#either way i love them. i loooooove terrible rulers who care deeply soooo much

[ahamkara-apologist]

savathun is cartoonishly evil and I love her because she's just a funny (not) little bug lady who likes playing funny tricks like trying to murder you for no reason. and even she is more redeemable than clovis bray because she was also explicitly victimized by the witness- she also just had the ability to forcibly break out of its control because she's a god and had the backing of the traveler itself. eramis was one single person who had the choices presented to her to either die or save her people from the apocalypse she probably didn't even know she was going to help work towards.

ABSOLUTELY, like Savvy is such a fun villain that even with all the horrible shit she did to Osiris (my fav human character) and Saint I still absolutely adore her. She's this perfect blend of 'someone who is a deeply selfish and absolutely horrible person' with 'person who does love and loves very deeply and was tricked into becoming who she was' that's absolutely delicious. She's billions of years old and has ended countless civilizations and feels no regret for it, only hatred for what it made of her. She's the god of trickery and lies. She speaks like a southern grandma. She puts the guardian through gauntlets of death for her own amusement. This is an act of genuine affection. She's just...such a good example of that charming trickster character that imo its impossible not to love her, no matter how horrible she gets, bc she's just so fun. And because, compared to Clovis Bray, her actions are not entirely selfish, or born in the arrogance and fear of an obsessive narcissist- she genuinely does act out of a desire to do better by her siblings and her people. It's just that she's extremely self-serving, so as soon as you lose your uselessness, oops, off you go! Good thing that we're all her blorbos in her own personal telenova

Eramis's situation was more of a deal with the devil thing I feel, where she wasn't aware of all the terms and conditions before she seized the Darkness. Like, she very much knew that she was making that sort of contract, but the vibe I got from Beyond Light when I replayed it was that she believed that she was taking the weapons of the enemy to use for her own gain, not realizing that it was the bait in a snare before it snapped shut on her. And, because she's not paracausal like Savathun is, once she was in that trap, she couldn't get out. I don't think it's a coincidence that when she accepted the Echo, she explicitly said that she has conditions of her own before she fully took its power- she learned from the last time she grasped something with such paracausal significance. Grasping blindly for power is what got her enslaved to an entity that she would have fought tooth and nail against if she actually knew what it wanted- that's why the Witness had to trick her into joining it like it did with Savathun. She made all the decisions that led her to that fate, sure, but overall I'd say that Eramis's arc is what is to be expected when you put someone in a situation of extreme stress, desparation, starvation/malnutrition, and constant fight-or-fight mode for god knows how long, make them responsible over a shitload of other people, and then trap them in a corner. They choose badly! You can force people to make worse choices with less pressure, and I think that when people bitch and moan about her being 'irrational' they forget that element of her story, or refuse to understand it. Kinda like a 'poor people are drug addicts because they're lazy' issue, where something is seen as a moral failing instead of a response to an environmental problem that wouldn't be taken if better options were availiable

But yeah, I fucking love Savathun. She's not my blorbo, but she's just an absolute gem of a character. Like, I know that this is sad for the Hive fans, but deadass part of the reason that I'm glad she'll never get a redemption arc is because that would mean that all her shenanigans would end. Like, fuck all the xenocide, idgaf about that, I like that she's a selfish bitch and a terrible mom who's playing us all like pawns on a chess board so that she can get a better future for her species. Like #slaaaayyyy, #girlboss. Everything she does is fascinating and funny. Please continue to put me into your little experiment chambers Aunt Savvy I'll gladly play your lab rat for you as long as you keep this game enriching