#this is just pettiness ignore me

[iheartbookbran]

My favorite part about the Debling plot was Penelope and Cressida doing the most over there top cat-fighting in order to win him over, not because they genuinely liked the guy, but because they wanted to escape their families and also lowkey just hate each other.

[agnes-come-back-challenge]

I love that everyone in TMA is just. Unremarkable. Jon isnt a heroic character; he's self-loathing and depressed and he exhibits the same self-pity as I do when I'm self-loathing and depressed. He doesn't stand out for his strength of will or quick-thinking or virtue. He's a good person but he stops trying to stay human when it gets uncomfortable. He's everything that a regular person is when theyre trapped in a horrible situation and it's ugly and insufferable and Real.

[ruporas]

being a little petty (ID in alt)

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[shokveyv]

shut up

[relaxxattack]

rereading the hivebent commentary makes me so annoyed that people are never really willing to analyze the actual effects that alternian culture clearly had on every troll, especially the highbloods. pretty much the only troll who ever actually gets taken in the context of her upbringing is vriska.

no one ever seems willing to think about the character arcs of trolls like equius and terezi, who are also bluebloods with extremely hypocritical and toxic understandings of the people around them-- equius is boiled down to a gross creep who is just like that naturally and definitely didn't get it from his society in any way, whilst terezi is scrubbed of virtually all her flaws and turned into a strange sort of woke love interest character who is all about being gay and too cool to be tricked by any of the alternian propaganda. quadrants? classism? how silly! terezi would never believe in stupid shit like that. she's quirky! and GAY!

despite the fact that equius and terezi both obviously have much, much more to their personalities than that-- and the alternian empire is informing way more dangerous things about these kid's beliefs than "you can kiss your enemies".

[unabashedllamamusic]

Even in the show where the two main characters are lesbians, the show focuses on their relationship, they end up together, and fuck on screen, sapphics still aren’t the fandom’s focus. Yes, jayvik and timebomb are great. But I’m both unsurprised and deeply disappointed that the sapphics are getting overshadowed. As always.

[girl4music]

Eh… Xena has her moments but lesbihonest.

Gabrielle is the jealous one of the two of them.

[micawla]

Magnus Bane, actively ignoring Alec since he won’t acknowledge their relationship: Alexa, please play Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan

[nectardaddy]

goodbye fuck ass people that unfollowed once I said I was going by they/them now

rest in piss

[sophiethewitch1]

www!reader WILL call batman a pussy for not killing on her private twitter. she does it like every other day. its cathartic

[writeouswriter]

Girl, help, the book authors are trying too hard to be "hip" with the fleeting "teen lingo" and trends again, immediately dating their works before they're even released

[glossolali]

happy 2nd mighty nein finale anniversary everyone and don't forget molly is alive 😌💜💜💜

[hells1nfern0]

Everyone whos saying they pulled a 5 hour long bait and switch on people just for the hl2vrai trailer. It wasn't just a bit for that it was so much more than that. Everyone is switching on a dime calling it such a good joke or staying stuck mad and pissy about it. Genuinely it was a fun stream. It was something the RTVS team clearly had a lot of fun making, they put 3 years of work and planning into it. There is more to them than HLVRAI. They never directly said it would be HL2VRAI.

But honestly though. I can't blame them for teasing it as such. If YOU put 3 years of effort into something would you allow it to just get ignored by everyone because it isn't what everyone cares about you for. Or would you want to make sure all the people started liking you for it initially would see how you grew.

BrBaVRAI was the same thing that HLVRAI was supposed to be. A fun stream with friends.

It isn't just for you man. It's supposed to be something fun and if you genuinely threw a shitfit about it or if you gave up on it called it unfunny, mid, or even bad. Only to turn around once you got what you Wanted.

You do not deserve what the RTVS crew will make.

You do not deserve HL2VRAI

EDIT: Honestly I don't care about most of the shit people are upset about. Yeah its fine for them to troll you they're known for that. Don't treat their work like it was always shit up until the point they gave you the shit you were waiting for. Just because you wanted a Twix doesnt mean a Snickers doesn't taste just as sweet. They aren't morally bad people for a prank that upset you.

[alibrandi]

9 Favourite Albums - Choose 9 & then tag 9 people! Or you can do nine singles or EPs, whatever lol.

Tagging @cactus-bag @catsafari25 @labyrinthal @sleeeepy-demon @retourne-toi-eurydice @belladonnafey @scorpius-rising @cry4judas @atuans @nicey-sandokan @evyes no obligations feel free 2 ignore

Albums listed (and me rambling) under the cut

TIME - ELO: my mum's favourite album that i first Properly listened to when i was 13. it's just the best sci-fi concept album ever....i love you jeff!!

13 Tales of Love & Revenge - The Pierces: sexy indie duo, most known for the song Secret, which isn't even in the top 5 of the best songs of the album. a treasure from when i was 11, and just figuring out i like girls.

Greatest Hits - The Eagles: again, my mum's interests becoming my own. it was really hard to pick between this and Long Road Out of Eden, but ultimately the greatest hits r that for a reason.

Laurel Hell - Mitski: my fave mitski album, heat lightning is underappreciated!!! and yeah just. its about solitude. recognition but not in the way you wanted or expected. emotional rollercoaster. im not eloquent enough to describe it and mitski does it better in under 2 minutes anyway.

Strange Trails - Lord Huron: again another hard toss between this and long lost but st wins out purely bc the transitions rule, and meet me in the woods + the yawning grave make me crazyyyy. so happy i got to hear those live in jan. lord huron is like what if a cowboy was also a ghost. thats the only way i can describe it.

Electra Heart - Marina and the Diamonds: i am not immune to music i heard at 12 years old. shame she's never made anything as good as this again.

Are We Having Fun Yet? - Black/Colin Vearncombe: another one of mum's. She found this guy when someone at Sanity was playing the album over the store speakers. loved it ever since, and introduced it to me. wistful ballads, jazzy touches, a little bit sexy.

Coyote Stories - The Crane Wives: this was a 2016-18 discovery maybe? i just know i was in school. im into folk indie i cant help it.

Wasteland, Baby! - Hozier: shout out to afro-elf for posting about movement n the whole ep, which is what spurred me to actually try this dude's music. and now i love him. but wasteland baby is immaculate: no skips, he roars in some songs and is as gentle as drizzle in others.

[sysig]

Still a thief at heart, stealing kisses (Patreon)