#as they tend to be...

[thewintercorner]

guess who's back to yap about vitalasy!

looking so deeply at s2 recently got me back onto the worldender and cycles analysis grind but from a different perspective and ohhh man has that been fruitful

i've always had this feeling about vitalasy that he got the cycles but didn't Get them. he saw the cycles, could identify them as they were happening, but didn't understand why -- except he did seem to understand why? okay, so maybe he gets why but he doesn't get enough of the indomitability of that why to know it's impossible to overcome it. except he knows when to give up. and he knows when the big sacrifices are necessary and effective. and--

point is, i always had this weird dissonance about vitalasy that i couldn't ever really overcome. for pretty much all of the time i've watched lifesteal, i've operated off of an assumption that reckoning with the cycles, understanding them, would inevitably lead a player to become a worldender. in my mind, there was no world in which a player saw their world for what it was - constantly decaying, dying from the moment it comes into existence - and doesn't then seek to put it out of its misery as quickly as they can.

and yet, there was vitalasy. there was this player that fought so hard against the end of the world, and yet seemed to understand on some deep level that there was only so much he could do. here was this player that started preparing to fight decimation almost as soon as he learnt their name. here was this player, ever self-sacrificial, who always seemed to know exactly when and what to sacrifice to let the server live on.

he acted with such calculation and talked about the server in a way that clearly spoke to at least some understanding of the cycles -- certainly much more than the average player, at least, especially in season 3. and yet, he wasn't a worldender - and yet, he fought to save it, over and over again. why the anomaly?

then, i watched spoke's s2 video again, and something about worldending clicked. the thing about worldending is that it is a wildly selfless task. to end the world, you must be willing to give up everything you have ever cared about, everything you have ever loved, in pursuit of a more graceful end to the world that it would give itself. and it's not just giving up; you have to be willing to kill, to annihilate all those things. it is selfless destruction of your entire existence. nothing you care about can remain.

it raises a question: where's the compassion? where's the room for it, for humanity, in an act like that? the answer, i think, is simple: there really isn't any.

turn back to vitalasy. here is this player, this person, with so much love to give that it seems to spill out of his heart at every opportunity. vitalasy loves fiercely, loves his friends and his home and his server. he loves all of it so much i couldn't imagine him ever ending the world.

worldending is selfless. selflessness is a choice one has to make. therefore, is there not another choice? can one not choose instead to be selfish?

im going to start quoting the original flow of thoughts (written in the back of my linguistics notebook; i loveee not paying attention in class) here, because i think i wrote it better then than i could rephrase it now:

"perhaps there is another option: to be selfish. to reckon with the cycles and the inevitable decay, to look in the eyes of death and still choose your friends. to foresee the apocalypse is not to accept it; by many moral codes, it would be a an act of monumental apathy to sit back and idly watch - or worse yet, fight to accelerate - the end of the world as you've seen it. understanding the cycles is a predisposition, not the diagnosis. to quote jacob geller (go watch his vids if you haven't!!), some people can more easily imagine learning to die that learning to fight. in the context of lifesteal, it's understandable. but amongst the war and fire, there is still love. vi loves fiercely, vibrantly, stubbornly. of course he is going to fight. of course he will use the reckoning to understand how best to fight the cycles. yes, they are inevitable. yes, he fights for an infinite end, an eternal battle. is an extra day of loving not worth it? he claws moment from the death grip of the reality he exists in because the love is worth it. the sacrifices he makes are worth it because he's buying them more time. the world is cruel, but he refuses to be part of the cruelty."

tl;dr: the other option is to let the love win over the despair, to fight to live instead of fighting to die.

this is what vitalasy does. in knowing the cycles, he turns himself into a more effective weapon against them. he's self-sacrificial to a fault, but it becomes an advantage when he uses that to take the moral cost, take the heart cost, to take his entire life and fight the fight that no one else is ready to touch. vitalasy is so often villianized because he uses the same methods as the bad guys; the part people miss is that he uses their techniques against them. yes, he dupes in s4; how else are they meant to fight the other dupers when the end the world? yes, he feeds one more death to decimation in his sacrifice at the end of s3 -- because it lets six others get revived.

there is not only dread. in the darkness, there is light. vitalasy just eluded me for so long because he was the first to see it.

(there is a whole other discussion to be had on the implications of this on oath!zam, especially in light of recent events. i plan to write a companion post to this sometime soon going through all of those :))

[sabertoothwalrus]

I believe pretty firmly that it's really only the stylization that makes Chilchuck's age as ambiguous as it is, and that it'd be a lot easier to tell in real life.

and after a serious-ish comic here's a little bit of bullshit

[hansoeii]

look at you, you're gorgeous!

[canisalbus]

✦ Picciriddu ✦

[transgayhawkeyepierce]

Everyone reblog with your most unemployable traits

[souperluminal]

Every day Road Work Wizard fills in potholes and every night Dark Road Work Wizard crafts new ones

[aridatinas-art]

something something ... Stanford "Why didn't Rudolf just kill the other reindeer?" Pines and Fiddleford "I create death-mechas when my feelings get hurt" McGucket

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The squad of all time has arrived on scene.

[ekingston]

does anyone know wtf word-stream.com is or where to send them a takedown request? i just found a bunch of fics, including my own, hosted on this AI slop site—apparently offering what I assume are AI-generated audiobook versions & (equally AI-generated) ratings and reviews. i can’t take a closer look without signing up, which, no thank you, but it looks like they’re hosting the full fics and are peddling a paid subscription for the trouble of hosting them. can someone more knowledgeable than me explain what our options are in this situation?

[dateamonster]

"top ten movies about Girlhood" whose girlhood? whose girlhood? what kind of girl are these movies about? answer quickly.

[sabertoothwalrus]

does science experiments on you (homoerotically)

[biblicallyaccuratemoth]

Whenever someone says that they’re ‘mourning’ or whatever because of my transition, I imagine taking my egg-self around back and putting him down like Old Yeller.

[licollisa]

In which Papyrus gets a diagnosis

[descendant-of-truth]

Shipping is fun and all but I swear every single time someone makes a comment, whether as a joke or in a legitimate analysis, about there being "no other explanation" for a pair's interactions, I lose just a bit more of my sanity

Like, no, you guys don't get it. Romance is not about the Amount of devotion, it's about the COLOR. the FLAVOR of it all. a character can be just as devoted to their platonic friend as they are to their romantic partner, and they don't love either of them more, just differently.

But because the majority of people still have it stuck in their minds that romance exists on the highest tier of love, I'm stuck seeing endless takes that boil down to "these two care about each other too much for it to NOT be romantic" as if that's the core determining factor to how literally any of this works

In conclusion: stop telling me that I don't understand the story if I don't interpret the leads as romantic, I am TIRED

[tojisun]

thinking about the way simon leans into you for a kiss like this— he curls his hand around your throat, and he doesn’t really tug or tighten it, instead uses his hold as a leverage to push himself close to you, like he is sucked into your gravitational force, always orbiting. always tethered.

he doesn’t know how it is to not be with you.

and this kiss, just one of many, shows the attraction he always succumbs to. he holds onto you like the way one would clap their hands around a glittering firefly, snuffing its way out to force it to sparkle only for themselves, and folds himself close like he is about to whisper a wish.

the kiss becomes a prayer; it is his offering to you.

and when he pulls back, you see the way your lips had burned him, leaving him all pinked cheeks and twitching nose. you feel breathless at the weight of his adoration, his reverence, because simon looks at you like you are worth more than the flesh that holds you up.

you swallow, throat bobbing, and simon’s fingers twitch on your skin. his hand around your throat feels like an anchor but you watch the way he still sinks into you.