#family is fucking hard

[excelsior9173]

…

this is… a tough one. idk. it feels bad but i’m also at the point where it’s like, it is what it is, y’know?

my sister and i are very much the black sheep in the family as far as my dad’s side is concerned

and i think the worst part of that is that we didn’t do anything but be ourselves- dad’s family takes the fact that they never liked our mom out on us kids. we’re too much like her.

for me at least it’s always been subtle. i wasn’t always a problem, or undesirable. my sister had always had it harder, i gradually fell out of favour with them. i feel so distant when i visit, i’m close with my one cousin and that’s about it. everyone else sort of feel like strangers at this point. they’re getting bolder with their distaste too- try to veil it behind humour but it’s starting to get pretty blatant

i knew they’d poke fun at my colourful hair and facial piercing and i knew they’d hate it when i got tattoos (shocker- my grandma can barely bring herself to look at my ink) but the comments have gotten more blunt. convinced my cousin to get matching tattoos with me, she loves it and is planning more! my uncle has “jokingly” lectured me/confronted me about it three times now. like he’s trying to play it cool but is pissed that i have ��corrupted” his precious daughter i think. he’s a control freak and i took that control away my grandma straight up flinched when i walked out of a camp bathroom in shorts and said “i’ll never get used to those tattoos”. like thanks, grandma, but i didn’t get them for you to enjoy them. all that shit is kind of water off a ducks back now, i expected those reactions, i was prepared for them. i don’t really care it’s honestly rather entertaining to me to see how much they’ll tie themselves in knots over choices i make for my own body.

the part that really made me realize i was falling out of favour as opposed to my cousin who can do no wrong in their eyes (i don’t hold it against her, i love her dearly and she was the closest thing i had to a sister growing up- until my sis transitioned) was my university convocation.

my cousin convocated last year, and i convocated in june. it was a whole big thing for my cousin! everyone came to see, we all took pictures with her, went out for a nice meal and had champagne to celebrate. my convocation? idk the family all came, we took a few pictures, went out and had lunch. they gave me their gifts and then everyone left- they had other plans to get to. i just- it felt like there was a lot less fanfare and celebration around it all. it was all “good job exie, but your cousin did it first and she has a grown up job related to her degree so 🤷‍♀️” they all ask my cousin how work is going, they ask her questions related to her degree, all that stuff. i get none of the same treatment. occasionally i’ll get asked something psych-related, but it always feels like they’re asking for the sake of being able to make a point. like i’m just a research engine and there’s no interest in my education. i genuinely wonder if any of them will even care once i get my next degree. it’s the same thing with holiday/birthday gifts. i feel like there’s thought and intent when they get gifts for my cousin, and for my sibling and i it’s just… random shit. the worst part is that my dad and aunt have asked for wishlists. my dad makes an attempt- his gifts are always thoughtful, last year he got me a heated sweater because i do dog walks in very cold weather. but the rest of his family? i got a mug and some froofy soaps and some kitschy novelty booze glasses (i have maybe a drink a month. except for new years and august long). even after they ask for a list :) i think i have become a stranger to them. my interests are so foreign and uncomfortable that they won’t even make an attempt at this point.

i kind of thought it would hurt more. realizing that i am not loved to the same extent as my cousin. that my sister, if they knew the truth, would be loved even less than i am now. but it doesn’t. i feel kind of numb to it. like i guess i knew this was inevitable. i would never be the perfect niece/grandkid. and i’m not saying it doesn’t hurt- it does, but it’s sort of like a long, old ache. it’s been hurting so gradually for so long that it’s sort of just a part of me. it doesn’t feel as bad as it is because i’m used to it. and that sucks to say. but it is what it is. i am not going to compromise any part of myself to earn the approval of people who can’t be bothered to even attempt to understand.

there’s more i wanted to say, or perhaps i wanted to say this all differently. idk. but that’s my rant tonight lol. family is great but it also fucking sucks.

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about not only the specific people lucanis pulls in to represent the 'locks' in his psyche, but the storytelling that happens in the structure/order of them. the underlying ideas are presented something like:

the lucanis who went into the ossuary never came back out again; he died down there (the boy caterina raised is gone forever) -> you're putting yourself in danger doing this (by being close to me), you should leave because I can't bear it if you get hurt because of me -> it doesn't matter even if we do try this, it won't work anyway (again because of me) ('you know what he's like, you can open the door but he won't walk through it' :'( oofie doofie) -> what if the real secret is that there was never anything but the monster in here from the beginning. you should leave, there was never anything here worth saving in the first place. (implicitly: what if I deserved what happened, all along.)

it runs pretty cleanly from outward-oriented attachment anxiety ('caterina won't even want me back like this, she won't recognize me (the same way I no longer recognize myself)) and gradually deeper inwards until we reach self-image and self worth. or you know, the harrowing basic lack of it lol.

"careful -- they'll know we're not right," spite says in one of their first scenes... but clearly, some very deep part of lucanis has feared or suspected for much longer than that that there's something inherently not right at the core of him, way before any demon entered the picture. and the voice he gives those lines to is the person who should know him better than anyone in the world, who he has loved more than anyone in the world -- and who deliberately chose to hurt him so horrifically anyway. 'It's better if I'm just a monster and deserved what happened than it is to allow for the idea that the brother I love doesn't really exist and maybe never did'. it's better if he's fundamentally flawed in some way that needed fixing to help him survive, and that's why caterina chose to hurt him again and again -- out of love. (this one I think he might have a very sad wakeup call on one day if he ever ends up with the responsibility and care of a child of his own in some way and realizes just how alien the idea of ever intentionally hurting them for any reason is to him. oh buddy. also interesting that he keeps caterina as the outermost lock -- there IS a distance he keeps there that he hasn't with illario. he doesn't resent her 'anymore' he says, but he also keeps her carefully further away from his deepest self.)

as far as I could tell the only note in the mind prison that's fully hidden and needs to be uncovered is the sad painful helpless stupid little truth that even after all this, even knowing what happened... he still loves his brother. is there anything illario could ever do that would make lucanis completely stop loving him, do you think? sometimes the trouble with unconditional love is that it is, well. unconditional, even when some terms and conditions probably would have been in order haha.

that's the pattern you see there again and again; he would rather destroy and abandon and imprison himself at every turn than let go of love, even when it's just scraps, even when there's only ever enough of it to hurt him. it's only when rook shows up and as it were takes his hand and walks along with him that he can entertain the idea of changing the story of what walking out the door might mean in the end.

[chthonic-kids]

IT'S ON SIGHT CHRONOS

[spaceistheplaceart]

once again thinking about @void-dude's static ford. ough.

check this out

[mohntilyet]

my initial knee jerk reaction to lucanis/spite saying "family, enemies, contracts" was bad because it felt like an oversimplification but actually thinking on it i really love that lucanis forces himself into this box to make things make sense in his life. family is unconditional, enemies are to be killed, but contracts is so. interesting... man who promises mila that he will find her father because he does not fail contracts. the same man who tells effe that he will kill her slaver because he needs to turn her from a poor young woman that he sympathises with, into someone he can make a deal with. it's not kindness, it's not weakness, he's just fulfilling a contract, and crows don't break contracts. if he kills a bunch of racist blood mages during that process, then he's not breaking the rules, just bending them. a very convenient excuse to be a good man while still being a crow and assassin. and of course when spite is forced into him, he gets out of it with something familiar! by making another deal! something he could work with, something he HAS to work with, because being just an abomination is unthinkable. if he can work himself out of this problem like he's done with every other contract in his life, in his mind maybe there's some tiny chance that this becomes another job that he can claw his life back from.

[fairy-bard]

i’ve been loving watching critical role recently if for no other reason than because i get to watch a decent portion of viewers actively falling for cult tactics lmao

a forbes article describes cult tactics as when cult leaders “censor dissenting viewpoints, promote a distorted narrative and use relentless repetition and peer pressure”

ludinus needing to monologue at everyone he meets. cherry picking what information to let people know (ie the orb). showing popular world leaders (gods?) at their absolute worst as a means to win over the vulnerable. creating dissent between cult prospects and the people who they’re close to outside the cult. doesn’t take no for an answer. repeating his points over and over, in whatever context he thinks will be most persuasive. targeting people who’ve lost everything. convincing people that they’re special

matt is a genius.

[1alchemistart]

some melindas spawned by the new chapter and a piece from a little while ago :D

[introspectivememories]

im sorry but i choose to believe that tim drake is the most insufferable "my man, my man, my man" girl about bear. he does not shut up about him. steph is cooking smth in the kitchen? oh my man can do that. bear cooks really well. dick triaging some poor victim on an emergency site? oh my man is really good at that. mhmm, bear is on his way to becoming a paramedic. damian building something? oh my man is really good with power tools. have you ever seen him build ikea? it takes him less than an hour. for our anniversary, he built me a coffee table. mhmm isn't he amazing? yeah my man did that. yeah my man, mhmm that's my ma-

[ithinkdogshouldvote]

Ah, the Oak family tradition of having very complicated feelings towards your father(s).

[kacievvbbbb]

it's interesting that despite all being the same age you can see a clear division of younger and older siblings within the Hargreeves siblings.

With five it's more obvious despite being mentally far older than all of them he looks like a child he looks like their much younger brother did when they lost him and so they treated him as such. But you can see that level out now to they still treat him like a younger brother but give him space to be an adult.

But for the other siblings that all remain the same age it's a nice little look into how parentification of the higher numbers and the wombification of the lowers ones by Hargreeves insane parenting methods created an artificial sibling age hierarchy amongst children of the same age.

Which is also why ben doesn't fit. He was number 6 to them but he was number 2 in his own family. They want to baby him but he is used to being looked to as an elder. it's also why him and Diego seem to clash the most can't be two number twos with complexes about being number two in the family it fucks the whole shit up

[htub]

I really like that they made Jor-El speak Kryptonian and Clark unable to understand him. The whole "aliens speak English" thing that happens in every goddamn media has bothered me all my life. Ik sometimes Clark just gets zapped in the brain for insta-second language but that always felt like a cheap shortcut.

Jor-El had a lot on his mind when he set up that magic spaceship okay. The world was ending and he was trying to do as much as he could before time ran out so he could be there for his son. He was rushing. He likely didn't consider Kal would be raised with a whole different language and not know any Kryptonian nor have anyone to teach him.

[peanutseagle]

this is what chapter 99 is gonna be btw

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[shima-draws]

Just got back from seeing Sonic 3 and HOOOOOOLY SHIT y’all. Oh my fucking god. OH my god. Ohhhh my g o d

[astralzeraphias]

“he was mentally ill. this monster was a- was a sick fantasy. a product of his dementia.”

“…i saw it too. does that make me disturbed? demented? does… that make me sick too?”

[epiphainie]

this is one of those fic ideas i wanted to write for every ship i've ever been into so it will probably never happen but i'd like to have a silly story with 40 yo, single, lonely tommy kinard who's been down on his luck all his life - like i'm talking ridiculous levels of mom dying at childbirth, dad being terrible, horrifically unfortunate experience of the military, a series of failed jobs, a series of failed relationships, friendships never sticking for long, risks he takes always going south, somehow getting paper cuts through chainmail gloves, missing the bus while trying to avoid his daily encounter with the neighbor's dog etc. - one day opening the door of his downtrodden studio apartment to this beautiful man who stands there like a fucking angel. who looks at tommy with big apologetic eyes, red cheeks of shame, and twiddling thumbs of guilt and stutters, "so, uhm, i wish you didn't have to learn it this way but hi, i'm the guardian angel who, as it turns out, misplaced your files about four decades ago, and so uhm it just resurfaced, haha, and like yeah, i've been banished here for penance. i'll take the couch, it's fine."