#need to process. more. again.

[convexcave]

gonna inflict my mommy issues on my classmates next monday lol

[slavhew]

look at this idiot not aware that his body is warm and his touch comforting everyone point and laugh

[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.

[sunnysidesevenup]

Neige, this isn’t very “friends” of you.

Vil watching this entire interaction: what have I done to deserve this. genuinely.

Part 7! | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Part 8!

[tapakah0]

Animation commission I guess...

Um... ha-ha, okay, it has been stuck in my head for the whole month, but if I will keep it any more I will explode, I need to busy my brain even more I'd like to take an animation commission. Like, a fully colored, shaded, with lightning, with in-betweens, with the clean line (and background). Up to 5 seconds depending on what you want to get I guess the price may start from 250$ and be higher or less depending on complexity of the details, character or movement (<- of course everything will be negotiated) I never took such commissions before so please be patient with me since I might spend even months ha-ha (really wanna beat this fear of taking something more complex) But I will do my best since it will be first experimental time for me 1. Payment via Boosty after acceptance of the sketch animation (very rough idea) 2. I think I can draw mostly anything (but won't 18+, guro and I can decline something if I feel like I will not like to do it) 3. You must have a reference of the character, I'm not ready to work with something that doesn't have a ref to start working right away 4. Please, properly think of what you'd like to see, I will not make 3 different rough animations of different ideas because you suddenly had another idea ;~;; 5. Note me in dms if you'd like to take commission... (I'd like to move to discord later since it's more comfortable in here) Uh... I have only this as a more or less proper example (it was based on amazing storyboard by yeye23)

Okay, I'll just leave it here if someone really will be interested and will delete if it if it will be decided.... I just feel like my brain is dying if I don't have an enjoyable/stressful more complicated work on a side that demands an attention from me. Have a nice day

[pokimoko]

I may be playing a DnD game with my friends in the near future so I thought I'd design a little guy for myself to play. I humbly present to you my bird bard barbarian.

[cacaocheri]

we both deserve to be happy

in case anyone is wondering, it gets easier. it gets so so much easier and i hope you find the love you're looking for

[mazken]

brush test slash rendering practice with ayem

[an-established-butt-dent]

Wanderer

[lemongogo]

anyways . silly thing

[jeff-the-kills-you]

curly at da park

he's having a nice day

[deliriousblue]

thinking about bison fully putting his hand over kant's nose and mouth

[brown-little-robin]

I think I'm in the "conscious incompetence" stage of being a social animal in the real world and it sucks so majorly. bro what do you do after you realize you're bad at socializing and then in-person interaction gets harder because you know you're failing at it now.

[reksink]

OFF with a Bunch of Very Bad Batters

[bixels]

So I l’ve been getting into your ko crisis story lately (it all sounds rlly awesome btw) and i was curious - you’ve said in the tags in a previous ask that ash is comphet, so is that gonna play a major role in her character arc/journey in any way?

Yeah, the story basically covers her journey of redefining her identity as a queer Asian-American disabled woman in a sports-entertainment industry, which is a media landscape that specifically targets, exploits, and fetishizes people like her.

[princessamericachavez]

like yes yes eddie needs to choose and buck needs to be chosen but also 

Eddie needs to get over the very big trauma of losing his wife. Last time he dated someone he had literal panic attacks at the thought of her being mistaken for Chris’s mother and as much as we saw him work through in therapy we never?? really?? talked?? about?? that?? So, yeah, Eddie needs to realize that he’s at a point where he’s ready to risk his heart and give love a second chance 

(and maybe realize he already did becase there already is a partner in his life who gets consistently confused for Chris’s guardian and it feels natural to him?? but he still needs to realize he’s ready for love)

And Buck needs to be ready to be in a relationship where he’s loved for who he is, where he doesn’t bend and twist to fit someone else’s expectations. And for that Buck needed to die, and needed to come back, and now he needs to process that trauma and steady himself. 

(and Buck loves so quickly, so openly, so loudly, and he gives so much of himself and he wants to be loved that way, and maybe he’ll realize that he already?? is?? loved?? but he needs to let himself accept it)

so basically, it’s not only a matter of choice... eddie needs to be ready to love and buck needs to accept that he is loved if they are ever going to find each other properly together

and that, my funny little friends, is the point of their arcs were we are at right now