#insane episode that was so fucked up

[insanesonofabitch]

I’m not sure if someone else already made a post about this, but I was rewatching Tombstone and something just hit me. Dean wanted to stay alone with Cas a little bit longer in that cowboy hotel room. Sam takes Jack with him and pairs Dean up with Cas, after noticing how happy Dean was to get Cas back (which he even made a comment on earlier in the episode, we love a supportive brother). Dean agrees with this change of plan. Sam and Jack immediately gets up to leave and head for the graveyard. But when Cas is about to get up too and get ready, Dean does this:

And this is the same fucking goddamn episode where Dean makes Cas wear a fucking cowboy hat. And then gets offended when Cas didn’t immediately recognize his Tombstone reference. “I made you watch it,” not “we.” The same way “where Dean spread your ashes” is NOT “we.” And Dean has probably already seen ALL of those movies, probably a shit ton of times. He just wanted Cas to see them too. With him. Like a movie date night. And then Cas imitates a phrase from the movie, “I’m your huckleberry.” And then Dean, after averting his eyes and closing them and gulping down, says “Yeah, exactly.” immediately followed by “…it’s good to have you back, Cas.”

AND NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT DEAN TOOK A PHOTO OF CAS OFF SCREEN???????? AND THEN PRINTED IT OUT??????????

[nosnexus]

Daughters of the Crown

[essektheylyss]

One thing that I feel is really interesting and often forgotten about Essek is that fundamentally, his characterization has been from the start based upon his desperation for external perspectives and connection, which, along with much of his narrative and mechanical positioning, means that he actually has an extraordinary and almost (but not actually, as I'll show) counterintuitive capacity for both growth and trust.

(Buckle in. This is a long one.)

In particular, I would argue, knowing now that many places where the plot touches Ludinus have long been marked for connecting back into the current plot, that he was quite possibly built as a prime candidate for radicalization by the Ruby Vanguard. He felt isolated from his culture, he was desperate for other connection, and he was certainly of the type to believe he was too smart to be drawn into such a thing, given his initial belief that he could control the situation and the fallout. If things had gone any other way, he easily could've been on the other side by now.

As such, he has been hallmarked by being fairly open to suggestion, perhaps for this reason, but the thing about that kind of trait is that it is both how people are radicalized and deradicalized. This is certainly true of Essek, who experienced genuine kindness and quite frankly strangeness from the Nein and was able to move from the isolation the Assembly had engendered to meaningful and genuine connection, largely propelled by his own internal reflection. By the time Nein are aware of his crimes, he's already begun to express regret to an extent and, furthermore, doubt in the Assembly, including explicitly drawing a line against Ludinus, even in a position where he was on his own and probably quite vulnerable.

Similarly, when the Nein reach the Vurmas Outpost some weeks later, he has moved from regret for the position he's ended up carrying a heavy remorse. This makes sense! He's fairly introspective, seems used to spending a lot of time in his own head, and was left with plenty to mull over. It's not some kind of retcon for him to have progressed well past where the Nein left him; it just means he's an active participant in the world who has done his own work in the meantime.

This is another interesting aspect to him. I've talked about this a bit before but I cannot find the post so I'll recap here: antagonists in D&D have significantly more agency than allied NPCs. Antagonists are active forces, against which the party is meant to struggle; allies are meant to support the PCs, which means they tend to be more passive in both their actions and their character growth. Essek was both built as an antagonist, in a position that gives him significant agency, and also was then given significant opportunity to grow specifically to act as a narrative mirror for Caleb's arc. Even when he becomes a more traditional D&D ally, he still retains much of that, though he occupies a supporting role.

I believe that this is especially true because of the nature of Caleb's arc, which I've already written on; the tl;dr of this post is that Caleb is both convinced that he is permanently ruined and also desperate to prove that change is possible. Essek is that proof, because he is simply the character in a position to do so. But this also means that his propensity for introspection and openness is accentuated! He has to do the legwork on his own, for the most part, because that's where he is in the meantime.

But he still ends the campaign necessarily constricted; he is under significant scrutiny, he's at risk from the Assembly, and he goes on the run fairly soon after the story ends. He spends most of the final arc anxious and paranoid, which is valid given the crushing reality of his situation. It would be very easy to extrapolate that seven years into this reality, he would be insular, closed off, and suspicious of strangers, even in spite of the lessons he's learned from the Nein and their long term exposure.

So seeing his openness and lightness now is surprising, but at the same time, given this combination of factors in his position in the narrative over time and his defining traits, it's not by any means unreasonable.

But one thing that I found so delightful is how much trust he exhibits, which is obviously a wild thing to say about Essek in particular, given much of what he learns is both earning and offering trust, which was something he says explicitly in 2x124 that he's never really experienced: "I've never really been trusted and so I did not trust." It makes up much of the progression of his relationship with Caleb, and the trust that he is offered by the Nein in walking off the ship is the impetus he needs to grow.

But I think it's easy to talk about trust when it comes to people who have proven themselves to you or to whom you've ingratiated yourself, and that's really the most we can say about Essek by the time he leaves the Blooming Grove. There is this sense in a lot of discussion of trust (not solely in this fandom) that it is only related to either naivete or love, but there's far more to it. Trust at its best is deliberate—cultivating an openness to the world at large is a great way to combat cynicism and beget connection instead. It allows a person to maintain curiosity and be open to experience, but it can be incredibly difficult to hold onto.

It is clear that the Essek we meet now is a very pointedly and intentionally trusting individual. He trusts Caleb and by extension Caleb's trust in Keyleth, as he shows up and picks up a group of strangers from a foreign military encampment and walks in without issue. He trusts the Hells to follow his lead moving through Zadash and to exhibit enough discretion so as to avoid bringing suspicion upon all of them. He trusts that Astrid will respond well to his entrance, but he also trusts himself and the Hells enough to execute a back-up plan in the case that she doesn't. In the end, he even trusts them enough to give them his name and identity.

He doesn't scan as someone who has spent half a dozen years living like a prey animal, afraid of any shadow he runs across in an alley, withdrawn into himself and an insular family, which would've been an easy route for him to take. He scans as someone who has learned the kind of trust borne of learned confidence and a trained eye for good will and kindness, which are crucial weapons one would need for staving off cynicism in his circumstances—as if he has survived thanks more to connection and kindness than paranoia and isolation. (If we want to be saccharine about it, he scans quite poignantly as a member of the Mighty Nein.)

So it is easy to imagine this trust and openness as a natural progression of his initial search for perspectives external to his own cultural knowledge. Though he makes those first connections with the Assembly to try to vindicate his personal hypotheses, he finds in them exposure to the deepest corruption among Exandrian mortals, which could've—and did, for a time—turned him further down that same dark path.

But it's also this same openness to exposure from the wider world that allows the Nein to influence him for the better, and in spite of the challenges he's certainly faced simply surviving over the past seven years, he seems to have held onto this openness enough to move through the world with self-assurance and a willingness to extend the kinds of trust and good will that he has been shown.

(I would be remiss not to mention that I was reminded about my thoughts on this by this lovely post from sky-scribbles and their use in the tags of 'light' to describe Essek's demeanor this episode, which is really such an apt word for it.)

[itsgonnagetinspiringsoon]

Izzy Roland + nailing Brennan's characters right on the fucking head

Dropout Presents Bigger! with Brennan and Izzy and Dimension 20: Never Stop Blowing Up Episode 5 'Double Death Doggy Style'.

[mimikip4744]

episode 16 was wild

Like, that was the best episode this far

but also WHAT THE FUCK!!!

[hermitcraftx]

The problem with a lot of traffic life interpretations in my opinion is they don't understand character foils or don't employ them in their writing. Grian-Martyn and Scar-Ren are genuinely pretty good character foils for a series that is not really scripted or planned out like a book is. I could go on and on about how they parallel each other and the similarities between them. Even the smaller details between the four usually match up

leaving the rant in the tags so I don't have a huge block of text again ueueue

[1nt3rnalpu7ref4ct10n]

s4e6

[gothsuguru]

this man has no fucking right to be THIS beautiful… jinshi my LOVE.

[jahanmp4]

Jericho : "Sir Marius, I mean this in the most respectful and polite way possible, but you already got one curse. Perhaps... Let us... Bear some curses so you don't have to, that's the point of friends !"

Marius, yelling : " I CAN BEAR MORE !"

Jericho "Why don't... you let your friends shoulder a little bit of your burden ? Let the world do its own spin !"

[loquatic]

Pk dragon design yay

still learning how to draw object characters

they're my favorite atm. Also the tags are out of order idk why trying to fix that darn.

[flying-bear-tv]

wtf!1111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! LOVE WINS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[bowsbar]

pillowbook thoughts because ive been thinking about them all day!

[funsizedshark]

pacing around in circles muttering to myself about daniel and louis and the years between the first interview and now...... daniel telling armand "he didn't even want me in the end" after offering to get on his knees for him instead... they didn't fuck but for decades "i really thought we did" / "do you want to now?"... daniel is old and dying in a penthouse full of impossibly young beautiful immortal beings and louis still laughingly offers something that daniel thought for years he'd gotten already. and then it turns out that not only he didn't, but something in him had assumed they did have sex and never explored that further and he's gone through this entire second interview so far under that assumption because that bridge has been crossed already. except it hadn't and when louis says "do you want to now" you can see the change in his expression like for the briefest of moments he really is considering it

[ef-1]

🍷<3

[fiendishartist2]

I saw him at a birthday party once. All the older kids were down in the basement playing video games, to hide from everyone. He was down there, too. He was older than the rest of them, though.

[kinuhanino]

Some Bubbline doodles on MS Paint cuz i really miss them

my gay awakening frs

what is her problem (Marceline)

idk theyre on a date or smth

GAYASS FIRST MEETING