#the reasons being she would murder

[trauma-bot]

sin eater

[trappedinafantasy37]

Anybody else realize that it is news to Minthara to find out that Ketheric wasn't working alone? She knew about Orin this entire time, but still thought Ketheric to be the head of the Absolute. Obviously she knew Orin was involved with the Absolute and did something for them, but she didn't realize the extent of power Orin actually had. And I think it is pretty fascinating that Minthara "men are only useful for breeding" Baenre did not immediately presume that the woman was in charge or had any significant power in the Absolute.

Can you imagine how Minthara felt to find out that not only were Orin and Ketheric working together, but that they were equals? I think it only dawns on her how much danger she was in the entire time and just how little control she had over herself. She was made the personal plaything of one of the three prongs of the Absolute and was slowly being driven into the same kind of mad monster Orin was. So what would have happened to her if Ketheric fully claimed her like he had intended before Orin basically stole her? How much worse could Ketheric have done to her? Or was she only in her shit ass predicament, debased amongst goblin trash out of Ketheric's pettiness for Orin?

But like, she knows Orin is the Chosen of Bhaal so she already knows how powerful and dangerous she is. But it almost seems like after finding out Orin is Ketheric's equal, she kinda places her at the top of the hierarchy between the Chosen Three anyway and insists she is the most dangerous. By Menzoberranzan standards, she probably would see Orin as being the most deadly and dangerous. Because in her experience, the woman is the most powerful. Orin already did a lot of fucked up shit to her, but she realizes that Orin could have done so much worse.

It makes a bit more sense why Minthara's tone about Orin turns from rage to terror in between acts. She is the only character in the game that portrays Orin as a threat. Gortash, Sarevok, Fel - they all treat her like a joke, an annoyance, someone to roll your eyes at. But Orin has shown a side of herself to Minthara that others either don't see, or don't take seriously. Orin is cruel for cruelty's sake - she revels in the suffering she brings to others. Minthara has scars and nightmares left behind by Orin, and it ultimately meant nothing. No - Minthara's suffering empowered Orin. Chronologically, Orin probably got her hands on Minthara after taking out Durge and establishing herself as Bhaal's Chosen. She was on a winning streak. Minthara's torment was her celebration, her victory lap, a tool to establish herself as the true monster she wants to be seen as. Everyone in her life has overlooked her, so she created a victim who never will. A victim who is so paranoid, that she is constantly looking for Orin's presence everywhere she goes, because Orin could be anywhere... Orin could be anyone...

[froggychair05]

Day Three of @deadbeatbug’s MCSM-tober: Pumpkinhead

I think we should talk more about how Lukas was framed for murder.

[moeblob]

idk if it's a fun fact or not but! Right's favorite color is green. He never wears green but it's his favorite color. then I've been working on silly emotes for my OCs and they're "disappointeddad" and "tryme".

(Also there is an AU where these two are knights along with Paul and Evelyn while Brent/Caspian/Atticus are princes. Chris is basically Caspian's personal guard while Right just runs around trying to do everything to stay busy even when not on duty which stresses Chris out. But since he's kinda busy with the crown prince it defaults to Paul having to babysit Right.)

[arathejedi394]

i cracked this morning and read the first like 200 words of my og novel that i wrote when i was 13/self-published at 14

and like

why did hank green post it on his instagram with praise?? like i think of it and i cringe. today i re-read the first 200 words and i wanted to stop existing?? why did my mom give him a copy of it i did not ask her to do that??? i just went to one of his concerts in 2014 and my mom just gave the book to somebody and for some reason that somebody gave it to hank green and then suddenly im in the crowd 15yo new best friend bc nerdfighteria and hank green is like "oh somebody gave one of the guys this book just before the show and i took a look at it and i kinda like it it's pretty good" and up he holds none other than my og novel he goes "a 14yo wrote this and it's pretty good this affirms my faith in humanity or something like a very young not-adult did this whole novel and it's not bad that's cool" idk what he said it was 10 years ago. and there's me in the crowd freaking the fuck out i say to my new bff who i had just met at the beginning of the concert bc we were standing next to each other like "BRO THAT'S MY BOOK" new bff is like "BRO THAT'S YOUR BOOK???" and starts jumping up and down for attention like "YO THAT'S THIS GUY'S BOOK" hank green hears points at me and goes "HEY HE'S RIGHT THERE YOUR BOOK'S PRETTY COOL KID" AND THEN!!! HE FUCKING PUT IT ON HIS INSTA??? AND PRAISED IT??? THE STICKY NOTE MY MOM LEFT ON IT WITH LIKE 10 WORDS OF SYNOPSIS STILL ON THE COVER??? ALL OF HIS INSTA FOLLOWER'S SAW MY MOM'S HANDWRITING??? AND MY WHOLE ASS INITIALS + LAST NAME??? A COMPLIMENTARY REVIEW BY HANK GREEN HIMSELF??? WHY?? WHY WAS MY 15 MINUTES OF FAME THAT CRINGE ASS Y/A NOVEL???

nobody go looking back at hank green's 2015 insta. do not confirm this is true. let this be a totally unverifiable claim of some rando fandom blogger.

listen. i was 13 when i wrote that book. i was so full of brand new baby teen angst. i do not understand why hank green did not open the book flip through a couple pages go "oof this kid needs a therapist and a writing coach" and never mention it again. i do not understand why he mentioned it on stage, i don't know why he put it on his instagram, it was so bad. ohmygod. i wish i could forget it ever happened

eXCEPT I CAN'T

bc iT wAs SuPpOsEd TO BE A TRIOLOGY. aNd I ONLY WROTE ONE. AND MY PARENTS ARE STILL ASKING ME WHEN BOOK TWO IS COMING.

IT'S BEEN TEN YEARS.

[reneesbooks]

9 lines 9 people

ok confession these games scare me bc tagging people still intimidates me but i'm being brave today here's some lines i wrote a while back from the dragons of kiltide. just fabin having a little teenage angst. also this is 9 (11 but shh the context!!) paragraphs bc i still don't know how to shut the fuck up. thank you @space-writes for the tag <3

the raedoran cycle

[Fabin] tilts his head, pressing his forehead to the window frame. “What are dreams like?” he asks quietly.

Emilia sits across from him, watching how his eyes stare through the window but see nothing. She thought he'd left that behind in the weeks and months after their parents were killed, thought the long silences were finally over. She tucks her arms against her sides. “They're...like memories. Only more vivid.”

His fingers close around the hilt of his sword. “What do you dream about?”

She rolls her shoulders. “Places I've never been. Things I've never seen.”

One of his hands presses against the glass. “Do you ever dream of...of humans?”

She studies him with a worried frown. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

He recoils, his expression twisting with anger before it closes off. “No. I'm fine. I don't have dreams.” He turns away from her. “Never mind.”

Emilia sighs. “I talked Muiris down. He doesn't want to kill you anymore.”

“Good for him.”

“You should apologize for breaking his foot.”

Fabin turns to face her again, his eyes wide. “I actually broke it?”

tagging @oh-no-another-idea @zmwrites @akindofmagictoo @writinglyra @k--havok @lyssa-ink @aether-wasteland-s @ink-flavored @avrablake to share 9 (or more or less or however many you feel like!) lines of writing <3

[reneeub]

Grace is such a lovely girl she just wants to help everyone :c

In Abstinence Camp she's worried that Steph might be pregnant and gets her send to Abstinence Camp for her own good

In Nerdy Prudes Must Die she's worried about Hatchetfield youth and wants to save them from co-ed dances and wants to help nerds stop getting bullied by Max

It's not her fault that all of her good intentions end with murder :C

[qoldenskies]

Thoughts on Kendratello?

honestly originally i didnt have much thoughts on it other than "haha toxic yuri" but i think my ironic jokes about it like. looped back around. i dont think i'd ever write it but its so based and people should be nicer to it

[trappedinafantasy37]

You are backed into a corner, there is nowhere for you to go, except forward. Unfortunately, in front of you is a man who is intent on shoving his knife between your ribs and stealing everything from your corpse. What are you going to do? Are you going to stand there and ask yourself, "Would I be a bad person if I fought this man, maybe kill him?" or are you going to pull your own knife and fight back? Cause, I will tell you what is more than likely going to happen. Your fight-or-flight sense is going to try to override your asinine desire to have a philosophical debate with yourself, and try to get you out of the situation alive. You will instinctively and without thinking, either pull your knife and try to fight back, or you will try to run away from this man, hell, you might actually try to just hand over your wallet if it meant securing your life.

Does this scenario make sense? Does the outcome make sense? Is it reasonable, in this moment, to forego morality for your own survival? Because if it does, then try to expand this idea to understand the TWO HUNDRED YEARS of bullshit Minthara has lived through in Menzoberranzan. Every single day of her life was a nonstop survival scenario, her fight-or-flight sense was always active, and she always defaulted to fight because that was what she was good at. Her conversation about someone always trying to kill her isn't her having an over inflated sense of self-importance. She was important. Many people actually did want to kill her, and many people actually did try. For fuck's sake, she was almost assassinated when she was just a baby!

And she prevailed above it all because she didn't waste a single second of her time asking herself, "would I be a bad person for trying to survive?" No, she picked up her maces and did what she had to and guaranteed her survival and she didn't spend a single second stewing in regret. Because what good does that do her when there are still threats out there?

This is why you will never be able to make her less "evil" because she doesn't see "evil", nor does she see "good". She does not subscribe to the concept of morality. If anything, she's amoral. She sees things in terms of you either kill or you get killed. And Minthara would rather kill. A majority of the decisions that she makes is about her own survival and increasing her chances of survival. She does not waste a moment of her time thinking on the morality of her choices. This may be a little bit charged when I say this, but the consideration of morality in ones choices takes an incredible amount of privilege and safety. And, in spite the abundance of privilege Minthara had as a Baenre, concerns of morality was not one of them because she was never safe. And she has never felt safe.

When she does something that guarantees her survival, only you see it as "evil" because you haven't been conditioned for 200+ years to view survival in the same way she does and you do subscribe to morality. She does not see it as an atrocity, nor as a bad thing and you won't be able to change her mind because the two of you lived in the end, and that is what is important to her. This is also why she will stand by you when you make what you perceive to be "good" choices. She doesn't see the action as "good", but more of "this action helps us survive." She does not care about being "good", she cares about being alive.

For example, Minthara does approve of you protecting Isobel and warning her of Marcus' intentions. She approves you making a seemingly "good" decision, but not because it is morally good. Isobel is providing you and the entire gang a safe place to eat and sleep in the Shadow Lands, as well as providing you with a blessing that allows you to walk around freely within it. Protecting Isobel is practical as it guarantees your survival. She does not care that it's morally good to help Isobel, she cares that protecting Isobel means you get to keep a safe place to sleep. Not to mention, it interrupts whatever plans the Absolute may have had for Isobel and Minthara certainly does want to fuck over the Absolute.

It's also the same exact reason as to why she doesn't give a shit if you kill Isobel while playing Durge. But it does depend on why you killed her. If you tell Minthara that you killed Isobel for the thrill of it, she will be quite peeved because not only did you lose a safe place to sleep, but you introduced threats to your lives that could have been avoided all for your entertainment. Your dumb actions jeopardized your survival for no reason, and that's a big no-no for her. But, if you tell her that Isobel would have seen you as a threat eventually, then Minthara would approve of it as she perceives killing Isobel in that moment as necessary for your survival. She's only mad because you didn't tell her before hand and she wasn't prepared.

And there are plenty of other situations in which she actually does approve of you doing "good" things, as well as disapproving of you doing "evil" things. In the end, she does not nor has ever cared about the morality of your decisions. She cares on whether or not you act with your survival in mind. But if you tell her that you did something because it was the "right thing to do" she will laugh in your face because doing the "right thing" often means going out of your way and endangering yourself, risking your survival and with nothing to gain in return.

This does not mean Minthara does not change, nor cannot change. She is not a stagnant person and she is constantly adjusting herself to the situation she finds herself in. But these adjustments have nothing to do with morality, but more reorganizing her priorities and desires. There is a reason why I keep circling back to the romance in the Karlach origin because it does demonstrate that Minthara is indeed capable of changing. In this particular ending, she demonstrates that she is capable of prioritizing the life of someone else over her own desire for power. She doesn't magically become "less evil" or "more good", her priorities have merely changed and you perceive that as a change in morality because you are trying to shove her into a box that she doesn't fit in.

She chooses to make changes within herself because she is inspired by you and your actions. But she will never change to appease you or make you feel better about her lack of morality. She changes because change is necessary for survival. If you do not like her, then that is your problem, one she will not fix for you. You either learn to like her, or you can leave her alone. But she will remain as herself and she will not compromise on who she is just because you want her to. She wants you to accept her as she is, because she accepts you as you are. She will never ask you to compromise yourself for her sake, and she expects the same in return.

Minthara is one of those characters that is meant to challenge your perception of what is and isn't evil. Would I say that you are wrong for seeing her actions as evil? No, I wouldn't because I do understand why some people see her as evil. But it is wrong to say that she is evil because she wants to be or that is just who she is. Minthara just wants to live and she will do whatever she has to do to live, and she is constantly readjusting herself to fit whatever environment she is in. If that means resorting to actions that you perceive as "evil" then so be it. But she is also capable of doing actions that you may perceive as "good" because sometimes, "good" actions can be beneficial to one's survival. Minthara heavily weighs the pros and cons and each decision made available to you and she tends to go with the choice with the highest chances of survival, which more often than not are "evil" choices. This is also why it seems like Minthara has a tendency to play both sides of things and that is because she can see the survival benefit of both "good" and "evil" choices simultaneously.

[outeremissary]

The Hierophant, Strength and the Hanged Man for Carmen?

Thanks for the ask! For once, there is something resembling brevity to my answers.

(also reordered to obscure some aeon spoilers for anyone for whom those are a concern)

[tarot asks]

Strength: On what issue is your character persistent?

The abomination thing. It’s the abomination thing. It’s most certainly that, the abomination thing. Carmen has developed a fringe theory of the cosmos in which the pristine world of Golarion has been corrupted by the unnatural incursions of creatures and forces not meant to exist on it. History is full of hubristic supernatural overreaches, evil wizard tyrants, and wicked gods and demons sowing destruction. Fey tricksters run rampant in the wilds, the self-righteous so-called good gods leave doctrines of discord for their followers while turning their backs on disaster, the unquiet dead have so infested the earth that a whole disgusting nation of them has taken root. People turn to religion for salvation and the gods feed on their fears and their hopes and all their beautiful, rich lives like parasites. And hardly anyone can see the connection, that there’s not good and bad types of abomination, but that it’s rotten all the way down. That you need to purge it all: the angels and the demons and everything else. The Worldwound is but one corner of a far greater crusade, one that mortals fight endlessly every day just to survive. She’s absolutely miserable to discuss religion with.

(From a meta perspective, this was an adaptation of her impractical and logic resistant tabletop philosophy that every arcane magic user ever born was, deep down, evil, because magic is inherently evil and corrupts everything it touches.)

The Hanged Man: When has your character needed to step back and look at things from a different perspective?

Honestly, just being appointed Knight Commander was a major moment for this. Carmen has never thought of herself as a leader. She knows she doesn’t have a lot of social savvy or patience for trying to parse issues outside of her skillset. Her skills in compromise are generally poor. She doesn’t like delegating tasks. She’s most comfortable receiving orders, not giving them. And grand strategy? She’s a soldier, she doesn’t know what it is that generals do. It’s hard to understand what she’s being asked when Galfrey makes her intentions clear, and it took some processing to come to terms with and accept. Trying to push outside of her usual narrow view of the present and to consider Galfrey’s reasoning, Galfrey’s character, and the state of the crusade did help. As much as the symbolic reasons or the reason of blessings she knew she hadn’t received and disliked being associated with didn’t resonate with her, she could see logic to the crusade needing new blood and fresh morale. The disaster of Kenabres made that much clear. And some morally superior part of her could also be swayed by the logic that she was the right choice for being more upright, for being more clear-headed, for being willing to do what others wouldn’t, just like when she purged the Wardstone.

I suppose in the end it would up less the empathetic understanding of others and more a roundabout way of reaching her own warped perspective there though. Common Carmen L. She does respect Galfrey though, mostly. She has very complicated feelings about Galfrey. All part of the toxic yuri love triangle.

AEON SPOILER ZONE

The Hierophant: Who has served as a mentor to your character?

Carmen has had effectively zero people in her life in the recent past she would consider mentors, especially in the crusade. To “mentor” her would require demonstration of shared values, valuable skills superior to her own, and a temperament she finds agreeable and worthy of respect. Let me just say that there are no characters in the game who meet these standards. She respects some, like Greybor or Galfrey, as equals or near equals. But there’s no one who can put her in a position where she feels that she is a student. The closest that you could probably come is the aeon in the mirror (it’s always that damn aeon in the mirror), and that’s because to her, it is very much not a separate being. It’s just her. She’s just spending time clearing her head and thinking- that’s normal, everyone does that! And she easily internalizes insights she picks up from there. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

Would love to see a dynamic of mentor and penitent disciple between her and Hal if she ever halfway shaped up her act though, that would be fun. I thought about that periodically in 2021.

[shadowinthetreesbutcooler]

red team are FULLY going feral im so here for it, cellbit vouching for cannibalism and getting excited, baghera wanting to build a dirt shack and everyone wanting to crawl into a cave and chase people through the woods

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

i swear i watched a YouTube video where someone had hatsune miku do am's hate monologue from i have no mouth and i must scream and I’m dying to find it bc it’s sooooo nova

[lovesickeros]

thought abt focalors + tsaritsa sagau fic bc it'd be funny as hell to throw them in a room together but now its actually got me thinking a little too much.......similar but only in the barest sense and complete opposites..one of them fearing celestia and the other trying to bring celestia down.

[satsuha]

summerrr........ its not over in my heart...... (says this every year)

[mortalscience]

Law and Order Criminal Intent - 1x05 - Jones Deakins: You can kick it over to the 1-5. Eames: Why? We got time for this. Deakins: Chief of detectives… needs a couple of bodies for the Mayor's Drug Task Force. Okay, I should know better. But it's a good opportunity. Eames: (waves Deakins off) Deakins: Suit yourself. (he leaves) Eames: (to Bobby) You like this case, too. Goren: Yeah, I like Angie. The captain's right, the task force is a good way for you to get noticed. Eames: I didn't take this job to get noticed.

[steph-anie723]

“ennis and jack only wanted each other for sex—” TELL ME YOU DIDNT WATCH BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN WITHOUT TELLING ME YOU DIDNT WATCH BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN