#all very meta

[crusheswhimsandfancies]

“You fucking patronising mollusc!”

[s0fter-sin]

thinking about the way ghost doesn't hesitate to start killing shadows when graves betrays them but soap only takes one hostage

you can almost hear the voice in his head telling him it doesn't have to be this way; they can still talk it out

"i'm calling shepherd"

his first instinct when confronted with betrayal is to play it by the books: to go up the chain. that goes against everything we've seen him do. he bucks authority at every chance except for the one time he's confronted with the barrels of his allies' guns

he wants a peaceful resolution; for the first time we've ever seen, he doesn't want violence to be the answer. there has to be another fix, a solution that doesn't end with him killing the same men he's been working with; his friends

nothing's happened yet

it doesn't have to go this way

but ghost has been betrayed before. he knows the way this ends; either with him six feet under or his enemy

he doesn't hesitate

it's only when they knock alejandro out that soap shoots; when they spill the first blood and cross a line they can never come back from

only when ghost orders him to run and he has to cover his retreat

and somewhere along the line, between civilians’ screams and taunting voices, between his shaking breath and ghost steady in his ear, that naivety is stripped away; his trust turned to teeth that he uses to sink into throats of men he'd have given his life for

"be careful who you trust, sergeant; people you know can hurt you the most"

he's learned the price of trust

just like ghost did

but unlike ghost, he has someone to guide him through the aftermath

"good advice, It"

[vaguely-concerned]

the more I play the more I think lucanis basically knows it's illario who betrayed him right from the beginning (he's had a year in the ossuary to think. not that many people knew where he was going. when you ask him 'did Illario know you'd be on that ship' his only answer is the hardest flattest 'yes' you ever heard). so it's not so much about figuring out who the traitor is (because that's ludicrous. we all know. immediately. they didn't really bother to hide it lmao) as about methodically closing off every single avenue of denial lucanis has clung to that whole time with as much or little gentleness as you might prefer until he has no choice but to admit it. because the moment he has to admit it, he'll have to do something -- feel something -- about it. and that's such a catastrophic event in lucanis' inner landscape (he has had TWO people in this whole entire world up until now and will do anything to hold on to them with a heartbreaking child-like desperation, even at and especially through the detriment of his own self) that he'd rather just. not. what if we quite simply. didn't. what if we just stayed here in the emptiness where we can both pretend you didn't hurt me in a way I should never forgive. I have so much practice in that with caterina already it's always worked out great for everyone so far. (press x to fucking doubt but that's trauma logic for you lol)

after everything illario did, so much of the storm of lucanis' emotions around it is 'what the FUCK did you get yourself tangled up in this time and how do I get you out of this mess safely'. what's worse: the fact that your brother murdered you, or that he put himself in horrible danger doing so and thus exposed you to the risk of losing him forever. lucanis' heart certainly has an opinion here and it's fucking unhinged (affectionate)

the themes of dissociation in lucanis' character in general makes me feel nuts. allllll these contradictory messy things he needs to cut off from each other because they can't coexist or be easily reconciled inside him. but all remain stubbornly true separately anyway and will have their due one day. love and resentment. tenderness and fear and rage. terror and longing. love and freedom don't coexist. the burned out golden child anthem is playing in the background. he was always caterina's favourite and he has to keep striving to deserve that dubious honour with every breath he takes and then, presumably, mercifully, some day he will die and be excused and can rest. and until now he's suppressed all the -- natural, healthy, protective! -- negative feelings that threaten the few attachment relationships he actually has, at the cost of ever actually having his needs for connection and safety met and leaving his core self imprisoned and compromised. and spite goes 'what. no. that's dumb fuck that' (*spite voice* I do not understand that and even if I did I would not respect it) and does not allow him to fall back into that, which I think is what saves his life, ultimately. it took being possessed by a demon for lucanis to even contemplate telling anyone he loves 'no' in any way, but hey. whatever gets you there right lol

lucanis is dealing with the freeze response allll the way down baby. and he was even before the ossuary, that just turbo powered it and brought it to a breaking point way before it could happen naturally. but something was going to break eventually no matter what, and I'm just glad that in the end, through the power of friendship and also pure spite, it doesn't have to be him

[mayasaura]

Was thinking about this line because Harrow what the actual fuck are you talking about, and I realised something.

Not only does Harrow really for real not know that Gideon loves her—in the bullshit context of their lives, this is a reasonable misunderstanding for her to have.

What has Harrow known Gideon's life goals to be since they were children? Hint: There are at least two Harrow is fully aware of.

The first is to be wanted. As much as Gideon hates and wants to escape the Ninth, she also paradoxically craves their acceptance. They're the only community she's ever known. Harrow plays on that desire from the very beginning, mostly by kind of .... well, okay, by negging her about it. Ironically appealing to her sense of loyalty and duty to her house when they both know Gideon never even had that bridge to burn. That kind of thing.

Whether or not she's right, Harrow sincerely believes that acceptance to still be important to Gideon. First flower of my house, the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. When Harrow has only seconds left to make amends, she not only banks hard into praising Gideon, she frames it to unambiguously offer Gideon the acceptance she's always been conspicuously denied. Assuring her of her value not just as a person or as a cavalier, but as one of their house, one of their people.

The second thing Harrow knows is that Gideon wants to join the Cohort. Easy, everybody knows that. She's only been telling everyone with ears (and then some) since she was eight years old. It's the bait Harrow dangled to entice her into this mess. She wants to be a hero, to do great deeds like in the comic books. She wants to be a soldier.

Against the backdrop of all that context, Gideon's dying declaration "for the Ninth" starts to sound a hell of a lot more like "for Queen and country." Especially when you remember that Harrow is still the sovereign ruler of the Ninth. From Harrow's vantage point, Gideon could easily be playing the heroic underdog in a war movie. The soldier no one believed in until she threw herself on a grenade to save her squad. The knight errant who proved her chivalry by giving her life in service to her king.

From that perspective, Harrow's line to Ortus makes sense. She's following through on her promise of acceptance, defending Gideon's loyalty to the first Ninth face she sees. She's playing out Gideon's war hero fantasy, where Gideon's act of heroism proved them all wrong about her. In which case Ortus's response, "You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth House could muster. I truly believe that," flows very naturally as a reply. He understands what Harrow is trying to say, and affirms it.

It's not a hero's burial in the Anastasian, but it's the closest thing Harrow has the power to give her. And it's a fucking reasonable interpretation of Gideon's actions that doesn't touch on her feelings for Harrow at all. Fuck me.

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[possamble]

Hold on

Was she

Hiding behind a portrait of her mother????? I know I joked about her emulating her mother to put off an air of a competent woman and mage but??? Did Ryoko Kui just straight up make the most straightforward visual metaphor of her feeling like a child behind the demeanor that she directly modelled off her mother??

[athenas-only-daughter]

The thing about the prologue to Downfall is that it also makes The Divergence a tragedy (or underscores the tragedy of it, depending on your view)

These beings came to the universe with Exandria broken, lost, and scared. They lost their home, they lost some of their family, and were somewhere totally alien to them, in bodies that were alien, too. Clinging to their siblings that survived.

And then, millennia later, they will seal themselves away from it, and largely away from each other, too, because they were fighting too much for this new place, this new home, to survive. They were going to end up destroying it.

If you think about it, much of the history of Exandria (its theological one, anyway, which is tied up with most of its history in general) is the story of a family dissolving, growing estranged and breaking apart. It's just that the family is a group of gods.

[sky-scribbles]

Hey do you guys remember how long it took for Essek to show his natural awkwardness around the Nein? Do you remember how they were friends with him for three months before he even tried making jokes around them? Do you remember the long slow process of him letting down the Shadowhand mask and openly showing how much he enjoyed their antics?

Did you see Essek just being himself around Bell's Hells, this bunch of weirdos he'd never met, even as he pretended to be someone else? Did you see him cracking that dumb joke about his pretend mother being able to stop time with enough ale, and laughing with them? Did you see him watching them for all of five minutes and going, 'This has been a very interesting first impression. I'm excited to see how strange this gets!'

Do you realise how much easier and freer with people he is now? How despite dropping the Shadowhand sleekness and showing his awkward side, he somehow seems more confident? Do you realise that despite the situation right now, Essek seems happy?

[nagitosstolenhand]

i don't like the growing opinion that people are being 'too hard' on deku for his failing to save shigaraki.

i've seen quite a few people complaining that a lot of the bnha-critical crowd are being too mean to deku for getting tomura killed, arguing that it isn't really his fault, and that hes a 16 year old child soldier who's been failed by almost every adult in his life, why should we be putting all of this on his shoulders? hes just a kid after all?

and the truth is, they're right. deku IS a 16 year old boy whos had the fate of the world thrust on his shoulders. but the story itself just plainly refuses to acknowledge this.

the narrative doesn't acknowledge how fucked up having a school that trains literal children how to be combo cop-celebrities is. it only tentatively acknowledges the fact that a universe having combo cop-celebrities is fucked up, and even then the only people who ever point this out are antagonists, who are portrayed and treated in-universe as untrustworthy. the narrative doesn't care how fucked up dekus circumstances are. the narrative treats deku like hes a fucking messiah here to touch the hearts of the evil depressed villains with his magical empathetic heart of gold before they get blown up or just sent to fucking superhell for daring to challenge the status quote.

deku isn't a person. he's barely even a fucking character at this point. he's a plot device, and a mouth piece for the objectively shitty themes bnha is trying to spout. the themes that tell you that if you're mistreated by society and want to do something about it, you're a villain. that disrupting the status quote and refusing to repent to some random teenage boy spouting empty platitudes at you means you deserve to get sent to fucking superhell. the themes that portray people fighting for civil change as mass murdering supervillains. the themes that look the audience dead in the eye and can call deku the greatest hero to ever live.

deku, who barely spared a second thought to lady nagant telling him the truth about the hero commission. who spouts meaningless platitudes about heroism and morality at nagant, and aoyama, and toga and shigaraki, when even the thought that he should question the world around him comes up. who's constantly talked about as this truly kind, empathetic person, but hasn't spared an empathetic thought to literally anyone who is classified as a villain. who listened to every authority figure around him except the ones who asked him to question his worldview. who saw la bravas tears, shigarakis various breakdowns, himikos plead for understanding, chisakis catatonic state, lady nagants truth, and barley batted a fucking eye. deku, who killed tomura shigaraki.

people don't criticize deku for failing shigaraki because they just hate deku. people criticize deku because of what he represents. because hes a mouthpiece for the atrocious morals and themes of this ideologically rotten manga. because any character he had was chopped up to bits in favor of the incomplete husk we have now. people criticize deku because hes the main character of my hero academia. theres nothing more damning then that.

[sidewalk-cracks]

The batkids encountering distressed children and calling them "sweetheart", subconsciously mimicking how Bruce would and will call them sweetheart when they're distressed, and not even realizing it?? Don't speak to me. I can't.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[mychapel-004]

watching people fight over how canon the book of bill is while completely mischaracterising bill is such a strange experience

yes he’s a liar. yes he’s a manipulator. yes he is so distant from any semblance of humanity that he is literally incapable of regret, empathy or remorse, or at least admitting to himself that he feels it.

but he’s also TERRIBLE at it. he’s a total loser. he’s objectively bad at the one task he’s spent lifetimes on. throughout history he attempts to sweet talk many, many different figures into building his portal and it rarely goes down well. multiple civilisations are aware of his existence and the sole reason we know this is because they hated him and invented their own ways of keeping him out. he has been consistently rejected by humanity at every turn, only coming close to completing his goal when he literally possessed a dead man and formed a cult.

ford is the only person who really, truly fell for the act. not just that, but bill didn’t even have to pretend to physically be someone else to get him hooked. ford took him as he was.

all this to say, bill is absolutely a grifter who will say anything to get what he wants, which means a lot of BOB is just sweet talk, carrot and stick, he’s just saying what the reader wants to hear. but that’s not the important bit.

bill is a liar but he wraps the truth up in layers of misdirection, doublespeak and lies. a monster really did destroy his homeworld. him and ford really were going to change the world. he even addresses this in the book, he lies until it becomes the truth. a lot of bill’s characterisation is shown in the gaps between his lies, it’s all in the fault lines, in a similar way to stan. he’s a very meta character, but ultimately he’s still a character and he still behaves in ways that are designed to convey meanings to the audience.

of course he’s lying in the book of bill, but he’s also telling the truth, in addition to bits of info from other sources that he is unable to edit like the theraprism section. it’s fun to have a character who lies a lot, but it would be a pointless exercise to have an entire book be non-canon and false, especially when we get much more interesting character work from the parts where he runs out of lies and his only options are desperate truths.

anyway. people wanting to enjoy canon info in a canon book isn’t just them “being easily manipulated” or stupid, and you aren’t a better fan for not believing it

[vaguely-concerned]

My two cents on how much of Mind!Varric is Rook’s mind trying to fill the blank space and how much is Solas actively talking through a convenient blood magic paper doll of the mind: I think it's a mix of both, a truly collaborative psychosocial horrorshow if you would, but waaaay more towards the second. It feels too directed and tactical at times to be anything else. Rook's mind is willing to go along with the denial phase as far as it can fucking carry them to not have to face the grief and regret and does its part in papering over details that don’t make any sense, the way brains will strive to create coherent meaning even out of deeply confusing input, but to my understanding it's a collaborateur in how that plays out, not the instigator or control center. Solas is using it as a path to agency and to gather insight into Rook as a person unguarded as he can't count on in his own guise. (That stoic option that leads to him being like 'oh I see you're cautiously denying me access to your inner life. well. at least you still have Varric to talk to. y'know as an outlet :)'. You absolute BITCH Solas! That alone convinced me that he HAS to have an active hand in it on some level.)

My guess is that it takes considerable effort on Solas’ part to make Mind!Varric do anything more involved or complicated than seeming to sit up in bed and give casual commentary, and that’s why he keeps having eerie five minute shallow pep talks with you before he announces he conveniently needs a nap aaanyway good luck kid you got this haha. When he’s just spouting NPC lines from his bedrest, I’m ready to believe that could be Rook’s mind being allowed to improv lines for him more freely because it’s less about Solas trying to get something out of them or working an angle and more ‘Still here! Still totally alive and fine and the mentor figure you know and love and trust :) don’t even worry about it! Thankfully there is no war in Ba Sing Sei, as we all know’ upkeep work lol. Rook’s mind is allowed to set the tone of Varric, the outlines, but not always the content. 

AND, on a (beautifully fucked up) character psychology level, I feel like Solas is indulging in actually getting to be the good supportive mentor figure to Rook with one hand to assuage the guilt he feels about what he's done -- and what he's going to do -- to them with the other. Same internal logic as he uses in Trespasser about the Qun. ‘Almost everyone is going to die from the course of action I’m doggedly pursuing eventually. But at least I can make their last years happier and freer and kinder than they would have been otherwise. and that kind of makes up for it right. a little bit. doesn't it. doesn't that make it better at least. I need that to make it better)'. Did I really take your beloved mentor and friend from you if you don’t know yet that I did? Some philosophers would argue not really! So it’s probably almost ok actually. Isn’t it even a little noble that I’m taking all this grief and guilt on myself and shielding you for now. With undertones that I’m not sure he would realize himself (and might be mortified by if he did) that he is so incredibly lonely, and even a dishonest and indirect emotional connection is more than nothing when you’re that desperate. In this setup he gets idk. Both the control he craves so incredibly badly in relationships and over himself, and the scraps, the fading afterimages, of intimacy and warmth and companionship, even second hand. The one thing Solas and Rook agree on deep deep down is that they really wish Varric weren't gone. They're handshake memeing this in the saddest and most creepy way possible.

I think an important element too is that Solas needs Rook and their team to *succeed* —  up to a certain point. He needs someone to hold the two other elven mean girls off until he can get out of here. Ideally, in a perfect world, even do all the hard work of killing them so he can swoop in at the end and do his thing when both sides are exhausted and out of resources to stop him, and then Bob’s your uncle! Same logic as he was using with Corypheus, and after that worked out so well, too! King of choosing to never learn from a single solitary mistake he’s ever made even though i fully believe he could have the capacity to Fen’Harel <3 The underlying idea isn’t flawed, you see, it was just unforeseen circumstances getting in the way. This time for sure it’ll all work out the way I cleverly imagined it in my head beforehand. Cue By Talos this can’t be happening etc. in the form of a statue almost crushing him like a bug. 

So he's providing guidance and forging Rook into a leader from two angles: one Rook might not trust, and one they probably will. Shaping them into what he needs slowly and carefully. He’s helping you hone your team into their most effective state, as he might have done with his own agents back in the day, setting up his chess pieces even if he has to squint through two glimpsed realities to do it haha. Pincer maneuver of an insidious stealth mentor you never asked for. Also… at one point mind Varric gives you a whole little monologue about how Solas' problem is that he’s always seen his interpersonal connections as flaws and see where it’s landed him, all alone and the worst part? it hasn’t even worked. it’s all been for nothing he’s back where he began with nothing to show for it but his mistakes. Like...that has such strong 'uh okay happy to play your therapist from two rooms away here what the fuck kind of traumadump is this' energy to me, I’m not sure Rook like. Thinks that much about Solas as a private person. So much of Solas' self-loathing and futile insights into his own flaws seem to shine through in Mind!Varric's dialogue all the time — I just can't believe that there's no guiding hand behind it as it were. 

Most of all. I feel like people underestimate the degree to which Solas is incredibly funny. As in, he has a very consistent and recognizable sense of humour. It’s one of my very favourite things about him. We must remember — it is crucial that we always keep in mind — Orlesian accent and wig Solas from May The Dread Wolf Take You (my beloved, the explanation for why I love this dude even with the. All of the everything else. No one does it quite like him). He is not at all above doing things or adding little flourishes for his own obscure amusement, in fact that seems to me to be one of his most consistent traits. The Randy Dowager Quarterly comment Varric has? The ‘Maybe this is the Dread Wolf’s revenge. Forcing us to house sit for him’ thing? To Me this is 100% Solas amusing himself in his boring Fade jail surrounded by the screaming hellscape of all his regrets. Source: it came to me as divine revelation through pure vibes trust me bro 

If nothing else I find it much more narratively interesting personally if the connection between Rook and Solas really is that defenselessly intimate and entwined (and so unbalanced!), and the sense of violation and invasion and betrayal afterwards consequently all the more nauseatingly intense. Even if you kept him at arm’s length in the open, he’s been under your skin the whole time, looking around, gathering what he needs to destroy you, wearing the face of a friend. Regretfully, probably, but choosing to do it every step of the way anyway. (Sound familiar, Inquisitor? Solas doesn’t have that many tricks when you actually look at it, he keeps returning to old tried and true ones like a dog with a bone haha.) Maybe he even genuinely meant some of it as mercy, which only makes it so much worse. It makes his sin against his own core principles of autonomy and the freedom of all beings in mind, spirit and body so much more juicily grave if it’s something he pursues actively and consistently, rather than it half-falling into his lap as a happy accident mainly orchestrated by Rook’s own subconscious. Solas, too, is at his very lowest point, the closest to giving in and becoming his own antithesis fully that he’s ever been, and it makes the choice of whether you still reach out your hand to him one last time or not all the more impactful and difficult.

[beescake]

back in the day we had pantskat

now we have sagg sollux

[dykealloy]

such a small detail but I cannot stop thinking about law leaving kikoku by luffy's bedside when he went out to talk with hancock and ivankov. idk it stirs up a lot of questions. like does law do this often? does law, like zoro, talk to his well-behaved cursed sword like "kikoku, sit. watch." before he leaves to go have lunch or a well deserved twenty minute post-surgery nap. is this the protective equivalent to leaving a baseball bat by the bedside? doctor's bedside manner emotional support blade? but then I also can't help but notice that it's unsheathed. which... actually, who is that sword protecting really, just sitting there? did luffy wake up more than once in the cradle of that submarine while his body was still recovering? (drugged up to the gills, entirely noncoherent, unable to be reasoned with, going in and out of consciousness, the only thought running through his mind being "ace"). probably would've been a nightmare for the heart crew

[secriden]

Not to be a Style apologist, but I feel like some viewers haven't quite picked up that Style's brand of wooing Fadel is quite literally intentionally designed (by both the writers and the character) to be as annoying and frustrating as possible.

Lets consider:

Style thinks his bff is in love for the first time in his life. He thinks Kant is genuinely down bad for Bison: let’s not forget his clear surprise when Kant agreed to give up the car. As far as Style is concerned, Kant is acting really out of character and it's because Kant desperately wants to be with Bison.

He also thinks the only thing standing in the way of True Love™ is Fadel, who according to Kant is being unreasonably difficult about Kant and Bison dating. He doesn't know that Kant has a secondary motivation, nor does he know about the mind games that Bison is playing with Kant. Worse, he has no frame of reference or context to make any of Fadel's animosity towards Kant reasonable.

Moreover, while I think we all agree that Style made a terrible first impression on Fadel, the same has to be said of Fadel towards Style. Like, yes, absolutely Style was in the wrong, but Fadel came off as not only condescending and impatient, but unreasonable (and very weirdly cagey) when Style tried to immediately offer a resolution. Again, Style has no frame of reference for why Fadel would first demand that he take responsibility for his actions and then immediately after claim to have no time to entertain Style's attempt to take said responsibility.

Also, it doesn't help Style's wounded pride that Fadel keeps 'besting' him at every turn. So at this point I think a significant portion of that initial attraction (in ep 1) has shifted to annoyance when it comes to Fadel. By the time he gets his hands on Fadel's information, I think he's more than a little invested in some payback. While I think Style very much still wants to help Kant (and Bison) out, at least a part of him figures as long as he keeps Fadel busy, he kind of meets his goal. And if he gets to embarrass, frustrate and otherwise harass Fadel along the way, all the better!

You can see him start to have some fun with it. He ramps it up SO much in ep 2. He gets to lean into that wild, brash, playful personality because he doesn't really care if Fadel likes him. Style gets to be dialled up to extremes, and I love that for him because he's honestly kind of justified because he knows so fucking little about what's really going on. I think it's only fair if the other 3 are playing 4D chess while Style only has the Uno game rules in front of him, he gets to be the most Unhinged about it.

So, yeah, while I absolutely agree with all the posts out there that recognises just how reasonable and polite and tired Fadel is, I do think we need to give Style some credit here. He's absolutely SO extra, but he's also the one, arguably, that has been lied to the most and I feel that he deserves some slack for that.

I'm so glad he figures out some things in the next episode because my darling boy deserves to at least somewhat even the playing field.