#fleeting existence

[a-typical]

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

[drdemonprince]

people who are obsessed with passing are gonna be the death of our community i swear

[devilat-thedoor]

don’t ask me what i’m thinking. it’s nsfw…

[canisalbus]

Since there was an eclipse recently I can't help but imagine modern au vachete viewing it and Vasco being in awe while machete is having some existential crisis about the horrors of the cosmos or something

.

[better-call-mau1]

Tell me I’m not onto something here…

[jemkha]

Tfw you are a small, ephemeral being who finds a purpose in living through your deep love for someone you wish to protect, but you are forced to watch your beloved get tormented and die violently via stabbing because you are a weak, useless creature that cannot protect anything…

Or is this too specific of a trope???

[And then later u get a human form and you meet back up with your beloved (who didn’t actually “die”), but they don’t recognize you at all until near the end of the story.]

[virsancte]

you wouldn’t think having a good time would be so goddamn hard

[buccellato]

Fucks me up to think about how Legato's legacy in-universe after his death in Trimax (and presumably Tristamp) is probably gonna be how much he sucked and nothing else....

Like, nobody will like Knives but Vash will be long-lived enough to be able to eventually talk about his good qualities from when he was a child and his quasi-redemption in his last days. But who remembers Legato? Livio and Vash are the only living people with any extended memory of him and neither of them would have anything nice to say (and rightfully so). Neither of them probably knew he was a slave, either—as far as Vash can tell this dude showed up one day and hated his guts, for all he knows he's just another survivor from July! Outside of Knives, Elendira, Legato, and maybe Conrad, I don't think any other character knows his actual life story.

And to add on to that, there's no way of looking up that past either—he had no name or personhood before he was effectively rescued, so who could investigators or reporters or archivists track down for information? The human being that was Legato only existed for as long as he knew Knives, before that he was something to be kept and abused as an object. There's presumably no surviving family they can reliably contact, nobody to really say "yes I knew him, here's what his life was like, here's how we can prevent something like this from happening again".

His entire existence will be reduced down to "a human weapon that was freakishly loyal to public enemy #1" without any reflection on the mechanisms that made him the way he was because there's just no actual knowledge of his life.

[astrobei]

listen.

[myrfjola]

comfort watch. Turns ten this year, I think?

[stardustthread]

SEE WHAT THEY KEPT FROM US???

[heycerulean]

that feeling when you consume one (1) piece of media and suddenly now you're Character Doing Thing for the rest of the day

[devilat-thedoor]

you guys wanna see what i’m currently hyper fixating on????

it’s fine, really. like, it’s not even a big deal. i’m so chill rn.

[bonesdontmelt]

Grudge Dolph - Hawkins Pirates

Going for a creepy scarecrow-type pose for our creepy voodoo pirates.

Moccasin-type shoes with miniature figureheads protruding from the front. Brown striped canvas skirt with tan patches sewn in, and a thick brown belt with little voodoo-heads hanging from it. Plain black button up shirt with the roger on the back (not pictured). Long blond hair and a nail-through-the-head gag like the roger, a single red candle earring, and black face paint around the mouth and eyes and in two lines down the face to resemble the roger.

[silverjirachi]

and then i realized today well shit man no wonder im exhausted all the time. i work all day and then i spend the rest of my time at home also working on writing and stuff so that i can obtain a single shred of the feeling of love and attention and validation through writing 150k words that some people get for free just for existing

[iniziare]

Kafka crossed my thoughts tonight at random, and so I wanted to re-post a little something here, with some minor edits thrown in. I just think it's often overlooked how... many human elements they've tied into her. A hungering sense of curiosity, the inherent sense of longing that clings to her being like a fever, and how she's caught (very humanly so) between the belief of we are tied to fate and thus it shall be, and the insistence on choice and how the Trailblazer seems to be inherently representative of its existence. And then I think of what being 'human' entails, and one could argue that it represents the experience of life, before one's end by the hand of destiny/fate. Is that... why she's so enthralled by all these human concepts? Because she's so firmly tied to fate? Yes, I still linger in the thought that she bears strong connections to fate, there are too many hints at the Moirai to me to ignore. But it's not even that, it's her Spirit Whisper, it's that her wanted poster made by the Devils that she used to hunt on her home of Pteruges-V, had to describe the ability and what it does— which tells ms that it's not native to there. But— I'm getting sidetracked, this isn't about any kind of potential nature that is far from humanity, it's about the evidence, even if she may turn out not to be inherently human at some point in the future of HSR, that she is drawn to, portrays and in some form, lives, very human concepts. And one of the ways I tried to make that clear before, was by talking about her in relation to her violin— or more specifically: the presence of its absence, the latter being which I will always firmly believe to be the eternal overarching narrative of Kafka's character. Any way, onto the babble:

I'll forever remember looking into the notes of someone's playthrough of HSR's first scenes, which is just something I like to do because you never know what kind of little treasures you might find. And there was a violinist tucked away in there, who I'd also seen in the notes of her main trailer, commenting on the intense accuracy of the movement of her fingers. And then on top of that, how they've usually been let down by the details when other games have tried to simulate it as well, but it was more so done to iterate how intentional this must've been for Hoyo to have focused on its accuracy so much.

So in that sense, I think it's close to a given that she knows how to play it, similarly to how I believe that she is someone who also plays or has played the piano. Where I differ however, is that I don't believe that she actually owns a violin at present, nor is she seeking to obtain one by her own means. Moreover, what and where I think the 'mimicking' comes from, actually, is from her memories and the emotional attachment that she once held for these instruments in them. Kafka's character, to me, revolves around and thrives within two concepts, that of intimate longing and that of loss (the pearl earring, the broken winged butterfly pin, and Blade's character story to name some) which plays intricately into the former. Now for me, her connection to the violin and the piano (primarily the former) play wonderfully into representing both of these, and thus can be drawn into these prevalent topics across the board for her incredibly easily. In simple terms, I think that there is a sense of longing to play them. Now, I feel confident in noting that Kafka does not come across as one who, if she had access to (in this case) a violin of her own, that she would crave to play it so intensely all the time, that when drawn from it for even the briefest of time, that she would enact the part of playing one during her separation from it. No, I think she's actively choosing not to obtain one, for one reason or another. Perhaps it's a memory that plays into the loss that her character seems to stray towards, or perhaps it's a lack of something else; I don't quite yet dare say. But there's something oddly wistful about it, if you look past the surface. All in all, I think her little moments of mimicking and humming, makes for an incredibly interesting "little" tidbit to me. It reminds me of something I wrote in an older post last year:

(...) And yet, and yet, I actively think if she were to find herself in a hotel room, even on her own, and there would be a piano right there— I can see her fingers tracing over the keys so very clearly, even as if she were touching the keys to play and yet she would never press down.

I still stand by this to this day. It's the ache to do something again, and yet for one reason or another, you can't bring yourself to do it. Whether it feels wrong, or there's something missing, something or someone; it doesn't matter, it's a longing of some kind. It really is the overarching topic and/or concept that I see in her character, and the fact that she's tied to such an inherently fragile instrument, only further solidifies it in my brain. But in that, I also feel a deep sense of melancholy when I think of her and that violin. And it plays into all of this, of course, but also the fact that I genuinely see no evidence in canon at present that tells me that she has one, and we know she could obtain one if she so wanted to,but she doesn't. Which tells me, on some level, that she doesn't want one. Which then has me entertain the concept of... if one were gifted to her, would that be different? Would that offer the person who gifted it to her a glimpse that no one else could ever get? The answer is a very likely yes, but I can't see it being gifted by most by any means; it'd need to be by someone who could come to grasp the significance of one, put in the appropriate research, who would know where to go, who to speak to, where to find the significance. And that, isn't most people.