#delilah cr

[dylbydoodles]

Critober Day 5: Briarwoods

Delilah and Sylas, the cursed lovers. 🖤💜

[loserwithanartacc]

Cooking up another laudna sketch because I’m feeling normal abt her rn

This scene was so fucking cool

[critterpages]

[likeappletrees]

pov you are delilah briarwood

[thewhalelord]

“I think it’s your turn”

[pknire]

When Matt/Delilah starts to echo Laudna thooooo?! I just HAD to draw this moment! Everyone did so good with the RP this session.

[liltaireissocute]

[nezumidou]

(Demons by Hayley Kiyoko)

[tarydarrington]

"What makes you think that might have changed?"

[floweroflaurelin]

Huevember day 10: The Patron

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Let’s do terrible and beautiful things.

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I’M STILL REELING FROM LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE I had something totally different planned for Day 10 and I shoved it to the side and made this instead. Shaking and screaming,, I’m just lucky the colour of Delilah’s influence is green…. Losing my mind over here

[pocketgalaxies]

Her dead husband. I'm going to have his face. || Delilah and I have shared a brain for an incredibly long time. (for @sharkodactyl)

[acebender]

Delilah: *shows up*

Imogen:

[school-zones]

Delilah is back.. so Imogen must stabby stab

[nolagranola]

wrestle from within

[shorthaltsjester]

one of the most infuriating parts of seeing people refer to cr as the “it’s love that saves people” show is that they completely ignore the context of that quote and that, yes, it is the “it’s love that saves people” show and that’s actually why c3 was a disappointment. because caduceus doesn’t just spontaneously say that to trent out of some pity for the fact that trent doesn’t have anyone, it’s that, as is central to caduceus’ journey and the mighty nein as a whole, when people love you they will challenge you and negate the foolish cycles of thought that can only emerge from a life lived in isolation. the mighty nein learned this lesson, with characters who notably and violently rejected the notion that they could be open to one another eventually realizing the only way to honour the friends they found and the version of themself that those friends came to care for required being honest with those friends about their motivations and feelings and desires. and in the c2 finale(s) we see the consequences of the choice each of them made to give up the lonely versions they’d sold themselves away as in favour of being a member of the mighty nein. fjord returns to an imperfect but cherished relationship with vandran that he’d previously committed to avoiding, beau finds her footing in the cobalt soul where her loudness isn’t just put up with but is valued for its keeping the institution true, caleb decides not to be the version of himself years of solitary confinement and abusive manipulation would have him be by electing to imprison trent, veth makes the choice to return to her family rather than see the empire bureaucracy through, jester opts to continue adventuring and helping her friends as they need it since she’s found her place in the world to be wherever they need her, yasha is finally able to make the choice to fully face her grief and bring the collection of penance stored in her journal back to zuala’s grave, caduceus returns to a grove recovering from a once-encroaching sickness attended by a family likewise recovering and commits himself to rebuilding the temple. there’s not a single outcome in terms of the character’s “happily ever afters” (which, as a side note, is why the claim that what people are frustrated with c3 for is the abundance of happy endings absurd and obvious in its refusal to actually take seriously a divergent opinion to its own — c2 was also a largely happy ending, likewise boosted by a an unlikely dice roll, the difference is the narrative earning) that is not mediated by literal years of character work and dming that orients that work toward the campaign plot (or that orients the plot toward the character work). c2 feels earned because it proves the implicit message of “pain doesn’t make people, it’s love that makes people”, where transformation happens in either case, but love is a transformation born out of choice, and pain demands a transformation for survival.

if you want to take seriously that c3 is part of a world constantly negotiating with the claim “it’s love that makes people.” you have to take seriously the initiating claim that’s it’s not pain that makes them, and that, in fact, in light of the love that one chooses, pain becomes inconsequential. given the frequency with which the fandom rolls out the “it’s not. x characters fault, they’re traumatized” i’d say it’s pretty obvious that bells hells have failed to qualify for, let alone pass, the “it’s love that makes them” test, since they are all still quite significantly defined by their pain and a refusal to choose love in the sense of transformation. there’s a bell hooks quote i used for this cr edit I made awhile ago that i’ve always felt really resonates with what caduceus says in that scene + what cr has tended to say about love through the characters and their journeys. and you can go to the link for the full quote but the pertinent part is that love is a commitment to being changed and a commitment to struggle to achieve that change even if it means letting go of the easier notions of ourselves as unlovable or broken to do so.

like, to be clear i’m not saying that bells hells don’t love people or each other at the end of the campaign, but that their love is a noun and not a verb. laudna goes to lieve’tel and has to be told she isn’t broken, ashton sacrifices himself and it’s not even the love of bells hells that saves them, it’s the deus ex machina of essek. bells hells are defined by their stagnancy, their refusal to give up on the definitions of themselves they’ve come to hold as a result of trauma. and while the initial creation of those identities is not on them, the continued maintenance of those identities such that they become bad faith habits that disallow any notion of growth to occur in the face of senses of self which assume their own brokenness is on them. and in all honesty that still could’ve been an interesting story, especially since it shows they’re of the same kind as ludinus, but it would not have ever been a story about the kind of love that caduceus is talking about when he says it’s love that makes people — let it not be forgotten that love (and fear) as a noun kept caduceus alone for years and love as a verb showed him the pay off of giving up stagnancy’s safety to pursue something else — nor the kind of love that c1 and c2 are built upon.

[thewhalelord]

“I feel like me”