#and like. i don't know how much mental space owen takes up in apo's pov but it also kind of makes me claw at the walls

[erstwhilesparrow]

okay actually gonna use some of my data to open tumblr and make this post because outsiders apo+owen makes me want to start biting.

the thing about outsiders apo and owen is that at the end of beach episode, owen comments on what a lovely day they've had together and says, "i can't wait to do this all again tomorrow." and there's no way he doesn't know, okay? multiple characters demonstrate over the course of the day that they remember what happened before this -- even if they hope otherwise, they know they're going back to the maze eventually; this day is an impossible and perfect dream. and look how they choose to spend it. apo and owen see the sun setting and hear the cries of the gulls melt into the birdsong of the clearing and the thing they do at the end of this unrepeatable day, knowing they will never have this moment again, is turn to one another and promise they care. they've been running all over the place reminding each other all day: i care about you, you're my best friend, i want to spend time with you, i trust you so much i'll jump down into the mouth of a volcano with you. whatever happens before or after this, it matters that for this one day they sought each other out and played stupid games and shared food. it matters that this was real for them. it matters that at the end of it all, they could not bear to part without saying first: hey, you're important to me. do you get it?

and also, do you ever think about that conversation apo and owen have before the second clearing about what they're going to do next, what they think about the maze, and just before they go off their separate ways, they say, "i trust you," to each other in the same tone most people say "i love you"? do you ever think about how the roots of that trust went so deep in owen that when it was broken, his faith in the entire clearing was broken? no one can be trusted, he said. everyone was working against me, he says. he decides something must be profoundly wrong with this world, because it is a world where apo was able to look him in the eye and lie him. it CAN'T just be about apo because his care for apo was so fundamental to his understanding of the world -- there is no place he can go or word he can say now without remembering him. owen's world is (was) the maze, the clearing, rasbi, apo. and even after all that, owen still says the next time he sees apo, it will be to drag him to the maze's exit. even desperately hurt and swearing to himself that they're done, leaving apo behind for real is unthinkable!! do you get it??

and the prison visit itself: i hope you know you were everything to me, apo. of course i regret it, owen, i lost you. apo made cheesecake. owen says, don't try to make me pity you, and i thought, oh, it's absolutely working, isn't it? you wouldn't be half so upset if you didn't care. if you could escape your care for him, you wouldn't have spent so much time circling the prison, pulled by the gravity of apo, apo, apo. and then the escape, and apo's memory becomes part of owen, hanging over him as a haunting, as much a real presence as the living person. "he's dead" becomes nearly like a chant -- owen wants nothing more than to put those memories to rest (he says) but he also can't stop saying it: he's dead, he's gone, he's been dead for months. as if he needs to remind himself, somehow. apo's gone, apo's gone, apo's gone. but owen can't bring himself to stop saying his name. can anyone hear me. do you understand what i'm saying??

after reunion, i spent a lot of time yelling in a friend's DMs about how owen should have died with apo -- that killing should have killed owen with it, and in some sense maybe it did, but owen walks out of that encounter still breathing and apo is still right there with him. this is the start of something new and apo was there for its birth. how do you silence the voices of the people you kill, he asks magic, because he can never seem to. some of us hesitate at the thought of killing our friends, he says to rasbi. i'll give you ten seconds, he says to apo, and maybe that's just a hunter playing with his food but maybe, for all that owen hardly seems to recognize his friend during reunion, something was still sticking in him. confronted with impulses he did not have the context to understand, owen thought his purpose was to protect everyone. and then his memories come back and it doesn't matter that it's apo in front of him because that's a demon, but maybe it does matter. maybe no matter how hard owen tried to forget it, it never stopped mattering. i don't know!!! do you get me!! do you get what i'm saying!!!!!!!

[erstwhilesparrow]

god there are so many little bits of outsiders that make me want to chew glass. in an effort to exorcise some thoughts:

there's something really fantastically horrifying about how much visual and mental space the maze takes up for almost all of the server's run, contrasted with the fact that we learn in the owenge q&a that the maze is one of multiple scenarios, built by STARR for a handful of seasons and ultimately meaning nothing. all this about learning the maze, this structure that was the outsiders' whole world for what they believed to be years, and it was a set piece that might not ever be used again. i can't stop thinking about the fact that on the literal actual minecraft server, the maze was built floating in the sky, and like, yeah. it was for this one server and nothing else. i get why you'd build it like that, in terms of practical concerns, but god. to know that thing never even touched the 'actual' ground.

hey. cc!owen PLAYS A GOOD FUCKING HEEL. oh my god he's good at playing the bad guy. this is not like thoughtful analysis at all but being able to hear so clearly the shift in tone when he goes into hunting mode, the willingness to just let things sit in silence, the way he completely sells a character's absolute conviction. the way when he has a knife in his mostly-empty hotbar during Spill Your Guts the distance between the currently selected slot and the knife right next to it feels like a tangible weight somehow!

speaking of which. please tell me the berries in his hotbar during his demon killing spree aren't raspberries. i can't actually identify them because i'm not familiar with the mod but i think if they're raspberries i would simply explode into a million bits of confetti.

hey remember how there was a giant underground reservoir beneath the clearing containing the skeleton of some enormous creature? was that fucked up or what.

hey also remember how one of the last written records left by the people who died in the frozen clearing was about how at least their friends got to die peacefully, in their sleep? remember how the maze was full of notes scribbled on pieces of paper and scrawled in blood on the walls trying to warn them, begging them to get out, hoping against hope that their last words might mean something? remember how mohwee's last words to the outsiders were take care of each other? they tried so hard to look out for each other, and whether they ever did it especially well is an open question but MAN. you can't say they didn't try.

even after deciding apo can rot down in the prison, owen still says, "the next time i see him is when i go shackle his hands together, and drag him through that maze to get him out." in the wake of the [don't dirty my name again] conversation, owen promises rasbi, "we came up together, we're gonna get out of here together." even with his faith in -- and i think i will argue that this is accurate phrasing -- the world shattered, owen has no concept of actually leaving either of them behind. he can't even imagine it. ;-; .

i don't know what the event is called in canon so i'm going to refer to it as [the clearing event with the scuffed mcc energy], the one where acho drowns, and it delights me that the nature of the medium is such that sometimes when owen says something, it becomes true because he said it. (i mean, this is true for all of them, but i say owen because he's the one i watched and he has an interesting degree of narrative control by virtue of having such a comprehensive pov.) acho didn't die in a way that minecraft the game would necessarily call a death, i'm not convinced what happened to him was distinguishable from what the characters call being 'downed' in the maze, but because owen said it, on some level, yeah, acho did die in there. isn't it so fun how you can kill someone by saying they died? reach back through linear time and make true what wasn't before? and i think about this and i think about how often owen declared apo dead, and how it makes apo not just a ghost but a sort of schrodinger's cat. apo is alive except no he isn't except yes he is. reality is so frighteningly malleable in mcrp.