#i understand her anger

[spocktaculartea]

daniel meade really fired someone for being a lil rude to his assistant about the amount of sun-dried tomatoes she wanted on her sandwich

[kay-rk800]

[inkskinned]

one of the things about being an educator is that you hear what parents want their kids to be able to do a lot. they want their kid to be an astronaut or a ballerina or a politician. they want them to get off that damn phone. be better about socializing. stop spending so much time indoors. learn to control their own temper. to just "fucking listen", which means to be obedient.

one of the things i learned in my pedagogy classes is that it's almost always easier to roleplay how you want someone to act. it's almost always easier to explain why a rule exists, rather than simply setting the rule and demanding adherence.

i want my kids to be kind. i want them to ask me what book they should read next, and i want to read that book with them so we can discuss it. i want my kid to be able to tell me hey that hurt my feelings without worrying i'll punish them. i want my kid to be proud of small things and come running up to me to tell me about them. i want them to say "nah, i get why this rule exists, but i get to hate it" and know that i don't need them to be grateful-for-the-roof-overhead while washing the dishes. i want them to teach me things. i want them to say - this isn't safe. i'm calling my mom and getting out of this. i want them to hear me apologize when i do fuck up; and i want them to want to come home.

the other day a parent was telling me she didn't understand why her kid "just got so angry." this woman had flown off the handle at me.

my dad - traditional catholic that he is - resents my sentiment of "gentle parenting". he says they'll grow up spoiled, horrible, pretentious. granola, he spits.

i am going to be kind to them. i am going to set the example, i think. and whatever they choose become in the meantime - i'm going to love them for it.

[magicratfingers]

grade digger

[now-you-sound-like-a-jedi]

thinking about this scene again

Cause I've seen a lot of different people's takes on this floating around on my dash recently, so I thought I'd add mine to the mix.

You could easily interpret this as a shameless attempt at a guilt trip and Bo-Katan being a hypocrite, etc etc. and that's a totally valid interpretation, but it's always seemed a little easy/one-dimensional to me, and I do think there's another perspective that's actually more interesting:

Bo-Katan herself is bound to be conscious of the fact that she doesn't really have a leg to stand on here. She knows she played a part in creating this situation, and that snipping at Obi-Wan for not caring enough about Satine is very much throwing stones from a glass house.

But when you consider her internal conflict, of fundamentally disagreeing with what Satine stood for versus memories of a time when they weren't enemies versus her own guilt over her perceived failure to save Satine versus the fact that, after everything, she was still her sister, it's easy to imagine all of this combining to leave her feeling like "am I allowed to grieve? Am I allowed to be sad?"

But, of course, this is Bo-Katan, so she's hardly about to work through this constructively. Instead, she channels it all into hunting down Maul, and whether it's justice or revenge or simply a destructive way of handling grief/guilt doesn't really matter to her.

And then she meets Obi-Wan, who should want the same thing, who (in her mind) has infinitely more of a right to these feelings of grief and loss than she does, because he was there for Satine when she wasn't, because he cared about Satine while Bo-Katan behaved as though she hated her, so his grief would at least seem rational...

... and yet outwardly Obi-Wan is Mr Perfectly Fine. If he feels anything like what she does, he doesn't show it.

So it could be a guilt trip, it could be hypocrisy, or it could be a genuine reflection of what this looks like to her, a frustrated questioning of "why am I, the one who hurt and betrayed and failed her, still so hurt and angry about her death while you, the one who was supposed to love her, aren't?"

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Broken Roofs and Fixed Perspectives

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[o-vera-nalyzing]

look i know the most likely option for why kipperlilly hates riz specifically is that he like has amazing grades and good friends and is one of agueforts faves while like chronically skipping class and breaking the rules (and laws) but i also have 18 stupid ass reasons i wrote down from rewatching s1 that i think are funnier

[djalideriva]

I should have known something was wrong when Varric wasn't all up in everybody's business.

[excaliefur]

There’s something about the fact that the first time gem didn’t immediately chase pearl away or continue the fake drama is when pearl literally couldn’t respond in a way that makes sense.

Gem had an amicable conversation with her when she could control the narrative, and in fact in her video she cut out a lot of their conversation with Pearl.

It’s interesting to see what kind of narrative Gem is painting from her POV. It doesn’t even seem to be justifying her actions it just frames it in a different light.

[faeriekit]

Okay I'm doing this gay ship thing all wrong because all my published ships thus far are "the world's most bisexual man" and "the world's objectively coolest woman*".

[princessdarth-vader]

I think my ultimate thoughts re; Kipperlilly is that I wish we got a scene where a character was allowed to show her... sympathy. I know there's a tone you wanna hit with a victorious season finale, and a somber note of a teenager falling into a deep well of rage doesnt match that tone but it would've been nice to see.

In my dream world, we get an extra epilogue scene where Riz goes to see Jawbone to go and talk to him, and brings up the thing he mentioned about "seeing Kipperlilly in himself" -- relating that to what Jawbone said at the beginning of the year, and wanting to talk about that deeply set in need for control, and the latent anger he has, and all the ways he is like Kipperlilly, and doesn't want to be.

And in response, Jawbone is able to address the ways in which he failed Kipperlilly, and let her down. That she needed more help than he could provide, that she needed someone who wasn't too afraid of their own biases to shut down her anger, someone who could maybe have given her a support system to turn to instead of Porter. Someone external to the school and the social dynamics within it. Just an acknowledgement from, as far as we know, the only adult in Kipperlilly's life who earnestly tried -- and earnestly failed -- to help her find a better path than her rage.

Just a small moment of acknowledgement that Kipperlilly was a child, an angry, scared, biased and deeply insecure child who was looking for help when she first walked into Jawbone's office, and because of all the adults who failed her, she was turned into something unrecognisable by the time she was 17.

[the-labyrinth-of-me]

Wait did both Alice and Zane record Alan when he was at his lowest point? Didn't Alice make her exhibition to show the world what she sees? To show Alan the truth about himself? That it never was Scratch visiting and terrorizing her, but Alan himself? Did she depict his "self" and Zane depicted his "persona"? The two sides of him that he wishes he can eliminate bc they brought him into trouble (Scratch representing anger and the fallouts with paparazzi and stuff, Zane representing his self-destructive behavior with alcohol and drugs and the party nights)? The both sides that caused his marriage to start falling apart? Was that the reason Zane made that video of Alan when they were on that booze and drug-fueled bender while working on the Return manuscript? Is this party video the companion piece?? Alan's downward spiral, same as Alice's photos? Do they fucking work together aasdffjfjfkfk

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[aliengirl]

ive been saying that since they were infants: its easy to distinguish the twins, you just need to see which one is smiling to you and which is being a menace

[amugoffandoms]

"You have your best friend."

(understand, misunderstand, accept, and let go.)

[thelesbianluthor]

Getting into bridgerton late means finding out people's rancid takes on my beautiful woman Kate 2 years later and being left baffled and peeved. The way people miss the point of her character completely and dismiss everything she has done and sacrificed makes me want to scream.

And if that's not the unfortunate fate of many female characters.. the amount of people that cannot handle complexity and mistakes if done by women even when they mirror beloved male characters...

Mistakes are part of what makes a character interesting, their baggage that held them back and then their growth after finally learning to let it go. If you dislike Kathani viscountess Bridgerton than you better stay away from me because I will let Anthony Bridgerton's spirit posses me and I WILL fight you for her honor