#feeling so normal about it i promise

[kalashtars]

unironically i think fellow travelers is my new comfort show which is insane considering the subject matter but truly there's something addictive about it

[birrdies]

carry yourself through the frozen desert, empty your thoughts into the well of pressure (x)

finally tried my hand at some 3L desert duo designs (ft. matching back scars) !!

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[ilovebooberfraggle]

wyatt callow my autistic king

[undertheoakleytreeart]

A Kiss that Feels like Unearned Forgiveness

[bisclavret]

what SICKO wrote the last scenes between gwaine and merlin is what i want to know. because even lancelot's last episode with merlin - which had to have been intentionally gay-coded since it's obvious the man is grappling with his feelings for merlin morphing from platonic to explicitly romantic - is still subtext because he doesn't have the tools to healthily express his feelings so he goes for the biggest romantic gesture he can think of: sacrificing his life to save a loved one. the writers also make sure to root this gesture back to gwen by adding a scene where she's inadvertently asking him to make that sacrifice first, so although it's very obvious that it's more for merlin than for gwen that lancelot dies for, she is there to add some plausible deniability, thus keeping his sexuality within the realms of subtext.

i don't want to delve too deeply into arthur's last scenes with merlin as there is both so much to unpack about what they mean to each other and there is also somehow nothing left to say that hasn't been said before. my point is just that there's so much at stake that if the viewer doesn't want to deal with the romantic subtext between them they can hang onto the 38 other dynamics merlin and arthur have represented to each other that the writers spent 5 years plastering on top of the gay subtext. basically, while the romance feels textual emotionally-speaking, it isn't "canon".

i don't mean to say that any relationship is better than another (even though i obviously have a preference) but that in gwaine's final scenes with merlin there's just no subtext anymore. his becomes the most explicit expression of romantic love towards merlin, and therefore the most explicit acknowledgment of homosexual love and the existence of queer people on the show:

it starts out with merlin suggesting that gwaine saved a girl from the saxons and then looked after her because he has a more than platonic interest in her, and they show us that merlin is right - gwaine and the girl eira slept together - even as gwaine half-heartedly denies any interest (which, why even deny it? merlin saw them holding hands! unless the lie is part of the point). then in that very same scene and directly after this exchange, merlin needs rescuing from the saxons, calls after gwaine, and gwaine performs the exact same role for him that he performed for eira: he saves him from the saxons and looks after him (for as long as merlin lets him).

the parallel between merlin and eira with such quick cause and effect (it literally all happens within the same minute) is where the shift from subtext to text becomes undeniable. yes, there have been other moments on the show where a character's affections towards two different genders are beat-for-beat the same, but, again, there has always been plausible deniability. in this case the parallel is meant to be taken at face value: the core point of it is to show us how gwaine expresses his attraction.

then, the dialogue they chose to bookend this scene with takes it a few steps further by functioning as a textual love confession to merlin himself: the scene opens with gwaine thanking merlin for everything he did for eira, and merlin saying that there is no need to thank him as it was the least he could do. a minute later, after merlin thanks gwaine for protecting him from the saxons as both merlin and the show just concluded gwaine did for eira for romantic reasons (even as he denied it by outright lying), gwaine parrots what merlin said when gwaine thanked him: no need to thank me, merlin, it's the least i could do.

but this comes off as the opposite of dismissive: in fact, this echoing of merlin's words is meant to jolt both merlin and the audience. by saying this right after saving merlin from the saxons, gwaine has now intentionally pointed merlin's attention towards the explicitly romantic parallel between himself and eira. gwaine is directly implying he just did for merlin what merlin correctly deduced he did for a woman because he desired her sexually and romantically, and he is using merlin's own words to challenge him into seeing past the initial flimsy lie that there is nothing between them. and what's behind the lie, of course, is that gwaine has done all of this and more because he desires merlin sexually and romantically. the camera even lingers on merlin, allowing him and the viewer to absorb what just happened. that for as long as we have known gwaine, his motivations have always boiled down to "i want to be there for merlin". and now both the audience and merlin finally know for sure what was motivating him the entire time.

what's more, by using merlin's own dismissive words, gwaine also implicates merlin's penchant for repression and denial and never allowing himself to be given credit where it's due. this unfortunately never properly gets dismantled on the show, but this moment shows that gwaine knows merlin well enough to know that he goes above and beyond for people, and that merlin's reasons for this ring as false to gwaine's ears as gwaine's reasons for saving damsels do to merlin. it also bittersweetly implies that gwaine has accepted that these are the platonic, repressed terms on which he can have a relationship with merlin. but i think the way in which he explicitly points all of this out to merlin is meant to imply that he isn't entirely happy about having to accept that. or, to circle back to eira, that merlin seems to be cheering for him to enter a heterosexual relationship when gwaine would clearly rather be with him.

what's additionally interesting to me about this is that this is one of the only scenes on this show that touch on same gender attraction that isn't using magic as a metaphor - because merlin doesn't have magic at the moment, yes, but also because gwaine is the more active character in this sequence, and he's an adventure hero, so he simply fights the bad guy to protect the person he loves. there is no metaphor to wrap this in, so he just gets to explicitly state his bisexuality. in the next scene, the very last one he and merlin share, it all becomes about magic again, which is both representative of merlin's sexuality and the show's "plausible deniability" approach to gay-coding, and so neither gwaine or merlin are permitted to acknowledge it. also, and this is for another post altogether, but all things point to "gwaine knew". not least because he gets to come out as queer without the complications of the magic-as-gay-metaphor which in turn emboldens him to ask merlin for the truth as directly as the metaphor-suffocated narrative will allow it.

tldr gwaine textually and canonically expresses and then confesses his feelings to merlin in a shockingly well-written and layered scene which makes gwaine the most explicitly queer character on bbc merlin and it's entirely because he exists outside the magic-as-gay-metaphor plot while loving someone who embodies that entire metaphor and it's crazy to me that we don't talk about this more. once again i ask what SICKO wrote this and where were they for the entire rest of this fucking show

tldrtldr at least gwaine is bi. its like i always say. at least gwaine is bi. at the end of the day. gwaine is bi. dont cry ok? gwaine is bi. at the end of the day. gwaine is bi. when all else fails. gwaine is bi. we'll always have. gwaine is bi

[panthermouthh]

Caring about Frankenstein was a mistake because I was just subjected to someone’s Horrid take out of nowhere and my nervous system reacted like a gun went off next to my head

[bikananjarrus]

percy knows full well that his mom is a queen among mortals and he will take every opportunity to make sure everyone else knows it too <3

[inafieldofstarflowers]

i can’t stop thinking about jean’s conversation with rhemann

[trickstersaint]

maybe you learned it from martyrs // december 14 2024

[daphnalia]

found this in my drafts from march 2023, are the dndadders still alive

[bennetsbonnet]

I think it's really interesting how perceptions of Pride and Prejudice and sentiments towards its various characters have changed over time. You can get a very good sense of such shifts from edition to edition, thanks to the blurb/cover art/introduction (or maybe this is how I justify the number of editions I own to myself...)

The oldest copy of Pride and Prejudice that I own is this edition from 1980:

And I think the notes on the dust jacket of this particular edition are very interesting:

The first paragraph contains a very sweet and relatable sentiment... but as for some of the character descriptions? They are certainly A Choice...

I do enjoy 'gorgeously intolerable' as a description of Lady Catherine... but not sure arch-snob quite fits Mr Collins? He definitely seeks the approval of one, but I don't think he understands himself what it takes to be a true snob. Would be a better description of Darcy though, than reducing him solely down to pride and Elizabeth to prejudice when they both exhibited each of those traits!

Also, to call Lydia a hoyden feels a bit... extreme...? Lydia is immature, yes, but I think that word has a certain (sexual) connotation that feels unfair to a fifteen year old who was preyed upon by a much older man(!!!) and I like to think we treat her a little more sympathetically now.

I do love this sentence, though, because I think it very succinctly puts into words what continues to draw us to Pride and Prejudice and ensures it hasn't been out of print for 212 years:

It is the people, however, who are timeless-they live, they have always lived, they will never really die.

[plushypluto]

I was doodling and then it got a bit out of hand…

[lucraven]

Stone wars timeeeee

[teapot-of-tyrahn]

more little lloyd drawings !! reblogs + comments in tags appreciated :)

[emiko-matsui]

im supposed to be normal over the grandson of a man who started a rebellion against a corrupt monarch and was killed in the streets for it who grew up hiding who he was since his alcoholic father also was killed for using his grandfather's name, fleeing to the sea and spending most of his life as a sailor running from his homeland, then getting hired for a mercenary job by a young prince (thane) and finds somebody he deems worthy of following and protecting, someone who could make a change in the world. he followed an honest man who invented a new position in his court to keep you around - a warrior, advisor, and poet. but war comes and you start to see a bloodthirst in his eyes, and he starts killing without thought, he grabs for the power he can get, and he's willing to sacrifice a lot to advance in the world. he says that you don't understand but he's doing everything to keep you by his side. you will be by my side as i conquer. of course you never told him the story of your grandfather, you're still terrified of meeting the same fate as your father and grandfather, but you can't stand by him anymore and betray the memory of your grandfather. so you tell him as you leave him, how you watched your dad be burned for keeping your family name, how you've run your entire life from this, you tell him your secret as you leave him and you leave your life in his hands to ruin if he wants to. you leave your position, you leave him your weapons, and you leave him your life. five years pass and your body aches. no one has come after you and you haven't even heard a whisper of your family name. and then you finally meet him again in the caves under the battlefield that would finally end the war. he's replaced you. the position he invented to keep you here he's given to a girl who so clearly revere him, but the moment he sees you life reverts back to five, six years ago. he listens to her council but all she wants is his attention. and then all his attention is focused onto you but all you ever wished was for him to listen to your council. to really listen to you. he still wants you, he still wants you back with him (he won't say it, but he wants you. he won't say it, but he still has the dagger you dropped the day you left him. he won't say it, but when you left he almost used it to cut himself up in distress), but his bloodthirst hasn't gone away, it has only grown. everyone sees it. the girl sees it too and she feeds it. you've spent the years trying to patch up the carnage his bloodlust caused. the monarchs have started a war (you helped. damn you, you helped) and somebody needs to be kind. warriors without kindness are tyrants and you have been haunted by tyrants your entire life, your entire bloodline. but do you still want him?