#i cannot stop talking about this man

[witchyafterdark]

— Ominis Gaunt Headcanons; pt. 4

I'd like to believe that should Ominis not meet his untimely death and that he escaped his family's fate, he most likely would have physically flourished.

In the game, he looks quite like his namesake. He does have a melancholic, gaunt look. He looks perpetually tired, thinner than Sebastian, borderline having an unhealthily pale complexion, and his overall posture is a little hunched.

He has a defeated look on him.

But I firmly believe that Ominis would grow up to be a healthy man if he made a run from his family. He would be able to focus on himself and regaining (or probably rediscovering) bodily autonomy. He'd be able to eat anything he wanted, focusing on honing his body to become reliable and sturdy. As he's steadily eating well, new weight would fill his once skin-and-bones physique.

Being able to finally sleep better, his exhaustion would slowly dissipate from his ashen face. Color would permanently settle on his now-plump cheeks. Most importantly, he would grow taller and larger, proving to himself that he is capable of transcending his traumatic childhood beginnings.

His build would be strong, putting on a healthy weight for a man his age and height. Ever since gaining a healthier body, he started to straighten his back and fixing his posture. Thus, his now-muscular chest is clearly noticeable. He would be properly filling in his Oxford shirts, and his trousers would no longer look lousy on him. The strength in his arms and legs would be evident without much effort.

But most importantly, he looks and feels happier.

The lightness and ease he would gain from emancipation will make him look younger, looking like his actual age. Nightmares would be a rare occurrence now, and his magic would actually flourish along with him without the constant pressure of performing well for the sake of the family.

(None of the images belong to me. All credits to their respective owners and creators!)

[anthonycrowley]

the neil gaiman sa allegations are wild because i’m sitting here like wow neil gaiman had an incredibly intense impact on me in a variety of ways for at least the better part of a decade like at the very least most of my friends i made directly or indirectly with my connection with gomens and i think it’s fair to say that if anyone has made gomens a personality trait it’s me. and i saw that five separate women (so far) came forward saying at the very least he’s a fucking creep who preys upon women who he holds power over so i went wow that’s disgusting i don’t think i will be supporting this man financially any longer. at the very least. like i will make a conscious effort to not support. this fucking. predator. and then i go onto the wider internet and people i hold in high regard are like neilman sa allegations? what’s that? news outlets i hold in high regard are like neilman sa allegations? what are those? and i feel like i am actually for real going insane. why are you gaslighting me pretending the author of my favorite book doesn’t have active sa allegations against him. why are you making me, a fan, be the one to get this news out to the best of my ability (which i feel like i have to do, because i’m a fucking gomens blog) even though i’d rather stick a fork in my hand than discuss this topic more than i absolutely have to. okay i know why it’s because neil is tied up financially in a lot of projects and you as people i respect don’t want to get on his bad side so you can continue to make bank. but also. oh my god. someone in the science fiction/fantasy world grow a fucking spine and take a financial hit for your morality and if you believe in that sort of thing eternal soul just once challenge.

[sforzesco]

DO NOT BE AFRAID

this is combining Ovid's Heroides and the Excidium Troie because I can't stop thinking of Hermes telling him not to be afraid. what the fuck!! Ares is wearing the crown that Paris gave him.

I have. thoughts. about Paris. he's almost got this Troilos parallel in my mind, that the event that defines him in detail exists in a lost narrative that we don't have (the Cypria), but everyone else knew. the event that defines Troilos is his death (murdered, butchered by Achilles, the violence of which haunts everything after. Achilles, child killer, you can't escape that!), and the event that defines Paris is the Judgement. what's a lost text but a kind of grave!!

idk I don't think that Paris before the Judgement would recognize himself after bc when you become god touched, it rearranges your guts. you become transformed in the worst way possible! how could you recognize yourself! but I also think that all the Parises after the Judgement would recognize each other because that event is so locked into the trauma of war and the scar it leaves on the land, it's like a scar on the narrative too. it exists like this forever, over and over again, so you exist like that forever too. Troy collects grief and despairs.

Troy as trauma: Reflections on intergenerational transmission and the locus of trauma, Andromache Karanika

and Paris is like. a miserable little god/corpse-puppet or something, like a match for the gods to throw onto gasoline.

The Excidium Troie + Ovid's Heroides:

Excidium Troie, trans. Muhammad Syarif Fadhlurrahman

Ovid, Heroides 16 (trans. Harold Isbell)

a collection of things regarding Paris that made me go 😬 but under a cut bc this is getting. very long.

The Divine Twins in Early Greek Poetry, Corolla Torontonensis

Iliad 24 and the Judgement of Paris, C.J. Mackie

Elegy and Epic and the Recognition of Paris: Ovid "Heroides" 16, Elizabeth Forbis Mazurek

Ennian Influence in "Heroides" 16 and 17, Howard Jacobson

Paris/Alexandros in the "Iliad", I. J. F. de Jong

[moeblob]

They're soulmates in every single universe and I miss them at the most random times.

[bruhstation]

of fucking course the best, most harrowing, most gut-wrenching tugs character only appeared in one episode (a bit of ramble in the tags)

[ghost-bard]

I feel like every time i hear about solavellan its talking about like “oh when they reunite and solas and ooooo” or like. Something angsty like one of them dying or something.

Anyone elses lavellan wanna just kill him like straight up

And i dont mean this in a hating solas way (irl) but at least in my lavellans case they went through hell and back in inquisition, and finding out solas wants to tear down the veil, effectively destroying the world as they know it, was the final straw. As in they were barely keeping it together before, and this caused them to spiral. Like a mental break happened. And that manifested in a very uh. Violent and hunting down solas at all costs kinda way.

[past-the-pines-by-the-shore]

I keep seeing this narrative that Zeus saved Thalia’s life and not Jason’s, and I’ve decided to come back from the grave to offer my two cents (that no one asked for).

Zeus absolutely did not save Thalia. She was never meant to come back out of that tree. Ever.

It was pure coincidence that Luke poisoned the tree and Ananbeth decided the Golden Fleece would save it. It wasn’t an action that was ordained by the gods, it hadn’t previously been foretold in a prophecy. It was simply a demigod solution to a demigod problem. Equally, no one at camp thought that the Fleece purging the poison from the tree would bring Thalia back, at all.

I definitely agree that Zeus turning Thalia into a tree was a deliberate act to prevent her going to the underworld. Though I would argue that this was as much (if not more so) to spite Hades as it was to stop Thalia being sent to eternal damnation in the underworld.

But to say that he saved Thalia’s life and then let Jason die is giving Zeus entirely too much credit. Jason is a proven hero, who was good friends with Nico, and died at a point in time where the sting of Zeus breaking The Pact had mostly worn off. There isn’t any concern that he’ll be sent to the Fields of Punishment. Thalia, at the time of her death, had only done this one big act as a hero, Nico and Bianca were still in hiding, and Hades was clearly pissed about her existence.

If Hades gets Thalia’s soul then he’s won. If Zeus smites the monsters that are attacking her, then Thalia lives but that runs the risk of her destroying Olympus when she’s 16.

Zeus wanted to contain her.

Trapping her spirit in a tree stops Thalia from ending up in the Field’s of Punishment, yes, but it does not save her life by any stretch of the imagination. And I’m a little tired of people pretending that what Zeus did was an act of kindness. It was literally less than the bare minimum. He was saving his own skin just as much as Thalia’s.

[seriousturd]

Some little BMB doodles

[widogaspmauk]

Days since Essek has NOT mentioned Caleb Widogast: 0

Hell yeah. Love your partner. I’m here for it.

[fumifooms]

You’re the resident chilchuck expert, so I was wondering about it there’s any canon evidence that he did smoke or drink alcohol when the kids were younger. I always thought it was something he picked up due to the strain of long jobs, when the kids were already older, but you seem to think differently and I was wondering if there was anything in canon that made you think that way!

Now that you mention it I guess it’s true there’s no evidence he did. Smoking we literally only know he does at all because of one post-canon panel where he has a pipe, so no, maybe this stick-looking thing in the panel below too though, I’m not familiar with medieval blunts eh. We’ve only gotten one panel of him and his daughters interacting when he was younger so that’s not too insightful on that end, and every time we see him young and freckled it’s in a job context so again not really where we’d expect him to be drinking. The earliest proof (/heavy implication since we don’t see inside his cup I guess) is 3 years before canon when Laios hired him, where he’s at a bar, classily placed in front of all the bottles ✨

Yes alcohol is almost certainly a way through which he copes especially with stress, so if we go with the theory he started around when work got stressful, well… Chilchuck started working as a dungeon diver ~10 years ago so when he was ~19, making Mei, Fler and Puck ~6 and ~4 respectively, so from that draw the ‘stressful enough to start drinking’ line wherever. We don’t know what he did before that with any certainty, and it could be he did odd jobs, lived off mostly mutual aid and community work, or just focused on only raising the girls. Half-foots tend to be poor and I see a lot of that in Chilchuck specifically so I don’t think he could have afforded to not have some paying work though.

Alright, so then why do I think he did drink when the girls were younger?

I give a more complete rundown of the info we do have on his alcoholism & his family with panels and references + all the speculation I make from it here. But the most targeted and objective answer I can give is:

Of course there’s just very very little we know of Chilchuck’s life with his family, and I think that’s by design too. I think the details being up in the air is to allow more nuance of the topic, like, will trying to reconcile go well, is their relationship salvageable? We don’t know, because we don’t know. So the message of giving hope a chance even if it’s a long shot, that things could truly go either way, is more relevant, impactful and meta in that way. How long was he usually away for work travels into dungeons here and there? How did he act with them? All we can really do is "it’s likely that", it’s a game of which way we think it’s more implied. There’s no right and wrong answer, it’s all Marcille-like larping the events out.

My main reason for thinking he did is that his father died from overdrinking and Chilchuck is very aware of that. He mentions his death casually in the extra about their stance in alcohol and in his Adventurer’s Bible profile, etc. He acts towards the alcohol presumably the same way his father did: with abandon, uncaring for the health effects, probably happily too considering Chil says "dying doing something you love is a good way to go". Very nonchalant. So you see what I’m saying here right, wether he started early or late, his view of alcoholism is very influenced by what he saw of his father growing up, it’s something he’s always been aware of and saw in a mostly positive light, something that was inherited you could say. It’s something that was normalized to him from a young age. Regardless or where it goes from there I do think this part is pretty inarguable. If he views it positively and we know that in the present alcohol is his favorite food that he loveees, why would he have held out on it? Personally that all makes me think he started drinking very young, especially since I don’t think they limited alcohol to age as much as modern standards (and I mean, teen drinking is obviously still a thing). And here you could argue, maybe his father only started being more alcoholic later when Chilchuck moved out, or something! And to that there’s nothing I can say except I think that’s a strained theory, and that Chil might even have largely cut contact with his family after moving out (since he and siblings are listed as almost strangers and he doesn’t seem to have much emotional attachment to his parents, but also we know he rents out his place to "a relative"), but it’s true we have no evidence. "I’ve picked up the same unhealthy substance abuse as my father haha! No big deal right haha" repeated several times to me just reeks of intergenerational trauma, & the alcoholism gene as they call it. Like effortless sliding into drinking as if it’s second nature, it’s natural after all, it’s normal after all, it just makes sense, it makes you feel good and that’s what matters.

BUT from my interpretation then we have a whole other layer: Alcohol is of course not all bad always. I think he’s always liked alcohol and drank it on occasion and it brought him joy etc etc, but I think here the implication in the question is, how much effect did his drinking have on the family relations and how early? And that isn’t so much about when him drinking started but when the alcoholism started. Addiction is defined by a habitual need, that has negative effects from filling that need (physical, psychological, social, etc) and negative effects from withdrawal. If Chilchuck drinks to cope and he can’t not cope without it, that’s addiction, if it affects his relationships, if it’s a need he has, it’s addiction. Addiction can be very insidious or look very casual, and how much people around the person are affected by it is case by case. Cheerful drunks can be sooo annoying and uncomfortable though let me tell you. Drunks are drunks. And this sounds harsh, but even if people around them don’t mind drunks it’ll still have some effects here and there, living with one can be such a challenge, ily drunks good luck with everything much like Chilchuck you deserve good things 🫡　

Ok so with the dad thing and the "ok well maybe he’s always drunk casually but it grew worse with time around when he started working as a dungeon diver" precision made, the other bit of info we have that can inform this is that Chilchuck is on a harsh diet and that alcohol is a hunger suppressant. We know Chilchuck "used to be fine not eating for two days", that literally on screen to quench his hunger so it doesn’t keep him awake he goes to drink water, drinking is his instinct to hunger. Again alcohol is a hunger suppressant and if you want info on that the internet has a lot of research and anecdotes about it. He diets to be light enough to not trigger traps, so it’s something he’d have started after dungeon diving most likely. Between the stress and the diet, yes it’s extremely likely he started going harder on alcohol after he started working in dungeons. There’s arguments on wether two days without eating is less bad for half-foots than humans, but apart from smaller portions there’s nothing that indicates half-foots should get less than 3 meals a day. They need less food but that’s because their bodies are smaller: the need is proportional to the body, not smaller than others’ races, the % of need is similar even if the kg amount of food isn’t. There’s also a popular headcanon with support basis that half-foots run hot and have a faster heartrate and whatnot, and that points towards a faster metabolism rather than a slower one: a bigger need for eating rather than a smaller one. He has the same bmi, 18, as Mickbell, but perhaps because Chil is much taller he’s less intensely visibly underweight with ribs showing than Mick during the bath extra, it’s most apparent when he becomes tallman.

Alcohol is something so important and omnipresent in his character that I have trouble believing it’s something that was part of only a small fraction of his life. It’s his immediate go-to, his no-brainer solution to a good time, I’ve sort of always assumed especially after looking at his family that it’s something he discovered decently young. Like he just acts like someone who’s always had alcohol to fall back on and started young idk. Alcohol is one of his 5 keywords. Alcoholism is very ingrained into his world view and life, his "it doesn’t matter" stance his ‘work hard play hard’ mentality his idea that the world is harsh so you get relief where you can, so it just makes sense to me that it’s always been in his life, if not actively then at least looming.

So yes, in summary, my take: Alcohol was always something he wholly enjoyed to an unwise level, but it could have been considered casual until he started working into dungeons and his need for it on a regular basis intensified. Alcohol has always had positive association to him as far as we see, so when it started being a problem he didn’t see it as such. To quote him, "I drink anytime I get the opportunity to". Why always? Approval of father’s alcoholism. Why alcoholism at all? Diet + stress & coping mechanism & emotional stunting + relationship issues, and she decided she had enough after they went out for drinks.

Conclusion

Chilchuck having drunk from a young age makes sense to me and it’s the strongest narrative angle I see on the table, but that’s objectively a me opinion, yes! There’s no evidence, moreso there’s canon basis and supporting info, but it’s all very left up to interpretation. I’ve made my own interpretations of things from the scraps we see, like everyone else making Chilwife and daughters content. Wether you have a stance on the topic or prefer to leave it vague in your takes, it’ll be a matter of what you think makes most sense, or what you’d rather believe I suppose (which is literally fine)

There’s a lot of subjectivity in even just setting up causal links like you probably noticed during this and I was careful with my word choices, because we’re just extrapolating from what we see and unless Kui states it explicitly from a reliable mouth all we can do is have informed opinions on most things. This particular interpretation is influenced by other details I’ve come to form about my interpretation of Chilchuck too, the more psychological and emotional sides of him and the timeline and how his marriage even happened, unplanned pregnancy imo. Like I hope you see what I mean, this wasn’t supposed to be a speculation post just a quick simple answer but there’s sort of just no other and concise but complete way with the subjectivity nuance to put "maybe it could be yes because of this but maybe it could be no because of this" haha

Edit: Wait the phrasing on this… Interesting. "In recent years"— This does imply that if not just his alcohol consumption increasing then the diversity and quality of it did, so either he indeed did start drinking more (not necessarily meaning he didn’t drink before) assumedly because of his wife leaving, or he started drinking other/more different kinds of alcohol maybe due to the union he formed + his experience gave him greater salary than he had previously (and no wife and family to provide money for), a mix of both perhaps.

[5hrignold]

awful. beyond redemption. i will stare at it for days

[guriten]

Also, I feel so guilty for talking about Grimmer a lot on this blog I'm sorry lads🫠🫠🫠🫠

[morganas-pendragons]

tonight’s thoughts are ALLLLLLLLLLLLL his.

[im-still-watching-anime]

one piece is crazy fr like what do you mean you’re following up Everyone’s Dead™️ with Objectifying Women: The Arc™️

[sinnamonpork]

Oh look, my favorite flavor of ships. Gay, head over heels in love, and sure to end in tragedy✨

[cringefaecompilation]

Wdym by mra-y arguments? I've seen some things that mill down to "Imogen is a crazy hysterical bitch that they need to put down" but i wanna know if there's anything I missed :0

i kinda brushed up on it in the ask, but the insistence about imogen not giving a crap about his feelings because he’s a man is/was weirdly popular. which is a flagrant lie, imogen understands how this mission sucks for him getting triggered day in and day out by having to interact with the guy who traumatized him, and has enough empathy to not want to take away the gods for fear of mass-traumatizing others. also, if you think she hates him or thinks her trauma is “worse” skill issue, no the fuck she doesn’t. please actually watch the show instead of getting angry at a “no boys allowed” twitter user quip about how much they want imogen to punch him in the face.

this also affected fearne a bit too, mostly in the way of “if only dorian was here, he would understand how orym is feeling/ashton is the only person in bh that cares about orym’s feelings” as if fearne isn’t his best friend or went through similar things. also dude’s just very “don’t rock the boat-y” in all his actions and often intentionally distracts the team from his feelings because he doesn’t want to bother them and at some point you can’t blame everyone else for it.

unlike most drama, this one actually has reasoning behind it. unfortunately, that reasoning is stupid. it took the massively equally dumb shipping drama behind the beau.jes community that was inundated with trans woman exterminatory radical feminists and applied it to im.odna and bell's hells. while there were and still are people who acted like women were perfect and all the men were abusers in the c3 fandom, a lot of complaints about the guys ranging from casual nitpicks to bad faith fanfiction were painted with the same brush of “crazy man-hating feminists” (because i guess trans women don’t exist or something?) and acted like all the women were evil demons getting every one of their eviiiiiiiiil actions excused because they had estrogen in their bodies. it was fucking dark. if you headcanoned imogen as a lesbian you were basically chucking heterosexual little boys into a meatgrinder. why else do you think laudm.oore got so insufferable?

look, i get it. it got annoying seeing people demand fcg get blown up for being reckless or that laudna should eat orym or that they should have abandoned ashton on the side of the road any time any of them did something sort sighted. but the way to get around that is not to start saying that imogen’s meant to go full dark phoenix and kill the party because she’s crazy and murderous or that laudna is just a delilah chrysalis from day one and is biding her time to strike. or that they’re going to be evil demonic lesbian twin bbegs that get murdered and then perc’halia and fjorester can make out on their grave.

on the flipside, watching people chuck orym and ashton under the bus any time one of them did/does something that they took personal offense to is so odd it loops around to being funny. double if they’re a delilah stan. like, who is worse for laudna? an abusive white supremacist-adjacent woman that tortured her nonstop for 30 years and tried to kill her thrice over the past month or two guys who act like selfish tunnel-visioned pricks to her intermittently? like you think that it’d be no contest, but a shocking amount of people choose the abusive woman because they headcanon her to be far more interesting than she really is and/or “at least we’re not forced to think she’s a good person!”