#it’s such a betrayal every time

[butterfly-apocalypse]

There’s a special kind of ouch that comes from learning that teachers that meant so much to you growing up are homophobic/transphobic

[lotus-pear]

11/20

[yashley]

campaign 3 episode 120: Imogen Temult, Exaltant Hope of the Red Storm (hot girl shit)

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[diamondsunbursts-and-marblehalls]

"Annabeth is terrified of spiders."

Luke and Annabeth's existence is so interwoven that the best analogy he can come up with for the reasoning and justification behind his betrayal of everything he's ever known and loved is one connected to her.

Say what you want, but I think Luke thought about Annabeth and Thalia during every part of his betrayal. He knew that even Annabeth's complete adoration and devotion to Athena couldn't make her care. He knew that the king of the gods, Zeus could have saved Thalia but instead, he turned her into a tree "as a last resort" to keep her out of the way for good.

Of course, his reasoning for siding with Kronos reminds him of Annabeth. Small and scary things will be crushed immediately, if he has a bigger power behind him he at least has a shot at making a change.

He's been mistreated by Hermes, but he's also spent years watching his little sister worship Athena, do everything she ever asked all for a hat that turns you invisible, and the occasional nod her way. He's her big brother, you don't think HE KNOWS that she thinks love has to be earned? You don't think he's done everything he could to prove to her that's not true.

Ultimately his betrayal had everything to do with Annabeth. It was for Thalia, it was for the rest of the Hermes kids, for all of the unclaimed in his cabin who had to spend their whole lives knowing that their godly parent didn't care about them enough to even acknowledge their existence, it was for Clarisse who has clearly been abused by Ares and yet would still do anything for his favour, it was for every half-blood who had ever been mistreated by the gods.

The first analogy he thinks of in trying to describe the relationship between demigods and gods is one associated with Annabeth because she's the reason he can justify his betrayal.

[sysig]

“It could be that the loss of her children drove the Queen deeper into her darker desires...but, I don’t believe she was fighting against them that hard before that particular tragedy. No monster does.” (Patreon)

Bonus:

Hmm, wonder what he could cover those holes with :3c

[stardvstbby]

in my opinion, Yona of the Dawn is about love in its many forms; the love Yona has for her father and how that colors her perception of him as well as the world around her (familial), the love she has for Soowon and how she moves on from betrayal (crush), the love she has for Hak which provides a steady reassurance that encourages her to find herself (romantic), the love she has for the friends she makes throughout her journey and ‬how it gives her a reason to push forward even in the face of struggle (platonic), the love she has for not just the people of Kouka but humanity as a whole that inspires her to change so that she can be relied upon (community)

love is the dawn that brightens even the darkest of nights

[coffeeworldsasaki]

Anyway talking about fictional betrayals, Morrigan did nothing wrong she tells you she'll go away after the last fight and then she does, end of story, it's not her fault if you take that so fucking personal

[fullscoreshenanigans]

(The Promised Neverland Art Book World)

Ah yes, one of my favorite genres of baby full score trio pictures: Isabella being openly affectionate toward Emma and Norman in front of Ray while being hands off with him.

(Chapter 2 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 165 | Chapter 170 | Chapter 177)

[wonder-worker]

Thinking about Elizabeth Woodville as a gothic heroine is making me go insane. She entered the story by overturning existing social structures, provoking both ire and fascination. She married into a dynasty doomed to eat itself alive. She was repeatedly associated with the supernatural, both in terms of love and death. Her life was shaped entirely by uncanny repetitions - two marriages, two widowhoods, two depositions, two flights to sanctuary, two ultimate reclamations - all paralleling and ricocheting off each other. Her plight after 1483 exposed the true rot at the heart of the monarchy - the trappings of royalty pulled away to reveal nothing, a never-ending cycle of betrayal and war, the price of power being the (literal) blood of children. She lived past the end of her family name, she lived past the end of her myth. She ended her life in a deeply anomalous position, half-in and half-out of royal society. She was both a haunting tragedy and the ultimate survivor who was finally free.

[innit1]

and the crowd is !! …. Confused. And a bit sad.

[cosmic-walkers]

I haven't seen a lot of people talk about him but harry melling absolutely killed it as wriothsely. for one of the first times we see the character of wriothsely really focused on in tudor media, he did an outstanding job at portraying a flawed, torn, nuanced and morally ambiguous risley. i loved him, and his ability to have amazing chemistry with mark rylance.

i could almost look past the fact that he didn't have red hair, in s2 even tho the s1 actor had it. idk maybe they ran out of lightener, copper hair color and 50 vol developer on set but he did good.

[hannahwdraws]

Just a couple of girls from The Free Marches

"I can't believe the girl I taught to weave flowers at the Arlathvhen grew up to be the 'fearsome' Inquisitor."

"I can't believe Varric didn't put two and two together sooner that we might have already known each other."

"Try not to blame him, you're so different from the girl I knew from back then."

"I'm still just a Dalish girl from The Marches"

[miniagula]

they make me ILL and SICK IN THE HEAD

[kaesaaurelia]

Friends, tonight's Hero Forge theme is betrayal, heartbreak, and having entirely too many dogs.

Companion to this.

[happyk44]

To me, children of Zeus are natural strategists in the same way children of Athena are. But the difference is that Zeus and his kids have multiple plans and contingencies if a plan fails at a certain point and needs to shift gears. So like they employ Plan A and get all the way to stage four of the plan when suddenly there's a deviation from expectations for whatever reason. So they shift gears from Plan A1 to Plan A2, which accounted for this deviation and continue on.

Athena and her kids, however, come up with one solid, somewhat broader plan and refuse to deviate from it at all unless there is literally no other choice, in which case they will improvise quickly and efficiently to accomodate the change and get back on track to the original plan.