#there isnt a catholic church in the community im living in and i cant get transportation easily to get to my home parish

[mystichistoria]

With the wonders of modern technology I found an app called CatholicTV and was able to attend the first mass I've attended since graduating high-school.

[fromthedeskofelizabeththird]

So Here are the Spoilers -Volume III

AKA I have not been this mad at Cheritz for ages. Let’s deep dive.

Warning: this post contains spoilers and mentions of abuse and p*dophilia. 

Also Rika.

So much Rika...

I am mad, yo

Not even mad, I am furious.

As I usually do when I give my thoughts like this, here is what I wanted from V after end and Rika DLC

V moving on with his life and having a happy ending with MC

The RFA healing and also moving on

A focus on MC and V!! And their love???? You know?? The point of him having a route in the first place.

An exploration of Rika’s past and Mint Eye, to fill in all the blanks we have so far 

Rika facing justice and seeking redemption.

I’ll be honest.

If you want fluffy V and MC content, go ahead and play the existing ends. The after end is not really about V at all. It’s along the same lines as Secret Ends 02, where your LI isn’t really present and instead dealing with their own emotional turmoil and issues. 

And, you know. To an extent I would have been okay with this in V content. V is the leader of the RFA and it would be weird if the fall out from Rika wasn’t even addressed. My beef about this is that we don’t get a secret end 01 where MC and V are together, repairing problems together. We don’t see V at all for 98% of the story. We get more Rika content than V...which is a whole other issue I’ll get to in a bit. Hell...I’m pretty sure we get more VANDERWOOD than V. (Don’t get me wrong...I like Vanderwood, but wtf??) 

It’s honestly the same complaint I have for both Jumin’s after end and Valentine’s DLC, where he’s not even present for most of it and it feels like a waste of time and hourglasses. (And at 80 hourglasses per chapter, plus another 100 to unlock both endings, it doesn’t come cheap.)

V and MC’s ‘happy ending’ is an afterthought. V’s entire presence in the after end is an ‘oh by the way, remember V? The character whose after end you’re in I guess???’

Ugh.

Anyway.

It was good to see the RFA healing and moving on. I was so heartbroken by Jumin’s inability to cope with what was going on, even as he took extra care to make sure the rest of the RFA were fine. I loved Yoosung’s anger and conflict over this person he’d admired and respected for so long. I loved Seven’s complete breakdown over the potential loss of his brother.

I loved that they got reunited!

What I didn’t like?

The forcedness. 

The after end gives you two choices: Judge or Forgive. I hoped that they would be complimentary to one another, like in Seven’s Valentine DLC, where both were good ends, just different in tone.

Well, boy was I wrong!

From the beginning of the After End, you are pushed towards Forgiveness, with the MC being portrayed as completely unreasonable and borderline hysterical if they show even an ounce of resentment and anger towards Rika. If you go on to unlock the Judgement ending, Cheritz not only spits in your face but every single one of her victims.

There is a short VN sequence called Rika Circus, where you are mocked for essentially enjoying torture porn and wanting Rika to come to a cruel end and suffer a horrible fate. It’s the judgement ending, but you the player are judged instead. 

Just getting these screens made me feel physically sick:

I don’t know where to begin with this bs. Maybe with the preface that I am an abuse survivor and pushing the idea that victims have to forgive their abusers in any way shape or form and aren’t allowed to hold even a small amount of anger towards them is completely shameful? This ending literally borders on the same gaslighting logic that if a victim stands up to their abuser they are the shitty one and hyper aggressive. I wish I could explain how bad this ending was for my PTSD. 

Actually no. I will explain.

The most important lesson I got from my therapist was how okay it was to be angry, because it was an acknowledgement that I was a victim and my abuser was in the wrong. That I didn’t have to forgive her if I didn’t want to. That it was important for me to feel valid in my emotions.

Maybe what bothered me was the cognitive dissonance (and gaslighting) that an MC wanting Rika to face justice must 100% want her to die or live out the rest of her days being mistreated and even sexually assaulted? Like??? How about no?? Are there no jails in Mysme’s universe? No community service? We know from the Judgement end that she got a life sentence, so it’s not like the MC sentenced her to death.

Maybe it’s because the player is given very valid choices e.g. being suspicious of the cult leader who stabbed their boyfriend and tortured numerous people, but are framed along the same lines as the MC being like KILL HER *knife emoji*. 

Maybe it’s because this ending is the first time the player gets close to knowing Rika’s past and then is made to feel guilty about not knowing it? 

I just

/inhale

right.

/deep breaths

okay

/breathe

my hands haven’t stopped shaking for hours haHA fuck my life

I can’t help but feel like this after end undid absolutely all of the highlights of V’s route. V only mentions his love being an obsession in the judgement endings.

Actually, all of the RFA’s reactions in the judgement ending are the same as their reactions to finding out the truth about Rika in V’s route. Jumin wants her to have a life sentence despite his conflict about it. Yoosung is upset and mad. Zen wants nothing to do with her.

And this is the ‘bad’ ending.

The forgiveness ending is pretty Rika centric and incorporates V’s good end. The RFA is back to normal, V comes back fine. It’s strongly implied that he and Rika both spent time in Alaska together before coming to propose to MC. Rika, as far as we know, never faced punishment for her crimes, which is framed as a good thing.

Perhaps the most abhorrent part of the forgiveness ending is that it’s the only one where Rika comes forward and confesses the truth about the twins...which...  I’m not sure why C&R’s fate, the Chois being safe etc et al comes down to MC’s feelings about Rika. It’s a disservice to Rika more than anything, because it seems like she only comes clean because MC was nice to her and not because...you know.. it was the right thing to do.

And this brings me onto the treatment of Rika in the route and DLC and holy shit, it’s a ride.

No, Rika is not redeemed. 

Yes, she is woobified to hell and back and then twice more.

We learn that Rika was adopted by Yoosung’s relatives, who were cruel and devoted to the Catholic church. Later she was verbally abused and assaulted by a priest. She later decided to take power in the fact that people would be afraid of her and thought she was Satan etc.

I’ll be blunt.

Rika’s DLC is just an expensive retcon. It’s seven chapters at 60HG each just to be told that Rika had a sad past and all of her terrible actions came from being treated badly. She does not even get to be held accountable for Mint Eye, because Cheritz gave her a sister who actually was the one to tell her not to trust V or the RFA and poisoned her mind.

Rika does not, nor ever, get a proper redemption because even in her own DLC it’s never admitted that she was in the wrong...which is some bullshit logic because...well..it’s really jarring to have it constantly reinforced that Rika did nothing wrong and should not be judged because of her sad past at the hands of her foster mother with cult-like beliefs... because if we take from it the fact that Rika became essentially the same, by extension shouldn’t we then forgive her abusers because we don’t know their story either? Should we shrug off any notion that the priest should be imprisoned because judging people is bad and we just want him to be tortured and forgiveness is the way to go?

I’m just

I don’t know what I expected but

they still managed to disappoint me

To summarise, the after end is bullshit, V isn’t even there for most of it, Rika gets no redemption arc and is treated like an uwu flower crown victim and it’s all very manipulative and rushed lmao. It’s a waste of hourglasses and time and literally undoes everything good that came before it

[se-anubis]

Can we stop with the Ancestor-Shaming already?

Ancestor worship is indeed an integral part of ATRs and ADRs, and for most of the established traditions its impossible to practice without Ancestor Work. That is true.

But the way people go about talking about Ancestor worship is very similar to prolestyzing in my experience. Replace the word "ancestors" with "Christ", and most of yall sound like the very bible thumpers you claim drove you away from the Church.

Ancestor work isnt for everyone. Not everyone can get into it, and admitting that doesn't undermine your own worship, it simply points out that you are of the fortunate group that has identifiable ancestors from recent memory who are willing to work with you.

Yes, family feuds do close people off from their ancestral line. How are those of us that are closed off from our families supposed to reliably identify which spirits are our ancestors and which ones are just lying opportunists that love taking offerings? If we cannot learn about the natures of our ancestors in life from people who knew them, or their nature in death from people who have worked with them before, then we cannot be 100% sure that a spirit claiming to be an ancestor actually is. We cannot trust "feelings" because as everyone that has ever dealt with an impersonating spirit will tell you, you may not feel something is off until its too late and that spirit has already attached itself to you.

In a similar vein, if there's no one in your family that practices spirit work and ancestral veneration, and its been like that for multiple generations, then you may not have ancestors willing to work with you. We cant seriously expect that every Black person, even those that were staunch conservative traditionalists of other faiths, are going to their descendents in death. They had their own faith (or no faith) and are in their own afterlifes doing whatever it is they're told they're supposed to do. And for a lot of us (not all), that means a lot of our ancestors are in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory actively praying that we stop practicing ancestor worship, because in life they truly believed it was wrong and evil.

The way that we continue repeating the narrative that all Black people become fully enlightened in death and dont hold on to their Earthly beliefs because OUR religion is the true one is disrespectful. I dont agree with my hardcore Catholic and Baptist ancestors, but I do recognize that because of their faiths, I shouldnt try to work with them unless they make the first move. They wanted to follow a path of eternal peace in death and complete isolation from the living, and Im going to respect that. And Im not going to tell anyone else that their super conservative family just abandoned all the beliefs they grew up with in death, because what Id effectively be doing is declaring ATRs as the "correct" way and the paths they followed in life as "incorrect".

Not everyone is going to be accepted by the ancestors they have the most recent connections to. Yeah, all the queer people that are turned off from anything regarding ancestor worship probably have queer ancestors, but they damn sure dont know those queer ancestor's names. They have no way of knowing who those queer ancestors are or if they even want to work with them. I dont know who my queer ancestors are, and that applies to most people because families have a tendency of trying to erase those people. I dont know which of my ancestors would be receptive to ancestral worship, and which ones will just flip the table and tell me to go to the nearest church and ask Jesus for answers (prolly half of the ones I can name, at least).

Not everyone can reliably contact their direct ancestors. If you can then congratulations, you are fortunate enough to have blood ancestors in your family's living memory that accept you. But that isnt all of us. And instead of being sensitive to that, instead I keep seeing us shame each other for not doing ancestor work or (worse) not doing ancestor work the "right" way (ie, the way that I do it). We're quick to call people fake or invalid in our practices, when instead we could be working with people and helping them develop their own power so they dont need to rely on ancestors.

And dont get me wrong, I get why people see ancestor worship as the better path. Our ancestors were living people who can understand our perspectives better than immortal dieties. Our ancestors are our family, and family is SUPPOSED to love us no matter what. While in the middle of our genocide, we can and should turn to our ancestors so we dont forget them.

But that's just it. The genocide worked. There are generations of Black people that truly detest all our people's traditional religous and spiritual practice. There are Black people alive today that can name their grandparents or great-grandparents...and that's it. And there is nothing that any living person can do about any of that, and we need to stop pretending their is, and making enemies of our own people just because they are the most impacted by this.

If our communities of...magic,religion,spirituality,etc are going to survive, then we HAVE to keep in mind that just as not everyone is meant to worship dieties, not everyone is meant to worship blood relatives.