#say she was ashamed

[bookalicent]

yeah so this was insane

[deimcs]

DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS (2009) + iconic lines [3/?]

[the-crooked-library]

One similarity between Jonathan and '24 Thomas I'd like to point out is the "unclean" scene.

Jonathan saw and experienced all the nastiest most vile parts inside of vampires, and when she declared herself unclean and when holiness itself burned her he loved her despite it all, and resolved that if she became one of those monsters he would follow her. Thomas also saw all the horrifying darkness in Ellen, and when she too cried out that she's unclean he like Jonathan said that she's not and that he loves her.

I mean... I don't think these scenes are really all that similar - and again, this is to do with characterization, because on the surface level, they do follow roughly the same script. They're both extremely significant to the dynamics between Jonathan/Mina or Thomas/Ellen - but more so as a juxtaposition.

Mina believes herself to be unclean and damned because she has been bitten by Dracula and is indeed at risk of becoming a vampire as well; and as you said, Jonathan vows to join her in that cursed undeath. It is an expression of beautiful, intense, blasphemous, extremely gothic devotion, and it defines their relationship throughout the story.

By contrast, Ellen believes herself to be unclean because of her own psychic ability - because she was the one who woke Orlok in the first place. Thomas does try to reassure her, he tells her he loves her; and he is trying his best, but this reassurance ultimately falls flat for two reasons - 1) he cannot convince her that she is not unclean, because that perceived "uncleanliness" is an inherent part of her, rather than something foreign; and 2) he wants her to eventually be free of it, which she cannot ever be - because, again, the horror is a part of her.

Unlike Jonathan, Thomas is terrified of that horror. He does not recognize it as a permanent aspect of Ellen, and he ultimately is incapable of making the same vow that Jonathan Harker did; and this limitation is crucial to the undercurrent of that scene, because it is the reason Ellen lies to him about her final plan. Mina trusted Jonathan and co. enough to openly ask them to end her life in the event of turning, but Ellen makes the arrangements with Von Franz in secret, before sending her husband on a wild-goose chase. She cares about him, yes, and he cares for her; but he does not love all existing aspects of her. He would not be able to accept her if she turned. Their goals in life, their desires, their perspectives are fundamentally incompatible, and so the only thing she can do for him is leave him behind.

Thomas may have good intentions and a similar choice of career, but he's no Jonathan. It's not exactly his fault, it's just that he's really not meant to be a Hero. He's a Damsel in Distress and he's being forced into the wrong role entirely by a patriarchal world - the existence of which only Ellen appears to recognize.

[s0fter-sin]

fainting goat hybrid!ghost whose father and brother loved to scare him and make him faint; exploiting a weakness he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to stop. they took sadistic pleasure in watching his body lock up and fall to the ground with no hope of catching himself until he ended up with more bruises and scrapes from falling than from being beaten

that helplessness chafed at him and he forced himself through the drawbacks of his biology to secure a place in the military, even with the prejudice against prey animals. just for him to take a mission in mexico and find himself enduring the “hospitality” of roba who thinks his involuntary paralysis is a great deal of fun; especially when he learns he’s conscious the whole time

what haunts ghost most is his waking autopsy

not the pain of the incisions, not the trauma of watching roba reach into his body and play with his insides, but the knowledge that he couldn't get away because his own body betrayed him. he wasn't put under, no drugs coursed through his system. he didn’t have restraints fitted on him to lock him to the operating table. it wasn’t necessary

roba just had to make him faint first

after digging himself out of his grave, ghost puts himself on a dangerous cocktail of muscle relaxers and other medications; hormones that block hybrid instincts, vasodilators to increase blood flow and stop his muscles locking up, anti-anxiety meds to cut off his surprise response at the root. he puts his body through the wringer to the point that medical is constantly worried for his health and shocked that he isn't regularly OD’ing

but he will never let his body betray him again

[stardecahedron]

i want to personally shake the hand of insertdisc5 for the creation of the most perfect woman in media ever <3

Odile my fucking beloved...

ISAT fans please sound off i know all the Odile lovers are here on the tumblr.com webbed site

(no im still not done with the game but i needed to just share with you all my feelings lmao)

[separatist-apologist]

None of the Archeron sisters are real and therefore have no opinions on any discourse surrounding them hope this is helpful

[horsegirlhob]

Season 6 Buffy really just needed someone to give her good information about kink and BDSM and shit I'm not saying it would solve all her problems but I do think it would help with several of them.

[lainalit]

Why is nobody talking about the fact that SJM talks sh*t about lord of the rings by Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy literature, because she thinks Frodo wasn't traumatized enough (spoiler he was) and that we didn't see him struggle with his trauma, even though he literally goes to the middle earth equivalent of a mental health institution at the end of the books/movies.

Here is the transcript from the interview:

Interviewer: You write fantasy, you write romance, but all of what these women go through that is grounded in experience that you experienced that your friends experienced

Sarah: It's when you watch any kind of fantasy, lord of the rings for example, like when you go throw in orc massacre, you gone have some trauma, right? I would be traumatized if I survived the battle of helmsdeep I would never sleep again, I would never be in a enclosed space again. It felt like a natural thing for my characters to face emotional consequences. The fate of the world sometimes is on their shoulders that's gonna leave a mark on them

[ciderjacks]

I am always thinking about Marcilles whole deal as a half elf. How she was closer to her tall man father, how she genuinely seems to dislike Elven society and culture, how most of her friends are shorter lived races. Yet in her own identity, she leans into being an elf and you don’t even learn about her tallman half until the other elves clock her.

[welcome-to-green-hills]

I will never understand the maria jokes

The minute the flashback started I cried cuz I knew EXACTLY what was gonna happen in the end and I was trying to prepare for it

It doesn't matter how it happens, it's still very sad :(

Im just happy shadow is gonna be able to heal

Me too, my dear. The jokes about a little girl dying or complaining that it’s not violent enough are the quickest way for me to block someone. I don’t care if we’re mutuals or if we’ve followed each other for a while. They’re getting blocked. It’s still earthshaking and destructive no matter how it’s played out.

[ssruis]

the thing about emu is that her life is super fucking wild and absurd shit is always just happening to her but because she’s so used to it and so full of whimsy she never acknowledges it. And so fans never acknowledge it either. Emu canonically has priceless paintings just hanging around in her house (in universe equivalent of fucking monet’s water lilies and van gough’s sunflowers iirc) and her family is Super Mega Owns A Theme Park And Airline rich and she has the ability to climb everywhere. She has personal body guards that have to wear goofy mascot costumes but are always prepared to die for her despite her not being in danger. Truly taking after her grandpa. Strange fucking creature. I love her.

[cnl0400]

"How are they going to make Thirteen/Mephistopheles/Raphael dateable If they aren't interesing in the MC"?

>A take made by someone who hasn't played S4 or any of the Memory cards/events that feature these three, or have gotten the Birthday calls...

It's even funnier with Raphael, because he's probably the one who states the most that he wants to get closer to MC, where do the "no interest" thing even comes from??

Even If you read all this cues as platonic, It doesn't mean that they can't become romantic later. That's what development Is for?????

[arc852]

how are you so open about G/T with your family i’m jealous 😭 i keep just trying to drop subtle hints i’m just like ‘oh have you seen that movie The secret world of arrietty’ and mentioning g/t movies like epic

That's kind of how I started with it too! It's been so long that I barely remember but when I eventually ended up fully telling them, they said they had already known lol. Which I think means my hints were being picked up on.

You just gotta tell yourself that G/t is just a trope. It's just another interest that people can have, it's not anything weird. And if that's how you act when you tell people, then they'll see that too.

[devilsskettle]

i’ve seen + heard people say that they thought norman bates was creepy from the beginning of the movie but that’s not my interpretation at all, i think now that that everyone knows the plot of psycho as pop culture trivia, it’s impossible to watch psycho the way it was meant to be seen (hitchcock basically changed how movies were shown in theaters so that audiences would see the whole movie from beginning to end and wouldn’t see the plot twist first, for the sake of suspense! now there’s not the same kind of suspense because every single person in the audience knows who the killer is). i think there’s clear foreshadowing and the whole vibe of the motel is creepy, but norman himself, while a bit awkward, i think comes across as endearing and kind but extremely lonely. obviously as certain things are revealed, he gets creepier, but imo the truly bad thing that he does consciously is cover up his “mother’s” crimes but ofc he has to try to protect her. none of what happens in the movie is premeditated or malicious or even intentional on his part. he’s not even a good liar. idk i really think you’re supposed to see his narrative alignment with marion and feel sympathy for how completely trapped he is in his life, while also being scared of him, at first as someone potentially predatory, then as an accomplice to murder, then as a murderer himself. but not until AFTER his conversation with marion!!

[anastacialy]

actually, fuck it, i AM writing the essay, even if no one will read it.

my thoughts on penelope, how she sees herself, and why the carriage scene's ending is the most important thing in the whole wide world under the cut. and bridgerton season three part one spoilers, obviously.

penelope featherington hates herself. bit of a strong start here but, there we go. that's what you get when i'm going feral about her again at three in the morning. (it was eleven a.m. when i finished writing this post. i rewatched all four episodes of season three...)

i'll start from the beginning — she isn't a confident person. i think that's what a lot of penelope hate really comes down to, not relating to her in that way at all. not understanding what being treated the way she has can do to you. so let's start here:

imagine for a moment, no one fucking listens to you.

this includes her favorite people in the world. her family, for one thing, that's obvious, but her best friend, too. many times we hear eloise discover and re-discover what penelope's interests are in the series because, as she says, "i didn't really hear it." she was so frequently not really listening to her. they've been friends for years, but huge aspects of her friend's personality were completely unknown to her. this isn't anti-eloise by the way, i love her too, but we're adults who can admit our favs are all flawed people. the show wouldn't be nearly as fun if they weren't. eloise continues to belittle others for their interests when they don't match up to hers (like that poor girl who was just really passionate about embroidery) and she's done so to pen, however unknowingly, for ages.

penelope tried to beg marina to not fool colin into marriage. she had so, so many other suitors, so many other choices she could have made. all pen wanted was to not have her other best friend slash crush make that life altering of a mistake. but for this, she was called a child. immature. talked down to as if she knows nothing about the world. (she had been mostly right, by the way, in her insisting that george must still love marina, would still want to marry her, discovering that the letter had been forged. if he'd not died on the battlefield, penelope would have been the one to secure a happy ending for marina.) when she wasn't listened to then, she got more desperate, telling colin that marina was in love with someone else to deter him from the marriage while still careful to not ruin marina's reputation and expose her pregnancy in the process. she tried. but no one would listen.

so only when the situation became dire, she did the only thing that she could, and took matters into her own hands.

which brings us to lady whistledown.

it's interesting, really, that she chose that name. to specify lady so she might be taken seriously, yet not hide under a pseudonym completely removed from herself (i.e. using a masculine pen name or implying she's not a part of the ton at all) it's clear that lady whistledown is, for the most part, what penelope wants to and yet fails to be: someone who commands attention, who people admire and trust for an opinion, someone who gets listened to.

by the time we find her in season three, she's fresh off hearing her crush saying he'd never, ever court her, and her best friend finding out that she was lady whistledown all along and had exposed a secret of hers — only after penelope had, of course, also begged eloise to stop seeing theo, to stop raising the queen's suspicions, and was once again ignored. her only friendships have been destroyed, and she has resigned herself to a loveless marriage of convenience because she can't stand to be ignored, controlled, and belittled by her family any longer. she's ready to take the devil she doesn't know over the devil she does.

so, when i say her self confidence is on the floor, i mean it.

yes, a sliver of hope remains in her, and we can see that in her decisions (wearing parisian fashions, for instance) but her plan remains, she is simply going to marry someone, anyone, because she has to.

but even still, her confidence has not taken it's last hit.

let's imagine some more: no matter what you do, people are going to laugh at you.

penelope finally, finally gets her big moment. people stare at her as she enters the room. she still immediately hides herself in a corner because that's who she's always been, but still. she has a moment. not quite what she'd imagined, i'm sure, as she bought all new gowns, but attention and awe nonetheless. but it cracks almost instantly when her social awkwardness comes out, failing to get anyone to ask her to dance, and shatters completely when cressida destroys her dress before she can ever take to the floor.

colin tells her she looks nice, and her immediate reaction is "do not mock me, please."

it's only after this that she confronts colin about what he said, only after this that she speaks ill of him as lady whisteldown — not saying any more than what his sister had already pointed out earlier in the episode, mind you, that his change in personality seemed disingenuous — only after she has been publicly humiliated that she lashes out in her anger.

and, this anger, she also immediately regrets after colin has proven himself to be kind. it's a bit like making a snide comment online without the ability to delete it after.

but when penelope has hope, she is kind. she writes of the promising ladies of the ton and wishes them well with their matches, when she has hope she speaks positively of would-be spinsters and their successful marriages. many of her earlier musings in previous seasons were to call the women of the ton beautiful, to speak to their skills.

but hope for penelope does not last long. she manages to successfully speak to one suitor at the next ball (which, though this is another argument entirely, is backed by a string quartet version of "jealous" as colin re-approaches her at the drinks table — any arguments that his feelings start at their kiss isn't paying near enough attention) but the entirely true rumor about her having help from him spreads through the vine and penelope is hopeless once more.

and a hopeless penelope is a cruel penelope, as we've seen, and this time, she turns that cruelty inward, publicly. while she later says it would have been suspicious if lady whistledown hadn't commented, in truth, she has proven time and time again that her emotions rule lady whistledown's writings. in that moment, eyes tearful, she was embarrassed and ashamed of herself, she decided to say so. she repeats the same sentiment to colin when he comes to visit her:

"in truth i brought this on myself. a sad, stupid girl who believed she might actually have a chance at love."

and here is where lady whistledown continues to be someone penelope sees as different to herself, because penelope doesn't see herself as a lady. not just for lack of title — she does not see herself as worthy of or requiring protection. to call back to antony's season one romance: "every woman is not afforded such gallant protection." "every woman is not a lady."

she says nothing of him bribing her maid to give them time alone. like most of the ton she doesn't think the time they spend alone together could be anything other than platonic, at least on his end. they spent extended time unchaperoned at the bridgerton house and not once did she speak on impropriety. he'd been alone with her in the previous season and even when they were caught no one had a thing to say about it. no one questions it because penelope is not recognized as desirable, not seen as needing this protection, not seen as a lady. she is seen, even by herself, as a spinster already.

when she asks colin for a kiss, she reassures him that she would ask nothing of him for it, she would not entrap him in a marriage citing impropriety, she doesn't even think about whether someone might see. she does not care in this moment if she is to be "ruined," she only wants to feel some illusion of intimacy, some imitation of being wanted. even her running back inside immediately after, and the subsequent conversation under the willow tree, are further proof that she doesn't believe he could have kissed her for any reason other than pity.

and, even after all she goes through with lord debling, she is still not the only object of his affections. the entire time she pursues him, cressida is there, hot on the trail, ready to sweep him away on a moment's notice. penelope writes of their dance that his choice of her is surprising. though her feelings for colin have not simply fluttered away once debling's shown interest, her possible engagement to debling is on a wavering tightrope. not once in this can she feel wholly at ease with lord debling, only afforded a bit of security once he asks her mother for her blessing. and amongst this, her mother still belittles her, saying she should not become greedy for wanting to marry someone who actually cares for her.

she asks lord debling if he might ever love her, in all the years of marriage they may have ahead, and he says probably not.

and when colin breaks up her proposal, insisting debling isn't right for her, still penelope does not even consider, can not even conceptualize that it might be done out of jealousy. colin having feelings for her is laughable, she says as much, and it is the same thing she has been told over and over since the start. he chases after her carriage out of breath asks to be let in, gets on his knees and tells her he can't stop dreaming of her and she tells him "please. do not say things you do not mean." she cannot imagine that any of this is real. it is confusion that prompts her to repeat the agreement they had in episode one, "but, colin, we are friends."

and while an entirely separate essay could be written about the rest of the carriage scene, it is what happens the moment the carriage arrives at bridgerton house that stands out to me. they have this moment, colin asks "could the carriage driver not keep on driving?" and they both laugh, the way they always do with one another, and he fixes her dress (carefully, avoiding using a select few fingers as he does so) and they kiss again, and he gets out of the carriage.

and for a single, heartbreaking second, penelope's face falls, and she calls after him: "colin?"

it is so clear in her demeanor that she thought that was it; that's all she gets. the fantasy is over and it is back to reality. for a split second, she believes he is no longer hers.

for a single second, it's as though she thinks he is going to shut the carriage door on her, and walk away.

but he turns around, hand outstretched, asking if she'd like to come in. and she's once again confused, "what?"

do not say things you do not mean. do not mock me please.

and when he says: "for god's sake, penelope featherington, are you going to marry me or not?"

she looks so relived she could cry.

[psi-yuri]

@sillychimera i drew your guy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ugwggwahhh i love him so much he’sso so auuhhwhahaa

+ a really old rosalina drawing i found and thought was pretty