#all of them painful. marisha ray i am sobbing. ENOUGH

[flowercoasts]

thinking a lot about how laudna bases her self worth on how she can service everyone else around her. for 30 years she was chased down with torches and pitchforks just for existing. even before that, she was ostracized throughout her childhood. so, of course, once she gains some true, lasting connections with people (her family, now), she would give all of herself in service to them, would do anything to keep that connection. 

back in episode 16, laudna says to ashton: “... i’m desperately wanting to be helpful. useful. have a purpose.” and isn’t that the entire point? laudna’s purpose is to help the people around herself. to take care of the ones she loves. which is why, as soon as she is alive again (after enduring a week’s worth of reliving her trauma in a loop, after waking up in the city that failed her, after everything) laudna is the one apologizing. 

she wakes up in a whitestone and instantly, people she doesn’t recognize have weapons pointed at her. an entire army is ready to kill her for the woman living inside her. not only that, but she knows that the hells experienced her trauma and, quite literally, fought her demons for her. waking up and knowing, explicitly and implicitly, how complicated she’s made things. how her past cannot be buried and forgotten. (death was never a big deal to her. it’s something that happened to her, and she’s had to learn to live with that. but now it’s happened again, and bells hells had to deal with that. now she can’t ignore it. now other people know how terrible it is, and how terrible it is to know.)

and her perception of herself too - because laudna’s a puppet. a vessel. she has never been able to live for herself, and has never been more than a instrument for someone else. she’s alive, partially, but her life is entirely about everyone around her. they revived her, but at what cost? she loves these people so wholeheartedly but cannot find it in herself to imagine they’d feel the same about her. because she’s just a tool. she has a use, a purpose. her life is parallel to theirs, but it’s not quite the same. in her eyes, they lost time to find out more answers about ruidis. they lost time to pursue otohan. they lost time to save someone. her resurrection is a nuisance. a roadblock. a distraction. in the grand scheme of things, she’s not important, they are. and she’s very sorry for not being strong enough to shift the focus back to them.