#but nonetheless i find it fun to dissect this stuff in detail so here we are lol

[ro-botany]

The Risen King and his Tactician

In my previous post about Risen King Chrom, I talked largely about who and what he is. What I didn’t touch on was questions of why and how; the reasons for his existence and the means by which he’s controlled. So that’s what I’m tackling today.

Naturally, this means an examination of Grima’s thoughts on the matter. It's not a purely tactical decision on their part.

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The first reason I could think of for why Grima would make a Risen out of Chrom was that it was an act of tactical cruelty aimed at their enemies. Nothing kills hope and morale in the enemy troops quite like making the shambling corpse of their exalt attack them! But while that’s almost certainly part of the point... It doesn’t explain why RK Chrom’s mind is intact. You can get that effect for a lot cheaper by bringing him back as a garden variety Risen with no sentience to speak of.

After reading the Forging Bonds supports, I initially thought part of the point was to be cruel to Chrom. They’re being sarcastic. They’re taunting him with his dead friends and torturing him by making him slaughter his people. That motivation would explain why he’s still mentally present—if the aim is to torture a foolish idealist son of Naga, it would hardly be satisfying if he weren’t actually there to be tortured.

But I think the main reason I read things that way is due to Heroes’ visual limitation of only having one portrait per character. They can’t adjust a character’s facial expression to better convey tone, which means that wherever tone is ambiguous in the text, the words are coloured by the expression of that one portrait. Since m!Grima’s portrait has that malevolent little smile, we interpret him as sarcastic or taunting and ignore the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the words are genuine.

Read those supports again, and this time ignore the portrait art.

Grima’s phrasing is never blunt. They couch all these hard truths about the situation in these long, indirect statements that soften them. They never bring up a point unless Chrom, in his panic and denial, brings it up first. They even play along with his delirium at first! None of the content of what they’re saying, absolutely none of it, is actually comforting; but the intent to comfort is there in the phrasing. It’s not “Robin is dead”; it’s “Robin is gone, lost, but I am here.” It’s not “Your friends are dead, and now they’re my pawns”; it’s “I know your friends are precious to you; don’t worry, I can bring them back, and you can lead them just like before.”

And they also lie about who killed Chrom. “Who stole your life, you might ask? It was I, with none other than the Fell Dragon Grima, within me.” It’s a bit convoluted, but it sounds like they’re trying to avoid implying it was Robin. But these supports aren’t a timeline where the details of Chrom’s death are unknown; we know he died at the Dragon’s Table fighting Validar, and his very obvious fatal wound is the same spot Robin stabs him at the Dragon’s Table in the premonition from Awakening. The spot that Robin stabs him, under Validar's control. If I were to speculate, I’d say it sounds like Grima is trying to preserve the memory of who Robin was. Spare Chrom the reality that it was his other half that killed him.

And the thing is, Grima has no reason to attempt to speak kindly to Chrom or to absolve Robin of blame... unless Grima remembers enough about being Robin to still care about Chrom. Regardless of how you interpret the nature of the connection between Robin and Grima, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Robin’s memories and emotions are part of Grima in some way, and influence their actions.

Why does Grima bring Chrom back from the dead? Because Grima never chose to kill the man they loved, and now that they’re a god again, they have the power to undo it.

But! We know that Grima is capable of true resurrection. They bring Validar completely back to life in the main timeline, living body and intact soul, when they aren’t even at full power. So if Grima cares that much, why not bring Chrom back as a living person?

The answer to that one is simple: because there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that Chrom would ever willingly participate in their apocalypse. What good would it do to bring him back only to have to kill him again? The fact that they don’t want to bear him being gone is what has them raising him in the first damned place. Grima needs him to be on their side... So they force him to be. They remake him as a Risen; a being bound to as dark a role as they are, and by definition, something they can control.

And here’s where we get to that how question. While Risen are naturally controllable through dark magic, there’s never been a Risen with a will before, and certainly not one with the blood of a different divine dragon. And given Validar’s actions, Grima is acutely aware of the fact that holy blood creates the possibility of control by another. Which means Naga might try something. They needed to counter that possibility.

Look at Risen King Chrom again and count the holy brands. It’s not just Naga’s anymore; he bears the brand of the defile too. At first I thought it might be attached to his sword, but I enlisted the help of a much healthier Chrom to check, and...

...no, the brand is absolutely attached to RK Chrom’s hand.

Grima covered all their bases. They minimized any chance that Chrom’s willpower or Naga’s meddling could interfere by making a blood pact with him as a second means of control.

Channelled dear old dad a little with that one.

---

So why does Risen King Chrom exist? Because Grima still loves Chrom. Or to be more precise... he exists because Grima loves what Chrom represents.

He’s the idea of companionship. A symbol of the brief moment that Grima was Robin, and was happy. And they love that idea so dearly that they can’t let it die. They bring Chrom back—but they don’t bring him back as he was, they remove his ability to choose and then force him into something that has the shape of their former relationship and none of the heart of it. Grima is still the tactician, and Chrom is still the exalt, and they’re marching to war with the Shepherds like they always do. They’re together like they always were. Right? Grima is acting out a hollow facsimile of a different life, and Chrom is trapped in a nightmare he can’t escape from.

What’s worse is I think Grima knows it’s cruel to keep him around like this. But they’re too rigid in their own beliefs to stop what they’re doing, and too selfish and lonely to let him go. And I think some part of them takes comfort in the fact that they’ve broken Chrom of his ability to hope, too. If even he can’t keep fighting the tide of fate, there really was nothing they could do to avoid this. (Nevermind the fact that they rigged the game so he couldn’t fight even if he wanted to.)

[hellofastestnewsfan]

I didn’t remember having signed up to host a high-school senior in my freshman dorm room, but suddenly there she was, fresh off the train from her yeshiva in New York, suitcase in hand. She didn’t look like a yeshiva girl. Or even really like a New Yorker. She looked like a Malibu-born-and-bred hippie even back then, with her straight blond hair, her perfectly worn-in Levi’s, her giant eyes that drew you in and threatened to drown you. “Hi. They told me I was staying here this weekend. I’m Lizzie Wurtzel.” She dropped her suitcase on the floor and flopped on my couch.

It was 1984. I couldn’t check my answering machine for a message from the admissions office heralding her arrival, because I didn’t have one. I couldn’t send the office an email to make sure this wasn’t a big mistake, because we were all still using typewriters. Plus I was instantly captivated: What was her deal? In my memory of that day, she still glows yellow. “Welcome to Matthews,” I said, which was the name of my dorm.

“So do you like this school?” she said, getting straight to the point. She’d heard the social life could be boring.

All I knew about Harvard’s social life at that point, in the fall of my freshman year, was that it seemed to be nonexistent unless you were in an all-male final club or invited to attend a party at one. I told her about the giant bus that had picked up select freshman girls—those of us who had been plucked based on our photos in the freshman facebook—and then driven to a party with too much grain alcohol and not enough restraint. Consent was not yet part of the college vernacular.

“Sounds fun!” said Liz, and she meant this earnestly, not eye-rollingly. Four years later, in The Harvard Crimson, where we both became columnists, she would write: “I cannot deny that I have spent a fair amount of my time at Harvard at final clubs. I have drunk their liquor, snorted their cocaine, smoked their pot, popped their ecstasy, eaten their food and danced on their floors. I have no right to say what I'm about to say … But of all the stupid and morally questionable things I have done in the name of a good time—and there have been a few—I cannot forgive myself for hanging out at final clubs.”

The next thing I knew she was browsing my bookshelf, snooping. Wanting to know why I had so many issues of Seventeen magazine.

I told her I’d had a column for the magazine in high school, which I was supposed to have continued writing once I’d arrived at college, but with my schedule of classes and all the reading I had to do, I could never find time.

“I have time!” she said. “What’s your editor’s number?”

The next thing I knew, she had taken over my column.

Years later, she wouldn’t exactly thank me, but she would say that meeting a teen girl who’d published articles in a real magazine had given her the courage to do the same.

By the time of her arrival at Harvard the following fall––now Liz instead of Lizzie––she was instantly college famous. Within weeks on campus, everyone knew who Liz Wurtzel was. How could you not? Particularly after the popped-cherry party she threw midyear. Or rather, our mutual friend Donal Logue threw the party, and Liz commandeered it. “So the story is we threw a huge party sophomore year in Adams House,” said Donal earlier today, when we spoke to commiserate over her death. “Liz, a freshman at the time, showed up and announced she had just lost her virginity and it was now officially the ‘Elizabeth Wurtzel lost her virginity party.’ At first, I was surprised. She seemed so wild. When I got to know her and understood her Ramaz background, her high-school life, it made sense.”

Now Donal and everyone else who knew Liz, or has encountered her work since, are trying to make sense of the idea that she’s gone. Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, at the age of 52, of complications from breast cancer. When I spoke with Roberta Feldman Brzezinski, her college roommate and friend ever since, she remembered Liz as “brilliant, acerbic, volatile, and fiercely loyal. In her last years, she became a fountain of life wisdom. Why do you care how people behave? You are the star of your own drama, and everyone else is just a bit player. In her case, that was epically true.”

[Read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay, “I Refuse To Be a Grown-Up,” published in The Atlantic in 2013]

All of us who knew her, in fact, have a Liz story. Our friend Amanda Brainerd, a real-estate agent who, at 52, will be publishing her first novel this year, thanks in large part to Liz’s example and urging, sent me a typical Liz-related text in the wake of her death: “She accused me of stealing the hairbrush that Jimmy Cabot gave her. I still have it. Also once relatively recently I bumped into her in the pharmacy in the San Francisco airport, and she hugged me then said she had the flu and was looking for meds. And yet her fearlessness helped me tell my deeply personal story, albeit in novel form.”

Wurtzel’s 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, forever changed the literary landscape. It redefined not only what women were allowed to write about, but when they were allowed to write about it: their messy, early decades in medias res. Mental illness was no longer something to be hidden or shameful. It was a topic like any other, to be brought out into the light.  

Liz was suddenly the It Girl in New York, throwing epic, unforgettable parties in her loft. Suddenly, in the same way that she’d once drawn courage from my teenage writing, I now drew courage from her literary descriptions of early adulthood. “You should write about your war-photography years,” she urged me during one of her parties. And so I did. From then on, whenever anyone wanted to criticize women memoirists for oversharing; or dismiss personal writing as lesser or not literary; or shame us for describing, in intimate detail, the joys and miseries of human love, in all of its messy glory, we’d get lumped in together or collectively shamed as examples of what not to do. As the years wore on, we sometimes even found ourselves “oversharing” on the same stage.

After my marriage fell apart, Liz showed up at my first post-separation dinner party wearing an outrageous miniskirt with spikes and chains and spouting equally outrageous stories of sex with rock stars, completely hijacking the conversation until we were all laughing so hard, I forgot about my broken life. Yes, she was famously difficult. Yes, she could be infuriating, hypercritical, annoying. Sometimes I felt like a prisoner in her apartment, looking for a break in the conversation that would never come. But when the term narcissist got thrown around to describe her, I’d put my foot down. No, I’d say. She’s not a narcissist. It’s not that.

[Read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay, “1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible,” published in The Atlantic in 2012]

I would argue, in fact, that when the chips were down, either for me or for one of her other friends, whether close or not, Liz was the first to pick up the phone and invite us over to carefully dissect each part of our sad, pathetic narrative, looking for places to insert a decent laugh track.

After she got married, she was happy for once. And I didn’t see her for several years.

The last time we emailed was this past summer, after I’d heard she was going through new travails. No, not the breast cancer that eventually stole her from us too early: that she’d made her peace with. It was other stuff. Private stuff. The kind of stuff we don’t––or, rather, didn’t–– share with the world, which was best discussed alone, just the two of us, for several hours, preferably on a floppy couch with several dogs between us. I kept offering up dates to come over for dinner, and she, in typical Liz fashion, kept flaking. “Hi and forgive me for the (very) delayed response,” she wrote on July 3rd, in one of her multiple forgive-me emails in that same chain. “I am like that. It takes me the longest time to do anything. Instead of reflexes, I have deflexes. Which, I’m sure, makes complete sense. Anyway, thank you for thinking of me. I am here and completely crazy, I don’t even know why. Shocked and maladjusted. That must be it. I would love to see you. Xelw”

The last time I saw her alive was last week, at Sloan Kettering, but she never saw me. Her giant, mischievous eyes were closed, lightless. Her yellow glow was gone, replaced by a hospital gown and the loud beeping of machines. Her mother was gripping her hands, leaning over her body like a chiaroscuro, shooing my friend George and me out of the room. We’d brought her a vase filled with fake red roses, not knowing if real ones would be an issue in her critical condition but wanting to let her know she was loved nonetheless.

I find myself wishing, right now, that Liz could send us a missive from the beyond, one last word to let us know she made it there safely, that the music was just meh, and that she was already asking everyone not how they died but how they lived, helping each to find, without shame, the humor, pathos, and humanity in their narrative arcs.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2QTweNP