#The Witch's Embrace

[tubbytarchia]

@mcyt-yuri-week Day 5, Rose/Thorns I never stop thinking about SL episode 8 never ever

[musubiki]

i think the most powerful final form for mochi timeskip outfit will embrace her witch nature 🖤

[beggars-opera]

bless their hearts they are trying so hard

[rue-with-the-tarot]

I’m sick of having to censor my language and beliefs in order to save face in my community. I am polytheistic. I am pagan. I believe in many gods. I worship many gods. I speak to the gods and they speak back. I can hear them. I can see them. I have conversations with them. I believe in faeries. I have faeries that are my friends and live in my house. I give them offerings and they help with the chores. They also take my things and play other practical pranks, just like the old stories said. I know their names. I speak to them and they speak back. I believe in ghosts and spirits. I grew up in a haunted house. I’m psychic. I can speak to the dead. I have spoken to both living and dead animals. I’m superstitious. I find comfort in old wives tales. I am spiritually powerful. I will speak my truth, even if it makes me yet another witch on the outskirts. So be it. That is my destiny.

Khairete.

[hitoshura]

variety pack of icon commissions from twitter! owners in captions, please do not use 

currently accepting commissions ^^

[darklight-phantasm]

"I loved being a witch." Hey so next time just shoot me in the head!

[spacefairynayu]

I can’t stop thinking about how Zorian is of mixed ethnicity and how that adds so many unexplored layers to his befriending of the indigenous minorities within Eldemar(ie. a morlock, shapeshifters, the aranea) AND layers to his mother’s rejection of her heritage.

Especially to his mother’s rejection of her heritage.

Witches are explicitly indigenous to Altazia, and yes part of the negative perception of them comes from the fact that many witches have done terrible things, but the villager’s treatment of Cikan and her mother also easily parallels plain racism. Cikan’s reaction to this being to completely abandon her heritage screams of a choice to assimilate into the majority culture to avoid discrimination. Her insistence on raising Kirielle as ‘the perfect lady’ by Eldemar’s standards is an almost obsessive attempt to erase any trace of her ethnic background and present both Kirielle and herself as ‘proper’ Eldemarian/Ikosian women. She says she’s doing it for Kirielle’s sake, and partially it is(albeit while heavily projecting), but it’s mostly to reinforce the family’s image, her image, as 100% Eldemarian/Ikosian.

Not to imply that abandoning one culture to embrace another is inherently a bad thing, Cikan is very clearly happier living as an Ikosian woman than an Altazian one. This probably was the correct decision for her. The problem is that she is taking the choice to embrace or reject their heritage away from her children(as well as doing the exact same thing that she hated her mother for, attempting to force a certain way of living onto them that made them miserable).

And then there’s Zorian. The Kazinski child who resembles a witch the most. He’s anti-social and withdrawn, he fiercely holds on to grudges and memories of every slight(and holds to memories of kindness just as tightly), he parleys with non-humans and ‘undesirables’, and to top it all off he inherited the bloodline ability that his witch ancestors cultivated and passed down to a degree that likely hasn’t been seen in generations.

Zorian embodies everything that Cikan has tried to erase from their family history. He’s a walking symbol of their Altazian ancestry.

All this to say that I feel it was a massive waste for Nobody to not explore Zorian’s heritage, his relation to it, and his family’s relation to it, as well as how that in turn affects his relation to/perception of Eldemar and it’s politics.

[thefirstknife]

i unironically hope Eris stays in her Hive form at least physically bc im already loving how both her & Immaru are pointing out Ikora's (and humanity's) inherent dehumanization of the Hive.

Eris being all "If this form does not leave will you still view me as a friend?"

Immaru when asked where the Experiment Subjects come from and responding with "Don't act like you care."

Honestly, it's so good. I really love the Eris stuff and some of these questions being posed. A lot of people react negatively to Eris doing this, forgetting that Eris has already been part-Hive for a long time. She was just hiding it behind the eye cover.

Technically, nothing inherently changed about Eris; she just embraced that part of her. And that's super important for her arc I think because she's been on a journey of accepting her trauma and her losses for a very long time. We helped her face her fears and traumas in Shadowkeep and she came out of it victorious. And the story never treated it as her traumas being gone; she still has them, but she has the means to tackle them and handle them and live with them. Since we helped her, she became more open and more involved with what we do to save our home, even if it meant tackling dangerous things.

And the thing is, now that her traumas cannot be exploited by Darkness anymore, she's capable of involving herself in these things, knowing that she has friends to fall back to and a support system and better mental fortitude. We've seen it through her endurance beneath the Pyramid on Io, and her grasp of stasis, and her dealing with the Crown of Sorrow and egregore and the Lunar Pyramid nightmares. And now with her embracing her Hive self. It doesn't change anything about her, but people prefer when she hides it so they don't have to see it. And she knows it (Sororicide lore book, page 1):

It's a perfect example of how we inherently view the Hive as untrustworthy. Obviously, there are good reasons for it! The Hive have caused immense pain and trauma to pretty much everyone in the universe, Eris included. It must take an incredible strength of character to embrace the fact that you're physically half-Hive, creatures that traumatised you in the first place. No one else has dealt with anything similar so naturally they're afraid for Eris. But I believe in her strength. And so does Drifter and Drifter is never wrong:

He'd read the reports. He saw the theories on VanNet. He didn't trust them. He trusted her.

There's a cutscene that people skip and can cause people not to see it, I recommend replaying the thing on a different character or seeing it online, but it shows Eris taking off her bandage in front of us:

It's such a powerful image to me. A symbol of her taking off her mask. Not pretending to be the same as us anymore. Because she isn't! The Hive are a part of her and have been for centuries. And she's always been in control. Our mistrust has always hurt her, but before this, we could act with pity towards her. Now that she's fully in Hive form, people's perception of her changed, for really no good reason other than prejudice. She is still Eris.

I definitely think that eventually we will have to reconcile with the idea of the Hive not being inherently evil in totality as a whole group of people. Obviously this is going to be difficult, especially when their leaders act the way they do, but eventually I do believe we will have to accept some of them, even if it's only Eris for a start.

[rynspiritual]

what are your plans for samhain / halloween? i’m looking for inspiration on some beginner spells / rituals!

[cissa-calls]

Countdown to Agatha All Along: Day 871

In the sea of promotional material showcasing the talent of Agatha’s designers, this is perhaps my favourite piece. Agatha Harkness might finally wear an iconic pointed witches hat, given some flare of course - a leather band, flounce of purple tulle, and chunky buckle, all set on a straw brim. The mixture of different textures and shape makes it jaunty, makes it Agatha.

[sesamenom]

Ar-Pharazon from the Reverse Gondolin AU and as Witch-King of Numenor - thanks to @who-needs-words for helping develop this idea!

[pixelfireplace]

Black.

[justpreciousotomebabies]

Me, someone who really wants children at some point in life, any time I play a dating sim with an undead or inhuman love interest: I wonder if this character and my MC can make babies?

[ferhog]

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury but it’s a rom-com from the 2000s.

[sokovianfortune]

currently fantasizing about a wanda stan's worst nightmare (animatic set to confrontation from jekyll and hyde)

[torchwood-99]

Eowyn really hit the jackpot. Her first battle, and she did something so badass that she will never have to buy her own drinks for the rest of her life. She'll be dining out on that story for as long as she lives. While I suspect she still picked up her sword in times of great needs and wouldn't say no to a spot of adventure, it makes sense that her thirst for glory has been quenched.

"I killed the Witch King and cut the head off it's Fell Beast? Well, literally nothing is going to top that! Guess I can put my feet up a bit now."