#but depicting him in his element instead was a good choice

[isfjmel-phleg]

A recent commission from @scarvenartist, who chose to draw my OC Delclis!

Dedicated (perhaps obsessive) young botanist who gets roped into the worst job ever: monarch of a major world power. His mind is a thousand miles away cataloging and analyzing specimens. The expression here captures it perfectly!

[reunionatdawn]

Weighing in on ATLA shipping discourse

Iroh: You're not the man you used to be, Zuko. You are stronger and wiser and freer than you have ever been. And now you have come to the crossroads of your destiny. It's time for you to choose. It's time for you to choose good.

Why did Zuko have a fever after decided to let go of his Blue Spirit mask? Well, the imagery suggested that he experienced a Kundalini awakening. A Kundalini awakening is a profound spiritual experience that involves the activation and rising of Kundalini energy, located at the base of the spine. In Hindu and yogic traditions, Kundalini is often depicted as a coiled serpent, symbolizing dormant spiritual potential.

Ida and Pingala are the two energy channels that run alongside the spinal column and correspond to the left and right sides of the body, respectively. Ida is associated with the feminine or yin aspect. It is linked to qualities such as calmness, receptivity, intuition, and nurturing. It is also associated with the moon, coolness, and the element of water.

Pingala represents the masculine or yang aspect. It is associated with qualities such as activity, dynamism, alertness, and willpower. It is associated with the sun, warmth, and the element of fire. In the yogic tradition, the balance and harmonization of Ida and Pingala are considered essential for achieving physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

Once the two energies combine at the crown chakra, a person's consciousness is supposed to transcend duality. What does that mean, exactly? It means to move beyond the perception of reality as consisting of opposing or dualistic concepts, such as good and bad, light and dark, right and wrong, or self and other. You understand that these apparent opposites are part of the same unified whole and are interconnected in a deeper, more profound way.

"I was head writer of ATLA, and this is exactly how I see it! There was some controversy that Zuko made the "wrong choice" at the end of season 2. A lot of fans were ANGRY! But it had to be this way… we wanted him to get everything he thought he wanted. The triumphant return. His father's respect, and a seat at his right hand. Only then could Zuko truly outgrow these things, and choose to do the right thing in a meaningful way." (Aaron Ehasz)

So, the symbolism definitely favors Zutara in that respect. Katara learned through Zuko that the Fire Nation is not innately evil. Even though he hurt her with his "wrong" decision, part of her character arc was understanding why he did it and being able to forgive him. And because he made that choice, she could trauma-dump onto him and that led to her gaining closure about her mother's death.

"I was head writer of ATLA. Azula and Zuko's relationship was not always well understood, even by the team internally. Azula loved Zuko, more than anyone save her father. She also felt competitive with him for their parents' attention of course, but since she had alienated herself from her mother, she focused her energy on pleasing dad… which of course meant acting in more and more intense and possibly evil ways." "By the end of the series, of course, her loss of her friends shatters the part of her identity that she could somehow control affection and love through intimidation. As a result she spirals… I did however intend to leave a kernel of humanity, and had we made a season 4 Azula would have completely bottomed and we would have explored the possibility of a path to redemption. True story!" (Aaron Ehasz)

But it's not even just Zutara. What I found interesting was that Azula was the blue dragon and Iroh the red dragon. Azula was crazy and needed to go down, right? By siding with his sister, you're meant to think that Zuko chose "evil" instead of "good". But it looks like some of the writers meant for it to be more complicated than that. There was no "good" or "evil" choice. Azula had a softer "yin" side, too.

Zuko wanted to get along with his sister. He did not want to kill her, even though Iroh thought that was the only option. The fact that Azula never got her redemption arc did a massive disservice to Zuko's arc as well. The fact that Azula had good in her is exactly why Zuko's choice in BSS couldn't truly be called "wrong" or "evil".

Azula loved Zuko and that idea wasn't conveyed very well in the cartoon. She was the one person on that beach who actually did understand him. She was jealous that Zuko chose the Avatar over her. And she knew that targeting Katara with her lightning was the best way to hurt Zuko. Katara found a non-lethal way to defeat Azula for Zuko's sake. Because after seeing how hard it was for him to fight her, she finally understood why he made his choice in Ba Sing Se.

"[Azula] had not bottomed in the end of season 3, she had further to go. At the deepest moment in her own abyss she would have found: Zuko. Despite it all, her brother Zuko would be there for her. Believing in her, sticking by her, doing his best to understand and help her hold her pain that she can no longer hold alone. Zuko — patient, forgiving, and unconditionally loving – all strengths he gained from Uncle Iroh." "And I always imagined that after coming out the other side, she would be one of those people who hilariously over-shares her own feelings all the time, and that she would be a bit over-apologetic. Like a Canadian version of Azula." (Aaron Ehasz)

The first episode of Book 3 was called The Awakening. Aang literally awakened to the energy twisted up in the middle of his back. He did not complete his spiritual transformation. The Kundalini energy did not reach his crown chakra. It was still blocked because he had an attachment to Katara that he hadn't worked through yet.

Zuko's awakening was figurative. Mai didn't understand how he felt. Symbolically, when she turned his head to kiss him, it showed the audience the scarred side of his face. When Zuko lied his sister, the unscarred side of his face was shown. I suspect that the writer for the episode, Aaron Ehasz, wanted to hint that Zuko did still feel a connection to Katara and didn't want Azula going after her and Aang.

Zuko in The Crossroads of Destiny was not supposed to be the same Zuko from The Avatar State. Both versions of Zuko still wanted to go home. But 201 Zuko was motivated more by selfish attachment. 220 Zuko was more motivated by love. He loved Azula unconditionally. Even with all of her twisted, ugly, and cruel behavior. His consciousness had transcended the duality of Iroh and Azula being opposites where one is "bad" and the other is "good". During The Beach he was fantasizing about a time when Iroh played with both of them as little kids. Back when they were all a family.

Mai: You know what will make you feel better? Ordering some servants around. I might be hungry for a whole tray of fruit tarts. And maybe a little palanquin ride around town. Double time.

I don't dislike Mai. I think she is an interesting character who was not a bad person or anything. I just thought she served a very specific narrative purpose. She was there to show how Zuko wasn't compatible with his old lifestyle anymore.

Mai wanted a typical socialite boyfriend. They really didn't get along too well or have much to say to each other during The Beach. She didn't like him when he started talking about his trauma and showed his uglier side. Zuko was insecure and jealous because he was not even sure if she really liked him. And she didn't even know the person he was after his banishment, only the person he was as a child. When he turned his head away from her, his unscarred side was shown.

Zuko: When I got to the meeting, everyone welcomed me. My father had saved me a seat. He wanted me next to him. I was literally at his right hand. Mai: Zuko, that's wonderful! You must be happy. Zuko: During the meeting, I was the perfect prince. The son my father wanted. But I wasn't me.

He walked out of that war meeting with the scarred side showing. Mai didn't love Zuko. She loved the perfect prince. The fantasy she built up in her head and the role Zuko was acting out at the start of the episode when he was ordering her the fancy fruit tarts.

Mai: I guess you just don't know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you.

Mai stood up to Azula to save Zuko, and she genuinely believed she loved him. But he left her behind to be with his new companions. If not for Ty Lee, she would have died. That should have been the end of that relationship. I thought it was very weird that they got back together. The NATLA writers should definitely find a different way to conclude Mai and Ty Lee's character arcs. Especially Mai. She deserved a more dignified ending than being left in prison and then threatening her ex-boyfriend to take her back.

"I love that even though Aang is sort of not in this story very much, to me, he's-his presence is in all of these scenes 'cause you know he's like the little angel on her shoulder [...]" (Bryan Konietzko)

The main reason I think the shipping discourse in the ATLA fandom is so toxic is because the creators Mike and Bryan saw the narrative differently than the other writers. They seemed to have a completely different vision for the story and characters compared to the head writer. So, there were two conflicting visions and fans who liked one over the other could argue their side indefinitely. Bryke saw things as more black-and-white and good vs. evil. You can see it in some of the interviews and commentary, particularly with Bryan.

IMO, there really was no "good" and "evil" side in The Southern Raiders. There was no "angel" or "devil" sitting on Katara's shoulders. To Katatra, what Aang said must have sounded like nothing more than a trite platitude. It's true that in the end, she didn't choose violence. But I don't think Aang's words were very pertinent to her decision-making when she finally faced Yon Rha, LOL.

It's understandable why Aang would come off as preachy, though. He was just a child coping with his own grief. The Air Nomads' philosophy was one of the only things he had left of them, after all. Such a teaching was no doubt his own personal coping mechanism.

Aang was right in the sense that Katara didn't need to resort to violence in the end. But ya know, maybe she would have if she didn't have someone by her side who understood her inner darkness and accepted her even if she had chosen violence. Just like how Aang might have killed the sanbenders if Katara hadn't been there. And Katara would not have condemned him if he had done so.

"Zuko and Katara might have shared some sparks, but sometimes there are people along your 'journey of love' who are there to teach you about yourself and what you really need, but don't necessarily end up being your partner. Come on, kids! 'Zutara' never would have lasted! It was just dark and intriguing." (Bryan Konietzko)

Zuko was a character of duality. Yin and Yang. Light and shadow. His two sides were represented by the scarred side and non-scarred sides of his face. I think Bryan viewed Zutara as a "dark" ship because a big part of Zutara was about Katara's shadow side.

Just like Mai did with Zuko, Aang built up a fantasy version of Katara in his head. The perfect, well, "waifu," I guess. The endlessly patient feminine maternal figure. The sweet beautiful girl with such manageable hair. But that's only half of who she was. There was another side to her that he never saw. One that used bloodbending. Angry, hateful. Yes, even ugly. And that's not a bad thing. It's human.

[fairestbeard]

The Bear “Pasta” episode is about tainted/interrupted magic.

 

Walk with me.

In my previous meta I discussed how The Bear uses magical realism or marvelous realism in its story telling as evidenced in “Pop”. This is also very evident in the episode “Pasta”.

What Is Magical Realism?

Magical realism is a genre of literature that depicts the real world as having an undercurrent of magic or fantasy… Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world.

David Lodge defines magic realism: "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative"

The genius of The Bear is that it’s so subtle in its use of marvelous realism that it is totally left to interpretation. The magical aspects of the stories are so blended in with the ordinary so much so that you might not notice at all. We can see The Bear employing aspects of folklore and the supernatural in the most subtle ways.

Violet.

Over the course of the season, we’d see the color and general ambience of the show shift a lot to emphasize the mood and the events. This episode focuses on Carmy and Syd bonding over the menu they’re trying to create and it feels (to the sydcarmys at least) like some type of love is in the air. This is the closest Sydney and Carmy had ever been in proximity and intimacy to that point. It is also the most progress they made on organizing the menu in the season. We even arguably see Carmy the most animated and relaxed for how neurotic he is known to be.

In this episode we see a lot of violet or purple, which is associated in magic with love potions. There’s a ray of violet light streaming through the restaurant and all through the episode we can that (especially) Carmy’s skin is ever so slightly tinged purple. There’s also a hint of purple in almost every scene either from the lighting to random purple objects in the background (remember season 1 with the tomato cans everywhere? They’re saying something).

This was a very deliberate choice and the biggest evidence is the Chicago flag shown at the start of the episode.

The Chicago flag in The Bear vs the real Chicago flag.

Wiz Richie

Richie assumes the role of the wizard-in-charge, dressed in the purplest purple and trying to assert himself all over the ongoing renovations at the restaurant. He calls himself the supervisor (supervisor of the spell?), accuses people (obviously the audience) of not knowing “how to watch stuff”, in other words we should be paying more attention. The movement or beat of the episode is also centered on him. Everything is going chaotically well as it does with the Berzatto clan both at  the restaurant and away but then…

Richie finds an anomaly.

 

Mold is the death knell

Fak tells them mold is the death knell and it could "ruin everything". In other words, it could spoil the magic that's already happening, because it will.

 

Richie is in denial about the presence of the death knell and is trying to get everyone to ignore the problem instead of dealing with it the right way. But there really IS a problem and his efforts to prove there wasn’t results in a more catastrophic ruining of the magic.

 

This moment is where the whole trajectory changes. That’s the exact moment Carmy runs out of veal stock and has to go to the store. While Emmanuelle and Syd's dinner turn from sweet memories to an argument about whether Carmy is trustworthy, Carmy runs into Claire.

A breached portal

What I love about this scene is how once you see it you can’t unsee it.

The way Claire is introduced into the scene, it’s almost like in a marvel-esque fantasy film where a portal is opened do or create something good but some other force gains access to that portal and is introduced to their world. We also see the introduction of the cold blue that pervades the rest of the season.

We can sense Carmy's discomfort. He tries to gently evade what's to come.

But the mold has taken hold.

Sometimes the dark force is not a horned creature with a three pronged weapon. Sometimes the dark force is beautiful and smiling and “remembers you”.

Note: While I now and forever will be anti Claire bear and even though the format, through this marvelous realism lens, casts her as a malevolent force, in reality she probably isn't. Storer stays deceiving and léger de main, remember? Ultimately Carmy is the one "trapped in a prison of his own design".

[beachf4gz]

just here to say that you have the best takes on hdb/disco elysium ever. keep doing what you do man you're awesome

also that earlier poll on whether harry is schizospec: yeah 100%. personally as a person with stpd I hc him as schizotypal and I'd love to hear your own hcs/opinions on schizospec harry

eeeee thank u hes a v important character to me so i have a lot to say abt him

this is probs j waffle but abt him being schizpec, i have always very much resonated with harry as a depiction of a mood disorder schizophrenic comorbidity. the ways in which harry is shown to see the world and how depression specifically functions within him reads to me as psychotic depression- his understanding of himself and the world around him tends to be wholistic and follow specific themes or recurring ideas that depict a detachment from reality "as it is"- the position that kim occupies in contrast to him. i see a lot of the gameplay as essentially harry having to learn to accept reality as it threatens him over and over, learning to percieve and function in the small scale of a life rather than the larger framing of the world, or of laws above the world itself, contextualised thru history and political conflict and poetry. i've seen some ppl say that harry can be read as having did- personally i dont think the skills are a good depicition of did itself or of plurality in that sense, but i think that harry is meant to be above all a person victimised by the conditions of being working class- that of exposure to stress and danger and trauma and a forceful impending hurtling into the future without any ability to control or change his circumstances, and from that i think that complex trauma, osdd, bpd, a complex mood disorder or schizophrenia can all be read into him fairly easily (however i do think the game, in choosing not to be explicit with his symptoms, depicting them in comorbidity with metaphysical aspects of the world, is actively discouraging a 1-1 psychiatric evaluation of harry. i think it is instead encouraging the framing of psychotic thought within a materialist approach to living). while i dont think he has DID i do really think the skills depict fragmentation of the psyche into functions- so something along the line of osdd- and from that its fairly easy to expand how a fragmented personhood functions to produce a fragmented understanding of reality in which there is overlay between input, or the psychotic elements of his thinking. I think the pale is potentially useful here also- the concept of delerium or total thought disorder, as information across time and location is fragmented and combined and then this delerium is presented as the opposite of life, or the opposite of reality, or the tearing of the world apart, it reads very strongly to me as feeling of *being* in a psychotic state. since DE is (imo) very concerned with the players mode of interaction being that of *being* a person (thinking their thoughts, deciding their actions, interpretting and reacting to stimuli), it kind of knocked me out to play *as* a mind in totalising thought disorder.

the constant pressure against harry's way of seeing and interpretting and placing himself within the scenes around him comes from multiple perspectives- i think kim is positioned as the cbt/dbt type approach to disordered thought in which a person removes themselves from those ways of thinking altogether and repositions themself as a person alike other people, and as a member of the larger structure of society and of humanity- to deal with circumstances and "get your shit together" as a choice or as a "function first" approach to treating "illness". i think this is positioned as flawed, but fundamentally helpful and caring in nature. I think trant/jeans approach to harry- that of attempting to figure out what is broken within the machine and diagnose, or discard, is positioned as unhelpful, uncaring and wrong. I believe this is probably advocating in some way to the player to reframe disordered thought or the seeing of grander concepts in the mundane away from psychiatry and psychiatric labels and approaches towards materialism, which i think is the intended frame the designers seek the audience to approach the world through. i think this is part of the larger marxist nature of the game- communism, marxism, leftism in general comes with a degree of allowing oneself to exit the grounding nature of their own lives and to seek to understand or see patterns, vague spiritualistic or metaphysical forces, in the world at large- and naturally it attracts and cultivates disordered thought as a result. i think in some way harry serves to demonstrate and instruct the player how to navigate living in a way that allows for material action, and for survival and happiness and the modes of being one needs to occupy to achieve those, without dismissing or undermining ways of thinking and being. idk thats a lot of words but yh basically i do think that disco elysium as a text is very interested in thought and the framing of a persons perspective, and explores both the consequences that has on a life and person as well as the metaphysical aspects that frameworking and psychotic relationality to frameworking have on the experience of being a person. i think if this wasnt something they were concerned with, harry would have been a very different character- probably one who was more defined by substance use in a traditional "outside in" depicition and not by the deconstruction of the act of being him.

i have a bunch of wayyy more specific things abt him i would like to communicate at some point but thats probs better for a time when i cba to find quotes and examples and shit XP

[sseanettles]

nothing grows in corpses (in the earth of me)

dream x hob gadling | mature | Finally cross-posting my take on the fandom classic of the show progresses as the comics do, even to The Wake. Until Death resurrects Morpheus and forces the choice of "redemption" upon him instead of suicide. It goes...horribly. No good. Very bad. Instead of learning the lesson, Morpheus (in his infinite wisdom) opts instead for a highly effective existence strike until one day Hob Gadling stumbles upon his ghastly handiwork and immediately decides that this just won't do. Man Who Refuses To Die vs. Man Who Refuses To Live: fight.

Dead Dove, Do Not Eat for the following: graphic depictions of starvation, illness, suicidal ideation, self-harm, blood and gore, loss of autonomy, etc. etc. This is some classic old world whump, folks! But I promise it's also supremely healing in the end.

CH. 3: take me back to eden, pt. 2 | 6.2 k | AO3 link | prev part | next part

(or: the one where Delirium finds her brother-no-longer and dispenses her wisdom.)

“You had to see this coming,” Desire drawled and leaned against the brick wall as if it were a pillar on the balcony of a resplendent palace and they were its sovereign’s most beloved concubine…and not the mouth of a dingy, foul-smelling alley. “What else did you think he was going to do?”

Death sighed beside them, and her fingers drummed upon her hips as she glared at one of the shapes within the narrow passage. It had wedged itself within the recess between a stack of pallets that hadn’t been touched in months and a forgotten rubbish bin, mostly exposed to the elements but partly covered by the tarp draped over the wood. It rested up against the wall at a tilt that kept its face turned into the shadows with its knees drawn up to guard its chest and its arms tucked down in-between the two.

“I thought, in the face of no other options, he’d actually listen to someone other than himself.”

Desire gave her a dour look.

“You’ve met him, right?” 

Death shot them an equally unimpressed glance and then stepped into the alley.

“Morpheus.”

The figure twitched but did not move any further.

“Morpheus.”

His eyes, once capable of such cutting ruthlessness, forced open with all the ease of rusted hinges. Where once his irises had been star-filled—his pupils bleeding out into their oceans until they turned as wickedly black as obsidian and just as sharp—they were now no more than washed-out forget-me-nots, the thinnest of blues marooned in bloodshot sclera and locked away behind a glassy sheen.

That smallest of movements was the only concession he granted her.

“…Are you here to take my hand?”

It took Death a few words into his question to reconcile the croaking voice with the human before her, let alone the fathomless entity she had once known it as. Even then, she managed it only by the thread of petulant stubbornness that yet underscored its disintegrating syllables. She sank her teeth into her cheek, catching the soft tissue between the edges of her molars that did not truly exist until she tasted the blood she did not really need to manifest. She staked herself in that flash of pain and battened her resolve.

She could not blink. No matter how ugly her brother allowed this to become.

“No,” she answered.

Morpheus felt a twinge in his heart unrelated to the palpitations and skipping beats that had become increasingly common in the last several days. He did not know why he felt it; it was not as if her response was a surprise. He had known to expect it. Perhaps, though, some new, human part of him had yet hoped she would relent.

Sparkling, optimistic eyes in an equally warm face haunted the backs of his eyes in the time it took him to blink, lit by flame and enveloped by the smell of beer and sweat and dirt.

…wretched humanity.

“Then, there is nothing more to discuss,” he half-croaked, half-wheezed, and shut his eyes once more.

He could taste blood at the corners of his mouth where the parched skin had split further as he spoke. His throat worked in useless reflex, his tongue doing the same as both tried to alleviate his thirst. It was naught but rubber on rubber, and he noted with faint, academic interest that a sharp copper tang trickled to life in the bottom of his mouth. It no longer seemed bone dry, more like a few drops of water spilled on dusty ground…scant rain pooling atop the hard-packed earth in pearls of muddy, gritty sludge.

It seemed he had just cut his tongue on the inner edge of his own teeth.

Ah, well. It was a new taste amid the stale foulness that had been growing since he wedged himself here.

“You’ve been doing this for two and a half weeks.” His head throbbed. His stomach ached, and the pain there radiated out along every nerve to settle in his bones, pulsing to the unsteady rhythm of his stuttering heart. “The family is getting worried.”

“Speak for yourself,” Desire snorted and tightened the cross of their arms over their half-exposed chest. “I would love to see how much longer he can keep this going.”

To Morpheus’ threadbare senses, his sister fell quiet, shifting on her feet as if to look sharply at something behind her. Nothing filled her silence, though, and he was not about to do it for her. He had said his piece.

“What?” Desire protested in the face of Death’s scolding glare and gestured first to the oblivious creature folded against the wall and then to their eldest sister. “All he desires is death, and that’s your domain.” They shrugged and crossed their arms once more. “As far as he’s concerned, I’m not here.”

They moved with the languid, mocking grace only they possessed, but even Desire, with all their skill at obfuscation and performance, did not lie well enough. For Death knew her younger siblings better than they knew themselves. And she easily spied the faintest disquiet that stiffened Desire’s flow and betrayed the truth of their state, their true reaction to the scene unfolding before them.

They were afraid. Afraid of how ugly he was willing to let this turn and of how long she would hold out against his protests.

They were right to be afraid.

Death put the twin out of her mind and returned her attention to their fallen brother.

Against the wall, Morpheus listened to the grind of grit between Death’s boots and the cobblestone as her weight shifted and sank. Her voice, when it came again, was lower to his level.

“You haven’t eaten,” she said, with all the patience of a mother talking down her tantrum-throwing toddler with deliberate, simply spoken logic. “You haven’t had even a single drop of water…so I know you know I spoke the truth before.”

At the mention of water, Morpheus’ throat once again spasmed and choked on phantom drink. He gritted his teeth further, redoubling the throb in his temples, and forced his desperate thirst to subside.

“You will not die,” his once beloved sister warned. “No matter what you do.”

He would take even rain at this point. But she could not know that. She could not win.

“Anyone else I would have taken by now.”

She sounded so sad. So battered, so tired…he could make that stop. All he had to do was—

No. No, he had to do nothing. She could make this stop as easily as he could—more easily.

She could not win.

He said nothing and tried to cling to the phantoms of The What Comes Next that still lingered like shades at the edge of his memory…wisps of smoke and nothing more. He did not think of food. Did not think of water. He had gone a hundred years without either as an Endless, feeling every ache of it in his bones then, too. He could do it again now.

Death, with her cadaver’s skull and lidless eyes, would blink first.

“Brother, you haven’t even slept,” Death pushed, and the first shade of a plea entered her entreaties. “He knows you haven’t gone to the Dreaming. He’s…he’s been waiting for you.”

Waiting for me, Morpheus wanted to sneer and instead ground his molars until the white-hot knife of pain shot through his jaw. Oh, sister.

I hate him more than I hate you.

“You’re torturing yourself!”

And there it was. The crack in her voice, the open beg for him to stop, just stop this, was as loud as the splintering of a frozen lake beneath the feet of a child—the snap of a climber’s rope and the millisecond of weightlessness before the free fall began.

The impact of a jouster’s lance on armor and the telltale smack of puncturing metal where there should have been a life-preserving ring.

The first fissure in her resolve.

Morpheus struggled to raise his head by trembling fractions, his hand following suit with dirtied, papery skin that could have gone up like tinder with the lightest spark. And with the deepest, most rattling breath he could manage, Morpheus pushed himself slightly more upright, his head raising until his forehead could brace against the sun-warmed bricks. His head turned on his aching, seizing neck, every muscle in his body trembling and cramping with starvation, and his eyes, both open now, locked onto his sister.

She was trying so hard to not stare at him in horror, he knew. The boundaries of even her quiet patience and compassion were reaching their limit along with his rapidly thinning form before her—with its darkening eye sockets and sinking cheeks and opening wounds and wax-like skin that somehow seemed both puffy and dried-out. His hair was stiffened with grime. His nails, once pale and pristine, were caked with dirt, and he knew he was starting to smell something spectacular.

“If…it bothers…you so,” he rasped between heavy breaths, painting his lips first pink and then red with each progressive word, “then…let…it…end.”

Death’s mercy stiffened.

“That’s how it is?” she asked after a long moment.

Morpheus gave his answer in his slow, marionette’s collapse back to his previous posture: shoulders hunched, head bowed, eyes closed, face averted.

And in doing so, he missed the moment Death’s face hardened into something reminiscent of their long-absent parents. He could not miss it in her voice, though, and if he had reflected on this moment, on what his sister offered him and how he was handling the situation, he would have realized his misstep. He would have re-evaluated his choices, his paths, and perhaps tried a different way. Perhaps, he would have ventured down that patchy elephant trail through the darkest part of the forest and seen what awaited him on the other side.

Perhaps, he would have felt even a flicker of guilt for driving his sister to such an extreme, for drawing out of her the echo of their parents’ lingering damage.

But Morpheus had never been one for honest insight.

“Fine.” Death sniffed sharply, dashing her hand to her nose, her eyes, and stood. She wiped her palms on her pants, adjusted her shirt, and passed her fingers over the chain of her necklace down to her ankh in fleeting comfort. “You want to play chicken with me? A staring match with Death?”

Her fidgeting stilled, and it left her standing as tall and firm as a Sovereign’s monument above her cowed subject. She looked down at him as such, and the sadness in her eyes was deep and pitying.

You brought this on yourself.

“Then, I’ll give it to you.”

“Wait,” Desire said, unheard at the alley mouth, “what?”

Death’s chin trembled and then firmed to an iron jaw. Her hands curled into fists, black nails sinking into her palms.

“You won’t see me again, Morpheus,” she promised. Her oath fell from her lips as bindingly as anything written in Destiny’s solemn book. “Not until you’ve learned the lesson.”

She turned from her once-brother in the alley and made it as far as Desire’s side before her certain step faltered. She dug her fingers into the ridge of her hips, hardly keeping herself from turning back to him. 

She looked to the sky. She blinked quickly and breathed in sharp, deep bursts as she struggled to hold her resolve.

There were birds overhead. Pigeons.

“Brother—” Her voice broke apart like the shards of a mirror beneath a sledgehammer, in a stuttering rainfall of glue and backing and glass. “You’re breaking my heart.”

Some of the precious moisture left in Morpheus’ body welled in his eyes. He did not let them fall, did not betray their presence in a flush across his cheeks or a deeper quake to his already unsteady breaths. He forced himself onward as he was: uncaring, indifferent.

There came the sound of wings and nothing more.

Alone again, Morpheus allowed himself to move. He sagged in a slightly different slump, canted his shoulders at just enough of an angle to grant him a line of sight from the corner of his eye to the alley’s mouth. Perhaps a part of him, that part that had believed that maybe his sister would change her mind, hoped even now that she would reappear.

To no one’s surprise, least of all his own, she did not.

Instead, the craving for food, for water, for sleep, came upon him once more with a touch more sharpness, and his eyes caught on the faintest shimmer of a deprivation-induced mirage at the alley’s entrance. Yellow eyes watched him from an uncharacteristically somber face, the bleached hair tinted at the roots with a shadow of their darker tones. Their lips, red and full and typically smiling with all the hunger of a cat with the canary ensnared in its claws, pressed into a strained, thin thing. They regarded him in much the same posture they had held before—leaned against the wall, their legs and arms crossed.

But that expression…Morpheus could not recall having ever seen that particular expression on Desire’s face. It was so foreign on them as to be unidentifiable. No matter how hard he tried or how familiar it seemed, it was….

“Why must you be so stubborn?” they sighed.

A wave of vertigo so great it nearly dragged him to the Dreaming itself swept over him. Spots of light and dark danced across his eyes, and for a fleeting moment, he swore a pulse of psychedelic color pirouetted between them, like a sullied paintbrush dunked into clean water.

He bit his tongue where it had already split, grounding himself in the subsequent flash of wet iron, and the butterfly wings of color settled once more into the shapes and tones of sanity. He answered his once-enemy, his once-sibling, from the silence of his mind. He knew they would hear it all the same. It was their function to know that which…that which humanity locked away, unspoken, in the confines of flesh and bone.

Because it is all that I have left.

He awaited no response, expected none. He curled back into the wall and submerged himself once more in that grating buzz of sensation, that numbing, static-laden bell jar of human existence where once he had been infinite. Everything fell away save that nothingness, including Desire.

And so, Morpheus lied there in an alley of Richmond-on-Thames, alone by his own hand once again.

He did not eat. He did not drink. He did not bother to even clean himself, allowing only the rain to wash over him when it came and not making any effort with it when it did beyond the will of nature and gravity. And while the agony of hunger and thirst, of starvation and desiccation, was nerve-deep in a way that it had not been as an Endless, it too eventually faded away into a dull, permeating background radiation if he ignored it hard enough. Sleep, he found, was not as easily refuted in a mortal body, but he had settled into a grudging rhythm with even that. For days at a time, upwards of a week, he would hold off the pull of his successor until he could no longer. And the sands that had once been his to command would pull him down, down, down—

Nightmares awaited him there, at rock bottom.

There in the Dreaming, in that place of power and refuge that had once moved at his command like a great symphony, he struggled and screamed and raged. He found no refuge from the pains of his Waking World, only a record of his worst mistakes skipping endlessly: his worst choices, his coldest and most calloused lows that he had once envisaged as his greatest highs. He wondered when he woke—with bitterness, with tear-less sobs, with a panic-stricken, racing heart—what he had possibly done to his successor in the short time they had known each other to warrant such treatment. He wondered how his Nightmares could hate him so, wondered if he had wounded them so grievously in life that they now leapt at such chances to turn their prowess against him. He had tried to pick out their handiwork even as he suffered at their hands, tried to distract himself from the contents of his dreams by attempting to peek behind the curtain, but so far, he had not been able to correctly call them out by name.

If he had, they had not betrayed themselves to him.

Meadows morphed into plains of agony, the long blades of grass hardening to razor sharp glass and metal that cut him to shreds no matter which way he moved. His falling blood blossomed into poppies, and his life blood coursed from his veins until a sea of wildflowers remained. When he could hold himself up no longer, the crimson turning now to petals before it had even left his veins, he collapsed into the ravenous land and impaled upon its ruthless fields until he woke screaming.

Libraries, once a quiet, reflective refuge, turned to consuming shadows as the shelves vanished within an encroaching dark that he knew he had to avoid at any cost. And as he fled amid their ranks, searching desperately for just one book, for one story that could show him the way out, he only fell deeper into a labyrinth he should have known as the back of his own hand. Every tome he opened turned to bone dust in his fingers, turned to rotted paper and buckram, and the spines transformed to vertebrae that dripped with blood and soaked his sleeves and stained his skin no matter how he scrubbed, and—

“…My Lord?”

Her voice…that blessed voice, he was saved, he was safe. His Librarian, ever loyal Lucienne would be able to guide him from here—

He turned to see her standing at the end of the aisle, just as the dreaded dark set upon her.

Her stalwart, kind yet stern countenance crackled and caught flame like the pages of a book, and she screamed, reaching for him with blackening and disintegrating hands as her eyes melted from her sockets and her glasses cracked with the self-immolating heat. Her agonized, shrieking howl turned to a drawn-out question, a demand raked over shattered stained glass and rubble, and voices three cackled amid the flames.

“WHY, MY LORD?”

He sat in a rocking chair before a softly crackling hearth, at peace, at rest. Until the flames jumped the stone, until the home caught fire, blazing into a 4-alarm inferno that consumed him and all around him. And all the while he was paralyzed within his chair, trapped at the heart of this hellfire with, at times, a babe clutched in his arms, swaddled in a blanket held tightly to his chest as it screamed and screamed and screamed. And the tighter he held, the louder it screamed, and the hotter the house burned, and his skin melted down to his bones, melted down to—

Sometimes, he dreamt of Fawney Rig.

Other times, he dreamt of Naxos.

He did not dwell on those dreams for too long. He did not dwell on any of them for too long. Even as he woke into the full-blown stupor of his youngest sister’s domain, he did not allow himself to consider the function of nightmares. He did not allow himself to consider that nightmares, at least under his tenure, had functioned much the same as Hell had under the Morningstar. The implication if he had would have been too great.

You received that which you thought you deserved.

There was no lesson to be learned. There could not be.

o\\__oOoOoOo__//o

The minutes stretched to hours, stretched to days, stretched to weeks. He could not recall now the first time that Delirium had appeared to him, only that she had arrived amid a torrenting school of glittering fish, a rainbow riptide that had set his skin crawling and his head spinning and had drawn a manic, helpless little giggle into his throat as his world tilted like a carnival ride in its wake. She had appeared to him cross-legged on the wall above him, her pale hair with its prism-colored streaks defying the laws of gravity and swimming about her head as if she were submerged in water with technicolor bubbles bursting from her lips as she spoke. Her eyes glittered neon blue and green each, and her head tilted to and fro like a curious dog as she considered him below her.

“You’re not my brother,” she announced after a time. “Brother-not-brother, sister-not-sister, but not sister-not-sister and brother-not-brother like Desire.” She rocked forward into a kneel that then sprawled her further onto all fours, reaching one hand down to poke at his filth-stiffened hair from her crouch upon the wall. “You’re brother-shaped but not brother insides.”

She felt like ants, like spiders skittering across his scalp, and he gritted his teeth to keep from scratching in a frenzy.

Not real. It is not real, it is only delirium—

She rocked back onto her heels, squinting in thought so deep it contorted the rest of her face along with it. The millions of little legs along his sunburnt skin, weaving between the roots of his matted hair, trickled away like the last dregs of sand from an hourglass.

“Like one of those bears or unicorns or fish or frogs, the mena…” She stopped. Blinked. Her fingers twisted and linked and released, trying to shape the letters and count the syllables she couldn’t recall. “Mena-whatever that word is, ménage a trois, menace—” She gave up in a huffing sigh and dropped into her cross-legged seat once more so that she could then double over at the hips, stretching her arms as far as they could along the brickwork toward Morpheus, her fingers flexing in kind before they dug into the mortar grooves. She turned her head, pillowing her temple along her netting-wrapped bicep at an angle that should have broken her neck. Those heterochromatic eyes, too bright, too saturated, watched him like needles. “The whatevers that they make at that place in the place made of other places where people go to buy and make and get things. Do you know that place? Where they make softer, squishier versions of bigger, stronger things?” Her arms crossed like her legs, and she settled her chin upon the X of her wrists in a pouting, scowling huff. “I wanted to make a little doggy for Barnabas, but they didn’t let us in. Stupid people.”

Her hair continued to drift and sway, drowned beneath invisible waves. Though he knew he had not moved, was pretty sure he had not moved—wait, have I moved—Morpheus felt himself float alongside her. Gravity could not touch him, could not tether. The cobblestones were firm beneath him, the wall as unyielding, and yet still he drifted.

He flexed his aching, spasming fingers into the pallet board and brick and tried to breathe through the vertigo.

There came a scooting above him, and his skin began to buzz, as if he were sitting too close to an old television screen, not that he personally knew what that was or had ever had the experience. Yet, he knew it all the same. He was standing close to the burning coils of something filled with power, and the barely contained chaos cloyed to him like dandelion fuzz.

When he dared glance to his once-sister from the corner of his eye, he found her looming mere inches from his face.

She was so strange, this close, with these mortal eyes. Porcelain-perfect skin, fragile as a doll’s and yet as sharp as diamond with just as many faceted surfaces refracting within itself until he was staring at a kaleidoscope: she was what he could only call fae-like and in the most terrible manner. She smiled with the same puckish quality, frowned with the same bafflement and nose-wrinkling disdain.

One spindly hand reached for him, fast and slow and smooth and jerky at the same time, impossible to track and yet impossible to not see coming. She picked at his hair, his skin, his clothes, pulled one arm from where he had wedged it between his body and the wall; and though he fought her all the while, he moved as putty within her hands, helpless to resist save for the droning whine that settled in his teeth at her proximity like a low, bass-y dog whistle only he could hear. The world was spinning. Spinning, spinning, spinning, and he was caught in the whirlwind. No, he was the vortex; no, he was the tear—

“Your outside isn’t as strong as my brother’s.” Delirium frowned as she ran her hands along the length of his arm, feeling every bone, each ligament and tendon that strained beneath paper-thin skin pockmarked with blisters and bruises. His muscles, once on par with that of an archer, a climber, a blade dancer, had wasted away, and he trembled in her grip. “Really not as strong as his. Think your stuffing might be like his, though.” She lowered his hand to peer into his eyes. “Is your stuffing like his was?” She frowned. “Or is it is?”

She released, and his arm snapped back to his side as if spring-loaded, searing and numbing in waves like the tides on a beach far from here. The vertigo began to ease, the world settling down to a tilt-a-whirl and not an outright tornado.

“It gets all messy with family,” she complained with another humphing sigh. She turned around to flop down on her back so that she hung upside down from the wall with her head settled beside his. “Messy, messy, messy like finger-painting—” She gasped and held her arms straight out to the sky, palms splayed. The sun sat between her outstretched hands, nestled in the cradle of her thumbs and index fingers. “Did you know parents used to put their kids on their shoulders even way, way, way back when to paint?” She wiggled her fingers, and little sparking pirouettes of light and color burst from them, as if drawing strumming lines of color and sound from the fabric of reality before her. “You can see their little hands up so, so, so high in those old, old, old caves from that way, way, way back time…too high up for them to reach so someone had to hold them up there.”

They stayed there like that for a while, Del on her back, squinting at the sun between her hands, and Morpheus below her, shivering and shuddering in the wake of her static. In time, she let her arms thud back to her sides. She chewed on her lip and looked a little less sure.

“I just saw him, y’know—my actual brother,” she began and rolled onto her stomach. Morpheus tried not to jump out of his skin as her touch brushed along his spine, sending a trickle of fingers spidering down his vertebrae like an old children’s rhyme that rose unbidden in his mind, not his to know and certainly never his to have experienced before. And yet there it was, in his memory, lilting in his sister’s voice like a siren from a watery cave.

Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk run down, let the yolk run down.

“But he doesn’t look like you,” Del mused. “He’s shiny and new.” Her nose crinkled, and she scrutinized her dirtied fingertips as she rubbed them together. “You smell, and you look dead. Is that mean to say?” She sighed again, this time tired and annoyed. “I don’t know what’s mean to say to family anymore, it’s so different for everyone now.”

She bent her knees, and her fishnet-clad feet kicked slowly at empty air, back and forth and back and forth.

“He doesn’t feel like you, either,” she said, contemplating Morpheus below her. “Your stuffing is all gooey and gushy and red, but he’s all stardust and ooh!” Her palms slammed down onto the wall, and she pushed herself up until her elbows locked like a mermaid on a rock or a yoga instructor in Cobra Pose. “Did you know space has a smell?” she blurted with a dazzling smile. “Do you know what space smells like? I went up there just to see for myself, it’s all burning hot metal and gasoline, summertime, burnt almonds on grills—” she dropped back to her elbows, her feet kicking faster now, her hands rising and contorting in storytelling accompaniment to her words. “It smells like an interstate. Going and going and going from one place to another and all these people right next to each other and all alone all at once until they crash into each other in hot metal and gasoline, and it’s all sunny under a big bright star, like a supernova. End and start and end and start, over and over and over—”

Her ramble stopped only to a deep, sucking inhale, and she stared at Morpheus with wide, moonish eyes. She reached down and thumped a hand against his shoulder blade. The stiffened joint crackled like old plastic, and once more the trickling fingers burst from the contact, running down his ribs to his hips and dripping to the filthy street. 

Stick a knife in your back, let the blood run down, let the blood run down.

“What are you?”

Morpheus said nothing for a long while, paralyzed beneath the running touch of those phantom hands, their cascading taps, their tingling contacts like a million little electrical shocks and a million little legs, a million little bites—

A million little butterfly wings.

“…Human,” he exhaled through cracked lips, the single word no louder than the breath it took to speak it.

Delirium worked herself back up into her cross-legged seat. Her head tilted.

“You don’t die like a human. You sure you’re human?” she needled. Morpheus nodded. Or at least he thought he nodded. He was still too overwhelmed with vertigo to be sure. “Human,” Del echoed above him, turning the word over in her mouth, shaping its vowels oh so carefully. “Human, human, hew-man. Hew means to cut,” she said, “to chop, chop, chop,” she said, driving the edge of one hand into the palm of the other, “to little bits—that’s really so much messier when you’re just a man. When you’re endless, you can unravel—” Her ankles turned beneath her, and she unfolded to stand tall, to rise on her toes with her feet still crossed. Her arms branched outward, and she fell into a sort of pirouetting spin that possessed all the coordination of a broken clockwork doll. “—and unravel and unravel, and you always—” her untangled feet landed firmly upon the wall, braced at a defiant shoulder’s width, “—unravel back into yourself. There’s nothing really to cut up.”

She stared down at her brother, swaying side to side. Colors and fish and butterflies and frogs lifted from the weathered layers of her red skirt with her movements, rising and falling like the pull of tides upon the drowned sands and grasses beneath their surfaces.

“But a man, a man cuts up in so many pretty colors,” she said and looked to her feet, twisting now at the hips as she swayed and moving her hands through the little friends that accompanied her as she did. “Like poppies and aaaall the fishies in the oceans.”

Her lights and sounds, her fish and butterflies and frogs, drifted down to him like bubbles waiting to pop, and their visages exploded into little bursts of confetti upon touching his emaciated form. Everywhere they lit upon him, the untethering furthered and worsened. He screwed his eyes shut and tried not to throw up blood and bile.

Spiders running up your arms, spiders running up your arms—

“Y’know, not-brother…” Delirium sank slowly into herself, into her masses, into her madness, and sat once more upon the wall. “I don’t think you’re doing the human thing very well.” Morpheus turned his head with painstaking slowness until he could fix one eye on his youngest sibling. She watched him, and in those eyes, both the same gleaming, brilliant blue, glowed something so far beyond the madness that it circled back around to sanity. “You should start over.”

Crisscross, applesauce—

She blinked. Her blue gaze halved to green, and the truth-sight went with it.

“Like an Etch-a-Sketch!” She lifted her hands as if holding a small board and began to shake it up and down. “Just shake-shake-shake-shake—”

—and now you have the chills.

A new sound encroached on Morpheus’ frayed senses, a loping pad of several light-footed steps overlapping each other in a patterned tattoo, and a gruff voice entered the alley a meter to his right and slightly behind him.

“There you are,” Barnabas growled, looking up at the girl sat upon the wall as he neared. She waved to him with a smile. “Every time you get away from me, I start to worry what you’re…”

His scold trailed away with his attention as his nose caught upon a truly offensive combination of smells, and he tracked it back to the mass huddled below his charge. But beneath the filth and the disease lurked something else. Something familiar, something….

Something from Naxos not that long ago but also an age past.

“Oh…oh, this isn’t good.” The dog approached slowly, his head low, his shoulders and haunches similarly stooped. His nose twitched, and a whine burred in his throat, low and warbling in the hollow of his chest. The man did not acknowledge him. “That you in there, Morpheus?”

Delirium tossed her arms with a frustrated sigh.

“I’m trying to figure that out, Barnabas!”

The dog paused and raised his unimpressed eyes to her without adjusting his head. “How’s that working out for you?”

Delirium humphed and drew her knees up to her chest, locking her arms about them as she watched what came next from atop her kneecaps. Barnabas resumed his approach with the same caution as before, until he was near enough to close the last of the distance between himself and Morpheus. He stretched forward but kept his paws planted firm, every inch of him ready to leap back if the man reacted poorly even as he kept his large form as relaxed and un-menacing as possible.

A damp nose surrounded by feather soft white and black fur butted up against Morpheus, tucking beneath his arm to nudge at his head where it drooped upon his neck.

“Hey,” a voice nudged. Its breath was soothingly warm, like its body, and another whine rippled through it, a touch higher than before. Its tail wagged, low and slow, and its ears pressed flat to its skull as, having met no resistance at first, the mutt pressed a little further and knocked its head against the man’s in a reassuring nuzzle. “You want to try to get some food or drink in you?”

That proximity was the only reason Barnabas felt Morpheus’ minuscule shake of the head.

No.

“Oh. I see.” The dog pulled back, his ears now cocked forward, his stance held tall, and he regarded his new charge with the same beleaguerment he viewed Delirium. “So, this is deliberate.”

Morpheus missed the warmth and softness in his arms. He twitched a little further into the wall and hoped he hid his spike of yearning in the shift.

“Do you want this to be Morpheus?” Barnabas asked.

Delirium’s mouth curved in a ponderous frown and, like a child playing leapfrog, vaulted from the wall to the floor.

“Yeah?” She stood. “I think so. I…” She began to sway back and forth again as she watched her brother-not-brother like he was a fading Tinkerbell and all she had to do to bring him back to her was clap her hands and say I believe! I believe! as loud as she possibly could. Her hands clasped at the small of her back with tangled fingers, the very picture of a little girl afraid of asking too much. “I miss him.”

Barnabas nodded, as far as a dog could nod.

“Ok,” he said and padded off.

After a few minutes filled with nonsensical hums and mutterings and the faintly rattling breaths of the living corpse slumped against the wall, there came a distant clatter followed swiftly by scolding shouts. Nearly a minute later, the loping footsteps returned, and Barnabas slowed to first a prance and then a walk as he rounded the corner, a slightly mangled sandwich and water bottle held gently within his jaws.

He set them at Morpheus’ side, nudged right up against his scabbed and sunburnt feet, and sat back to wait.

“You know what they call us dogs?” he asked when the man continued to show no intent of moving.

There came the slightest shift in Morpheus’ sunken, heavy-lidded eyes that told Barnabas he had made some kind of effort to look in his general direction. But in his sullen silence also came his reply.

No.

“Man’s best friend,” Barnabas said in answer to himself. He walked out his front legs until his belly pressed to the ground, and he pillowed his jaw upon his paws in wait. “I’m about to get really annoying.”

Morpheus’ eyes shifted forward once more, into the filthy, cobwebbed dark of the pallet boards and wall.

Delightful.

[vykker]

Oddworld Headcanon 4/?: The Tragedy of Queen Sam

It's often suggested that if you want to write a good story, you should imagine the worst thing that could happen to a character, then write it. But what if one idea could be the worst thing that could happen for EVERY character? It's well known that Abe's mother Sam was supposed to be in Munch's Oddysee. She would have been held captive in Vykker's Labs, before the story pivoted just to Abe rescuing Labor Eggs. They even got as far as rendering Sam. However, it's never explained where the story would have gone after she'd been introduced. With this in mind, here's my theory/headcanon/wild speculation that Queen Sam was supposed to die at the end of M.O.

1.Sam is ancient and severely depressed. Sam has a ton of concept art, and each piece emphasizes the fact she is not doing well. Here she is smiling, but her eyes are exhausted and pained. Here she is with a hair piece resembling a halo, but imo, it also looks like a noose being lowered over her head. The official Art Of Oddworld Inhabitant books says this about Sam: "We got to portray a likeable earthy grandma quality". Abe is an adult, sure, but not so old that you'd expect his mother to be a grandma already- her elderly status seems to be the earliest design element they wanted to emphasize.

She's also shown to be exhausted and depressed, which is why we have so much cool art of the Shrinks, which are AI's designed by Vykkers Labs to serve as therapists and companions to treat her depression. Also, while looking for more info about the Shrinks, I learned that apparently they were originally called Angels. So Sam was to be surrounded by angels? Of course, this could've just been to make her seem more saintly. But aren't a lot of saints martyrs? Anyway, back on topic...

2. Sam is trapped. I find it interesting that in every piece of art, Sam is deliberately shown sitting on a raised, immobile platform. Often times, she's even in chains. Some of the concept art includes the scenery around her platform, but there's never any sign of a trolley or crane or something that the player might use to save her [or the characters could use in a cut scene to save her]. If the intention was for the player to move her, you'd think there would be concepts for how this might be done, but from what I can tell, there aren't.

Her immobility is NOT a result of her status as a queen, either. The other queens we have been shown- Skillya and Lady Margaret- have concept art displaying how they may be able to move, albeit with extreme difficulty. But still- some thought was put into these queens being able to move somewhat. Sam deliberately cannot.

So she's immobile. But couldn't this mean that Abe wasn't going to save her in Munch's Oddysee, but just meet her instead? While this is a possibility, I think it would be an Odd™ choice. For one thing, it seems like a waste of time and assets to put a complicated character like Sam in a game and not have her do anything. They could have had Abe learn about Sam through some other means, then vow to save her. Like maybe he can relay a few messages to her through the Shrinks? Or something else? But no, clearly, he was meant to meet her in the flesh. So would he have met her in person, left, THEN come back to save her? Would it have been a race against the clock for Abe, considering her advanced age and declining health? Maybe! But I don't think so, and here's why:

3.Sam has accepted her inevitable death. You'll notice that in each piece of concept art, Sam is never shown to be sad. Her eyes are kind and her expression is soft. Not only that, but in most depictions, she's shown with her arms outstretched. She is made to look placating and serene.

I think Sam knows that the end is near for her, and has made peace with this fact. Why? Because she met Abe. She knows that Abe will save their species. She knows that, by sewing his mouth shut as a baby, she succeeded in keeping him alive long enough to reach adulthood and fufill his role as savior. I think finally getting to meet Abe is a massive comfort to Sam; not only because of her believing that her species will be saved, but knowing that she has done her job and can finally pass on and rest. And I think she even tells Abe this, too. She sends him on his way warning him that she knows her time is short- but that she has accepted this- and this is the catalyst for his next adventure: Find a new queen!

4.Sam dying would be the worst thing that could happen to every character. And because of this, it would make for some incredible storytelling potential.

Abe would lose his mom. It would be absolutely devastating not being able to save her. To meet her ONCE and have her pass away shortly after? ABSOLUTELY heartbreaking. Furthermore, if her dying wish were for him to find a way to save their species- that would be some powerful incentive for him, not that I think he really needs it, but still.

The surviving mudokon scrubs would suddenly be a finite resource. It would be harder than ever for them to run away.

Some factory owners might even try to kidnap wild mudokons.

Munch would not be assisted in traveling to Ma'Spa, because his Mudokon allies have their own problems to deal with. He would have to take the gabbiar there by himself.

Vykker's Labs failed to keep Queen Sam alive... oops! This would bring to question everything else about how they operate, and I do NOT imagine vykkers take kindly to being scrutinized.

The industrialists are now cut off from their labor supply. Their ENTIRE ECONOMY is based on an endless supply of easily replaced labor. Imagine the panic. Imagine what lengths they would go to find a replacement. They would tear the whole continent apart!!! They would tear EACH OTHER apart!

Lady Margaret- who is dying herself! - now has to deal with THIS shit!!?? And since it's been said that Margaret's own grandmother is currently frozen and is only thawed out for emergencies- well, this would be one hell of an emergency! Can you imagine her fury?

As the population of worker mudokons stagnates, who would have to step in to fill the gaps? Where would the glukkons get new workers from in the mean time? Would it be the sligs? Would Queen Skillya be put into overtime laying eggs? We know she already hates doing that. Would it be some other easily exploited species? Would THEY grow to resent the mudokons?

And who would the Industrialists blame for Sam's death? Well... who do you think?

So anyway, that's my theory. It doesn't really mean anything and with Lorne being on twitter and all it's possible there's been some lore shared that would disprove this theory. But still, I figured i'd share it and see if anyone else had reached the same conclusion or had any ideas. At the very least it's an interesting What-If. It would have made an incredible cliff hanger ending for Munch's Oddysee if it had happened, that's for sure!

[quohotos]

So about the Serpents in the Prophecy of Bane...

I'm almost certain this is an allusion to Jules Verne's seminal piece of speculative fiction about going underground Journey to the Center of the Earth. Exerpt from the Wikipedia page:

The story begins in May 1863, at the home of Professor Otto Lidenbrock in Hamburg, Germany. While leafing through an original runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga, Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel find a coded note written in runic script along with the name of a 16th-century Icelandic alchemist, Arne Saknussemm. When translated into English, the note reads:

Go down into the crater of Snaefells Jökull, which Scartaris's shadow caresses just before the calends of July, O daring traveler, and you'll make it to the center of the earth. I've done so. Arne Saknussemm

Lidenbrock departs for Iceland immediately, taking the reluctant Axel with him. After a swift trip via Kiel and Copenhagen, they arrive in Reykjavík. There they hire as their guide Icelander Hans Bjelke, a Danish-speaking eiderduck hunter, then travel overland to the base of Snæfellsjökull.

In late June they reach the volcano and set off into the bowels of the earth, encountering many dangers and strange phenomena. After taking a wrong turn, they run short of water and Axel nearly perishes, but Hans saves them all by tapping into a subterranean river, which shoots out a stream of water that Lidenbrock and Axel name the "Hansbach" in the guide's honor.Édouard Riou's illustration of an ichthyosaurus (which is actually more like a mosasaurus) battling a plesiosaurus.

Following the course of the Hansbach, the explorers descend many miles and reach an underground world, with an ocean and a vast ceiling with clouds, as well as a permanent Aurora giving light. The travelers build a raft out of semipetrified wood and set sail. While at sea, they encounter prehistoric fish such as Pterichthyodes (here called "Pterichthys") Dipterus (referred to as "Dipterides") and giant marine reptiles from the Age of the Dinosaurs, namely an Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus. A lightning storm threatens to destroy the raft and its passengers, but instead throws them onto the site of an enormous fossil graveyard, including bones from the Pterodactylus, Megatherium, Deinotherium, Glyptodon, a mastodon and the preserved body of a prehistoric man.

So that's our culprit. That basically fits the description of the Serpents. Thought that was just a cool detail and reference.

The underground jungle is an element that you could potentially say is also an allusion to Verne, though I think the version in the underland chronicles is significantly different since the depiction in Journey to the center of the earth has light from above whereas all the plants in the underland are basically carnivores and/or feed off of volcanic heat.

It's also possible that this allusion is not deliberate, as much like War of the Worlds, Journey to the Center of the Earth has basically been subsumed into pop culture cannon and referenced so many times that a lot of it's unique elements have just become tropes. Dinotopia also used dinosaurs in a cave surviving the asteroid, Minecraft, Terraria, Spelunky, Noita, and basically any other video game that involves digging will at some point put a Verne styled underground jungle in there.

One YA series that leans really hard into the Journey to the Center of the Earth inspirations is the Tunnels series. I actually read them in 6th grade to attempt to scratch my TUC itch. Let me tell you, they're not as good and don't even come close. Whereas TUC has some tasteful allusions, Tunnels goes all in. The underground people are more evil (if that's possible) and are intent on wiping out all life on the surface. Worst of all, it's set in England!!! There's cool world building, but no giant talking bats so I have no choice but to award it zero stars. It was supposed to be turned into a movie in 2009 and all the books got stickers for that... said movie appears to have never materialized.

Idk, something I thought about while listening to today's @returntoregalia episode

Okay bonus details about how I made this connection: As a kid, wishbone would come on once a week at like 4 pm or something, I didn't get to see it often, but I vividly remember one of the episodes. For anyone who doesn't know, wishbone was PBS show that followed a dog and his human family as they go through some struggle that wishbone (the dog) finds allegorical to a piece of classic, public domain literature. The episodes are split in half with the parts in the present, and the reenactments within the dog's imagination of the classic piece of literature. In one of the few episodes I caught was about Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. I do not recall how this novel was relevant to the characters lives, all I know is that it's way to long to fit into half of a 20 minute episode, so they had to really rush through a lot of parts. In one shot the characters are in this jungle and they run away from a Plesiosaurus puppet.

[nathantheauthor]

I'm excited to get into the post I'm going to drop as I finish it, take a while, but the next major information post isn't a character exploration... But, design concepts! The four main designs for the characters throughout the Revver era of the Ripper Inc story. But as I put that on the back burner, this post is about mythology and the international branches. It's not going to be that detailed. Just kind of a teaser for some of the stuff going on with them and some of the conceptual ideas, and some of the crossover elements of the universe.

For those who are just seeing this, the main concept of Ripper Inc in this giant crossover fanfic sandbox is a company that reforms monsters and serial killers, or even just gives people a job. Austin time they hunt down other serial killers and monsters, but sometimes they're hired security, birthday party attractions, etc. They're technically morally good, they'll do anything they're paid to do, but a lot of them do have very questionable backgrounds and needed the mental help program offers. Of course, most of the following examples don't fit that criteria, as they were approached due to already being morally all right, most of them at least. The main idea of the organization is to rehabilitate killers and monsters by turning their violent tendencies on to other killers and monsters all while giving them psychological help they need.

But, before we get into the lot of their members, I think we should introduce....

BRANCH DIRECTORS (PART 1)!

Because this whole postal focus on just the briefest summary of the directors.

Mary-San!

Starting with Japan's very Phone Call From Mary. This is one that's very much done for both the colony of it and because of the terrifying practicality. For those unfamiliar with the urban legend, Mary-San, or Phone Call From Mary is a Japanese ghost story about a haunted doll and phone challenge rolled into one. As per the legend, if you call her first you will get a series of phone calls from Mary-San, each one her announcing herself in a location you had recently been to until finally It All leads up to "Hi, this is Mary-San, I'm calling from behind you." Her height may make her a comedic choice for a largely yokai branch, but she is the perfect tracker, equipped with only a phone call she is a master strategist and can locate anyone.

I am also very much playing with the backstory of her mythology, with the very reason she originally joined Ripper Inc being the promise of finding her original owner, who by the point she enters the story is already a very old woman. By the time the promise is fulfilled, it's a visit to the grave of the woman, with the rest of her branch and her own boss there to comfort and support her.

Sun Wukong!

Also hailing from Asia comes the Chinese branch director, The Monkey King himself. I'm not going to get into how I'm handling gods and all that in this post, but I will say that I'm leaving him very much the trickster gremlin that he is. In fact, inspired by a friend's Fate portrayal, I've elected not to give him a set design outside his origins. Wukong instead will shift and use the designs of adaptations and depictions of him, or characters inspired from him. Meaning he could look anything like Lego Wukong to Son Goku.

The Victorious Fighting Buddha's reason for joining repairing is a mixture of responsibility calling to him and the simple fact that he finds the concept and idea to be absolutely fun, the idea of HIM being the leader of a company branch is hilarious. How could he say no? It is an evolution of some of his themes, he may still be a trickster, but knowing their ultimate mission he takes the job rather seriously, often he can't help but recall The Journey To The West when working with his crew.

Annora Petrova!

For the Russian Branch director, I know a lot of you old school Creepypasta fans might recognize this name, she is an underrated classic. I say Russian branch, however they do more cover the collection of countries around that area (minus China). I do have an explanation for why she's around, given I actually haven't rewritten anything about her story!

In this reinterpretation she has become the Slavic spirit of folklore... A Rusulka, this is due to a character I won't spoil editing her wiki and once more altering the course of her story. She's now come to be the director for this large branch of Ripper ink and works closely with / shares resources with Wukong. Everyday she has the temptation to check her wiki, to see what it has to say about her. To see what isn't about her newfound fame.

Brianna Grianne!

Hopping on over to Ireland, we meet the first OC director! Brianna is a fey, one that outright goes against the will of her people and instead uses her fae powers to aid and give people what they need. It's very notable in her wording, never does directly ask for something, avoiding fae deals.

She much rather live and be part of the human world than amongst her less benevolent kin, finding the world of mankind to be much more intriguing and hospitable.

Nero Claudius!

Who better to lead the Roma- Italian branch than this resurrected Roman Emperor? They were all seriousness, it is very much they're fully resurrected Nero's way of still serving and protecting her country, finding herself having to figure her life out after the events of Point Breaker's closing act.

She's very much the same Red Saber we all know and love, however, she is a composite variant, and very much a living Nero, so she's got quite the legs up on her Fate canon counterpart.

Cameron Bryce!

I haven't tagged this SCP for nothing! Turning our attention over to Scotland, I introduced the next OC director, Cameron Bryce, a former Global Occult Legion squad leader.

After a cold winter night in his youth his life was forever changed, finding himself scooped up by the GOC to hunt down anomalies with deadly precision... But ultimately he hated the job and jumped at the offer for the directoral position. Working with and meeting people who will actually see tomorrow, with more competency, and power, than his GOC squad. He's generally really chill, one of the most laid-back people you'll ever meet.

Camille Noemie!

The French director, and Dame Blanche (White Lady), she's very much a spectral figure trying to do her best for her community, alongside other legends from france, and their few serial killers capable of joining, they're one of the smaller branches, but they make do!

Camille is a very friendly woman, merely using her afterlife to help her community and work through her regrets from life. She's merely trying her best, and she'll do everything in her power to help.

Now, stay tuned for part two tomorrow, featuring the directors for the branches in Canada, Germany, Britain, Korea, Australia, and more!

[twistedtummies2]

Top 10 Portrayals of Dr. Seward

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lucy Westenra - Dracula’s first female victim of note - is desired by three separate men. First, the man she chooses to be her husband, Arthur Holmwood: he’s the single most boring character in the entire main cast of the novel, and yet somehow he makes it into multiple adaptations…most of which do very little to make him a whole lot more interesting. I fail to understand this. Second is Quincey Morris: he’s more interesting, in several ways, and is even one of the gents who slays the undead Count, sacrificing his life to avenge his beloved Lucy and destroy the vampire. He also almost never makes it into any adaptations, and even those that do feature him usually conflate him with Holmwood - I’m guilty of this, myself. And last but not least, there’s Dr. Jack Seward - the only one of Lucy’s Suitors I plan to discuss. In the novel, Seward is a young and brilliant psychiatrist and physician combined, and the head of a local mental institution. He’s a skeptical scientist, who needs to be shown the reality of the utterly horrific and fantastical nature of vampires. He is also the “caretaker,” for lack of a better word, of Renfield, which makes him important to the team due to his connections with Dracula’s Servant. It is through Seward, in the book, that we learn so much about Lucy and Renfield alike, and it is Seward who summons Van Helsing in the first place to try and help out. While many adaptations DO include the character of Dr. Seward, nearly all of them change the character from his literary origins. Most make him an older gentleman, and focus more on the connection to Renfield than anything else. Indeed, many times Seward is made to be either Mina or Lucy’s FATHER, rather than a potential suitor. Even a few that do stray closer to the novel sometimes excise important elements of his character. Give Mina and Lucy credit, they usually still resemble their original forms to some degree: Seward is essentially a 50-50 shot. He’s either going to match the book version, or he very much isn’t. With that said, let’s take a look at some of those attempts at Seward now. These are My Top 10 Favorite Portrayals of Dr. Seward.

10. Orson Welles, from the Mercury Theater Radio Version.

The Mercury Theater Radio production of Dracula is interesting in that - much like a few takes on Quincey Morris in other adaptations - it conflates the characters of Seward and Arthur Holmwood. In the radio play, Seward’s work at the asylum is barely referenced, and Renfield is nowhere to be found: instead, he’s depicted as Lucy’s fiance, and the only major connection he has to the book version (aside from the name) is that he is an old friend and student of Professor Van Helsing. The main reason this version makes the list at all is because Orson Welles plays both Seward AND Dracula in the radio play, which is certainly an interesting choice of double-casting.

9. Buz Setton, from Disney’s Dracula, Pages From a Virgin’s Diary.

In the Disney graphic novel, Chief O’Hara (hold your horses, Batman fans; I’m talking about the Mickey Mouse character) plays the role of Seward, or, as he’s called in the comic, “Buz Setton.” (Not sure why the name was changed.) There’s really not much to say about this version except that it’s expectedly amusing, and aside from the name change and the goofiness that lies abundant, it’s a more or less accurate depiction of the character. Also, Pete is Renfield. This makes me chuckle.

8. Herbert Bunston, from the 1931 Film.

The origins of Seward being reimagined as an older gentleman, and the father of one of the main ladies in the play, begin with the Hamilton Deane stage adaptation. When the play went to Broadway, Herbert Bunston was cast in the role of the good doctor. When Universal decided to make their film version of the story - based more heavily on the play, rather than the original book - Bunston was one of the actors from the stage version who got a chance to reprise and immortalize his performance onscreen. While I feel his work is a bit “stagey,” even by standards of the time, it’s clear he’s comfortable with the material, and fully immersed in the character.

7. Jose Seriano Viosca, from “Spanish Dracula.”

The Spanish-language version of the previous film is, in my opinion, largely inferior to the original. While a few things in it are certainly interesting, much of the cast, in particular, just doesn’t strike me as being as strong as the cast in the English version. There are, however, two chief exceptions: one is Lupita Tovar as Mina, or “Eva,” who I spoke of in a past list. The other is Jose Seriano Viosca as Dr. Seward. Viosca’s Seward feels so much more natural in his performance than Herbert Bunston, in my opinion. He’s got more of a sense of humor, too, which is refreshing compared to Bunston’s more proprietorial character. There’s also a wonderful warmth between himself and Tovar, as well; they really do feel like father and daughter in this version. It’s still not remotely close to the book, but it is, in my opinion, a generally more interesting portrayal to watch.

6. Patti LuPone, from Penny Dreadful.

This version strays about as far from the path as you can get; thankfully, the character here is still very interesting, so that ultimately doesn’t matter much. After two seasons of teasing Dracula’s appearance, the third (and sadly final) season of “Penny Dreadful” finally brought several of the characters from the novel to life. Among them is Seward, here reimagined as a female doctor, and an alienist (an early term for psychologist), who has some unusual ties to the main protagonist of the series, Vanessa Ives. Never thought I’d see an older Evita meet Dracula, but here we are.

5. Donald Pleasance, from the 1979 Film.

This film, like the 1931 Universal pictures, is based largely on the stage version of Dracula. Pleasance’s Seward is depicted as the father of the Mina character once again, and this time is very deliberately played up as something of a comic relief figure. He’s a somewhat bumbling character, who ultimately has to stand up to the challenges Dracula’s presence creates for himself and his family.

4. Mark Burns, from the 1977 BBC TV Film.

FINALLY, a properly accurate interpretation of the character from the novel! Burns’ Seward gets a lot of focus in this movie, as not only does he have the relationship with Lucy intact, but the character of Renfield is given some more focus in this adaptation as well. As a result, Burns gets more time in the spotlight by extension.

3. Daniel Weyman, from the 2006 BBC Radio Version.

Once more, not pictured in costume, because this was a radio version. Much like the Orson Welles adaptation, this version conflates the characters of Arthur Holmwood and Jack Seward together, so that he is now Lucy’s fiance and gets sole focus - no Holmwood or Quincey Morris in sight. HOWEVER, unlike the Mercury Theater rendition, we do get to see (or, rather, hear) him in the Asylum, and learn of his relationship with Renfield, which I think is a vast improvement in comparison, since you now get the best of both worlds.

2. The Version from Anno Dracula.

“Anno Dracula” is a series that takes place in an alternate universe, where Van Helsing and his team failed to stop Dracula, who is now effectively the ruler of England, acting as Queen Victoria’s royal consort. In this world, vampires are now the norm: at least 50% of the population are vampires. The interesting thing with this is that vampires aren’t depicted as naturally evil, monstrous beings; they’re just…people. Like anybody else. Some are good, some are bad, but they aren’t inherently diabolical. This is where Seward’s role in the first novel comes into play: it’s revealed that Seward is the only human survivor of the original story, and has basically gone insane after his experiences. He becomes none other than Jack the Ripper: in this universe, his attacks are a pithy attempt to destroy the vampires he’s come to believe are evil creatures. While Seward’s motivations and perspectives are tragically understandable, he is still in the wrong. It’s interesting to see this character in this light, and he’s one of the most memorable figures in the book, as we see the story from his side several times.

1. Richard E. Grant, from the 1992 Film.

A great actor playing the role basically as Stoker wrote it. For all the things Francis Ford Coppola changed in his version of Dracula, one thing that pretty much stayed true to the source without any deviation was Richard E. Grant as Jack Seward. This is pretty much exactly how I imagined the book character to be, and that’s really all I need to give this version top marks on the list. Case closed.

[thestupidhelmet]

Hello! For the character ask- Kelso. 😅

Thank you! 🤗

Sexuality (canon): heterosexual, heteroromantic, allosexual, gray-romantic.

Sexuality headcanon: Same as above with an openness to him being bi-romamtic but demi-romantic toward anyone but women.

Gender Identity (canon): Cis male.

Gender Identity headcanon: Cis male but sometimes gender non-conforming in gender expression if he believes he looks hot dressed and made up more femininely (which is actually canon but only explicitly in one episode and more subtly depicted in one or two others).

Ship: Kelso and Brooke.

Brotp: Kelso and Fez.

Notp: Kelso and Jackie.

General Headcanon: Kelso's narcissistic wounding, especially toward women, stems from his parents having seven kids and neither parent having enough time to give attention to all of them or set proper boundaries. Since Mrs. Kelso, from the nearly nothing the show tells about her, is likely a stay-at-home mom while John Kelso is the "breadwinner" (and must make enough money as an analytical statistician for his large family to be middle class), the focus of Kelso's anger is on his mom.

The deep vacuum of maternal love Kelso carries inside him manifests as a sex addiction, possessiveness and a sense of ownership toward Jackie, and both chasing and avenging the maternal love and attention he was deprived of through compulsive sex with a many women and making promises of fidelity while having no intention of keeping them. The same way his mom promised to be faithful and attentive to all of her kids by having them but, in actuality, betrays this promise (to Kelso's subconscious mind).

Kelso's maliciousness toward Jackie in seasons 2 - 5 is a trigger response. Viewing her self-care and boundaries as betrayal and punishing her for it how he wished he could punish his mom.

Growing up in the home he did, he learned how to be conniving and commit acts of premeditated malice as a survival technique. A lack of common sense doesn't preclude an ability to manipulate purposely and with forethought, as he demonstrates throughout the series.

Side Note: I have a post in drafts that highlights just how capable of premeditated schemes he is. The intention is to pull out every example from every episode of T7S S1-S7 where applicable. I became mentally tired after the first two episodes ("Streaking" [1x03]) and "The Keg" [1x06]). Kelso might be an idiot, but he's not stupid. Writing an exhaustive list would be good to have on the record, but facts -- no matter how consistent and myriad -- can't always break through strongly held opinions.

Opinion on the Character: I wish the show had allowed him to keep growing and changing instead of reverting him back to status quo. Bits and pieces of likeable elements exist within him, beyond the amusement his antics cause (mostly thanks to AK's comic timing). But, with rare exception, he serves as an antagonistic, oft-malicious, chaotic force on the show. Like a masked clown in Commedia dell'arte, certain behaviors and choices are expected of him, and the writers deliver (instead of the actor improvising within the character's type).

[millenari]

if you aren't tired of "bitching" about the broadway revival, what are your thoughts on the changes to tugger's number? i find a lot of the characterization in the choreography got destroyed but i'd like to hear your take

My first problem with Tugger's number happens before the song even starts.

It's that little bit they changed, where Munk sings the 'Jellicles ask because Jellicles dare / who will it be?' and then Tugger echoes him for the start of his song. I get why they added that bit (to strengthen the plot, to remind the audience that the Jellicle Choice is the point of all of this) but I've mentioned why I dislike the idea that the cats are ALL competing for the Choice before, and of all of the cats I think reasonably Tugger ought to be least interested in the honor. So having him echo Munk as if indicating interest in being the Choice is bleh to me.

Believe it or not I don't hate Tugger's new number… I don't like it, but I don't dislike it as much as Jenny's number. Given that John Partridge's Tugger in particular is so iconic & beloved, nothing they were going to do was going to satisfy me (or most of us tbh) and I admire that they tried to go at Tugger's character at another angle instead of trying to blindly recreate something they knew they wouldn't be able to recreate.

That being said. I don't like it. In Cats, the way a cat moves is indicative of their personality. The styles they're assigned speaks of their nature, I mentioned that in the Gumbie post: Jenny has tap because it has more of a militant vibe than flowy ballet. Victoria's very romantic and sensual subplot does get flowy ballet. The dances/songs that Bomba leads are all jazzy and sensual and provocative like her. I could go on. Tugger in particular is based off of the glam rockers of the 70s and 80s. He's a rockstar, and like those rockstar figures he's sexual, provocative, unapologetic, wild, fierce, ambiguously bisexual--

He's confident and horny. Let’s put it at that. And the way he moves and dances reflects that. He doesn't crawl much, (In 98 he doesn't crawl ever I don’t think), he struts when he moves, his 'default' position has his hands on his belt right near his crotch, like a solid 30% of his choreo in Lynne's version is hip thrusts… That's how he's been characterized for a long time. In the Bway revival, they take him in a different, less slutty direction.

& to be frank, you usually would have immediately lost me at 'less slutty' but I'll admit that some of the heavy-eye-contact-plus-pelvic-thrust elements of 98 are a little. Weird. So I do protest removing the sexuality from his number (not only because I'm pro-horny and not only because I respect Gillian Lynne's horndog vision but also because I think it's vastly unfair that the Macavity number is barely touched but this one is toned down pretty aggressively. Even in the Bombadance the female dance is present and just as sexual (you know, the bending over part) but the bit where the boys join in is pretty much removed. Why are women shaking their asses as objects to be admired acceptable but abstract depictions of actual sex/sexual elements aren't? Ugh.) buuuuut I see why they would have wanted to change it. Less slutty doesn't inherently mean less good, after all, right? And he is still a little slutty, it's not like they Kids Bop'd him.

But then they also add this element of insecurity to him. Where original Tugger is oftentimes unshakable, Revival!Tugger tries to slap the shit out of Munk and Alonzo for delivering the 'terrible bore' line (And usually I prefer Misto having this line but plenty of productions give it to these two instead so whatever), he hisses at the group of cats sliding up on him near the end, and you can see him kind of primping in the background when Old Deut is announced, like he's nervous.

This… is fine, I guess. Giving your characters more depth is usually not a bad thing, but I protest Tugger + insecurity on the grounds that

A) Bomba and Demeter's (the main Female Horny Cats) sole interesting skill is apparently flirting, and yet Tugger (the main Male Horny Cat) has to have all these hidden depths, and

B) this element in addition to how they seemed to be deliberately casting (for the bway revival AND us Tour 6) Tugger as younger-sounding and also kind of sillier, he comes off more to me as somebody's lost fratboy who needs therapy instead of a famous star. And it really leaves me questioning why all these characters are supposed to like him so much when, again, he kind of gives the impression of being a bratty frat boy.

So yes, I agree on the characterization. I admire that they tried something new, but I just don't really care for what they tried, and I think the changes actively work against the core of the character, which is: the obnoxious horny guy with so much charisma and confidence that he keeps pulling anyways.

But enough on Tugger, onto the actual song.

I really like the layout of the classic Tugger number because everyone is pretty finely split up by how they think of him. You've got:

his baby fangirls on his left doing their cute little fangirl dance

his hornier, older fans just to his right (Plato in the front) who are doing a dance that's a bit more provocative

his backup buddies on the far right who seem to be less attracted and more deferential to him

a group of cats just behind him doing a dance that strikes me as neither particularly sexual nor particularly platonic (who melt into the previous two groups during certain sections of the song)

the elders in the far back, watching on with disapproval

Bomba, Munk, and Misto, who each watch on alone(ish), indicating perhaps that each of them has a unique relationship to Tugger there.

(Sometimes there are additional watching cats, depending on how the number is set up. In 98, Alonzo also watches him alone, as well as Cori).

But I love how after only a minute or so of watching, you can tell what the majority of the cast thinks of Tugger, and who agrees with who. It's super efficient storytelling. In Broadway Revival Tugger, pretty much everyone is one of Tugger's backup dancers. There are some elements of Elder Disapproval (Jenny standing up to him, Skimble trying to shoo others away) and you can see some sections of the dance are the girls fawning over him while some are the boys backup dancing for him, but they're real quick. The song has a lot of [group of cats do a dance near Tugger] [group of cats move away] [Tugger spends a couple seconds there just kind of doing nothing] [another group of cats come up] [repeat]. Compared to the classic, there's not a lot going on, and yet it still feels more disjointed.

So anyways, the song starts, Tugger poses for Google Earth, (always taking pictures), some cats come and go & backup dance for/with him, Alonzo and Munk do the terrible bore and nearly get slapped for it, Jenny and Skimble try and fail to interrupt, and then Bomba's section happens.

I don't like this part especially; it bothers me that Tugger and Bomba don't really dance with each other during her section. They just sing their lines while staring at each other and kind of walking around. Not only does it feel kind of boring, but I really love that butt-to-butt dance they do in the original, and it makes me so sad that it was removed. [smacks fist against desk] it was SO bisexual. So, so bisexual…. Plus having Bomba kneel in front of Tugger for the following 'nah' is so strange, because honestly it looks more sexual than Tugger dipping her, and makes it way less obvious that he's rejecting her after (potentially) leading her on. I'm not sure a first-time viewer watching from far away would even realize he's saying no to her. Also this section includes the entire(ish) cast lining up behind Tugger in two different ways over the course of like 15 seconds. Why.

Then Tugger admires himself in the mirror after 'Horrible muddle'— which is fine, but I like it less in conjuncture with the self-esteem thing. After that comes the little dance break, which is my favorite part of the whole song.

First, I love having Plato and Victoria doing a little dance in the background, it kind of builds up to their later dance and I think the idea of them bonding over liking Tugger is the cutest. Second, I love the Tuggoff dance that happens at the same time.

It's weird, because a lot of the time I look at the bway changes and I can't really figure out if the new choreo means anything or is trying to say anything the way the original often was. (Like that screenshot I posted just a couple paragraphs up. Why is everyone lining up behind Tugger? To show that they're all on his 'side' in regard to his interaction with Bomba? Why do they do it twice? The answer is probably just 'because it looked cool'. Tragically.) But this little Tuggoff dance is weird because it’s one of the few sections where I can easily make a guess as to what they were trying to say do/say with the choreo. I talked about it in the tags on this post, I won't type it all up again.

Tugger deliberately passing by his attention-hungry fans and grabbing Misto chilling off by himself, and then pulling him into the literal spotlight is just so on point to their relationship I made a post about the same concept not too long ago. Like this whole idea of Misto being the only one to give Tugger the space he needs and Tugger returning that sentiment by giving Misto all of the attention and spotlight he needs, is just. 10/10. No notes.

After that point I don't have much commentary. Everyone dances together for the end: I don't love that part but that's mostly just me not liking the overarching style of the new choreo than anything to do with this number in particular. I also don't like the new ending but I can't really pin down why, so I think it's just me not liking change? I'm not sure.

So yeah, don't love it, don't hate it. I have to say though: I think it's kind of incredible how this choreo has already aged in comparison to the original. The bit after the mirror where Tugger basically nae-naes makes me want to beat my head against the wall due to Cringe, and that choreo is only like 8 years old! The original is nearly 40, and it still stands up fine! It's just wild how much effort they put into making Cats 'modern' and before a decade has passed those changes are already dated!

(Though I think the cats taking a 'selfie' with the big prop camera at the end was kind of hilarious. Maybe we can have some modernization.)

[pistolenprinz]

RDR2 CHARACTERS AS THE MAJOR ARCANA (PT. 4 OF MANY)

I’ve been really digging tarot lately, and finding a lot of comfort/joy indulging in the universe’s energies, so I figured I would try my hand at assigning each of the main gang (with some exceptions) to one of the major arcana, as well as giving my personal interpretations of how it fits. Note: For this post, I’ve dipped into my own deck (Raven Rogue’s Tarotorial), and will be pulling the imagery-specific elements from them. I will cite things as such “Insert text here [Source Name].” Regardless, the actual applications to the plotlines and characters is my own and is my opinion. To cut down on the length of these posts, I’ve privately paired up gang members that I either think provide a good foil for one another, or those that I just think pair well in terms of discussion. This section will be copy-pasted across all the posts in this series for sake of clarity.

BILL WILLIAMSON - JUDGMENT

Judgment presents as adults and children rising from their graves to respond to an angel's trumpet call as they're ready to be judged by the universe. This card deals out absolutes. [Tarotorial; Card Imagery].

Stating the obvious first, Bill is a man who deals in absolute. There is, or there isn't. This is not an inherently bad thing, particularly in the type of environment he finds himself in among the Van der Linde gang; the preservation of the group comes first and foremost…. usually. That said, the question of good or not comes from Bill's inner motives. We see this in RDR2, we see this more in RDR. Bill's motives are, arguably, driven by a simple lack of self-awareness. A 'rules for thee and not for me' mentality, that ultimately leads to him being unable to learn his lessons, and going on to become even more of a brutal terror on his own than he was within the Van der Linde gang (where he, usually, had others to ground him and refocus his purpose). This card's imagery echoes those of Death, reminding the interpreter and viewer that everything comes to an end, damned be the consequences.

MICAH BELL - THE DEVIL

The Devil typically depicts a saytr, known as Baphomet, atop a pedestal behind the chained male and female figures to show that they're under control. The man and woman are ashamed, and becoming less human the longer they're under the Devil's control [Tarotorial; Card Imagery].

Ignoring the explicit evil imagery, the label of "evil" as a whole, and Micah's status as an antagonist within the gang, I want to instead focus on the core of his character. Of the deep-rooted greed that pushes him to become such a powerful force among the members, effectively overturning the dynamic and tipping the scales in his balance. If we look further, into the time before his gang, we see that it's a constant. All he has known is greed and violence, through his father's own outlaw nature. We can look at how vicious the falling out between himself and his brother, Amos, was, with the latter threatening to kill if he'd even considered contact with his family. The Devil itself is less about evil itself, but the intricate acts that may lead to someone being considered evil: Greed, materialism, excess, temptation. All things that Micah exhibits throughout his story, all the way from attempting to "take" Sadie for himself, to confronting Arthur at the end of it all and ensuring that he would not leave freely (with or without the money, as that choice is player determinant). On the other hand, and through the lens of characters such as Bill and Dutch, Micah is a symbol of true freedom. Of releasing one's inner desires and being prideful with them. These tenants are core to the "outlaw" life, in their eyes, just as they are core in the card's other half. There are reasons for his actions, but those actions are not "good", regardless of intent or reason.

[mysticstarlightduck]

Happy STS! We all know about the tropes, elements, and themes we love (and in some cases, use over and over again) in our WIPs! In The Last Wrath, which trope, theme, or element did you choose NOT to include, and why? Was it a deliberate choice or did it just happen that way?

Happy Storyteller Saturday! Thank you for the Ask, @clairelsonao3!

This is a very good set of questions, I'll try my best to give it a great answer too!

In The Last Wrath, which trope, theme, or element did you choose NOT to include, and why?

I guess I wanted to stay away from the obvious typical overdone tropes from the high fantasy genre and try my best to subvert them *

For example, the Chosen One trope, I try to give all my characters deep importance to the story instead of ever using this trope, and even those that could be considered to have "prophecied ancient powers" - looking at Julyan here - are not Chosen Ones. The path is not paved for them, and often their "gift/blessing" bears far too great of a price or toll for them - especially until they learn to control it, and even afterward. With Julyan's character - the most overt subversion of this specific trope in TLW - his arc begs the question "What is the line between a Man or a Monster?" as in, how far can uncontrollable powers push you and you can still be considered human? He was born with ancient powers, yes, but the powers are more of a curse than a gift, and he struggles with the fact that he is merely the vessel for this untapped magic that can both destroy or save. He wonders if he can still be considered himself and not a weapon after these powers, and the burdens it brings, grow. And even when he learns to control it, it isn't a prophecy that is ever going to save him, but his effort to be something more than the sum of his inhuman powers and use these abilities for good, he doesn't have an easy road to follow nor mentors to train him. He has to do it all by himself, with the help of friends that know nothing about the extent of his magic, in a world where all knowledge of such godly powers was already lost.

But I also try to avoid the smaller, more subtle tropes, such as the famous (which I despise with the entirety of my being) "In Medieval Times everyone wore dirty and dark clothing and lived in unhygienic cities with no sense of culture, in a non-diverse depiction of a very inaccurate Europe". We all know that is not true (while the Medieval Times were often convoluted, our "Dark Ages" perception of it is deeply incorrect, and heavily influenced by Renaissance scholars, who wanted to paint that era in a bad light to make their own time seem more enlightened. People will be people, always, no matter in what era we live in. There is color and diversity, and culture, and the Middle Ages/Medieval Times were no exception) To avoid that trope, I try to give the continent of The Last Wrath as much color and diversity as I can - I try to make all the kingdoms unique, with their own heritage and politics, color schemes and traditions to spare. (This is one of my most despised tropes of all time, so I actively try to avoid that godforsaken thing).

I refuse to add the "Cardboard Cut Out (a.k.a one dimensional) YA Heroine who is Not Like Other Girls and who is toxic to everyone around her." HELL TO THE NAW. My heroines may be unique, but they're humans above all things, they have their quirks, they have their strengths and weaknesses, they love their families (and the people around them), and most importantly, they don't go around shaming other girls for being girls or trying to make it seem like "oh I'm so special look at me, I'm such a victim of the world", NO. Also, a character can be strong and female while not being cliche and unbearable. A girl can be a leader and fall in love (those things shouldn't be "either one or the other." A girl can be both a strong warrior and a caring girlfriend. Just look at - my beloved - Annabeth Chase from the books).

Also, on the note of female character tropes in fantasy fiction, I refuse to write heroines who are "femme fatales" (especially if that sums up their entire personality). A woman can be seductive, and embrace her sexuality while being more than that, while being intelligent, brave, or both. Another reason why I refuse to write good characters (and even most villainesses unless that is the point of their character and they're multidimensional) as "femme fatales", is because often the role of the "seductress" borders WAY too close to glorified s3xual assault (especially female-on-male, or more rarely female-on-female) and no hero character should ever do that. Those are villainous actions suited only to the most twisted, perverse, and sadistic of villains. (It should never be something to admire in a female character. Dominance should always have a limit on both sides of a relationship and femme fatales oh so often cross that limit). It's a deeply problematic trope, and unless the character is properly portrayed as problematic, it bugs the hell out of me. A woman should be more than just sexy, even if she embraces it. A woman can be sexually empowered, without being an offender. (For example of badly done femme fatales, the female heroines in many Bond movies or Irene Adler in most Sherlock portrayals.) And this trope has taken a return on the YA genre, especially with "Not Like The Other Girls" kinds of leads, and I find that... disturbing, to say the least. I also despise the Bad Boy Trope (the male version of a femme fatale that you will often see in YA romance novels) for the same, deeply problematic nature of the trope. Just no.

Relationship Tropes that I openly avoid (due to their problematic nature) in The Last Wrath also include: toxic/unhealthy/dangerous Enemies to Lovers (a relationship, even if it is Enemies to Lovers, should always thrive on respect and love, and be something healthy rather than a twisted fairytale), One Dimensional Villains (all characters need to be well developed, especially the ones that will contrast with the protagonists, that is, the villains, as they are the source of conflict for the story), Problematic/Twisted Family Relationships (a.k.a The Lannister Twins from Game of Thrones. Sweet Home Alabama - NOPE. It gives me all the ick and it is deeply disturbing, to say the least.).

I don't like "grimdark, all hope is lost" worlds. The point of the whole world in TLW (and one of the main themes of the book), is that, while their world may be a truly dangerous and dark place, where many horrors await and justice is often denied, and wars tear lives apart, hope is not lost - and that one must not give up in their search for a brighter future, whatever that search may be. There is light in the midst of the overwhelming darkness. Even if Agrannor is dangerous and their rulers are corrupted, there are people worth fighting for, and there are wondrous things worth living to see! It may be a dark world, as it is a Dark Fantasy novel, but there is hope (even if just a spark of it). Having hope, and allowing oneself to dream of a better future, are one of the bravest things one can do in the face of great darkness and peril.

I try to AVOID the trope that all fantasy heroes need to be one specific type of person. Anyone, if they really try, can be a hero and use their hidden strengths to achieve that goal! Raelen may be the heir to a lost Mageborn House, but she is not a great fighter (at first) nor an incredibly powerful mage, she's just a crafty and smart adventurer who tries to save her world despite many people hating her for her magic, and that she chooses to do so despite knowing she is not powerful enough to face the villains alone. But she is going to try. Ellinor may be the princess who had her kingdom stolen from her, but she chooses to become a warrior assassin and train to actively take back what is hers by fighting on the front lines and bringing justice to those she loves. Darian doesn't know how to fight or use magic, and his inventions often end in disaster, he is small and shy, but he chooses to venture into a warring world alone despite his overwhelming fears and blatant weaknesses, to save his best friend. Zephyr may be a sorcerer, but he has a deeply debilitating curse that makes using his magical affinity a living hell and which considerably weakens him, and yet he is still trying to find an anti-magic spell to reverse the attacks of the Secret Court - so that no one has to suffer like he does. Helios was framed for something he didn't do by someone much more powerful than him and had his whole life stolen from him, and yet instead of giving up and hiding away, he is still trying to find the truth. Nadinne is a delicate girl, a lady on all fronts, but she is not a damsel in distress, and her feminine traits never become weaknesses, and she would rather use her delicate and wishful nature to find a diplomatic solution to her friends' war.

The point is, anyone can be a hero. All it takes it to genuinely try your best, even if against all odds! After all, all we can do is try and hope for a better outcome.

I got very carried away with this post, but I hope I answered your question properly! (:

[escarlatafox]

6, 11, 13, 25, B!

Uncommon Questions for OCs and their creators

Thanks so much for the ask! I wrote a Lot. 😅 So I'll put it all under a readmore :P

Will answer for my OCs Patrick and Vincent.

6. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

Immovable! (Answer applies to both).

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

Vincent would seek clarification if the situation allows/calls for it – he generally wants to make sure he understands things thoroughly and correctly. For Patrick, it depends. For things he 100% doesn’t understand (e.g. an entirely new concept gets mentioned, or someone making a statement that seemingly doesn’t make any sense at all without context he doesn’t have), he would seek clarification, but for things he only partially doesn’t understand, he is likely to just sit with the confusion instead and try and “figure it out on his own” or otherwise just accept that there are elements he doesn’t quite understand, or understand yet, at least. However, he certainly wouldn’t “pretend to understand”, so sometimes if someone realises he still doesn’t quite get something, they might offer more information even if it isn’t requested, but they’d have to be able to notice…

13. What colour do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that colour?

HAH, I’m not really a fashion person + I have a very “taste/aesthetics are subjective” point of view where I wouldn’t want to try and assert my subjective opinion as fact, but I’m not sure I necessarily have an opinion to begin with here, so…

In any case, Vincent would have Opinions on this and those Opinions would be “correct” because I consider him to have good aesthetic judgement (he’s from a family with good social standing who also associates with/has connections with many families of good standing in turn, this kind of thing would somewhat come with the socialisation I think…). I don’t personally know what his opinions are, since I’d consider his aesthetic judgement to be way “better” than my own in its alignment with society/general views, LOL.

Patrick doesn’t really have an opinion about this. His/his family’s strand of Christianity has some level of focus on plain/modest dress where it would be bad to intentionally stand out or w/e, so in the end, looking “good” isn’t really the point (though looking presentable is). So, the standard outfit that I depict him in features shades of brown (as in my icon). But yeah I don’t really know for sure what he’d look “best” in, but I guess I think the brown(s) of his standard outfit does suit him fine imo. But yeah, he doesn’t really think about questions like “what colour do I look best in”, so.

25. What are their thoughts on marriage?

So, they both are from an older era of like 100 years ago, and they both come from conservative type families. They’re very much surrounded by and growing up in an environment where marriage is the standard expected thing of everyone.

Vincent has a romanticised view of marriage and wants/expects to be married when he is older (he’s 17).

When Patrick was very little (as in, around 6 years old or under), back then I think he would have just considered marriage to be the default state of adulthood that would simply “happen”/that simply “happens” to basically everyone as this standard thing, something expected/compulsory of everyone like how kids are required to attend school – not really associating it with romance or really understanding much about what marriage is (understandable at that age). He’d just know that his parents are married, other adults he’s aware of are married, probably pick up this general notion from family/society that Marriage Is Good, etc. There wouldn’t be a whole lot of awareness that it’s this active choice that two people make and (ideally) want for themselves, he’d just see it as, again, a standard/default state of Grown-Up Existence. He might have some notion back then as well that being unmarried as an adult is “bad” or a “failed state”, and that an adult who has not yet “achieved” that status would need to “achieve” it.

Obviously as he gets older, he would understand the concept more and know better what marriage actually is. And… he’s never been attracted to anyone, and the idea of a relationship doesn’t really appeal to him in the slightest. But Good Citizens Get Married, and he wants to be a Good Citizen. He does not want to be a Bad Citizen. From an early age he’d just assumed marriage would be in his future because of what I discussed above, and now that he’s older… well. He’s certainly not openly advertising that he doesn’t want to be married, nor does he really think about or acknowledge that much. There’s a bit of cognitive dissonance there. For a while, on some level he’s been able to simply not think about the matter at all because he’s “too young to be thinking about it/too young for it to be relevant to him”, kicking the can down the road as if anything is gonna change (it isn’t). But he’s getting older… (Like Vincent, he’s 17). Yeah, he can still get away with avoiding the topic. For now.

(There is a possible avenue of acceptable escape, which, more and more, he’s also starting to figure is the route he will go down: he’s extremely religious, so he can simply assert that he’s devoting his life so much to God that he can’t make room for marriage. Which wouldn’t even be a lie. The fact that his own father is a pastor might dampen that excuse a bit though. His dad devoted his life to God, and he still got married. Plus, he’s their only kid. So I think his parents kinda want/expect him to get married… lol. Oh well, 1 Corinthians 7:1. Good luck being a confirmed bachelor back in those days though).

(All of this becomes moot, of course, because he won’t ever need to face The Future anyway - since his storyline has him going away from the world, society, and basically everyone, to a pocket dimension and effectively remaining 17 forever.)

B) What inspired you to create them?

For Patrick, it was Milan Kundera’s concept of “totalitarian kitsch”.

“In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.”

The concept, discussed at length in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, made me want to take the basic idea and run with it and put my own spin on it: what if there was a “realm of totalitarian kitsch” that actually physically existed (see: the “pocket dimension” I mentioned above) as opposed to being a more metaphorical language descriptor of absolutist-style ideology? What if there was someone who could, and did, embody the concept of totalitarian kitsch – (or at least, the specific take I chose to spin on it?). This work of Kundera's comments on the duality/conflict of body and soul, so I really drew on that for his character.

For Vincent, I wanted a character to embody traits/characteristics that I like and/or want to explore which the character of Patrick couldn’t really get at. But inspiration was also drawn from Kundera for him too – namely, the concepts of “categorical agreement with being” and “the laughter of angels”, which I essentially think have some overlap anyway:

“Behind all the European faiths, religious and political, we find the first chapter of Genesis, which tells us that the world was created properly, that human existence is good, and that we are therefore entitled to multiply. Let us call this basic faith a categorical agreement with being.” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

“[…] whereas the devil’s laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good and meaningful everything here below was.” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)

Vincent is able to find a certain resonance and contentment in regular everyday existence in a way Patrick never could. The two characters share some important similarities (that’s why they’re good friends), but also some good contrasts.

[goodolreliablejake]

Niche Danganronpa post:

I don't know when it happened, but somehow, imperceptibly, Hajime became my favorite series protagonist.

When I first booted up Super Danganronpa 2, I laughed out loud at his design. With that ridiculous ahoge and just his whole look, he was like a parody of Makoto, in the same way a lot of things in 2 seem to consciously echo and warp elements of the first. On top of that, I just got this vibe that he was a bit prickly, a bit of a jerk. But the conclusion I've reached now is that he thematically does everything that Makoto does, but in a more interesting and impactful way.

I know there are a lot of problems with Danganronpa 3, but that's where his character really clicked for me, and I think it's such a satisfying conclusion for him:

While Makoto struggles with thinking of himself as average, the series kind of waffles on the issue of whether he got into Hope's Peak by chance, or if his luck is a literal superpower. And it sort of mitigates the power of hope, doesn't it? I mean, it's a lot easier to hold onto hope when probability itself, some mystical unseen hand, conspires to make things work out for you. How do you hold onto hope when there is no divine intervention coming? What if the worst has already come?

Hajime actually is average, and it destroys him. He's at the premier school for the world's most gifted, and he knows that no amount of hard work or determination will ever fill that gap. Chiaki tries to offer him the chance to turn away from this obsession with excellence. Life isn't actually about being the best, it's about your connections and experiences: living a good life with the life you've been given. Let's play games together.

Instead he commits a symbolic suicide by becoming Izuru, because he'd rather be dead than average. And he gets his wish, because Izuru is a spiritual zombie, desiring and loving nothing, trapped in a hell of boredom and inaction.

His friends are much the same. Their Remnant of Despair personas are strangers to the versions of themselves that we meet in the Neo World Program, and their grotesque depictions certainly bring the undead to mind.

But they are not dead. The game ends on the implication that they will forget their experiences in the Neo World Program, but when we meet them again in 3, they have clearly been changed by it. After all of that, they have to figure out how to continue living, knowing everything they've suffered and all the evil that they have done. To me, that is a truer representation of hope than any Makoto Hope speech. Which, frankly is a shortcoming of the series in general. They yell about hope and despair often, but it's usually kind of a pretense for the story, not a coherent thematic statement. Except, perhaps, here.

I also think that's why the "power of friendship" idea rings truer with Hajime. He's made a choice to accept himself and the rest of his class regardless of their dark pasts and uncertain futures. That's why only he could reach out to Ryota, to stop his plan and save his soul. He's one of them.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I dislike Makoto. He's a little cutie. But to me it feels like he's the guy posting inspiration quotes, and Hajime is the person who was in the trenches, shoulder to shoulder with you when things went dark.

[expfcultragreen]

Oh im sure she'll put it on the fridge right next to the magnet plaque that says "everyone should be as passive about my sons choices of creative expression as i am, he's a good boy."

Im assuming most of his passive-aggressive boundary breaking goes over her head because theres always some sort of plausible deniability about whether its malicious or just transgressive, and she chooses and has always chosen, to focus on how he's "being productive" by making art, instead of asking why he makes the art he does (he gets a sadistic kick out of making other people uncomfortable, thats literally all it is; he may not even be able to parse the positive feeling he gets when he does it,,,, but its sadism) and what kind of culture forms around it. Guessing his mom doesnt find those types of questions useful to put to justin because he's a gaslighter, and no one else has answers that allow her to think of herself as A Good Mother, other than the people who say he's a great artist in the outsider tradition, a canon in which his work is entirely mundane

And if im right about any of that, being raised by someone so alienated from the meanings of his "humor" is exactly why he gives her mother day cards like this; its funny because she has to like it, like its funny because in order to get what she wants out of it (feeling like a mother worthy of her childs love) she has to pay the justin toll (looking at a childishly grotesque caricature of herself). He's the ultimate be-careful-what-you-wish-for child; he'll go through the motions you want him to go through so you cant say he didnt do what he was "supposed to" (he'll remember mothers day, have a career, etc) but everything about it will be a slightly convoluted fuck you that no one can ever definitively prove theyre justified for being offended by. Because the cover story is, all he's doing is commenting on pointless cultural taboos (like nudity and deformity and secondary sex-characteristic normativity) and the kind of fascistic people who find such things ugly. Its not him going out of his way to make triggeringly ugly things on purpose--no, its your underdeveloped sense of beauty thats the problem! Justin is just a person with a very unusual sense of beauty. Its just a doodle of his mom with her huge tits and dick out with the nipples lovingly rendered in detail, what on earth could be more harmless--from your own pov? Like your critique proves he's smarter than you are. And that maybe youre the fash?

SURE! and like maybe his mom is a huge r crumb fan and this crude colorless depiction of her with wildly distended genitals on display is exactly the card she always wanted.

But if she's a normie, this card is a slightly convoluted "fuck you" over whatever; regardless of whether justin himself sees the art as ugly or not, there is no way he doesnt know that normies do not see the appeal of the style and are in fact repulsed by it. Like its deliriously trolly to combine these elements in this way and thereby manufacture a stage from which you can gotcha people who dont like it; ie are you saying trans women are grotesque just because this picture has unrealistic anatomy??? because justin would never do something like ...intentionally using transmisogynistic tropes to knowingly ruin his normie mom's experience of getting a mothers day card. Thats just projection. Justin is saying he loves his mama and trans women. Obviously. Right?

Another possibility is that he never gave her anything for mothers day and the idea of doing so is hilarious to him enough to make a post saying he's giving her this

Ive been having this argument in my head with someone whose mom would totally take this card as a thoughtful gesture from a very gifted creative child. Frankly so would i. My mother would hate to get this card, she would feel like it was a massive fuck you, even if i had a detailed explanation about how im just being jungian in my attempt to distill my warm regard for all the things she has been to me; she'd be like, now youre trying to make me feel stupid for not liking it.

Bro culture is fucking wild. He's so used to that sentiment carrying weight, that he can be abusive but its "funny" (as long as you "have a sense of humor") and if lines were crossed youre the asshole for making a thing of it because theres no one who hasnt done something stupidly in character while drunk, right. so like he rrrreally doubled down on the silencing tactics there; its hypocritical/bad karma to drag drunk people if youve been drunk yourself as most people have, and if you do drag him its a ~violation of his ~trust that youre going to be more engaged with his pov than that.

Why he has that particular sense of trust in place to break at all is just like, the vanity and hubris of peak whiteguyism.

Fucking cant stand this type of guy

Assume everything youve ever said was on the record, fuckclown. Everyone should. Why have bros enshrined unthinking gut takes no one is supposed to repeat because they dont want to deal with the repercussions of people in general knowing what they really think and act like? Because its "being authentic"? Thats your idea of authenticity? Making sure knowing how big of an asshole you are is a special secret? (Gordon ramsey voice: "fuuuuck meee")

So sorry that having to consider actually being known for your own authentic words and deeds inconveniences your communication style, how horrible for you