#end the cycle of abuse

[strawlessandbraless]

Live

Laugh

Lobotomy

[sarcastic-clapping]

LET YOUR DAD DIE: IT'S FINE IT'S FINE IT'S WHAT HE DID TO HIS DAD.

Lestat + Claudia: Patricide & The Cycles of Violence - INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (2022) - Catherine Lacy, "Cut" (2019) / Anne Rice, "The Vampire Lestat" (1985) / Anne Rice, "Interview with the Vampire" (1976)

[sunlit-mess]

consumed by the inevitable

[mortysmith]

try not to think too hard about the fact that your grandpa (the worst person you know) was literally exactly like you when he was 14 (pr/ship dni)

[mochii-derogatory]

ive been watching the dog motif show... why is no one talking about this guy. isaac lahey come home from france,,,, sweet boy,,,, we miss you,,,

[furiousgoldfish]

Not calling out abusers because they had 'a tough life' and didn't know any better --> abusers using the 'tough life' and 'not knowing any better' excuse to keep abusing --> abuse is always excused and never has any consequences for the abuser --> abuse continues endlessly

Calling out abusers and holding them directly responsible and liable for abuse --> abusers forced to acknowledge they can't excuse their behaviour by invoking compassion in the accuser --> their behaviour has direct consequences for them and they're forced to change their behaviour in order to stop the bad consequences --> abuse is stopped

[hellamorte]

do you ever think about how lucanis keeps losing and losing and losing — his entire life? losing his parents, losing his childhood because of the crow training, losing his freedom, his sleep, and one year of his life due to imprisonment. then the maker smiles upon him, and he's discovering something good (rook, the veilguard team, purpose), acquiring something back (his family, his life, his freedom, his job, his city), finding some peace in mundane things (coffee, cooking, taking care of others). it feels like the scales are finally moving, balancing — only for him to lose again. he loses caterina, he can lose his city to blight, he loses at weisshaupt, he loses grip on himself (thanks to spite), he loses control — he loses himself, piece by piece. rook can help lighten the load on his chest (thanks to spite), he gets caterina back, and breathing feels a little bit easier. but loss is not done with him. he loses illario, and it feels like losing a limb, a large piece of himself violently torn away. he's visibly shaken, but no one truly knows what it takes to string the assorted pieces of himself together and keep functioning. and then loss deals what seems like the final blow: some of his friends are dead or lost, and rook is gone, too. he failed; he only knows death, doesn't he? life only takes, and takes, and takes, giving only to tease and take it back. at that moment, he's falling apart completely — until they find rook, and there's a sliver of hope once again. the scales are moving, the team wins, they eventually go back to their lives — and that's when he realizes that the final blow is the life as the first talon.

[taldigi]

crisis aside I think that "kids can handle dark stories if they have happy endings" is just going to apply to me forever.

I think games are awesome for having multiple endings, especially if one of them is happy- or at least hopeful. Heck- even better if some are bad.. because that makes the happy ending better? Worth working for?

as I get older I find myself drawn less to dark and hopeless media. I still appreciate that kinda stuff when it's the middle of the story- a little bit of salt to bring out the flavors of a dish and all- but when the story ends and "they never spoke again and they grew apart" or "everyone died anyway because they never had a chance and the world is cruel and cruelty is eternal." or "they put aside their passions forever because the waking world does not take kindly to love and the path of least resistance is the correct one"

Maybe if the characters I love can face darkness and still come out the other side better people facing a new sunrise with the people they love, then maybe there's hope for me too.

im not really going anywhere with this. Im just talking to myself.

[hunting-for-sport]

"It’s about breaking out of whatever prison you’ve allowed yourself to live in, whether you built that prison for yourself or whether it was built around you and you just accepted it. The message in the whole record is just: Fetch the fucking bolt cutters and get yourself out of the situation that you’re in — whatever it is that you don’t like."

"Fetch the Bolt Cutters," Fiona Apple + Isaac Lahey & Derek Hale, Teen Wolf (2011)

edit: i can't fucking believe i have to say this but if you rb this and tag it as a ship thing i hope you choke

[osarina]

honestly the most tragic relationship in civzai/pmreader universe is yosano & reader and i will stand on that hill forever.

like originally i was thinking maybe they only rarely interacted while on tokoyami island, but the more that i thought about it, the more i realized that they probably did interact frequently. mori would've wanted his "immortal regiment" as soon as possible and to have it perfected, he needed reader's ability to be able to "heal" the soldiers' minds. so mori would've likely had yosano try to help her figure out how to work her ability. they would have been friendly enough with each other, the only two young girls in the warzone, both dragged into this war in some manner or another, yosano probably saw her as a younger sister tbh being 3 years older, wanted to help her as best as she could.

and then mori does mori things. when yosano's help doesn't give him the progress he needs, he starts using other tactics to try to get her to develop her ability in the way he needs. starts comparing her to yosano, starts holding her place at his side over her head, threatens to send her back if she can't be useful. all things that a kid in her situation would be terrified of.

and like you guys have to understand pmreader does NOT have a reliable narration of those years. like we'll see it in the canonverse & the civzai verse (which is actually what stemmed this post), but her memories of those years are very warped courtesy of trauma & mori's manipulation. it all happens directly after she watches her entire village slaughtered in the crossfires of the great war so she's already very unstable, and mori gets in her head VERY quickly.

so she thinks back to these years and can only remember the threats of being dropped back off in the ruins of her village & the way mori held yosano as a type of idealized figure that she'd never be able to catch up to no matter how hard she tried. "be more useful like yosano and you can keep your place here" and stuff like that. she doesn't have like ANY memory of the months yosano spent trying to help her figure out her ability, doesn't remember how she would sit with her for hours and tell her that she's making good progress even when mori would give that disappointed frown, doesn't remember anything because its all been warped and twisted by moris' constant threats and comparison. so naturally she becomes resentful and hateful about it.

meanwhile, poor yosano only remembers the 7/8 year old girl she tried & failed to help, couldn't do anything when mori separated them and turned reader against yosano. yosano got off of the warfront and out from under mori's thumb, but reader didn't, and yosano has had so much guilt over it for years, living in the what ifs and wondering what ever happened to her.

and obviously mori's manipulations of reader never stopped after that—probably gets worse, even, because he would lament losing yosano while keeping reader, would've preferred the opposite. so when reader and yosano meet again years later, reader immediately rejects and spurns her, and yosano is just soooo distraught over it like the one person that could rlly truly fully understand her rejecting her in such a manner HURTS. hurts even more when she sees how reader has turned out so similar to mori bc she still remembers her as the kid she was and failed to protect.

i suppose while we're on the topic - i always get a lot of questions about reader and mori's relationship. dazai kind of mentions it in 'i laugh like me again,' but reader has like undying loyalty toward him that he definitely doesn't deserve. as shitty of one as he is, he's the only father figure she remembers, she still feels like she owes him her life for rescuing her from the warzone and has a VERY intense complex of trying to make him proud of her. i wouldn't say that mori doesn't care about her, he does in his own way, but whatever feelings he does have for her are overshadowed by his ambitions.

anyway tldr: yosano and reader are tragic, and mori is a cunt. i feel like im missing stuff concerning reader's and mori's relationship but that wasn't the point of this post anyway maybe ill make it its own post

[dxxtruction]

Louis' "You're boring!" Could mean so many things, but I think what's most apparent about that line is that Armand takes no initiative just for himself. He's not really anybody, because he never goes out and finds himself or gets attached to anyone but Louis. Without Louis as his guide he's literally just sitting on a couch picking lint! That's the thing.

He orbits constantly around what would make Louis happy, and never really fully going what would make me happy? Ultimately that drive to please Louis is what drives him to torturing Daniel, not so much that he'd care to just do it. Ultimately, not giving proper care to Louis is just a way to make sure Louis knows he has to orbit around him as well, with shoving Lestat onto him just that other nail on the coffin. So, even if he fails to figure out how to make Louis happy with him, he still knows what Armand is good for, and better than.

That dependency is what drives Armand's abuse. It really just comes down to that. Armand doesn't even realize how suffocated he is by his own dependency. This is just how life is to him. (It shouldn't be lost either that dependency is a theme considering this episode also deals with addiction).

Daniel's fascinating because he's just so driven to be somebody. He's largely independent, he seeks things because he wants them. It's his drug to poke and prod at all the things that he shouldn't. Daniel's exciting because he lets Louis in to something different, lets him in to all this potential in another person that he can also do the same with for himself. It's a real connection. A two way street. It's easy to tell how Armand can be smothering then because he's never introducing him to anything really new, and most the ways both of them connect are all painful and traumatic. It's never just fun because there's always that layer of that pain. Fun died with Claudia.

50 years on they've gotten to a lot better place, both of them, but it's still that same shit. No seriously, "How is this any different from last time, Louis?"

Well... Because Armand's going to be, at the very least, making one [1] decision only for himself - and that's to hold power over Daniel's life. Fucking sick foreshadowing.

They aren't driving each other to the brink anymore but "The vampire is bored" STILL. Maybe it's even worse, despite being in better places, because Louis' sort of just been defeated by it. (I mean, can he even really leave this either?). He's accepting the dependancy cause he kind of has to. He'd literally ended up letting all the enjoyment be up where he can't reach [The book shelves]. Armand so desperately wants Louis happiness but what really ends up happening is that Louis ends up having to give Armand all his own. He's got no one or anything else to get it from. But like an iPad and an over the top eating ritual. Two extremes of what's just more lint picking.

This whole relationship is one I find just tragic inside and out. You have to just pity it, really. There's ways in which you can find yourself feeling bad for both of them. But you can only really be mad at Armand for any of it. Armand, who isn't even 'free' in any sense, having so little concept of his own independence, but is at the same time so controlling over other's. It's a tragic cycle. It's an infuriating one.

Louis at least has the mind to know when enough is enough. If just needing that extra push to get there. Armand's too scared of it being over to even try.

[zykamiliah]

on the topic of lestat, loustat and the cycle of abuse, it's really striking to me how lestat ends up reproducing the same of abusive family dynamic that he had in the past, with him as his abusive father, louis as his mother and claudia as the child, probably because he really hasn't internalized it and examined himself in the light of it, and overlooks how much he's like father. well, he does know he has "his father's temper" but that's a way to absolve himself of the blame and not really examine and be aware of how he'd be capable of doing the same.

i mean everything he says at the DPDL dinner table is basically what happens later: even the part where he drags claudia back home against her will is hauntingly similar to what was done to him by his father and his brothers.

goes to show how being abused doesn't really prevent you from developing abusive behaviors later in your life. he's one core part of the cycle of abuse, and i really hope the show will eventually address how he needs to change his ways (he admitted at the end that he wronged louis but i would like to see him enumerate the many ways he hurt louis and claudia)

[saurongorthaur9]

For some reason, I've been feeling Extra Emotional about Sauron the last couple days 😭 I mean, I have felt Emotional about Sauron for the last twenty years, but it's hitting me harder than usual.

[rozecrest]

happy 25th birthday to the utena finale 🌹

[revenantghost]

What a manipulative piece of shit

[sticks-and-souls]

Anakin & Letting Go

I always found it to be a little skeptical that Anakin could become a force ghost after it took Yoda, Qui Gon, and Obi-Wan learning and training how to do it, and I always thought “really? Anakin? Finding that level of peace and letting go?” But after this episode, seeing the care and lesson that he imparts upon Ahsoka that he learned so painfully, I understand it from him so much better. Vader was so stuck in his complete self-hatred that he allowed nobody who had known him before as Anakin to reach him (most notably Obi-Wan and Ahsoka) because of the overwhelming extent of his shame. It took his son, who had never known him and yet who still stood before him and believed in him, loved him, sacrificed himself for him, to call Anakin back from the depths of Vader. And this Anakin, let everything go to save his son and to allow his son to save him.

And it felt so impactful to get to see this mature post-Vader Anakin reaching out to Ahsoka to teach her this very hard-earned lesson that he took the very hard road to get. Because she has Vader in her. She is everything Anakin taught her, and we saw the behaviors that led Anakin to becoming Vader—the fear of losing his most cherished relationships—reaching out of Anakin very early in the clone wars (and before) and the two of them are both very aware that he imparted those lessons on her. And then we've seen across this season—and overtly in her clone wars flashbacks—that she believes she is inextricable from these traits.

I’ve always loved Anakin as a fictional character, getting to see his earnestness, his flawedness, and his intensity (to borrow Huyang’s very accurate adjective), but this episode brought a level of humanity to him that has moved me so deeply. Life is HARD, loss gets forced on all of us no matter what, and the lessons that we learn through mistakes that we made can be extremely painful because acknowledging and taking responsibility for hurting people is actually really painful for humans (not owning up to our actions is the emotionally easier choice and George Lucas has stated time and again that the Dark Side is about taking the short-term easier choices). But it ultimately means that learning from your mistakes is an actual choice you have to MAKE. And this is the core of Anakin’s lesson. He is teaching Ahsoka that she has to choose which lessons he has taught her that she will live by, but more than that, that she is empowered to be able to choose. Yes, she has everything that he taught her—the good and the bad—but she is not condemned to live out all of the lessons. 

And the beauty of it isn't just the lesson, but that Anakin gets to be the one to teach it to her. The betrayal that she experienced in discovering his fall, the taintedness that she has been portraying that she feels about herself, gets specifically addressed because if he figured it out, then she definitely can too. If he is more than just Vader, then she is too. And THAT is what the "Is that what this is about?" line is actually about. It's so so important that we get to see pre-Vader, Vader, and post-Vader across her vision because the point is that yes, Vader is a part of him, and that brilliant shot of the two of them glaring Sith eyes across the blade at each other did it's job in conveying that Ahsoka is capable of that darkness too, but you are not only the darkness. You get to choose. ("You're more than [death and destruction] because I'm more than that"). And more to the point, you have to choose. Because if you don't specifically choose to fight the dark, then you're ultimately choosing to fall into it. "Fight or die."

So for Anakin to be able to reach out to her one more time, to be able to love her the way he, as Vader, had refused to the last time when they met on Malachor, and to open with “you’re never too old to learn”, because god if he didn’t learn that the hard way too. And to be able to pass on to Ahsoka how to actually let go because he himself had only just finally been able to learn it as well, feels so powerful and poignant.

And that look of pride and wistful sadness that he gives her at the end? That both she and Luke were able to learn so quickly what took him so long? And that maybe, he may have helped save her from the worst traits that he imbued upon her? That’s him having let go of his own shame. He feels grief, he feels guilt—we can see it on his face—but what has happened has happened and he has accepted that, and finally learned that letting go doesn't mean it didn't happen, it means it doesn't have to define your actions going forward.

And finally, it’s also him letting go of ahsoka. By teaching her that she will choose her destiny, he has to accept that he cannot control it either. And he has. “There’s hope for you yet.” 

So yeah, Anakin learned to let go, and getting to see him here, in this headspace of acceptance and peace, practicing and understanding what it means to be a Jedi, was so unexpectedly cathartic and revelatory for me as viewer.