#my whole heart is in this piece

[strangefable]

The Chariot

Micah Hale, Deputy, Hope County Sheriff Department

The Chariot is a card of willpower, transformation, confidence and determination. It's a card of forward movement and action, determinedly pushing into victory and overcoming challenges. It's a card of intention and resolve, facing obstacles head-on and never backing down.

For Micah, her motorcycle is her chariot, a symbol of her sense of self and her sense of freedom. The wings and antlers are symbolic of both her past and the guiding forces in her life, as well as representing her status as 'Rook' and her place with the Whitetail Militia.

Instead of the traditional wand, she's holding scales, weighed with planes. The allusion to John is obvious, as is her precarious balance between the Resistance and the Project; her torn loyalties and her desire to balance them despite all odds being against her.

Her sphinxes are Boomer and Peaches, opposing forces of their own that she walks between, keeping them together and working smoothly, and earning the loyalty of difficult and varied personalities.

Ultimately, she's a harbinger to both the Project and the Resistance, a hero and villain to both sides of the conflict, desperately, and vainly, trying to forge a path to peace.

She fits both upright and reversed readings of the card, as torn as she is in an impossible scenario she can't win, yet she never quite gives up.

All my deepest heartfelt gratitude to @redreart for so beautifully bringing this concept to life for me. She took my idea and turned it into something beyond my wildest dreams. The details are so perfect, from the colors to Micah's hair... every little bit is all I could've asked for and more. Thank you for bringing my girl to life so incredibly! <3 If you get the opportunity for a commission, don't hesitate! <3 <3

[hinamie]

I don't want to regret the way I lived

[bluspaghetti]

Lil doodle based on this screenshot <3

[lost-time-memery]

I really don't wanna see anyone talking about Betty as if she was a "poor little misguided girl" that had to sacrifice her whole life for a man.

She was her own character and made her own decisions during the whole show! Yes, jumping through the portal basically doomed her life, but it was HER DECISION.

I'm not saying it was a good thing for her, being impulsive and reckless is a very consistent flaw to her character, as well as being passive and inattentive to her self destructive behavior was a flaw to Simon! Their relationship had flaws like any other would, but they loved and admired each other the exact same amount! (Simon went back in time to apologize and say goodbye to her, while Betty refused to accept his loss and tried to go back in time to change the future, he was more willing to let her go AT FIRST)

I'm also devastated that Betty got such a tragic ending, but the important thing is that SHE ACTIVELY CHOSE HER FATE. And she did not regret it.

SHE CHOSE TO STAY WITH SIMON AND NOT GO ON THAT TRIP

SHE CHOSE TO JUMP THROUGH THAT PORTAL

SHE CHOSE TO TRY TO FIX THE CROWN EVEN WHEN SIMON BEGGED HER TO STOP

SHE CHOSE TO STAY BEHIND AND MAKE HER LAST WISH

(I'm also a little bit disappointed with the fionna and cake finale, the way they handled Simon's character development was kinda underwhelming, but seeing people treat Betty like the ultimate victim makes me a lil bit upset... SHE WAS SUPER PROACTIVE)

I'm not trying to romanticize her toxic traits, being this obsessed with someone is not healthy, but at the same time... In a show with world ending monsters and interdimentional beings and telepathic war elephants, the fate of the world in both AT and FaC depending on a normal human woman that just loved someone SO MUCH is so beautiful...

It's PAINFULLY bittersweet but also immensely true to the nature of human beings. 🥲

[deadeery]

my heart on a platter, dedicated to serving you 🫀

[moonpatroclus]

𝒯𝒶𝓀𝑒 𝓂𝑒 𝒷𝒶𝒸𝓀 𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉☀️

Happy @elucienweekofficial day 2!!! I’m so excited to share this commission by the incredible summergorgon 💗 They were so lovely to work with, and so kind to let me hold onto this commission for months and save it for Elucien week!

Please do not repost

[elvyn]

doodles some of my favs from One Piece because after two years I'm finally almost up to date with this anime😭

[aeon-uriel]

they love using each other as pillow. or bed.

[saintaviator]

moar hl scraps…. does a pose

[spiritoast]

1, 2, 3, 4, Did you miss me, Monte d'Or?

[llemon-soda]

akishinji... they literally mean the world to me

[so11aris]

Squish da baby

[thinwhitedoc]

SHERLOCK | Martin Freeman as John Watson

[sen-ya]

what if there was a phase where rocy really wanted, demanded even, siblings??? i know some kids want to stay the no. 1 center of attention of their parents but also some just want siblings to play with lol. (also i'm just having feels about lami and ace. one piece tragic siblings bro 🤧)

[mercurymacaroons]

arrives 15 min late with a latte

......sup

[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.)