#there's nuance ok

[genderdryad]

she/de/ic knight femme frosgirl trans lesbian flag!!

pls credit me if you use- thnx!

[heartorbit]

if we could stay connected, just like this

[dapper-lil-arts]

I'm not the kind of person that's like "Here let me fix the canon" usually but like holy crap gen 5 implied a lot of messed up shit about our hero Twilight Sparkle lmao

[pseudophan]

out of the closet dan and phil preaching about how rpf is great actually is just so funny. like yeah man you guys just get free porn written about you and your boyfriend, of course you're pro rpf

[spending-life-pretending]

conservatives really wanna act like the “woke left” is winning the culture war or whatever when people are out here making basil and dorian brothers and casting white men to play heathcliff in 2024

[spooky-dice]

okay not to over analyze a lighthearted piece of dialogue from freshman year but when gorgug dies and wilma&digby are upset because they don't know how to connect with him in that feeling, it makes me think abt transracial adoptee gorgug and the experience of white parents who fundamentally do not understand their child of colour and cannot bridge the gap to sympathizing with things they do not relate to. i know wilma&digby love him and i think they're good parents, but the stance in fandom that they're perfect parents is very strange to me tbh. their house is too little for their son to exist.

[naturecalls111]

WIP!!! Stealing glances amidst victory celebrations in Suna….

[eggsploded]

i never posted this lol

[butchfaith]

ok we've been discussing this in our archaeology groupchat and i'm curious

there's no right or wrong answer and obviously this is a very culturally sensitive question- the history (and present state) of displaying human remains is closely tied up with colonialism and (dis)respect for religious and cultural practices, which is why i'm really curious about how many people WOULD be ok with their body being displayed- and why/why not- so if u wanna expand on your answer in the tags please do!!

[critter-wizard]

you are all I have, you are the eyes that see, the air that breathes, how can I worship anything else?

[drenched-in-sunlight]

Yesterday for the first time I saw a post in a public forum that actually points out Marika has every reason to be so cold & distant towards Maliketh... thanks God.

The Two Fingers/ EIden Beast stood aside & let her entire family die, then when it successfully entrapped her in a literal divine prison it said “here we gave you a brother lol” like istg WHAT are you even saying. Her entire real family is already in a ditch !!! No prayers to the Gods help them! And now these Godlike beings are like take this random guy as your bro???

It’s confirmed in the base game Shadowbeast is like sleeper agent that the Two Fingers put there to monitor their Empyrean & off them if they try to rebel, no matter how earnest the Shadowbeast sounds. Ranni and Blaid literally grew up together & we still have to get rid of him at the end of her questline 💀 Marika was a young woman who had lost everything then forced to recognize some stranger as family. To her that must be some fucked up joke.

And get this, I do believe Maliketh and Blaidd care for Marika & Ranni genuinely, it’s a tragedy that they were born to bring “nothing but bale” to the person they love. Just like how Messmer, the beloved son in the Shadow, also became a curse to the person he loves the most in the end. That’s the doomed narrative they are trying to portray.

[aster-ish]

Just learned that the word "robot" is derived from the Czech word "robota" which means "forced labor," coined in 1920 for use in the Czech play Rossum's Universal Robots (which! Yes! ROZZUM from The Wild Robot appears to be a reference to)

I'm usually p unwell about robots in literature as it is, but just thinking about it....... their very existence.... inextricably linked to the concept of humanity's greed, arrogance, and cruelty: those themes aren't just a byproduct of what the subject naturally entails, they're implanted deep into the heart of the word itself.........

...and yet, no matter how much we as story writers like to subvert tropes.... no matter how much we as society change, and our stories change with us.... we still can't help but to humanize them. In part because of our pack bonding tendencies, but also because we've seen all too well that a person doesn't need to be artificial to be treated as inhuman. After all, the ones made to do robota were originally humans... Ough.

[kayanne369]

I genuinely think the main issues with Nandor and Guillermo is that they have completely different types of love language. Nandor isn't a words guys. He's never gonna say "I love you" or "You matter" or anything like that. He's never gonna tell someone how he feels deep down because that's not how he is. He's an actions dude. He holds hands, he protects, he, he jokes, he gives gifts. He sees acts of service as these deep intimate moments. Likewise, words mean very little to him so it doesn't occur to him to say anything because why would he need to. Guillermo, on the other hand is someone who needs words of validation. He needs to hear things, say things. And I think a really nice theme that's been prevalent throughout is their coming to mutually understand one another. To where we're at a point where Nanador is realising that Guillermo NEEDS to hear him say it. He needs him to say "You're super cool. You're a warrior. Fate brought us together. Come home." And Guillermo is realising that grabbing Nandor's hand and looking into his eyes is more intimate for him than anything else. This isn't a slow burn. This is the story of two people realising they've ALWAYS loved one another and I personally think that's really fucking beautiful tbh

[bonefall]

Clear Sky threw his son in front of a fox?!

YES!! He SHOVED him in front of a fox! It's in fury from the fact Thunder refused to kill Frost. This entire section is VERY poorly paced and glances over it in two paragraphs, so most people don't fully register it.

Clear Sky dragged Thunder down off the stump and shoves him at it, blaming him for bringing the fox to camp with his loud disobedience.

He then leaves Thunder to fight this fox on his own. Leaf and Falling Feather jump in to help him of their own accord. Clear Sky then tries to praise him for being strong and Thunder tells him to shove off for the first and last time.

It's not the last baby of his he knowingly and consciously endangers to prove a point. In Moth Flight's Vision, he refuses to allow Acorn Fur to get medical help for Tiny Branch's fox-inflicted injuries until his condition worsened, bellowing, "SkyClan does NOT ask for help unless there's no choice." AND didn't allow her to complete her training after he caused Micah's death.

Clear Sky is a serial child abuser. He is willfully neglectful, emotionally abusive, and physically violent.

[neiptune]

keep in mind that these are stories... that people are writing as a hobby... for free... most times for you to bust a nut...............

[vaguely-concerned]

do you ever think about how, when we get lucanis' ossuary mind note on what he was thinking during the fireplace scene at the end of his recruitment mission... what's implied to be his instinctive internal reaction as he's saying "you'd have to kill me" out loud sure isn't 'and I don't want to die'. it's '(and spite would die)'. do you think spite's gremlin-y candle-hungering give-me-FIRE! >:D presence has maybe saved that guy's life even more times and in more ways than are immediately obvious at a glance. do you ever. cry.

it's also very. him that the thing that would stay his hand on killing himself partially might be that he just isn't willing to visit the same cruelty or harm on spite as zara, even when accepting his passenger spirit as collateral damage would at least offer a chance to put an end to his own pain, which at that point he seems unable to see any other way of truly escaping or find real relief from than to die. there's so much resentment and fear and other understandable fraught emotions in spite and lucanis' relationship early on, but it's just as clear that deep down lucanis conceptualizes spite as fundamentally innocent in what's happened here -- perhaps, indeed, more innocent than he manages to conceptualize himself until someone else can help him get in there and start to untangle it with him. he's protective of spite in some subtle ways right from the start, taking pains to point out several times on the jog through the ossuary that the spirits here were just as much victims in what was done to them as anyone else. when spite acts out during the fireplace scene... how much of lucanis brushing it off the way he does is about the '*actively bleeding from the eyes* don't worry about me' avoidant side of it all, and how much is him trying to shelter spite from the eyes of people he does not know well enough yet to predict how they’ll react in response — towards himself or spite. (additional idea to really bring on the heartache: do you think he has maybe intervened in pretty much the same way between illario and caterina over the years and that’s how he does it so smoothly and automatically; it’s basically psychological muscle memory. Haha. ow.) 

Between that and the pretty consistent language he uses that frames spite as child-like, even when he means that in frustration/enfant terrible flavoured terms lol, you get the sense that regardless of how much Lucanis is aware of this on the surface, there is a deep instinctive protectiveness in him for spite. I think that even comes across in the scene where lucanis tells you he’ll continue to pursue a way to separate him and spite on the minrathous route. So I was kind of picking up on/working with that already subconsciously, but when I found that note it hit me like a sledgehammer that clearly in some part at least, the reason lucanis is still here is that he knows now that spite would die with him and doesn’t find that price acceptable. Spite thinks that lucanis mentally locking himself in his (torture :() room and refusing to speak to him is an act of rejection or trickery, but to my eyes taken with everything else we know about how lucanis’ brain tends to work… as much as it’s an expression of avoidance and fear and overwhelm and trying to get away from the voice pushing him towards action when the mere prospect of action fills you with despair to even contemplate (“There’s nowhere to go”), I think it’s also a mark of lucanis’ affection and protectiveness of spite. The guards along the way make it very clear that more so than to keep the outside world from coming in, this place is for protecting people from what might break out. 

And that’s why I think this is also such a good case study to look at lucanis' internal freeze logic and why it has been so adaptive for him up until now when faced with completely impossible emotional situations to which there are no good answers or causes of actions available, even though it's inherently and unavoidably one of those 'what's worse, the medicine or the disease' solutions a brain cooks up. lucanis by the point of inner demons is facing this conundrum: 1) I can't live like this, it hurts too much. I've been in pain so long I’ve got screams where my blood should be and it just keeps getting louder, and nothing really touches or helps that. 2) I can't die to escape this, because that would also kill spite (and also I've got a job to do I guess *working 9-5 slowed with reverb and with underwater sound distortion effects is playing in the background*). those are of course not actually his only options, but in the state he's in they are the only options he can conceive of. (that's not infrequently how it works, when the suffering is that intense and unrelenting. Nothing gives you tunnel sight quite like ‘I just need this to stop’ agony that has gone on long enough to add sheer soul exhaustion to the mix)

so what happens in the end? his freeze brain -- honed, I'm sure, through many long years of attachment trauma and abuse and loss for exactly this kind of 'uh-oh. Incoming FUBAR situation alert let’s go' -- kicks into action and makes him do nothing except what's externally required of him, so he can stay just functional and momentarily distracted by a plethora of avoidance behaviours enough to get through his daily life, if like not particularly happily so... and otherwise, as it were, locking himself in his room deep inside where nothing can touch him, where nothing gets in and nothing gets out, no harm allowed to either escape from within nor allowed to pierce through and get inside. numbness isn't actually a cure for that kind of suffering, but it's the closest thing you're likely to get with any immediacy and if you’re desperate enough by god you take those. It’s how he survived his upbringing, and it’s how he survived the ossuary — as he tells Davrin straight out, the trick to just shut down every part of his soul he can to get through intolerable pain, loss or helplessness. I don’t think that mechanism came to him in the ossuary the first time, I think that blueprint was deeply embedded in his neurons and went ‘ah. My time again. Not to worry I’m a bit of an expert at this I’ll get us through this yet (though you may not thank me for it by the end of it all)’. 

In that state he's unable to himself reach out and meaningfully ask for help (and also like... why would his inner world have any framework for that as even being on the table? this has never been an option before in his life, not in any safe or consistent way; he's fucked up the way he is because the same things/people that should have been and partially, comparatively, were the sources of help and relief and safety growing up are also the sources of pain and abuse, that eternal irreconcilable ambivalence, the double edged sword of unpredictable insecure attachment), but it also keeps him from doing anything uh drastic the other way too, on acting impulsively in ways that can’t be taken back. (that seems to be more illario’s role/dubious privilege in the family lol.) at many points in his life and especially growing up, freezing and going numb around the pain is as close to having control of anything as there was any hope of. 'harm will be inflicted on me unpredictably, but fuck you I don't have to truly feel it as long as I shut all this other stuff down as well, that's what I can control' nervous system logic. (it'll get you every time.) for what it’s worth I’m not so sure his nervous system judged that one incorrectly, I think that is the kind of rebellion you would have to cling to while being raised by someone like caterina, because look at illario if you want to know how much she respects and rewards anything more overt or active. (I mean, if you don’t succeed, at least. swing at Grandma Dellamorte you’d better not miss or you’ll meet that cane swinging at you the other way and she will not miss)

I say all this because I think it's as easy to demonize the freeze response as it is to demonize anger, to conceptualize it only as an obstructive force that, as bellara puts it, is one of the purest forms of a heart not seeming to want to let you be happy, or a mindless byproduct of trauma. But in my experience, the brain doesn’t generally come up with ‘stupid’ defense mechanisms. Even in the most maladaptive of coping mechanisms, there is at the core of it some part of you that once meant to save your life, no matter what trouble it is wreaking for you today. when you look at the setup of Lucanis’ soul, as it were, you can see the dual and in some ways genuinely noble and even tender qualities this response has in him, however misguided: it does imprison, but it also protects, and it means to protect; for all the pain along the way it has sheltered all the parts of his soul that are most precious and breakable, the most vulnerable parts that want to live and so so importantly love completely and freely. Lucanis thinks he’s protecting not even primarily himself but everyone he loves by staying where he is. (“It would be better for me to stay here than to risk losing you”) A child’s logic, to be sure, but logic of a kind and clearly one that caterina has encouraged in him because that’s a conception of love it’s been very useful for her for him to have. Freeze looks like utter hopelessness on the surface, but in some ways I think it’s the utmost triumph of hope — a spare and unrelenting winter that exists because it thinks one day spring might still come, and the things too precious and fragile to thrive in your life as it is now might bloom then. 

He is an adult now, and Caterina no longer controls his entire world, physically and emotionally. There’s finally room for other things, other people, himself, in his life, without everything having to defer to the gravitational force of what Caterina wants from him at the end of the day. And while I think her jumpscaring him with the First Talon position is partly her attempt to wrangle him back into the status quo of control she once had, I’m not sure it’s going to work quite the way she might hope — at least in the Treviso saved route, there are just too many fresh spring shoots in his life at that point that could grow into something new, it’s too late to trample all the saplings growing up through the cracks in time (and indeed some of them might also fight back). (The outlook on the Minrathous saved route is um. Perhaps less convincingly immediately hopeful to me and the prospect of actually getting around to healing further down the road, but I refuse to give up on him that’s my little guy and he’s above all incredibly smart and stubborn and not a quitter and all the rest of this still remains true beneath it all, just like. Give him a moment here.) His hopes and dreams have diversified while she had her back turned lmao he suddenly keeps them with so many more people than just her and Iillario now. She doesn’t hold the monopoly of meaning and connection in his life the way she used to. And whether out of love (you know. Hope is every man’s prerogative I suppose) at seeing him really happy for perhaps the first time or sheer pragmatism, I think she’s going to have to accept that and adapt her ways of doing things with him accordingly, or else have him drift even further away from her.

Spite is the urgent impatient voice that starts to break through to go ‘that moment is now it HAS to be now. We need to shake off the shackles and illusions and face what’s actually here so we can learn to properly live now, or this winter will starve us to death as surely as anything Zara could do to us’. And he is right! As crucial as this soul-starvation landscape has been in survival, it has clearly reached the end of its sustainability, you can’t survive permanently on frost alone. I just also want to recognize the credit Lucanis (and his fucked up but valiant nervous system <3 pour one out for a real one) also deserves for stubbornly holding on in any way he had to until Spite’s true escape project is even an option for either of them. Especially since Lucanis seems to harbour a lot of self-loathing and frustration over his own propensity for freeze — “You know him. You can open the door, but he won’t walk through it”  (still one of the saddest most painful things I’ve ever heard. In case you were wondering. He knows. He knows what he’s like, and he despairs of it, he thinks it means it’s his own fault he still feels like this. Augh.) The real point at the end of the day is not that spite saved lucanis or vice versa, but that as traumatic as it was to get there and against all cultural expectations, it is ultimately their enmeshed condition, their togetherness, that saved them both. (which, again, when you consider the cultural narrative of possession and spirits most andrastian nations are working with…what a radical conclusion to come away with haha. Not unprecedented at all, if you look at Wynne and her spirit, but on a deeper and more psychological plane than ever and even more impactful for it, to me.)