#and forcing vitalasy into a villain role that is literally what he is doing

[myrmica]

my reading of lifesteal season 4 is so personal and involved at this point that even if i was going to post more character analysis i would not know where to start. it would require footnotes to documents that don't exist. listen to luddites and lambs by everything everything and you'll get half of it though

[irrealisms]

#I LIKE THIS WAY OF LOOKING AT IT.#i had been thinking of vitalasy as kind of the combination witch/beast to subz as knight and zam#as prince/princess (his whole deal with wanting to be saved/rescued/taken care of but rejecting it when it happens) but the animal bride#is getting at something similar...#there really is no clear answer about which story is more true because they both have literal authorial power over their own#versions of events & they're both aware of this power that the other possesses#and vitalasy specifically is so concerned with this. being “misrepresented” or at least portrayed in ways that don't line up with how he#wants people to see him regardless of what actions he has actually taken really bothers him.#so you have vitalasy who is simultaneously mad at zam for (in his mind) forcing him into the “villain” role instead of working with him#And trying to fulfill that role and lean fully into it by way of “okay then you get what you ask for!"#And failing to follow through on that because what he actually wants is still to negotiate with zam and find a compromise#and to be seen for the self sacrifice and love and all of that#intentions aside when he does try to enact the version of things that zam was afraid of he can't do it for very long at all.#and so he instead tries to do what zam & the solar union say they want from him by putting the exploits down as a way to escape#having to play out the thing he's realized he does not want to do#but in that he fails to complete the real request being made of him; to deliver on all of his perceived narrative promises#which aligns with the idea that the door has to be opened because otherwise there is no story in an interesting way; what vitalasy does#makes everyone so unbelievably mad precisely because he's briefly ceased to behave on storytelling logic. they're mad that he's not#following through on what he's set up. they can't believe that he would actually put the exploits down because then what was#any of this for...#if what's in the room is a schrodinger's cat situation which it kind of is#regardless of the material truth of the exploits due to the way storytelling works it's like. what would#happen if bluebeard quit his job half way through bluebeard and all of those dead wives vanished into thin air#but everybody else has not gotten the memo and you can't go back and rewrite the first half of bluebeard so everyone is like#'BUT WE SAW WHAT YOU HAD IN THAT ROOM???'#lifesteal#Forgive my wall of tags (tags by @myrmica)

not only do i forgive your wall of tags i love you forever for leaving them. thank you so much these are GOOOOOD takes

i lied lol im also dropping some s4 thoughts. i've been doing some thinking about s4 vitalasy & zam recently (when am i ever not thinking about s4 vitalasy & zam) and fairy tales . from vitalasy's perspective they're in the crane wife story, or a similar story. from zam's perspective they're in bluebeard. in both cases you've got one partner keeping a secret in a secret room, and as soon as it's discovered everything collapses and they can't truly stay together anymore. but in the crane wife the secret is self-sacrifice and in bluebeard the secret is hurting others. (notably these are also both gendered--the self-sacrificial victim is the wife, the murderer is the husband. and in lifesteal they're obviously both men and are not playing out traditional fairy tale gendered dynamics lol. this is part of why there isn't a clearcut answer to which of them is right about which story they're in.) either way there is a question hiding in the margins: if the secret is never revealed, will the wife die or will they stay together happily? we don't know. they don't either. they have to open the door. this is how the story goes. there is no version of the story where they don't open the door. the important thing is that the one you love has a room they are hiding from you, with a secret that they know will tear the two of you apart, and you enter it anyway, and things are never the same.