their new state. It is telling that if they don't end up permanently destroyed (and given how high-profile these schemes tend to be, they end up destroyed a lot), these liches generally abandon their schemes, often without comment, certainly without any intention of coming back except, perhaps, to use systems left behind for their benefit. An ancient lich who once founded the empire your character was raised in isn't still the empress, she owns a damn gem mine so she can show up every 25 years and collect spell components.

It turns out that when you don't care about other people and separate yourself from nearly everything you have in common with them, power kinda sucks to have. Power for its own sake is already an exercise in futility, but for the lich it is also an exercise in denial of their condition. All of the rewards for being a despot are off the table. Even a lich who's emotionally or intellectually obsessed with unethical sadism is going to find that it's easier to just kidnap random people from across the planet, never learn their names, and then put them in the torture machines. And the thing is...most liches are not those liches. They're more or less ordinary assholes who don't think much of or about other people who now confront the eternal, grinding drill of the banality of their own evil. They are not bestirred to help others, or to harm them; they are not interested in making a mark on history except perhaps through their obsessive ambitions, and once those run out, what're you going to do. Conjure a new obsession out of nothing? For the average lich, the only thing keeping them undead is the faint, yet not absent, fear of true death. Few indeed are the liches who can come to peace with their own amortality, and even amongst those luminaries of undeath there is always time on the world's side. They'll give in, eventually. They can't fight it forever. And in the meantime they steep in their own pathetic evil, cut off from the wonder of the world not through malice but through simple apathy, no better than the venal bandits and muggers they imagine themselves so removed from.

There Is No Escape - Let us imagine, for a moment, that you are a lich in the model of D&D 3.5. You are a sovereign being, removed from all need and nearly all weakness. Your reliquary will generate new bodies for you no matter how often you are struck down, and it needs nothing to do so. Your soul is not degrading; you experience no hunger, nothing even remotely cognate to a survival need. You are a thing which feeds on its own fire, asking nothing and answering no one.

Quick question, Dread Master - where do your spell components come from?

Maybe you don't need many material components; there's feats for that (in 3.PF) and arcane foci (in 5e), but uh. Your undead minions require expensive onyx, and that doesn't mine itself. Diamond dust for stoneskin neither mines itself nor grinds itself. Living creatures, blessedly, do die on their own without any intervention on your part, they're very polite that way, but y'know, for some reason their corpses don't deliver themselves to your door? That magical item you're making, do you think the wood logs itself, the metal mines itself, smelts itself, forges itself? No? The ink for your scrolls, spellbooks, and tomes, does that make itself - hell, does it keep indefinitely on the shelf? For that matter, the parchment required for scrolls and spellbooks - parchment specifically - do the sheep raise themselves? Do they slaughter themselves? Treat their own hides for you? The quills you're writing with, do the birds simply fly into your lair, shed their own feathers, and then cut them into a useful form? If you want a pen instead, does that make itself? If you use undead minions to get this done, do they feed themselves or raise themselves from the grave? Okay, living minions - do they pay themselves? Are they immortal the way you are? Will they always listen to you? Well shit, okay, let's try extraplanar - are the dao of the Great Dismal Delve going to give you shit for free? How about devils from the Nine Hells of Baator, they doing charity work lately? Celestia isn't even returning your calls, that's a non-starter. Maybe you try to enslave a djinn, that surely doesn't have any history of ending badly but, oh yeah, she still needs things too, and worst of all these extraplanar forces still see you as a pissant mortal.

Say you try to stockpile resources early in your lichdom, put off this problem for as long as you can. You pile gold, gems, metals, high-quality items suitable for enchanting, tools, books, and furniture in your lair. Congratulations, you are now dragon-bait the same way dwarfholds are, and Dread Master, let me tell you, dragons are high on the list of things that give you pause (though admittedly, you are high on the list of things that give dragons pause). Okay, what if you set up an institution instead, you found a school of magic or a support system for ranchers or something. That needs upkeep, not just in the sense of money (which you can't make from nothing) but in the sense that you need to check in with them pretty regularly to make sure the institutions are still serving you as well as keeping up elaborate fictions of your identity so that you can draw from them without bringing attention to your undeath. Well shit, okay, maybe being a despot won't get you the usual rewards of despotism but at least you can openly have an entire kingdom feeding your lab and you can get people to mostly run it for you, right? No, wrong, do you have any idea how much even the most hands-off king gets fucking bothered every single day? That's even worse than being the silent partner of the entire sheep industry!

The sovereignty that you have purchased through blood, darkness, and pain was and is a lie. You are not freed from the living world, nor can you be. There is no escape. There never was any escape. You have done this to yourself, and in exchange you have gotten nothing. Nothing. At. All.

Dead Inside & Out - Active vs. Inactive Lichdom

Liches can, broadly, be thought of as being in one of two modes. An 'active' lich is in the modern vein; this is an undead villain proactively attacking the world in some way. It might be for world domination, for revenge, for godhood, some ancient racist crusade that's on levels of Van Helsing Hate Crimes that the modern adventurer can't even begin to understand, whatever; the lich wants something, and they're trying to get it. Conversely, the traditional 'inactive' lich is the guy sitting in a tomb, though balenorns, lich-kings, and the like also tend to fall into this role. Let's talk a bit more about them

Some Serious Chair Time - Inactive Liches - As noted above, the inactive lich was the first lich presented in D&D, and also tends to be the lich most in harmony with her lichdom. These are the folks sitting in their thrones having a nice long think about magical theory, the nature of the divine, or what have you, but they're also balenorns serving as what are essentially undead park rangers (when they say 'don't feed the bears' they mean it, though blessedly you're more likely to end up teleported away with a geas to not come back than you are, say, to have your soul stolen - they're balenorns, after all), lich-priests managing theocracies, elders of the sahaugin who embrace undeath to preserve the histories of their people, and the like. As you may be noticing, this means that inactive liches don't necessesarily need to have no contact with the living, and indeed even the guy in the tomb has that 'you need material to do stuff' problem I explained above. Rather, they are characterized by long periods of inactivity, a hands-off approach to interacting with the living world, and/or specific, special roles in their societies that mediate their semi-regular interactions with the living. These liches tend to be the calmer, more mature, and more self-aware of the two broad varieties; they have had time to make peace with their undeath, and though the madness of ages is upon them and they are, not to put too fine a point on it, evil, they rarely represent a rampaging malevolence.

So why use an inactive lich in your campaign? There are a number of reasons. The classic inactive lich is great as a sudden sidequest or one-off encounter, one which might be resolved through might, magic, mayhem, or diplomacy; the players are in a location for some other reason, and a lich is also there, either because it is her lair (or her lair is attached to it) or because it has something she needs. These liches make for excellent dubious allies if approached properly, who may have a use for or interest in adventurers - perhaps the party wizard could be tempted by an apprenticeship to the Dread Master, or a Cleric might be stunned to encounter an undead creature whose relationship to their own god seems so shockingly different to their own (this one is great for Clerics of more neutral-aligned gods like Mystra or Azuth). An inactive lich might own an item the party desperately needs, or if you like giving your players rope to hang themselves with, one they simply want very badly. An inactive lich needs no foreshadowing, no prior justification for being in the campaign, and if you decide you've made a mistake by including them their separation from the living world is a convenient ripcord to pull any time you like. Certainly having to make a new lair is annoying, but it's probably not the first time. It might not even be the hundredth.

Screams Of The Undying - Active Liches - Active liches are those who are a threat to the living or possibly the entire world. These are the dudes trying to make a planet of the dead, take over a kingdom, kill a god, whatever. And they're clowns. You may have noticed in my arguments above that being an active lich solves a couple of lich problems (the madness of ages, the inevitability of dealing with the living world, etc) by more or less giving up all of the advantages of lichdom in favor of being a particularly resilient spellcaster. This is their strength and their flaw, and the flaws far outweigh the strengths; by being tied to the living in this way, the lich attracts enemies by the score, and even their victories will only create more enemies. Unless this motherfucker actually ends all life he is going to have groups of 3-8 traumatized orphans with class levels after his reliquary forever, and even a world of undeath is no protection when you remember that the undead have forever to hold on to a grudge against the bitch that killed them. Despite these problems, which become rather obvious when one sits down to have a good think about them, the active lich is far and away the most common in modern depictions of lichdom, and yet even in the relative thoughtlessness of the people pushing it (IT'S PAIZO IT'S ALWAYS FUCKING PAIZO IT IS PAIZO EVERY GOD DAMN TIME) we see some themes emerge. These liches tend to be 'young', they became liches to become particularly resilient spellcasters, and they tend to not grasp the futility of their goals. Power doesn't do anything for a lich! They get no rewards from having it or exercising it! They are, at best, hollow things, the undead version of your Elon Musk or Robert Moses who seeks what they cannot have with tools that will never give it to them.

The advantages of an active lich in one's campaign are obvious. They are powerful, motivated villains who are difficult to destroy and have had decades, centuries even, to figure out their esoteric plans. Even in a more mundane kinda goal - taking over a kingdom, say - tools like magic jar, imprisonment, various illusions, and RAISING THE FUCKING DEAD make the lich himself a particularly esoteric threat who can easily generate mysteries, puzzles, and full-scale war. But they are also, ultimately, very intelligent and driven morons whose activity is a raging scream of denial about this thing they have done to themselves, which will reap them no rewards, which cannot make them happy or even content. For a player group inclined towards diplomacy, there's a powerful, Fallout style social game one can bring to bear against these liches, turning their own dissatisfaction, hypocrisy, and double-think against them.

Callous Cruelty - Liches And Alignment

One day I will do that alignment article and then it's over for these hoes.

So, I'ma repeat something here for my argument. With limited exceptions - there's the balenorns again - becoming a lich generally means you're evil in the first place. Putting a human sacrifice and a shitload of poison into a blender before giving it the big chug is not one of those things good people do, no, not even if your virginal human sacrifice is a fucking incel. You have devoured the life of another to sustain your own as an act of selfishness and disregard for the other person, and it only gets worse as you move forward in time when ideas like soul devouring get introduced. "Hey why are you getting ahead of the idea of finding an acceptable target to sacrifice for lichdom" buddy let me tell you, I am extremely sympathetic to the idea of destroying my enemies and taking their shit, but that is not what's going on here. It comes up in the discourse a lot more often than is fucking reasonable.

The thing is, for most liches the kind of evil that motivates them into lichdom evidences the problems that liches have well before they become liches. They are distinterested in other people or actively contemptuous of them; they see the needs of being a living thing in a society or a culture as, at best, an ongoing annoyance, and generally as an indignity beneath their station, talents, or intellect. Misanthropy is common albeit far from required; the belief that anyone would become a lich if they could and you're just ahead of the curve is certainly conducive to lichdom, but one doesn't need to hate other people to find the 1-4 murders necessary for you to become undying. All you really need is to either find them to be less important than yourself, or already be primed by prejudices and other biases to consider some of them acceptable targets, and lemme tell you, that's not hard to find.

Exceptions exist, of course. The clown motherfuckers who become active liches are predisposed towards malevolence and cruelty, or at least a bitter envy and entitlement that can stand in just fine for malevolence and cruelty, but for your traditional liches this is the original problem which will inform the evil to follow. Liches are rarely active threats to the world, and often do not bother being cruel as such. Rather, their indifference towards other, less sovereign beings manifests as a callousness that can do duty for cruelty just fine. A lich may not bother killing a failed experiment to create new life before recycling it into the flesh pits; why go to the effort and waste the spell slots when it's going to die anyway? A lich might use an item such as a mirror of life trapping as a passive defense in its lair, reasoning that it can interrogate prisoners at its leisure, and never think twice about the existential horror the victims are subjected to. Ironically, killing intruders with spells like finger of death or wail of the banshee is more morally neutral; motherfuckers did, in fact, break into the lich's house, start stealing his shit, and then - in all probability - threw hands. To fuck around may be human, but to find out is divine. But this, too, is rooted in callous apathy, a symptom of the lich's alienation and sovereignty.

So what if a lich wants to stop being evil, or a PC believes they can get a lich to stop being evil? There's a lot of ink spilled on this subject. In Pathfinder 1e, Paizo spends quite a bit of page space in their dedicated lich article about how lichdom 'warps the soul' and even those going into it with theoretically good intentions are turned irrevocably evil, which is a deeply weird thing to spend a lot of page space on when, again, the least evil lich ritual in PF 1e involved torturing thirteen people to death. I would like to reject this premise. Instead, consider: getting a lich to care about other people, the first step towards a lich becoming a good-aligned person, does not actually necessitate that they become a better person. Let us ignore for a moment all of the vast incentives the lich has to continue to not give a shit and take it as given that a compelling argument for going outside to touch grass has been made. A lich wields vast power, incredible concealment of its nature, and is a civilization-level threat to the average society by itself. If you get a lich to believe that an evil empire must be stopped, that man is not walking into a courthouse to persuade people of the injustice of the law. He's going to start murdering cops and he's only gonna stop when there are no more cops. Alternatively, he will seek connections to the world which do not disturb him overmuch, which we see in Larloch of The Forgotten Realms. Larloch is a famous and classical inactive lich, a being of evil whose callous cruelty can be most succinctly expressed in his spell Larloch's minor drain, and homeboy has a whole second lich in his employ whose job it is to take down Larloch's words on the history of Netheril. Larloch and this assistant record vast and intricate tomes on the life and culture of people history has forgotten, hymns no longer sung to gods that no longer live, art that burned in the flying cities, the peasants and smallfolk ground into dust by their wizard masters, and they do it because they sincerely believe they have a duty to history and the world to ensure that those people are remembered, and that the world know that they lived, and died, and that it mattered. Not to leave this unsaid, copies of these histories are then delivered to the libraries of the living, notably to include Candlekeep, so that they may be read and understood. This upwelling of compassion and the feeling of duty to truth has not made Larloch less of a piece of shit! It is very much compatible with him being a piece of shit! People are complicated and evil people don't get mystically simplified just because they're evil.

If you can solve that problem somehow, really talk the lich around into taking some ethics courses, maybe learning modern Common, really go The Good Place on his undying ass, there are still some obstacles. Though previous editions lacked mechanics for this, narratively a lich is supposed to still be degrading, requiring either pillaging the souls of others or increasingly elaborate magical protections and remedies to sustain their immortal fire. In 5e this is explicit; a lich must consume souls, an act of pitiless evil that cannot be justified. This isn't so much a problem with becoming a more ethical person in and of itself - as already discussed, being a lich doesn't automatically make you a worse person than you were to begin with (which, admittedly, is a pretty bad fucking person) - but rather represents the closest thing these liches have to a survival need. Your lich, in seeking to be a better person, faces the death he's been avoiding for aeons. Maybe he spins the wheels a bit for a few centuries, feasting on demons and the like - they're very convenient targets for soul-stealing - but if he stays on his ethics grindset that turns out to also be deeply unethical, and then the lich faces a few choices. Self-annihilation is the most obvious one, and a lich dedicated to ceasing their own evil may well pursue it. For those who wish to finish the business of their life, ceasing to be a lich via wish or divine intervention might possibly be options, but they're risky and they definitely put you back on the path towards a true death. For most, ascension into a greater form is the only true exit, either via divinity or by becoming an astral being, more on that when we talk about demiliches later. Both options take immense amounts of time and effort, and in the case of becoming a god the lich either has to attack and defeat a god somehow - no light task even for an immortal archmage - or seek sponsorship from a deity both willing to uplift them to the heavens and who is compatible with the lich's newfound ethics.

The exit doors are all kinda scary, aren't they?

The Obituaries - Lich Variants

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed that I, just now, brought up the idea that liches degrade and wonder why it didn't come up in the history of liches section way up there. This is where I repeat something I've repeated in every article so far and will repeat in every article after until people get it through their heads: in any fight between mechanics and narrative, mechanics win by default because they are the tools with which you actually interact with the game world. Which means in turn that you as a DM or a setting designer (or both) have a choice to make here; mechanically, nearly every lich feeds on their own fire, sovereign and sustained. I believe I've made a pretty good argument for the thematic value of that so I won't repeat it. However, there's something to be said as well for the drain of ages, the way exposure to the Negative Energy of their own undeath harms the lich's soul and requires answer.

There have been, over the years, many potential solutions to this. Many liches simply kick the can down the road as long as they can, inventing new and more elaborate spells to protect, shore up, or even heal their souls if they can, though that last isn't an option for every lich. Most will eventually predate upon a souled being, though again the idea is to minimize time out of the chair; summoning a Planar being and then devouring them works just fucking fine, and you barely have to walk the five feet to your ritual circle to do it. For the truly arrogant and brillaint, you can stop cutting into your chair time to eat souls if you could find a way to link your soul to a source of Positive Energy, renewing it with no further effort on your part, which has many obvious advantages and the slight disadvantage where the tiniest error will annihilate you instantly. As a result, most liches who grind their faces against this problem for thousands of years eventually seek an astral ascension or godhood to solve their problem. Godhood isn't the best idea, but it does solve the problem they want to solve.

In addition to this basic question of the sustainability of lichdom, there have been many variants of liches across D&D and Pathfinder. Here's a few of the more notable ones, and a refutation of a being often thought of as lich-like.

Balenorns (D&D) - I keep bringing them up, here they are. Invented by elves, the balenorn is a lich variant greatly concerned with not being a hole in the world. They achieve undeath through a wholly different process that does not produce or require a reliquary, instead using clone and a specialized spell that creates and sustains their undead state so that they can transcend mortal limits and mortal needs. Rare even in the context of the rarity of liches, balenorns are typically employed as the teachers of ancient and complex lore that cannot be written down (for reasons that might be sacred, practical, or traditional), as the guardians of holy places, or as something akin to park rangers for elven roams. They typically train their own replacements. A balenorn is an unambiguous candidate as an ally for a good or neutral-aligned party of player characters, and an interesting ambition for an elven spellcaster, especially one greatly concerned with the traditions of their people.

Dracoliches (D&D) - Pop quiz, what settings are dracoliches native to? If you answered anything but The Forgotten Realms I have some bad news for you! Though the idea of the dracolich has spread to fantasy in general and has many variations (Seath the Scaleless in Dark Souls comes to mind), the origin was in the work of Ed Greenwood, where it is wild as fuck. There's a cult that thinks they worship dracoliches but essentially worship Fantasy Nostradamus and they're trying to take over the world because they believe the world will be ruled by "dead dragons" and they are not chill about that shit at all. In an extremely related story, becoming a dracolich is not something a dragon can do by themself, and therein lies the trap. You need multiple high-level spellcasters to make a dracolich, and that in itself is a bit of an obstacle; dragons draw their personal space bubbles with maps. Then these high-level spellcasters need to talk the dragon into letting them turn it into a dracolich, which involves, at a bare minimum, THE DRAGON DYING AND LETTING THESE ASSHOLES FONDLE THEIR SOUL. But hey, say the wyrm goes through with it, its constancy is assured! There's just this small problem where all those high level spellcasters and their minions own its reliquary, know where it is at all times, and want the dragon's help taking over the world. Fucking oops.

Dracoliches are excellent 'active' liches and high-level threats who cannot have a normal relationship to lichdom because there's a gun to their head. They cannot control the fanatics who ostensibly worship them, and even if you take the idea outside of The Forgotten Realms I highly suggest keeping that push-pull relationship between the dracolich and its assistants, as it both impels the creature to be a threat of some kind and provides an angle for cunning parties to play both sides against the middle. It's a ton of fun, trust me.

A brief note for PF1e specifically; Pathfinder's liches can be "any living creature", so explicitly in Golarion a dracolich is just a normal lich and none of the above applies. They also don't get different abilities the way a traditional dracolich does. I'm not necessarily saying this as a criticism, just a 'keep this in mind'.

Psychic Liches (Pathfinder) - Rooted in Pathfinder's 'occult magic', psychic liches are the ultimate end point of its active liches; spellcasters who sustain themselves by turning the legends of their atrocities into a reliquary. They are, universally, idiots. Like, liches on Golarion are already having a bad time, they kinda have to do some high-profile shit just to become liches, but when you need to sustain yourself by continuing to commit herostratic crime eventually even the other evil people are going to come after your ass because they don't want to tolerate a wildcard. I am torn here, because on the one hand I find the concept deeply stupid, but on the other hand it being deeply stupid has narrative value. Then again, it only really works with occult magic or something like it, so, call your shot.

Forsaken Lich (Pathfinder) - The other end of the spectrum from the psychic lich, the forsaken lich is a load-bearing pillar of Golarion's lich worldbuilding; these are victims of failed lich rituals or spellcasters who accidentally (or on purpose) tried to use someone else's materials to become a lich. Most of them explode pretty quickly, and the ones that don't are bound to a single location which sustains them. Honestly they don't necessarily need to come up even in a lich-focused campaign, but their existence helps gird Golarion's themes around the uniqueness of lichdom and the soul. Rare Paizo W.

Horde Lich (Pathfinder) - This one is just funny and might be worth stealing for a non-PF system; horde liches are essentially normal liches, but they have built their undead bodies to be many bodies that they Voltron together, and which they can shed during combat to make additional minions. As boss fights go, a boss who is his own adds is deeply funny to me, and a potentially interesting tactical situation especially with a couple more elite minions (say, an evil Cleric) to back him up.

Demilich (D&D and Pathfinder) - So in Pathfinder and D&D 5e, a demilich is a degraded lich. In Pathfinder, they lose most of their spellcasting; in 5e, they're still a dangerous, high-level encounter that steals souls. Ultimately, though, they're the same concept, the idea of a lich's futile war with entropy finally being lost, and they're perfectly servicable in that role, though they are also, y'know, definitely in the vein of the original Acererak - this is a thing you find at the bottom of a dungeon and nowhere else.

This was not the case in prior editions. A demilich isn't even, metaphysically, the lich. The entity once known as the lich, seeking truer sovereignty (or, in extremely rare cases, an ethical end to their lichdom that isn't suicide) dedicates the work of ages to an Astral ascension, becoming a new kind of being further beyond mortal concerns - ironically, going through a process much like just dying in a regular-ass fashion from the other direction, as it turns them into a beast of Thought and Belief, much like a Petitioner or an Exemplar. However, this being still has strong connections to the mortal it once was, even though it has changed far beyond that person. These connections, especially its former reliquary, its last body, and its possessions, can be used to form sympathetic magical attacks against the ascended lich, and so they leave something behind that is a bit like a clone of themself, and a bit like a guard dog, and a bit like a door bell. This being is known as a demilich, and it is under the rather distinct impression (most of the time) that it's the original. They lurk in well-hidden lairs, either to receive an ever-dwindling list of acceptable visitors, to work on projects it believes are still important (and which the original has abandoned), or, you know, to kill anything that disturbs it on sight.

Official stats for these ascended liches do not exist. As plot hooks and opponents go, they're in the same sort of weight class as like, a demigod. But there remain narrative opportunities here, especially for those seeking truly ancient lore, or evidence of forgotten knowledge. Notable is that a lich who ascends to divinity may well prepare a demilich beforehand for similar reasons, and that entity is a self-protecting weakness; if you can cripple and capture it, you have something in your hands that might be used to attack a god, perhaps even usurp it. Awfully tempting, isn't it?

A brief note here; though the iconic form of the demilich is a yellowed skull with many soul gems inside of it, this has never strictly been a requirement. It's iconic for a reason, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of the floating skull. However, those soul gems could be the joints in a skeletal hand, a disembodied spinal column, hell if you're running a comedy campaign make the poor thing a single leg with the soul gems as the toes on its foot. You really only need one relatively continuous body part that you can replace bones with gems on, you got options.

And now for the one I need to refute...

Siabrae (Pathfinder) - Click the link. Read the flavor. Read the abilities. Read the abilities again. Tell me if you spotted the problem. There's a lot I could say here about the blatant pillaging & blaspheming of Celtic faith (do you have any idea how hard you have to try to blaspheme there? It is genuinely fucking difficult), the internal contradiction of Paizo's own worldbuilding (how is a demonic corruption undead exactly?), the way the sustainability of these druids makes them a problem even more thorny and impossible than a normal lich, but I'm not going to do any of that. I am instead going to point out that these entities, being undead creatures sustained by and hellbent upon revenge, have more in common with ghosts and revenants than liches. Indeed, Pathfinder has a whole-ass ghost wizard running a necromantic nation! This is not a lich.

Lab Safety And Other Eternal Concerns - A Lich's Lair

There are certain universal concerns and incentives when designing a lair or other base of operations for a lich. Many of them are the same kind of concerns any high-level spellcaster may have! While the image of a lich simply moldering in her tomb is fairly accurate - given that a lich can devote literal centuries to really following a good train of thought down, chair time is most of their existence - they do have projects that they're working on. A lich attempting to make large-scale constructs or undead, such as, say, zombie giants, will need large open spaces. While a lich rarely has to worry about concerns like ventilation (which can make an underground lair extremely appealing as they do not need to compromise its structural integrity), an exploding alchemy lab may harm other projects; likewise, clouds of poison or toxic runoff might harm the lich's scrolls, tomes, holy texts, or delicately forged magical items, which means that like a living wizard, such labs go near the top floor. While smoke and soot from a forge will never affect the lich, it may damage its lair, and so such facilities may in fact need ventilation or even to be in a separate place from the main body of the lair itself.

There are, however, other concerns. Liches are holes in the world through which Negative Energy seeps; rarely do they find some pre-haunted forest to bury their tombs in, and instead they tend to be the generative cause of such hauntings, afflicting the living world with the abrasion of centuries. Young liches often do their best to mitigate this damage, as it's a fairly obvious sign of undead presence which in turn brings annoying people to their doorsteps, but at some point when you get up from a hundred and fifty years of high quality Chair Time it's just not worth the bother to clean up the mounting taint. This, then, becomes both the sole warning people get (posting actual warnings also brings annoying people) and the reason liches almost inevitably move to rural lairs far from the living. It's one thing when a stretch of an uninhabited forest is haunted. It's quite another if the city parks are.

That said, many liches will end up with more than one lair over the course of their unlife, for various reasons. Younger liches with more alive-seeming bodies, especially those who routinely interact with the living, may simply stay in their towers, mansions, or temples. There are many advantages to this, not least of them being that one has, presumably, already built the facilities. They're well-ventilated, hospitable to the living, not suspicious, and close to any business the newborn lich wants or needs to wrap up. These youthful liches may well be finishing the training of an apprentice or acolyte, preparing to create a new, more isolated lair, simply enjoying access to victims and/or kinky motherfuckers who want to get possessed (that particular entertainment can last awhile), wrapping up career obligations, under the mistaken impression that they can pretend to be alive long-term, or any combination of the above. Additionally, there is a certain adjustment period to lichdom. While the lich is now immune to, say, poison, a young lich may well still value safety features in her lab because she does not emotionally understand this; as Afroakuma put it, the situation is quite similar to getting a new upgrade in a Metroidvania that makes you immune to spikes, but forgetting this because it's so new. However, these relatively public abodes also come with a certain floor of scrutiny; with many eyes on the building, and potentially many wandering hands, keeping one's less savory experiments secret may be difficult, and as the lich begins to experience Chair Time or yearn for the same, the living become an annoyance. Those liches who remain in this position long-term are, inevitably, balenorns or those evil-aligned liches in a similar social position.

Most liches will be encountered in a kind of undead middle age. These are the liches who look like mummies or heavy metal album covers, and the ones who will be most commonly encountered, either by enterprising adventurers raiding their tombs or because they have emerged to enact something. They tend towards isolated, rural lairs for the reasons explained above, and almost all will eventually build something underground to better defend against scrying, teleportation, and other means by which annoying people might bother them. However, here we see a bit of a split. More arcane liches - bards, wizards, sorcerers, and the like - trend towards the classic tomb. Divine liches need sacred spaces to work with, and given the limited number of gods tolerant of lichdom many divine liches will be more active than their arcane counterparts. A lich sworn to, say, Bane, has some shit to do on a regular basis; a lich devoted to the likes of Mystra may be holding on to ancient traditions such as the now-forgotten rite of stocking dungeons with magical items before new monsters move into them (no, really, no, really). A druid lich may be protecting a sacred grove or holding back an otherworldly corruption such as a portal to the Abyss, and therefore ironically be among the least visible liches despite their Healthy Outdoor Living (it's not healthy and birds have eaten their flesh). While these liches have access to powerful teleportation magic and have had plenty of time to get used to being liches (lairs with no entrances may be favored as a result), there is still a certain appeal to...convenience. A lich who needs to operate a forge may well make her lair in the mountains so she can just go mine her own metal, for instance, while a lich devoted to a god likely needs to make his shrine at least theoretically accessible to other worshippers.

Notable for these middle-aged liches is that harm to the lich is less annoying than harm to the lich's possessions and projects. The lich repairs itself; bookshelves don't. Their magical traps and defenses often lean on necromancy, save-or-die effects, and items like the mirror of life trapping not solely out of malice (though, yes, callous cruelty is certainly a factor) but because a door that casts wail of the banshee on intruders doesn't fucking blow up their lab. If for some reason the lich has made a grievous mistake and needs these people to not be dead, imprisoned, or trapped in a mirror, their vast wealth and magical power often makes reversing the problem trivial; at worst, such as a person refusing a raise dead cast by the lich, they can mantle themselves in illusions and deliver the unfortunates back to a living person who can do that for the lich, and then get back in touch via magic to make whatever apologies, threats, or social calls might prove necessary. Nothing pisses a middle-aged lich off quite like her Chair Time being interrupted, so you can bet your ass she's going to handle her business quickly.

Elder liches are the rarest and also the hardest to categorize, because they are not really a function of time per se. Rather, an 'elder' lich is one that has gotten fed up with the limits of lichdom, and seeks an ascension to remove their final weaknesses, to escape the trap they have built around themselves. A lich seeking an astral ascension requires isolation so that they can devote absolute thought and time to the work. One thinking completely rationally may well build a new lair with no entrances or exits, such as a demiplane (through the spell of the same name) or by shapeshifting into an earth elemental before teleporting into solid rock to carve out a bubble in a mountain. However, a lich that has had enough time to work on ascension may well be under the impression that their current lair is just fine, and simply tighten the defenses while making it clear to any extant social contacts that they are going in for the best fucking Chair Time of their life and that they are not to be disturbed upon pain of death. This, then, is where we get demiliches in frontier tombs and forgotten ruins - the fruits of successful ascension, girded by the most formidible magics the lich could bring to bear in protecting any scrap of their old life that could be turned against them.

Seeking divinity is certainly the riskier and more high-profile option, making it seem more common than it is, but it is also the faster option. For many liches who decide to escape lichdom it might seem like the only option; their research has failed to uncover the possibility of astral ascension, they have powerful enemies hammering down the metaphorical gates, or they simply misunderstand divinity and are under the hilariously mistaken impression that being a god will make them ever-more sovereign and removed from the world. The advantages of seeking divinity is that gods are available to be usurped and have some very storied and famous histories of dying and being devoured that one can research, if not easily, at least more easily than figuring out how to transmute your soul from base principles. Slightly more complicated, but much safer, is attempting to ascend without usurping a god, which often involves gathering divine energy, scraping fragments of divinity from many lesser gods, and the like. However, even these 'safer' methods run into the politics of the divine, and not to put too fine a point on it, usurping a god means going head to head with a fucking god, who may well attempt to interrupt your attempt ON THEIR LIFE and whom you may need to defeat in single fucking combat. It's not easy, but the reward for success is divinity and all that implies. These lichgods are now beings of Belief; worse, their lichdom is now an inextricable part of their divinity, no more easily removed than Odin having only one eye. Many discover, too late, that while they are no longer dependant upon their reliquary, it now forms a weakness that they cannot destroy without harming their own godhead, chaining them to the items that have become part of their legend in a manner that tempts with opportunity and damns with vulnerability. Fucking oops. And since their lairs need to be somewhat accessible so that they can go on the adventures and quests needed for their fell purpose, congratulations to the newly divine lich - you need to get a church around fast, and get them to hide your shit for all your new life is worth. Good luck.

The Ungrateful Dead - Liches In Your Campaign

The following section covers liches in your D&D campaign from both a DM perspective and a player perspective. Talk to your fucking group and get on the same page if we're seeing liches on the player end, as this may well influence the players' plots relating to these liches! That said, let's start from the pure DM end.

...And Then The Body Moves - Liches For The DM

Consider the following when you're looking to introduce liches into your campaign and game world.

Sovereignty - You may be noticing up above that there are many versions of the ecology of lichdom, and they break down into two general camps. The first is that the lich is wholly not sovereign; she requires corpses to return from the dead, she needs to eat souls, whatever. The second is the 3.PF model; the lich needs nothing (except all the things she needs) and is wholly sustained by her own fire. Each approach has some advantages.

A lich that isn't sovereign is one that has a lot of angles of vulnerability. They become a sort of puzzle with many solutions; separate the lich from the ability to eat souls, burn her stash of bodies, destroy her reliquary, maybe even negotiate! Or run! These liches must be more actively cautious, and are ever-more inclined to be retiring and inactive as a result. These liches are great as random encounters, sidequests, and one-off antagonists, though they also have potential for recurring antagonists who are particularly subtle and concealed, moving in the world through minions.

The more sovereign lich is great as an active villain because they have less to lose and are less vulnerable. Narratively, this may be the strongest mode of the lich as the sole nearly-sovereign thing, with but a single grain of sand that gives lie to their perfection, is such a sharp contrast to player characters who are living things in a living world. The trouble is, this mode has not actually existed at the same time as characters that are living things in a living world. It exists in 3.PF, where characters are windup dolls who go on an adventure and then go into a closet when they're done. If you want this lich, you need something like the Bastion system in the 5.5 DMG, which strongly loops your character into the world and creates that contrast.

Either approach is good, but you're going to have to pillage mechanics and lore to fully commit either way.

Thematics - So uh, who is your lich? No, really - are they an arcane caster? A divine one? What sort of projects fascinate them and how might that theme their lair and defenses? Are they still holding a grudge about something, and do they bother to prosecute it? There's a lot you can do here, ranging from drawing on funerary traditions for their lair - for the morbid, realistic, or just culturally proud lich who has come to terms with their undeath - to emphasizing differences in how the lich casts spells (in a different language, with different somatic components...), even the language your lich attempts to speak to the living with might be relevant. Is that truly ancient being speaking in, say, Infernal because he's a piece of shit, or because he correctly deduces that Infernal has very little linguistic drift and someone educated in this group of intruders surely must speak it (other fun and potentially thematically resonant candidates for that include any of the elemental languages, Celestial, Abyssal, Dwarven, or Giant)?

I wanna say again that the classic lich look with the crown and the rotting robes and so on and so forth, it doesn't exist for no reason. The kind of mother fucker who sips the forbidden lean in the first place is pretty arrogant, y'know? But even if it's all a front, if that lich was never a king, never a ruler, never greatly respected by their society...if you intend to use your lich as a recurring antagonist, or a recurring ally even, it pays to pay attention to how they present themselves and the ways in which their lair, their attire, and their actions hint at who they are and how they think. A lich is not an alien malevolence from beyond mortal ken; quite the opposite. Give your players these hints and nuggets of information in good faith.

The Reliquary - Okay, so. Here's the thing. There is a sort of default dichotomy between liches and their reliquaries where either they hide their one weakness away as hard and deep as possible, gladly sacrificing convenience & access to their own possessions in exchange for a more certified revival, OR the reliquary is 15 feet away during the boss fight in plain view (thanks World of Warcraft). Lemme trouble this some. While it's quite true that the cautious lich may well go to a lot of effort to bury their reliquary deep, they do have like...needs? Needs and limits on their resources. Every moment spent gathering money to pay for a separate set of defenses and concealments, and then to maintain them, is a moment that does not involve Chair Time. In many cases an inactive lich "lives" near their reliquary because even for the undead convenience will beat out caution quite often - and with such dire defenses in place for their projects, what more could the lich do to make the reliquary truly safer, especially since putting it in a separate location means it loses an important line of defense in the form of the lich itself? An active lich has plans in motion which are going to be time-sensitive either from the lich's perspective or from an objective one, and they may well choose to rely on concealment over other forms of security; the bard lich published in Libris Mortis, for instance, uses a wooden spoon as her reliquary which is concealed in the castle kitchens where she works among many other such spoons. Is that the "rational" move? Sure! She's got shit to do! People to scheme against, a kingdom to take over, the living to manipulate, girl is on a fucking schedule - should her body be destroyed, she can't afford to tack even more time onto her 1d10 days of revival. She has willingly accepted a potentially greater risk of permanent destruction in the name of her goals, and if she survives that decision she may well have different priorities later in her unlife.

On the other end, a lich whose reliquary is there for the fight, there's a few ideas. The most obvious is that the party has found the reliquary of a more cautious lich and it has showed up to defend its one weakness; this can be great for a tense combat encounter in which stopping the lich from escaping is as important as attempting to kill it, especially if the players don't have control over the reliquary yet. However, I want to make a case for a lich that carries their reliquary around with them and what that might look like. It does seem, on its face, to be a fantastically bad decision, and indeed if you go this route the resilience of the lich is at least hypothetically very damaged. While spells like nondetection or magic aura can make the reliquary a less obvious target (potentially causing the lich to revive quite close to its slayers), it's a lot of risk regardless! So why? The easy answer might be that in your game world, it's required; the lich can only be sustained within a certain range of their reliquary, necessitating that they or their familiar carry it around. If they're going to have to carry it around anyway, they may well enchant it into a power source, a weapon, or other useful item; a ring turned into a reliquary is worked further to become a ring of spell storing, for instance, which also masks its nature as a reliquary and makes Ye Average Adventurer reluctant to destroy it. For more martial liches - your rangers, duskblades, bards, and the like - they may simply carry their reliquary around with some form of concealment or disguised form because they recognize that they cannot build the usual terrifying magical defenses that characterize another lich's lair; indeed, they may make an actual weapon into their reliquary and then enchant it further, relying on its power or curses layered into the blade to keep it safe.

Whatever route you take for your own lich(es), the thing to keep in mind is that you need a reason that your players can interact here. Certainly if you're better at the mechanics than your players are you can create an ironclad defense for your lich's reliquary that cannot be touched, but that's no fun, y'know? When deciding how the lich treats and defends her reliquary, look at her values, her goals, and most of all, the convenience and costs of her chosen solution. And while you're at it, go look at Crimeworld, published in Fate Worlds II: Worlds in Shadow and written by the writing lead from Leverage. It's from a different game system, sure, but the advice is invaluable in any context in which you want to think about the pressures and incentives of a character's security systems as well as for heist plots - and what is going after a lich's reliquary but a heist where the Score is the undead sorcerer's immortal life?

Lair vs. Bastion - The Bastion concept re-introduced in 5.5 (Dungeon Master's Guide, 2024) is the long-awaited official return of an idea that was last mechanized during AD&D 2e under TSR. It is, perhaps, worthy of its own article, but the brief summary is this: as the PCs level up, through their great deeds and accumulating wealth, they gain access to a building or buildings and land upon which they themselves may build further. The genius of the Bastion is to tie the player characters to the world, binding them strongly with the twin incentives of narrative power (favors from their lords, economic leverage, military might, information networks, and more) and mechanical benefits (item crafting, increased profit-making, access to poisons, generating Charms, and more), and in this way it is a much more elegant and refined variation on its predecessors. A Bastion binds the player characters to the game world before the Bastion itself is ever finished, and indeed it will only be finished at level 17 or so; for an adventurer's entire career, their Bastion - shared or solo - will be continually changing, continually being upgraded, continually altering in response to the events of the campaign, the desires of the character, and the interests of the player.

This is in sharp contrast to a lich's lair.

A lich's lair may have started much like a Bastion; indeed, a young lich's lair may well just be their Bastion, until or unless they relocate. But the pressures and incentives of lichdom will either force changes or relocation or both eventually. Some obvious things come to mind, chief among them being that unless the lich has made the extremely unusual choice to have living creatures in their lair (to get in-house access to spell components, say), it's not a place where people live. A lich's lair does not have bathrooms, kitchens, or food; with nothing alive in it, the lair might even lack dust. The altar to the lich's god may be quite "lacking" in offerings (temples in D&D don't like, heap gold that their gods eat - they're using the money they charge for their services to perform sacred works, lobby politically, and buy spell components, all things the lich likely isn't doing or may even travel to another temple in disguise to donate towards). Depending on the attitude of the lich, considerations like stairs and corridors might not be installed; while a lich has no need to display their magical prowess or install a teleportation circle (any visitor is already a failure of the lair), they may well consider temporary expenditure of their spell slots to be a good price to pay for the extra security turning their lair into disconnected rooms, being flight-accessible only, or even requiring incorporeality represents to be quite worth it. Indeed, even if the lich bothers installing stairs and corridors - perhaps to save those spell slots on the rare days they go outside - they may well keep their personal rooms behind permanent illusions and emerge into the "false" lair only to attack intruders or deal with projects that are less security-sensitive. "Hey Vox that sounds like Dark Souls," I have exciting news for you about where Miyazaki got it.

What this means for you the DM is that a lich's lair is a wonderful opportunity to contrast with your player characters and their dreams, ambitions, and changing lives. It's said that the best villains mirror the heroes in some ways, and honestly here's your chance. A PC wizard's arcane laboratory is full of plans and moving parts, pieces, components, forever being reshelved and moved around and in the glorious disarray of life; when she steps into the lich's ancient forge for magical items, which burns pure gold for a fire hot enough to fold magic to steel, is she unsettled by her own thoughts of magical convenience mirrored in this master of undeath? A cleric of Lathander entering the temple of a divine lich must grapple with the knowledge that this, too, is a holy place - a testament to the glory of the living world built by something profane. A bard runs her hand along the spines of books written in languages nothing living speaks and wonders: was this person like me, once? And the worst part is, yeah, the lich probably was. This ancient evil was just like you, once, and in some ways they still are.

You May Do It Once - So there's a concept that's crossed my dash a couple times here, and by God I wish I could find it and just link it; if y'all do, let me know and I'll edit the proper credit in here. The post in question proposes having liches cast spells from older editions, to represent their ancient sorceries and disconnection from the living world. This is absolutely hilarious and the worst possible idea and I love it. The downsides are obvious - there's a lot of work to be done in how the PCs interact with such magic (how does a dispel magic work in this context, especially with editions that use a separately tracked 'caster level'? How about counterspell? If you drag in, say, a darkness effect from an older edition, how would newer light effects interact with it? If you're using 2e style countermagic where specific spells can counter and dispel other ones, can the modern equivalents still do that, or newer spells like the older ones? Can the lich do that to the modern magic?), the game balance changes drastically, and not to put too fine a point on this one, spells older than 5e don't use Concentration, leading to buff stacking to an unholy and terrifying degree. You should absolutely not do this.

However, it is very funny and I encourage you to do it once. You get one shot per play group, and I might suggest in this context that it's done best in the specific form of an early encounter with the lich to demonstrate the problem, followed by a subplot about researching these ancient forms of magic and then the quest to confront the sorcerer and resolve that person somehow. Before you pull this ripcord, though, keep in mind that your players are gonna want to use this magic, and any excuses you have for why they can't are gonna scan like bullshit. Additionally, many settings - notably here to include Forgotten Realms - make changes to spellcasting diegetic, which is to say, these ancient sorcerers are swept up in actual alterations to the laws of magic themselves, and pulling this little trick may be in conflict with the lore of the setting. That isn't to say that you can't do it, but you either need to be prepared to say that this lich is an unusual exception or perhaps has an item that shields them from the changes (the latter is a great way to let your players have access to these spells) or to say that here at your table the lore will be different.

The esteemed Afroakuma on review of this section offered a pair of practical suggestions for giving players access to this older magic, should you choose to dance this dance. The first is that the remnants of these ancient sorceries require some manner of praxis that will die with the lich, the kind of thing so ingrained and obvious from the inside that the lich didn't bother writing it down. While this means the spells essentially die with the lich, magical items made by them - wands, staffs, scrolls, spell gems, and the like - still retain them, giving your PCs the ability to literally break the rules when it really matters to them without it becoming their number one option. The second suggestion is a more narrative problem; buried deep in the lore of the Planes is the Draeden Compact, an agreement between five unlikely signatories which, among other things, obligates them to cull the spread of magical knowledge from before the current iteration of the multiverse. The lich had some way to hide from the Compact, but your PCs may well only learn it exists when the Keepers (think the Men in Black) and/or the githzerai come after them and they realize they have a brand-new life problem that they could have a whole adventure about that lasts and lasts and lasts until the end of their careers.

The Skeleton War - Liches for PCs

Consider the following if you're looking to incorporate lichdom into your PC's backstory or character arc.

Peepaw's Off His Shit Again - Perhaps the easiest way to incorporate a lich into your player character's backstory and themes is to tie them to the ancient sorcerer directly. Back in the Paladin article I proposed the idea that a lich had sponsored a young paladin for mysterious reasons and I still stand by it, that shit fucks, but there are many more options. Perhaps your character's family is part of a business which unknowingly services a lich's research. A young bard finds an incomplete work whose creator mysteriously vanished, and it inspires her; later in her adventures, evidence of the work's author persisting emerges. A desperate peasant girl pacts with an ancient lich and becomes an Undead Patron Warlock, bound only partly willingly to a cult of Mellifleur, Lord of the Last Shroud. In his youth, a Cleric was brought back to life after a misadventure in the wilderness by a skeletal priest of his own god, and now seeks to understand what strange dogmas would drive one of the chosen many to seek immortality.

As a perpetual dungeon master myself, this sort of thing is pure gold to me, and working with your DM can get you a long-term character arc whose opposing figure can be dubious ally, villain, and mentor at turns. If your DM is less interested in that sort of thing, eat them while they yet live and get a better one. However, do keep in mind that the DM is gonna want to, y'know, add in their own plot twists, expand on the ideas you present, and generally have fun making the game world and story for you to confront and interact with. The ideal situation is a strong hook that can be fleshed out beyond your sight and brought back to you as something thrilling for you both.

Becoming A Lich - Don't.

Okay, that's not fair. The temptations of lichdom have a lot of dramatic potential going for them, and if you're playing in 4e or earlier the game bears it just fine with absolutely minimal problems on anyone's end. If this is a thing you want to explore in that context I don't even need to give more advice than you've already read to get this far in the article, so I won't.

The trouble is 5e and 5.5. These editions hard-code liches as enemies and give them access to Legendary abilities that are just not ready for PC use, to say nothing of trying to handle questions like their Immunities and Resistances. So the simple answer is: don't. Maybe you plan a story of temptation that will ultimately be refused, leaving the idea of becoming a lich on the table that will ultimately be declined, but like, what if you're playing an evil PC who doesn't give a shit about the moral cost of the forbidden lean? Perhaps new liches are not currently possible; the knowledge has been lost, fiends have moved away from this technology, the laws of magic have changed, the gods themselves are beating the ass of anyone who tries (if your character then proceeds to take on a god in single combat over their immortality and win...well, congratulations on becoming a god, that's a new set of problems and also handily blocks lichdom). This is by far the easier route as it avoids a great deal of mechanical problems and personal labor on the part of you and your DM and your group.

If everyone involved wants to do that work...well, I endorse the 3.5 model of lichdom in which you need to be at least level 12 to become a lich and that anyone who can cast spells could become a lich. The initial transformation should hand out the paralyzing touch, the lich's immunities and resistances, and the benefits of being undead; you already have the spells. As your character levels up, work with your group to figure out how the other abilities trickle in, and definitely save the Legendary abilities for later - level 15 at a minimum, maybe even level 17, trickling in over time as you develop off-turn actions. Keep in mind, though, that at that point you're kinda the main fuckin' character of every combat. Whose turn is it? It's your turn, every turn, and you're swinging the battlefield mightily. At that point your character arc is about your relationship to this heady rush of power and whether or not you understand and accept the dark bargain you have made for your sovereignty.

And that's our article folks! Usually this is where I toss in some homebrew or example characters and I might do so in a reblog later but the inspiration is not upon me at this time (new job got my ass in shambles). That said, if you found this helpful, entertaining, enlightening, or if you're simply burdened with wealth you can no longer abide, I did start a ko-fi recently and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Look forward to the next article on something at some future time.

[maxdibert]

Sirius is my favorite character after Snape, but it's so funny when people try to elevate him to some huge figure in the war? A war hero? 💀like, the small amount of information we have about the first war indicates that the order was losing BADLY basically the entire time, and maybe I forgot something but I can't recall a single thing that he did?? We know that Moody killed Rosier (and maybe Wilkes? idk) and then proceeded to arrest a bunch of DEs, but I really, really don't remember hearing about Sirius doing much?

He was fighting for the Order and putting his life on the line from the get-go for a cause that didn't really concern him, and that is noble onto itself! There's no need to invent delusions about him being some kind of big, classical hero, especially since HP doesn't do those, like, at all.

Also, Snape being called a child murdering fascist is so funny for some reason. WHOSE child did he kill, what

One of the things that bothers me the most about the new fans of the Marauders is their view of Sirius Black because they basically strip away all the interest from his character. I mean, they transform a character with plenty of issues and highly questionable attitudes—someone who is capable of following the "good guys" from the start despite his sadistic impulses and elitism, someone who can love people deeply and hate just as intensely, who can be an amazing guy to those he considers his own and a true monster to those he doesn't—into some sort of rich hero for the working class, who, if he doesn't have two hundred medals for heroism, it's only because the world is cruel. Damn, let Sirius Black be Sirius Black. Let him be a shitty guy, because that's what makes him interesting. We know he was a powerful and talented wizard; we know he showcased that talent during his years at Hogwarts by creating a map and becoming an Animagus; he doesn't need to take credit for others' deeds during the war years. I mean, Sirius was just a kid during that time, and we don't know if he did much more than being a soldier for Dumbledore. In fact, if he had been crucial to Dumbledore, he wouldn’t have been allowed to go to Azkaban so easily. We know how Dumbledore operates in these matters; he can be very cynical and hypocritical if it suits his plans.

No, Sirius wasn't a war hero, and that's one of his great tragedies, which is one of the things that makes his character not flat. Sirius wanted to distance himself from everything his family represented, but he continued to behave just as violently as his family toward those he didn't deem worthy of his sympathy and empathy. Sirius got involved in a cause that didn't really concern him because it was a way to continue opposing his family’s values, and despite being a powerful wizard, despite his talent, despite having the name, the blood, and everything in his favor, he ended up losing his friends, losing his youth, and finally relegated to being a poor man locked up in the house he hated so much, unable to contribute a damn thing to the war, watching everyone else bust their asses while he stayed locked in his mother's room, only to die impulsively and recklessly in a ridiculous way, ironically, at the hands of his own cousin. Sirius wasn't a war hero, but that's precisely why he's interesting, because his path was supposed to be that of a war hero, and he didn't achieve it. And it's much better this way, because his tragedy stems from his pathetic nature, and pathos is wonderful for a character. I mean, we truly don't need perfect characters or for them to be turned into lambs or social justice icons. We need characters to be as they were conceived, with their good parts but also their bad ones.

Well, calling Severus a fascist is itself amusing because it shows that these people have no fucking idea what fascism is and, incidentally, once again exposes how these people dedicate themselves to twisting, manipulating, and arbitrarily changing the narrative to make him look like the ultimate villain because they need excuses to hate him openly.

[binomech]

Some thoughts on Severance S2 and the use of romance as a theme with @infestedguest:

infestedguest: I think that meta may have partially healed the hole the lack of focus on platonic relationships + MDR in general outside of Mark/Helly (especially Irv) this season has left in my heart. Like, most of your S2 metas do that at least a little bit anyway (especially that one about S2E4), but it’s especially potent in this one.

infestedguest: I might just be talking out of my ass, but in a way, Mark Scout trying to convince Mark S to end his life in the S2 finale is an inversion/perversion of that repeated theme of “loved enough to die for.” Mark S isn’t a person and thus is automatically not loved enough to not die for the sake of Gemma’s safety and Mark Scout’s happy ending. Mark Scout loves his wife enough to lead someone else to die for her. But also Mark Scout still, at least in some ways, genuinely conceptualizes his innie as just a part of himself, and it's there that there's an element of the straightforward “loved enough to die for.”

binomech: I’m very happy to hear that! I've been struggling with that too (for family abolitionist reasons and generally love for anything that exists outside of the permitted main text of what love can be under capital), but I think this was kind of deliberate from the script. other things, maybe not, but the fact that the both Marks are manipulated through their monogamous romantic interests, but also the Dylans (economically and as a way to pull him away from loving fellow innies as people), even Irving (he's allowed to know about Burt because they need him out of the house and the point is to get him or both of them killed anyway; it's never framed positively, but it's still using the promise of romantic love as fish bait), but it doesn't mean the rest isn't there.

infestedguest: I think it’s likely that it was deliberate, and there are definitely interesting dimensions added by it, and I agree the rest is definitely still there, but I think the focus on romance at certain points distracts from many of the other themes of the show to the point where it becomes a hindrance in a way that does not feel purposeful. A major example of this is how Miss Casey’s entire presence in the S2 finale is reduced to a single joke, with zero acknowledgment of her personhood (or even a perceived lack thereof) by either the characters or the narrative of the episode itself, even though Mark S’s “people not parts of people” speech (where the audience was first explicitly introduced to the idea of innies conceptualizing themselves as their own people) was made to her, about her. There was a clear setup to do something interesting with her character, but they just chose to completely ignore it, which, while not unusual, feels very strange in this particular case to me because of the major role she plays in the finale + the setup that was already there + how incongruous just ignoring her feels with the thesis of personhood the finale makes clear. But she and Mark S are on the side of the Gemma/Mark square with the least romantic angst potential, and I don’t want to be cynical, but I think that may have contributed to the lack of focus they and, by extension, she gets in the finale (as well as in S2 as a whole). They might address this in S3, but in my opinion, S1 + S2 should be able to stand on their own, and not even hinting at it in S2 leaves a major hole in the themes of the show. Sorry, it probably sounds like I hate S2; I promise I don’t, it’s just really interesting to dig into why what doesn’t work for me doesn’t work.

binomech: I'm 100% with you on this. I understand the individuation season needs, to an extent, that each character gets their own separate screen time with their own separate networks. I think that was an interesting choice. It just so happens that 90% of that was Mark S (and I love Mark S, I'm extremely vocal about how much I love Mark S on this blog, but S1 already had Mark almost exclusively as the outie lens, and I really wish it had been more balanced in S2), and that eats up your budget and your screen time. And then you end up with Gemma and her innies being nothing (which I'm hoping they address in S3, but like you said, I feel like they should stand on their own, especially with S3 not being a guarantee during writing and filming).

binomech: I know that John Turturro wants to come back, and it's insane to me how he was the only member of the cast, to my knowledge, that was like, "Well, I filmed this with the intention of it standing on its own, but I'm not going to be happy if I don't get to make more of it because Irving deserves more than this" in public from the get-go. I've been seeing Britt Lower and Dichen Lachman also talk about it in these terms since the finale aired, which I appreciate so much, but again. Love the cast, love the effort, but can we get more of this in the actual show?

binomech: So I'm pissed about what they did to Miss Casey in particular and Gemma in general, and Helly as well! Sure, yeah, it's very compelling to know more about Helena and Helly was the innie lens in S1, but wow. Helly was a plot device for Mark this season even in the plotline about her own bodily autonomy, and it makes me miserable. and I loved Sweet Vitriol, but I need Reghabi and Milchick to get similar levels of attention in regards to their ties to the company, and while I think Milchick might, but I doubt Reghabi will. And that will be, once more, a Petey situation for me where I'll live forever in my "what could have been" hole. I don't think they can cleanly reintroduce Petey's presence in S3 after S2's complete and absolute sidelining of him (and June and the WMC). or if they do, it might be in the context of Irving Bailiff’s organizing, which would make me happy but would not lessen the disappointment I feel at these choices in S2.

binomech: It's not bad television, I still love this show; but a big chunk of what made S1 so special and dear to me, which was the extension of solidarity and care between innies because they did not have that societal expectation of hierarchy in relationships (beyond department loyalty due to the quarterly goals being important to prioritize), or seen as people enough to love at all, is just... not there in S2. and it makes sense that in blurring the boundary of severance, societal expectation would suddenly enter the severed floor, but the only time it felt like it was presented in that context was in Dylan’s scenes with Gretchen. And if S3 enters the conversation of why this was necessary but not unambiguously good, then I'll be elated, but I don't think I should be having to bargain with this conditional.

infestedguest: No, it makes perfect sense! Those are my feelings as well. Early in S2, it felt like the lack of innie solidarity was a way to demonstrate the way Lumon is dividing them. And I’m not saying it’s not important to highlight that, but its absence takes away the heart of the show and a major pillar of much of its themes, and that tradeoff just isn’t worth it for what we got, imo. Also, I haven’t really looked into BTS material beyond the S2 end of episode bonus features, so it’s cool to hear that some of the actors have at least vaguely similar opinions.

binomech: Episodes 1 through 4 of S2 were very enjoyable to me. Trojan's Horse was slower by necessity to actively sit with the messes of reintegration and the ORTBO, and I think it did a solid job. I have to confess that Attila and Chikhai Bardo, while obviously relevant in terms of plot content, are the episodes I take up most issue with. When I watch them, I can think of exact lines in which the following scenes could have engaged with the surreptitious cruelties of Lumon more explicitly but then didn't: Helena stalking Mark Scout at Zufu, Gretchen having become complicit in Dylan G's alienation to the detriment of both him and her husband (and herself), using Burt's outie in particular to manipulate Irving Bailiff and potentially manage to get them to kill each other, Gemma's relationship with being aware of severance, Mauer's entitlement to all her innies and by extension her, anything about how she ended up on the testing floor. I'm particularly displeased by the framing Mark Scout's rose-tinted memories of her as the only parts of her worth remembering as something romantic rather than the cruelty it is (especially when most of those moments for her were spent grieving and not having anyone to grieve with because Mark was partaking in his usual avoidant behaviors.) I assume that in sidelining that, the episodes came out cleaner in terms of reception and discrete parallel scenes. Sweet Vitriol and the finale are unequivocal wins for me, but I would've liked Sweet Vitriol to be... not a bottle episode, perhaps, because it threw off the pacing. The After Hours is the one that I'm still trying to digest, because each individual scene was incredible, and I enjoyed it, but then when you put them all in a row, it feels like a "We have a million plotlines open; wrap them all up quickly for the finale" sprint.

binomech: I don't have access to any official materials, and I avoid actively looking up interviews/the podcast, but I was so visibly clawing at the walls that my friends who engage with this kind of thing sent me all the relevant quotes, which I find hilarious. But yeah, in any case, I was very reassured by Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Dichen Lachman when they alluded to S3 potentiality. They're the real ones.

[lizbethborden]

Hallie Rubenhold's new book was reviewed in that issue of Ripperologist, and not without some condescension. To some extent that's par for the course with book reviews, but Rubenhold's previous book, The Five, about the canonical Ripper victims, was EXTREMELY poorly received in Ripperologist circles, and for reasons that give one pause.

In particular, she was criticized for the framing of her book as a corrective to negative narratives around the victims; she explicitly wanted to rehabilitate their stories and fight against a perception that they were "just prostitutes." The argument went that serious Ripperologists and serious writers about the Ripper NEVER treated these women as "just prostitutes," and that Hallie Rubenhold was fighting an enemy that didn't exist, all to market her book.

To be honest, that reaction in itself feels a bit suspicious. Basically arguing that Rubenhold is coming in and #MeTooing it all up is not a great look, and it also disregards the STRONG public perception of these women as "just prostitutes." Movie and TV about the Ripper absolutely paint the victims as "just prostitutes," and the cultural image of the Ripper is very much as a killer of prostitutes, rather than a killer of vulnerable women, some or all of whom were prostituted.

Moreover, it disregards a significant contribution she makes, which is her "rough sleeper" theory. That is, she suggests that many of the Ripper's killings were not initiated by him soliciting sex from his victims, then being taken somewhere private for the act, whereupon he killed them. She suggests that in actuality, at least Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddowes were killed while they were sleeping rough on the streets or while looking for somewhere to sleep.

This suggestion doesn't change the fact of their deaths, but it DOES put both the historical and contemporary approaches to the case to the test. As she points out, the press and police at the time had decided on the narrative that the Ripper was killing prostitutes specifically, helped along by the Ripper letters (such as the Dear Boss letter, quote "I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them til I do get buckled"). The narrative that prostituted women were nymphomaniac, criminal, and deserving of violence was incredibly popular at the time. Prostituted women are still considered a subclass of person meant to absorb the rapist and violent impulses of the male population, to this day. (Consider the "we need to legalize sex work or more men will start raping" or "why would you inflict a dangerous or gross kink on your partner, go to a sex worker" arguments.)

It is both fantastic and meaningful that Rubenhold chose to challenge the baseline assumption of the Ripper's approach and motive. This isn't to say that somebody already in the Ripperology community might not have made the same argument. The difference is that Rubenhold did it in a well-researched and sourced work of pop history that is readily accessible to others. Ripperologists defending their territory against a (nagging/complaining female) outsider miss the mark when they suggest that this work has already been done and she needed to just keep her mouth shut about it. In fact, it's quite common that arguments and information in highly specialized communities will be filtered to the larger population in this exact way; look at Charles Mann's 1491, which brought a great deal of specialist insider knowledge from precolonial history into a pop history setting, allowing it to disseminate. This is, in fact, why jobs like "science communicator" exist. 

[resisteverything]

Just for fun (I am really not invested, haven't even watched the full thing): why do you dislike Hazbin Hotel?

This is the biggest one, the hotel is useless. Charlies whole goal is to redeem sinners with the hotel, but by the end of the season there are only two guests, and then one of them dies. This is particularly bad because of the six month deadline set in episode one. Like what is Charlie even doing over those entire months?

The main characters are weak. I expected to learn more about Angel dust in the show itself, and see a new side to him, but in the end his entire character is summed up with Addict, except the show gives him less personality than Addict does. And he's the best one. Charlie is just a Disney princess parody, the only unique trait of hers being that she swears randomly and has daddy issues, the latter only mattering in one episode, the other seven either shafting her character or giving us no new information about her. Vaggie never once does anything that isn't what Charlie told her to. Alastor is vague and mysterious, but the intrigue and fear factor he brought is just sort of ruined in the show proper. He doesn't work as a foil to Charlie or an antagonist because he never does anything for forward the plot.

Nothing happens in this show. Episode one's only contribution is the dead angel and six-month deadline, everything else is skipable. Episode two changes nothing except that Pentius is at the hotel now, and he doesn't do anything. Episode three is only important in that Alastor hears about the dead angel head, info which he doesn't use until episode seven, like no other character is aware of the angel head. Episode four is only important in that episode six centers on whether or not angel has redeemed himself, except in episode six has the question be answered with "Actually heaven doesn't care about that and was never going to listen to Charlie", episode five is only important in that it's setup for Charlies meeting with heaven, a meeting that ends in her being kicked out and nothing having been changed. Episode six is that meeting. Episode seven is Charlie literally giving up on her motivations to prepare to do battle with heaven, and episode eight is them fighting that big battle. Nothing Charlie did from episodes one to six actually brought them closer to resolving the conflict, and season two is just a return to the previous status quo of hell.

The series is packed full of side characters that should not be so numerous in an eight episode season. Why is Carmilla Carmine, a character that shows up in two subplots a more relevant character to the narrative than any of the main characters? Why did we get half an episode dedicated to the Vees dicking around in ways that in no way affect the plot but never got to see Charlie and Angel dust have a real conversation that wasn't antagonistic? Why did Charlie work out her issues with Vaggie with a completely new side character she's never met before this episode instead of with Vaggie? Why is Vox spying on the heroes for all of episode eight instead of doing anything? Didn't one of them actively try to incite a war against heaven? Shouldn't she be siding with the heroes?

The show has a bizarre relationship with the pilot. It expects you to understand that Charlie taking Alastors hand is a big deal, or know who Cherri bomb is, because these things are in the pilot. But it also Retcons things like Lucifer's characterization, or Husks reason for staying at the hotel. It makes the show hard to follow plot wise.

The tone is all over the place. Pentius dies as a joke that kills a serious moment but then they try to make it serious. Charlie and Vaggie have a serious conversation with jokey slapstick noises in the background. Valentino flips between scary and goofy at random. Angel gets raped and it’s a big deal, pentius gets raped and it’s a joke.

[silver-soul00]

I'm making this HUGE post because I'm also a bit tired of what people read about Tyler's character.

And let's be clear, the question of the ship has nothing to do with it because here i will analyze both the character, but in particular the reason why we shouldn't feel obliged to feel sorry for him ONLY because the series showed that scene in the cave.

He is a victim, of course no one ever rules this out, but the issue of the victim tortured in the cave was rendered very badly, and in addition to this, other factors surrounding the character were written and shown in an awkward or clumsy way.

The series is not excellent, but only good and what also lowers the rating is how Millar and Gough (and also Burton) worked with Tyler's character in a very poor way and unfortunately this has pushed many fans to justify many absences with headcanons or statements by the actors (the issue of the look or the confirmation that Tyler was controlled by Laurel already a year before the events of the series).

Remember, making headcanons is not a mistake, feel free to do so, but please do not treat them as scenarios or thoughts actually conceived by the creators of the series.

Well, shall we begin?

The first season of Wednesday established itself for its contemporary gothic style, for the brilliance of Jenna Ortega and for the adolescent reinterpretation of the Addams universe.

However, beneath this fascinating surface that has conquered all the audience lies a deep narrative fault, which opens right in the heart of one of the most significant, but also most criticized emotional arcs of the series: the relationship between Wednesday and Tyler Galpin.

The final twist, which reveals Tyler as the monster Hyde and accomplice of the real antagonist Laurel Gates, not only overturns the emotional development seen up to that point, but betrays the internal coherence of the story.

More than a well-constructed shock, it is a very artificial twist, not supported by a psychological progression of the character nor by a wise use of narrative clues, my personal criticism does not only concern the unexpected unmasking of Tyler, but the way in which the series has built (or not built) his double identity.

A well-written thriller does not limit itself to hiding information: it must disseminate subtle signals, contradictions, ambiguous behaviors, it must allow, once the truth is revealed, a rereading in a new key, capable of enhancing everything that has been shown before.

In the Netflix series, this operation is completely missing.

From the first episodes, Tyler is presented as the good and reliable boy, marginalized by his father and marked by the mourning of his mother.

The one who should be the partner for Wednesday.

He shows empathy towards her, he is the only one with whom she can share moments of vulnerability, he is present in key moments.

The scenes between them have an evident emotional charge and, although punctuated by the protagonist's characteristic black irony, they contribute to building a romantic tension that seems authentic.

There is nothing, until the final revelation, that suggests a secondary intention, a moral ambiguity, a mask that is about to fall, but rather the series tries in a rather clumsy way to use the character of Xavier as a false red flag on who the Hyde could be.

And yet, we then discover that Tyler is the Hyde, who killed on command, who collaborates with Laurel Gates, and – a detail brought out by an interview with Hunter Doohan – that he had been “awakened” by her a year earlier.

And it is serious, seriously, this is really serious.

If Tyler was already active as Hyde well before the events narrated, then his entire relationship with Wednesday is built on a huge scam.

His kindness, his care, even his intimate confidences, were part of a set-up, the problem is not that Tyler lied, but that the series never shows the effort of lying.

No sign of a split, no emotional crack, no fracture in behavior.

One of the few scenes that could suggest an internal conflict is a flashback in which Tyler, alone, screams in a bathtub.

It is shown before the final revelation, and therefore could seem like a clue to his suffering.

The series awkwardly shows you that scene to insinuate that there is something wrong with the boy, but it is a fairly specious choice and in fact analyzed carefully, that scene is extremely weak from a psychological point of view.

It is isolated, has no contextualization or follow-up.

It does not generate any visible change in the character's behavior.

As clinical psychology teaches us, an identity conflict – if real – manifests itself in microsignals: ambivalence, emotional swings, incongruent behaviors. Tyler, on the contrary, is always composed, strategic, confident.

The scream in the tub is therefore an aesthetic parenthesis, not a psychological revelation, it could indicate physical pain from transformation, as happens in classic werewolves, but it does not suggest a moral rejection of one's role at all.

And here comes the crux: if Tyler is aware, then every gesture he makes towards Wednesday is a fiction, unfortunately the series does not dare to show it to us as such.

After the revelation, there is no room for an authentic confrontation between the two, no exploration of the emotional betrayal and Tyler turns into a flat, stereotypical antagonist, as if all his previous humanity had been swept away in an instant.

It is as if the writers had not been able to manage the double soul of the character, and had preferred to cut it short, sacrificing coherence in the name of the surprise effect.

This narrative choice has a very high price: it discredits the entire character of Tyler and the romantic subplot he had with Wednesday.

The audience may have appreciated it, I doubt it since the romantic subplot was the most criticized aspect, but a person with a more critical eye can not help but wonder: was it all fake? If so, why are there no subtle but intelligently placed signals? If not, how is it possible to fall in love with someone while killing on behalf of a murderer?

It is a dichotomy that the writing fails to resolve.

And the result is that the entire emotional arc loses meaning, there is no longer an authentic development of the bond between Wednesday and Tyler, but only an illusion, followed by an abrupt cancellation.

This inconsistency also undermines the protagonist.

Wednesday constantly questions trust, intimacy, the balance between rationality and impulse but when she discovers the truth about Tyler, she has no real emotional processing.

(Clear evidence that Wednesday at that moment was no longer in love with Tyler otherwise she would have felt a minimum of remorse)

In narrative terms, the revelation about Tyler fails on several fronts:

• It is not supported by a progressive construction of the character.

• It offers no room for authentic reaction for either him or Wednesday.

• It retroactively makes the viewer's emotional investment in their relationship senseless.

And here is where the biggest damage comes in: the romantic subplot is not only pointless, it actively works against the plot.

Instead of enriching the protagonist's inner world or generating morally interesting conflicts, it ends up destroying the coherence of both characters involved.

Tyler could have been a tragic, tormented, ambivalent villain - a modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

After all, it turns out that Tyler suffers from bipolar disorder perhaps his mother suffered from bipolar disorder, and Wednesday concluded that this condition (having bipolar disorder as a direct result of being a Hyde) was passed down to Tyler.

All thrown down the toilet to give viewers a bland romantic subplot with some references (disturbingly) to Twilight.

Tyler has become a narrative mechanism at the service of a spectacular but meaningless finale.

And the love story, which could have been a powerful engine of vulnerability and transformation for Wednesday, is reduced to a diversion betrayed by a writing too fearful to address its moral implications.

Tyler Galpin is not only the "monster" of the series: but a double victim, a victim of Laurel and a victim of a script that has sacrificed coherence and depth for the easy twist.

The real mystery, if you look closely, is not who Hyde is.

It's understanding why the authors chose to sabotage their own characters so much.

One of the fundamental laws of serial writing, as codified by teachers such as Robert McKee (Story), Linda Seger (Making a Good Script Great) and John Truby (The Anatomy of Story), is that the plot twist must never sacrifice the psychological coherence of the character.

Instead, in Tyler's case, the series makes the classic mistake of the "twist that retroactively empties everything that came before".

For eight episodes, Tyler is presented as a kind, welcoming, empathetic boy, with a vulnerable look and a sincere affection for Wednesday.

No action, look, dialogue or micro-expression leaves even the slightest glimpse of a double identity.

There are no seeds of ambiguity, as sophisticated writing would require.

In fact, the fandom often talks about the "sincere" look that Tyler had towards Wednesday.

When it turns out that he is the monster Hyde and that he killed on Laurel Gates' command, the revelation works on the narrative level (plot twist), but fails completely on the dramatic level: we understand nothing of his descent, we have never witnessed his internal torment, we don't even know if he felt anything for Wednesday.

The tragedy, Frank Daniel teaches, always arises from the "moral dilemma" in which the character is forced to choose. Tyler, simply, never has a choice on stage.

And if he does, it is not shown to us.

We are informed of his corruption, but never invited to experience it.

Many think that Tyler is “under the control of Laurel Gates” and therefore not responsible for his actions, Emma Myers herself said that Tyler is “innocent”.

And it’s true!

But even in this case, the writing fails on two fronts:

It doesn’t show us the psychological effects of control. We don’t see dissociation, anguish, repressed anger, or efforts to resist.

The only scene that could suggest a conflict, Tyler screaming in the tub, is left without context, not followed by any reflection, and without a narrative payoff.

It is an emotional promise that is not kept.

It does not define the limits of control.

If Tyler is totally at the mercy of Laurel, then he is not an antagonist, he is a tool.

If instead he has margins of conscience, why does he not oppose, or at least not suffer?

In both cases, the character is emptied of will and drama, condemning him to a purely mechanical function in the plot.

Narrative psychologist Christopher Vogler, in his "The Hero's Journey," observes that "every well-written antagonist is the hero of his own story."

Tyler has no internal history.

He is never the protagonist of his own conflict.

He is the enemy when it needs to be, and the sweet boy when it is convenient to maintain the mystery, but he has no arc, no agency, no visible trauma.

He is a mask, not a face.

He could have been a suffering hero, but the script decided that his suffering was not worth telling properly.

Continuing the discussion ... one of the biggest mistakes the series made was the way in which the relationship between Tyler and Wednesday is first built and then disintegrated.

In affective narrative models, romantic interest must be a lever to reveal hidden parts of the self.

Let's give some more concrete examples, okay?

Examples both romantic and non-romantic.

Jesse Pinkman reveals Walter White's fragility in Breaking Bad, or how Kim Wexler becomes Jimmy's moral mirror in Better Call Saul.

In the context of Wednesday's series, however, the love story is purely instrumental: it serves to create apparent empathy, which is then destroyed by an unprepared revelation.

The result is that those who carefully analyze the series feel neither real anger nor real pity.

It is not an emotional betrayal like that of a lover who has become a monster out of desperation or ideology.

Tyler does not break: he unmasks himself.

There is no pain, neither in his gaze nor in ours.

Scholar Linda Williams, an expert on melodrama and “cinema of excess,” emphasizes that romantic relationships work on screen only if they generate a recognizable emotional dynamic, based on desire and impossibility.

The relationship between Tyler and Wednesday never has an internal obstacle: it is interrupted by an external revelation.

So it is not tragic.

It is manipulative, but not in the narrative sense, but in the metanarrative sense: it manipulates the viewer without offering him emotional reward.

To understand how badly Tyler's tragedy is written, just compare it to a character, good but condemned to commit evil actions, a successful tragic character, even if in a very different narrative context: Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman.

Speaking only and exclusively of the first season of Better Call Saul, Jimmy is shown as a man in conflict, torn between a right and correct ethic that he desires and a shortcut that he knows and knows will lead him to easy results... but at a huge cost.

Every mistake he makes is explained, experienced, anticipated by an internal tension.

He too is manipulated (by his brother, by the system, by circumstances, just like Tyler), but never passive.

He is autonomous in his failure.

And this makes him human.

The viewer does not approve of what he does, but understands why he does it. He feels compassion, not just surprise.

It is the principle of tragedy according to Aristotle: phobos (fear) and eleos (pity).

With Tyler, however, we have no access to anything because we have not learned his motivations correctly, nor his thoughts.

We do not know if he has ever felt guilty.

We do not see if he has ever fought.

OR AT LEAST, excluding details that perhaps could be grasped, but precisely, they are the type of details that do not allow the character to have a type of character or type of story.

And so, we cannot fear or pity.

We can only… observe.

But I know what you are thinking, Jimmy is still the protagonist, Tyler is not.

Well, it is true… but the history of television series is full of secondary characters written very well, with conflicts, contradictions and deep psychological arcs, even in a few scenes.

I want to remember Ben Linus from the acclaimed series Lost, who begins as a secondary character but becomes one of the most complex characters in the series.

A fate that seems like Tyler himself could have for the second season.

So the point is not the "narrative weight", but how that weight is managed, Tyler in Wednesday has a lot of narrative space: he is present in almost all the episodes, he has a love story with the protagonist, he is the object of mystery, and in the end he is one of the keys to the final twist.

He is not an extra, he is a functional pillar of the plot.

And so, precisely for this reason, it is legitimate to expect a minimum of introspection, internal coherence, visible psychology.

If Jimmy is a tragic character in six seasons, nothing prevents a skilled screenwriter from building a secondary mini-tragedy even in a few episodes.

Mainly because in the first season alone, Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan planted the first seeds of what would later be Jimmy's “”damned“” life from season one, something Millar and Gough could have done.

Because if in Breaking Bad we know Jimmy as a funny but also skillful secondary character, in the first season alone the character is skillfully shown as a suffering character and that we viewers understand that he will do questionable and even horrible things to get to success.

This is what refined authors do: they inject tragedy even in lateral roles, making the narrative world denser, more realistic.

With Tyler it would have been perfectly possible.

It would have been enough:

• To show us a scene (even just one!) in which he fights against what is becoming in a concrete way, perhaps enigmatic but also understandable in terms of meaning;

• To insert a moment of moral crisis in the relationship with Wednesday.

•To leave us a doubt, a crack, a nuance that suggests that he is not a blind puppet.

Jimmy teaches us that the interesting evil is the motivated one.

But unlike the many headcanons that surround the character, Tyler is written as a thriller mask.

And it is not a question of space, but of authorial intention.

Even if we wanted to say that Tyler "cannot" have a tragic complexity because he is not the protagonist, then the problem is even more serious.

Because the screenwriters have still entrusted him with a central role in the finale.

He is the one who kills under Laurel's orders, and he is always the one who betrays Wednesday.

You can't give him narrative functions as a protagonist (betrayal, mystery, revelation) and then write him as a decorative character.

It's a narrative short circuit: you ask the viewer to feel betrayed, hurt, shocked... but you haven't given him any material to really feel anything.

Jimmy McGill hurts us precisely because we know who he is when he makes a mistake.

Tyler doesn't do anything to us, because we don't know who he was even when he was smiling.

The problem is not who the protagonist is, but how to write someone who has an emotional weight

The comparison with Jimmy McGill holds up precisely because it shows what was missing in the construction of Tyler: you don't need six seasons to build a tragic character.

You just need to want to tell his internal conflict, instead of using it as a deception.

If we had seen a fragment of Tyler fighting, a flashback, a contradictory gesture... maybe we wouldn't have forgiven him, but at least we would have understood him in a more natural way.

Just as we understand Jimmy even when he makes a mistake.

Instead we have to put up with posts where they scream in your face that Tyler is a victim without however setting in motion any critical sense.

I think that the teen side killed Tyler Galpin's character a bit and I say this with a bit of sadness.

If you like the character, don't take this as an attack, but more as food for thought, here it is.

I only now add another thought.

The scenes between Donovan and Tyler are not bad...but even there, everything is depowered by the script.

Even that is not enough to save the character.

Only acceptable response to this post

[ballinandcantgetup452]

VERY OBVIOUS MY HERO ACADEMIA CHAPTER 427 SPOILERS

So... I guess Deku's ending the series quirkless. Honestly, I think that's perfect.

I'm sure we've all seen the memes of Fast Food Izuku, but, if you actually thought about it for a sec, Deku becoming an ambassador of peace is kind of an amazing ending. I feel like the thesis of BNHA (at the very least from MVA and onwards) was the idea of a hero society was contributing in pushing the cycle of violence and brutality that hurt everybody that was considered abnormal. All Might both redefined the idea of a hero and killed the idea of altruism just by existing in his prime.

It's kind of why I love Deku's very last costume (I'm presuming).

For a while, I wondered why the Final War suit was throwing me off so much. I finally found out it's because that costume purposefully makes itself almost iconic. I made a post on an old account about how Deku's character progresses through his costume and how the more iconic the costume becomes, the closer Deku is getting to his arc being completed. What I specifically love about this rendition is that I believe Horikoshi is saying that he isn't fighting Shiggy as Deku, he's fighting him as Izuku.

That all being said, I do wish that the manga presented Deku sacrificing OFA in a more FMAB "Good job! Be satisfied! You made the right choice!" type of vibe, but that's coming from the guy that unironically wanted a "yeah, and that was My Hero Academia" to be the last line.

I'm fine with him magically getting a quirk, but there's a part of me that really hopes that he becomes an ambassador of peace. That seems more narratively fulfilling.

[lamialamia]

We have a problem: cheating, humanizing your characters, and delivering your message

This meta is going to talk about Crosby's cheating in episode 7 and 8 of MOTA and how the show's lack of acknowledgement for it ultimately weakened its message on the effect of war.

So. I have talked about how Sandra's abrupt change of heart regarding her principles in her relationship with Crosby disrespects her character in this post. Now, I'm going to talk about the cheating plot point again from another angle: MOTA wants us to see how war is capable of changing people for the worse, but it will not engage with this message any further than the surface level.

When Crosby decided to cheat on his wife with Sandra, it happened within episode 7 and ended in episode 8. You can see him looking at other women in episode 6 and then spend a day hanging out with Sandra and is impressed with her as well as sending her longing look, he also shares a moment of vulnerability with her by talking about Bubbles. This is a legit basis (I'm only going to talk about Crosby in this analysis) for him to cheat with Sandra.

However, after the affair ended, the show never mentions it again. Crosby never says a single thing about it, his friends and colleagues never says a single thing about it, the story never says a single thing about it. Does Crosby feel good or bad about his action? Does he has remorse? Does he feel he is justified for an extra-marital affair? Does he think he's more of a man now that he has done it? Does he regret not courting Sandra further and making her his wife?

Not a thing.

(and that's it 🙃)

The problem with this is not about the cheating itself, but about how the narrative ignores Crosby's humanity. As war changed him, we see in the conversation he had with Rosie in ep 9 that he has doubt and struggles with his role in such large-scale destruction. The show is showing me how a man like him is capable of violence and contributes to human suffering in a big grand level. However, when it decides to never mention any kind of impact on Crosby, his friends, or the overall narrative that stemmed from his cheating -- a small-scale everyday cruelty -- the show weakens his character. Not because he cheated on his wife, but because it tries to say we should ignore his small cruelty in favor of his big one. Effectively, MOTA tells me its characters are above judgement for small cruel thing. That is inherently dehumanizing.

Let's make a comparison. Meet Brad Colbert in Generation Kill.

He's a Marine who is on his way to invade Iraq and pretty much a weapon of war. Other than that, he enjoys riding his bike, surfing, hates country music, and he was cheated on by his ex-fiancee and his best friend.

Here we can easily see that Colbert is pained by this experience. It affects him so much he stopped dating altogether and only have sex with sex workers.

Despite his prowess to kill a lot of people, despite the fact that he is part of the military complex of the USA that is committing atrocities, this man is still vulnerable human being. He is still a man who can get hurt from the betrayal of those he trusted. And by showing this vulnerable side of Brad Colbert, GK effectively made its case: the banality of evil - The person who enact evil is as human as you and me. And Evil can be enact by any average human.

This is because anyone and everyone can commit both the everyday-cruelty AND the grand-scale atrocity.

But unlike GK who reflect on this duality, MOTA only spent screentime to reflect on the grand-scale atrocity. It spent time to share Crosby's regret and guilt in being part of the war effort that kill many people, civilians and military personnel alike. It spent time to have John Egan faced down en entire street of angry civilians to make that point.

However, if you do not acknowledge that your character can commit the every-day cruelty, and show how only his grand-scale atrocity matters, then your character only have half his humanity to lose. You dehumanize him. And now, your message of how war affect the humanity in an average citizen is only half as effective.

[its-no-biggie]

okay i just finished rewatching fma brotherhood and can we please talk about how fuckin 15 ed is. like lots of anime protagonists are 15 but ed is *so* 15.

like- he needs to disguise the car so he makes it into a 15 year olds idea of a really cool car, and its so cringe the adults force him to change it. he makes ling a sword and puts a little skull on the handle (for literally no reason except that he presumably thought it would be cool, even though they were in the middle of getting their asses kicked by envy) and then gets defensive when ling calls it lame. he gets riled up unbelievably easily over NOTHING. his fighting style is scrappy- hes experienced but not disciplined, and he'll use whatevers on hand to get the job done. he'll mess around in the middle of a fight, use unnecessarily flashy moves/weapons, and hes just generally a nuisance in combat. he gets really flustered when people insinuate that winry is his girlfriend, and then when he DOES confess to her 2 years later he uses a fucking alchemy metaphor because hes a NERD.

im saying all of this with affection by the way- hes a cringe 15 year old because 15 year olds are cringe! i feel like most of the time these high school age protagonists are basically just adult characters with more naive ideals, or theyre a bit more emotional, or they have "childish" interests. ESPECIALLY with these high stakes action-adventure stories, where the fate of the world is in their hands. but a kid can have the weight of the world on their shoulders and still handle their emotions poorly, act recklessly, goof off at inappropriate times, and generally think and act in a way that adults wouldnt. and still be mature and competent characters! i mean, ed is a GREAT protagonist. he has a full understanding of the stakes and he knows how and when to get serious. but he also does shit like breaking into a secret government laboratory, alone, in the middle of the night, with no plan, and nearly gets himself killed in the process. because hes a reckless kid! and if he HADNT done that, they never would have found out the enemys plan in time!

and its just so perfectly executed- instead of childish traits being sprinkled on top of adult problem solving and emotional regulation, him being 15 informs how he acts all the time! sometimes this is a good thing because he solves problems in a unique way, and sometimes it causes even MORE problems. its a fundamental aspect of his character that contributes to both his strong and weak points.

and my absolute favourite part is that hes still treated like a person worthy of his title and reputation- not only by the adult characters, but by the narrative itself. but he isnt treated like an adult either! the adults around him dont talk down to him, but they also dont have adult expectations of him. theres a whole bit about how the adults shouldnt stand by while the children are on the battlefield- insinuating that while the children are worthy of standing on the battlefield alongside them, they also feel some responsibility to lead them since theyre the adults. which is super reasonable! its probably the best take on adult mentor figures for child main characters ive ever seen.

and yeah theres an argument to be made that it was pretty fucked up of mustang to recruit ed to the military at 12 years old. but he was super upfront with him about what it would entail and didnt force him into it. so watching it as an adult, yeah, its fucked up. but the target audience is kids and thats how kids want to be treated! yeah its a lot of responsibility, but ed knew that going in AND he has a huge support network of trustworthy adults who are looking out for him. hes fine. and hes DEFINITELY better off than most high school age protagonists, who are just sort of thrust into high stakes, life-threatening situations with little guidance. the dynamic is less "you are The Chosen One who will singlehandedly save the world" and more "i mean you certainly have the skills and we really appreciate you working with us but what the fuck is a child doing in the military. who authorized this?? youre going to get yourself killed PLEASE be more careful!" and like. if youre gonna have a show about a 15 year old saving the world, then thats definitely the way to do it.

and what really seals the deal is how pissed ed gets when people treat him like a kid. thats the most 15 year old thing ever! he FEELS like hes being talked down to and disrespected just because hes not given the same expectations and responsibilities as the adults. watching it as a 20 year old im super impressed by the way the adults treat ed, but i can also understand why ed gets so frustrated. its the nature of being a teenager and thinking you can handle more than you can. which really just solidifies how fuckin 15 he is

btw im not saying ed is the only well written teenager in the show. hes just the clearest example- hes so LOUD about who he is and it makes it really easy to talk about his character traits. also hes like my favourite character ever and i just have to talk about him. so like al and the rest are also really convincing kids, and a lot of this stuff kind of applies to all of them! im just talking about ed because i want to lmfao