#what a complicated man and character

[vaguely-concerned]

My two cents on how much of Mind!Varric is Rook’s mind trying to fill the blank space and how much is Solas actively talking through a convenient blood magic paper doll of the mind: I think it's a mix of both, a truly collaborative psychosocial horrorshow if you would, but waaaay more towards the second. It feels too directed and tactical at times to be anything else. Rook's mind is willing to go along with the denial phase as far as it can fucking carry them to not have to face the grief and regret and does its part in papering over details that don’t make any sense, the way brains will strive to create coherent meaning even out of deeply confusing input, but to my understanding it's a collaborateur in how that plays out, not the instigator or control center. Solas is using it as a path to agency and to gather insight into Rook as a person unguarded as he can't count on in his own guise. (That stoic option that leads to him being like 'oh I see you're cautiously denying me access to your inner life. well. at least you still have Varric to talk to. y'know as an outlet :)'. You absolute BITCH Solas! That alone convinced me that he HAS to have an active hand in it on some level.)

My guess is that it takes considerable effort on Solas’ part to make Mind!Varric do anything more involved or complicated than seeming to sit up in bed and give casual commentary, and that’s why he keeps having eerie five minute shallow pep talks with you before he announces he conveniently needs a nap aaanyway good luck kid you got this haha. When he’s just spouting NPC lines from his bedrest, I’m ready to believe that could be Rook’s mind being allowed to improv lines for him more freely because it’s less about Solas trying to get something out of them or working an angle and more ‘Still here! Still totally alive and fine and the mentor figure you know and love and trust :) don’t even worry about it! Thankfully there is no war in Ba Sing Sei, as we all know’ upkeep work lol. Rook’s mind is allowed to set the tone of Varric, the outlines, but not always the content. 

AND, on a (beautifully fucked up) character psychology level, I feel like Solas is indulging in actually getting to be the good supportive mentor figure to Rook with one hand to assuage the guilt he feels about what he's done -- and what he's going to do -- to them with the other. Same internal logic as he uses in Trespasser about the Qun. ‘Almost everyone is going to die from the course of action I’m doggedly pursuing eventually. But at least I can make their last years happier and freer and kinder than they would have been otherwise. and that kind of makes up for it right. a little bit. doesn't it. doesn't that make it better at least. I need that to make it better)'. Did I really take your beloved mentor and friend from you if you don’t know yet that I did? Some philosophers would argue not really! So it’s probably almost ok actually. Isn’t it even a little noble that I’m taking all this grief and guilt on myself and shielding you for now. With undertones that I’m not sure he would realize himself (and might be mortified by if he did) that he is so incredibly lonely, and even a dishonest and indirect emotional connection is more than nothing when you’re that desperate. In this setup he gets idk. Both the control he craves so incredibly badly in relationships and over himself, and the scraps, the fading afterimages, of intimacy and warmth and companionship, even second hand. The one thing Solas and Rook agree on deep deep down is that they really wish Varric weren't gone. They're handshake memeing this in the saddest and most creepy way possible.

I think an important element too is that Solas needs Rook and their team to *succeed* —  up to a certain point. He needs someone to hold the two other elven mean girls off until he can get out of here. Ideally, in a perfect world, even do all the hard work of killing them so he can swoop in at the end and do his thing when both sides are exhausted and out of resources to stop him, and then Bob’s your uncle! Same logic as he was using with Corypheus, and after that worked out so well, too! King of choosing to never learn from a single solitary mistake he’s ever made even though i fully believe he could have the capacity to Fen’Harel <3 The underlying idea isn’t flawed, you see, it was just unforeseen circumstances getting in the way. This time for sure it’ll all work out the way I cleverly imagined it in my head beforehand. Cue By Talos this can’t be happening etc. in the form of a statue almost crushing him like a bug. 

So he's providing guidance and forging Rook into a leader from two angles: one Rook might not trust, and one they probably will. Shaping them into what he needs slowly and carefully. He’s helping you hone your team into their most effective state, as he might have done with his own agents back in the day, setting up his chess pieces even if he has to squint through two glimpsed realities to do it haha. Pincer maneuver of an insidious stealth mentor you never asked for. Also… at one point mind Varric gives you a whole little monologue about how Solas' problem is that he’s always seen his interpersonal connections as flaws and see where it’s landed him, all alone and the worst part? it hasn’t even worked. it’s all been for nothing he’s back where he began with nothing to show for it but his mistakes. Like...that has such strong 'uh okay happy to play your therapist from two rooms away here what the fuck kind of traumadump is this' energy to me, I’m not sure Rook like. Thinks that much about Solas as a private person. So much of Solas' self-loathing and futile insights into his own flaws seem to shine through in Mind!Varric's dialogue all the time — I just can't believe that there's no guiding hand behind it as it were. 

Most of all. I feel like people underestimate the degree to which Solas is incredibly funny. As in, he has a very consistent and recognizable sense of humour. It’s one of my very favourite things about him. We must remember — it is crucial that we always keep in mind — Orlesian accent and wig Solas from May The Dread Wolf Take You (my beloved, the explanation for why I love this dude even with the. All of the everything else. No one does it quite like him). He is not at all above doing things or adding little flourishes for his own obscure amusement, in fact that seems to me to be one of his most consistent traits. The Randy Dowager Quarterly comment Varric has? The ‘Maybe this is the Dread Wolf’s revenge. Forcing us to house sit for him’ thing? To Me this is 100% Solas amusing himself in his boring Fade jail surrounded by the screaming hellscape of all his regrets. Source: it came to me as divine revelation through pure vibes trust me bro 

If nothing else I find it much more narratively interesting personally if the connection between Rook and Solas really is that defenselessly intimate and entwined (and so unbalanced!), and the sense of violation and invasion and betrayal afterwards consequently all the more nauseatingly intense. Even if you kept him at arm’s length in the open, he’s been under your skin the whole time, looking around, gathering what he needs to destroy you, wearing the face of a friend. Regretfully, probably, but choosing to do it every step of the way anyway. (Sound familiar, Inquisitor? Solas doesn’t have that many tricks when you actually look at it, he keeps returning to old tried and true ones like a dog with a bone haha.) Maybe he even genuinely meant some of it as mercy, which only makes it so much worse. It makes his sin against his own core principles of autonomy and the freedom of all beings in mind, spirit and body so much more juicily grave if it’s something he pursues actively and consistently, rather than it half-falling into his lap as a happy accident mainly orchestrated by Rook’s own subconscious. Solas, too, is at his very lowest point, the closest to giving in and becoming his own antithesis fully that he’s ever been, and it makes the choice of whether you still reach out your hand to him one last time or not all the more impactful and difficult.

[wasteland-wrecker]

Your art is amazing and I admire how consistent your art is for characters! Could you share your process or a speed paint of your work?

Okay so first of all I’m not a professional, so keep this in mind while you read.

My process for a colored piece is very simple: sketch - refined sketch (lineart) - flat colors - shadows and lighting rough placement- rendering - final adjustments (+ a bit of chromatic aberration and noise)

Tricks I use: flip horizontally the canvas a lot of times while sketching - zoom out to see the whole canvas in a miniature (easy to spot mistakes) - put on a gray filter on the colored piece to see if the contrast is good - go away from the drawing for some time, come back to find the mistakes you couldn't see before - never do a piece in one day from start to finish - avoid tangents…

As long as I’m happy with the results lately, I see there’s much I could improve.

Anything else you want to know, feel free to ask!

(Sorry for the bad quality of this recording 😭)

[animangalover-writes]

Yk it really bothers me when I see people talking about eurylochus and the crew like they were the problem. It just feels like everyone is just missing the point. Yes they stopped listening to ody, yes eurylochus opened the wind bag, but that's what makes them so human.

Picture this, you leave your home to fight in a war. It takes literal years for this war to be over. You've lost friends, you miss your family, you've been through hell. You're starving and your captain tells you they found food on this island.

And then the cyclops happens. More friends die, you barely escape with your life, and your captain gives his name to the creature that killed your friends.

And everything after that is a direct cause of that decision.

So you hesitate to trust him. Yes he's smart, he's capable, he always has a plan. But he would do anything to get home, and you know that. So when he comes back to the ship claiming to have a bag full of wind, and when he refuses to let anyone near, refuses to trust his own crew, you get suspicious.

Its been about a decade by this point, and your captain seems to get more and more desperate to get home. A god is after you. Odysseus is forcing himself to stay away, all to make sure nobody touches that bag.

Its human, it's realistic, it makes sense that someone would open the bag. Because odysseus stopped trusting you, and so you stop trusting him. So you open the bag.

I just find it frustrating that people look at the crew/eurylochus as bad guys because of this, as pawns for ody to get home and thats it. The point of the show is that ody has become a monster, has dealt with and left behind his humanity. We, as listeners, root for him. We give him grace because of his circumstances. Because he's the main character.

But for some reason, people don't give that same grace to the crew. They're human, their circumstances are awful too. They have no idea if they will get home, they aren't sure then can trust their captain anymore. They question things. They make mistakes. They cause the deaths of others. It's human, its that feeling you get when you think that maybe hope is lost after all, it's what this story is about. Mistakes and loss and blame.

People dislike Eurylochus because he opened the bag. But odysseus gave the cyclops his name. And polites trusted the lotus eaters. And Athena told odysseus to be cruel to a fault. Nobody here is innocent, not really. And none of them knew better either. They were working with what they had, with the terrible circumstances at hand. It's no wonder they made mistakes. It's no wonder people died.

Why are we ignoring the humanity of the crew? Why are we arguing that they, or that eurylochus, deserved it? If the story was about them, odysseus would be seen as the bad guy. But he's the main character, so the others are stupid and wrong, right? All that matters is that odysseus gets home, right? Even if it costs the lives of his crew. His crew who stopped trusting him when he stopped trusting them. His crew who he sacrificed to get home.

I think we're missing the point here. Odysseus did become a monster, and although we cheer for him getting home and Penelope and Telemachus forgive him, we have to acknowledge that he did do terrible things. Those men will never see their families again. Why are we erasing that humanity in them?

Humans do bad things for the sake of saving themselves or the ones they love. That includes Odysseus. That includes Eurylochus. That includes the crew. And that includes every other character in this musical.

[emberunderscore]

i wanna draw marcel but what the fuuuuckkk is his outfit??? like ik ven's shown what the skirt looks like but WHAT THE FUCK IS THE SHIRT???? WHAT AREE YOUUUUU

chat i cannot look at minecraft skins and go ah yes this is what it would look like as clothes . all the mc blorbos i draw i take reference from other art/cosplays . i have no fucking clue what marcels shirt is supposed to be . like . are those suspenders ??? wjat ?

[tilseptemberends]

People when the morally grey characters they asked for aren't presented as being 100 percent in the right by the narrative and don't make objectively "correct" decisions

[flour-is-a-spice]

My roommate and I were talking about hobbies Connor would take up post-pacifist ending and we agreed that he would be a big fan of poker

[ferronickel]

Thinking bout the time someone yelled at me because they didn't understand butches.

[lucabyte]

🐮

[catboygirljoker]

Questions 1, 21, 23 and 25 for Xiggles on that character questions meme (surprised if no one sent any about him already)

oagh thank you !! i havent received any asks for that ask game yet actually!

character ask game :o)

1. Why do you like or dislike this character?

[vibrating] i have a normal and countable number of things i like about him. for right now: hes representative of many of my favorite things about KH.

one of those things is its thematic depth—he has really interesting interactions with a lot of my favorite themes in the games, including identity/personhood, fatalism, authority figures failing those under their authority, also a lot of the Christian themes/motifs (and the ways those themes are played with), also the ways in which characters parallel each other or act as foils to each other. lotta stuff to dig into there!

another thing i like about KH is its sprawling, epic scope. and luxubar is present for or has a hand in nearly every single plot element in the games. call that bitch humpty dumpty the way he was always there

another thing that characters, like. fuck up? they make mistakes and are wrong about things. they lose sight of their noble goals or do the wrong thing in pursuit of them and end up being unable to achieve those goals. they spread lies and misinformation on accident or on purpose. and boy howdy luxubar has made a lot of mistakes and told a lot of lies. hes a complicated messy flawed character!

all of that AND he's Fucking Weird!!! just a fully bizarre person who says weird shit! even if you dont know anything about his backstory he's still one of the most memorable and fun characters in the series!

in terms of what i dont like about him. 99% of the things someone might criticize about him, i would respond with "yeah thats the point, thats why he rules as a chracter". but if someone said "i hate xigbar because hes a misogynist" i wouldnt even have a response. like yeah. he says some weird "haha girls am i right" shit in Days. i Dont like how he talks to Aqua in BbS. the only thing i could really say is "xigbar is a misogynist because he is in a game series written by misogynists and you have to correct for that" but i still kinda grimace every time he talks to or about a female character. really hoping thats not intentional and future games wont continue to characterize him that way

21. If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?

oh man i could give a dozen different answers for this...in developing his overarching story in my current fic, im really enjoying exploring the like. existential horror of his Whole Deal with the added wrench of "trans man in a cis man's body". no body dysphoria at the cost of total alienation from his body and from potential community with other trans people. unable to participate in conversations about transness; unable to explain why. especially since my other protagonist [oc lamia] is transmasc and has his own complicated relationship with gender and his own body. much too think about !!!

i dont really know how to answer the "what i dont like" part of the question lol...like i write fic as a way to explore a piece of media and its characters. saying something like "i wish he had [x] characteristic so i could do [y] plot thing" feels like saying "i wish this person im interviewing had said something different so i could write this interview differently". like idk! im doing literary criticism, effectively, my writing is responsive to the character, i just writes him like i sees him

23. Favorite picture of this character?

oh MAN i could give a million different answers for this.... right now im thinking a lot about this half second pose he has in DDD.

just something very funny to me about seeing him giving a thumbs up. the supportive smiler.

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

ive answered this question here! relinking because theres a video clip involved lol. primarily my first impression of him was "evil little league coach". that was before i even played Days, he's REALLY an evil little league coach in that game. it's remained basically true for him to me this whole time.

now whenever i see him im just like "THE BITCH HIMSELF <3 <3 <3 <3 <3" and i kick my legs and smile and grin and clap and play.

[forcedhesitation]

why should it just be steve who has all the torturous purgatory realm fun?

[thefloatingwriter]

relating to your reblog.. no one actually gets beetee i fear. minus you mostly. but the consensus of him being a chill tech guy and not in part a mass murderer both in the arena and in the rebellion & also pretty morally grey in a sense? yknwwww. yknw!

yes yes yes. all do this yes. he’s morally gray. it is so obvious he is morally gray it is practically written on his forehead. his morals are definitely questionable. that is so obvious and yet…

at this point i think i need a therapy session simply so i can rant about other people’s interpretations of beetee. because. do you even understand him. did you even read the trilogy. like i don’t even know what to tell some of you at this point except that you just don’t get him like i do.

[herenvibing]

cr3 is gonna end and the pc’s still feel like the same people to me :|

(crcritical content in the tags feel free to skip)

[junebugdunes]

I hope the guilt hits you like a brick

[cicadascribbles]

One day I’ll make more fanart I swear but unfortunately there’s little gecko Teifling thing my brain made called Desmond Vassago that’s lording over my mind weather I like it or not. So here’s a doodle turned class art project of the criminal himself.

[artemx746]

really hope it becomes much more clear in the future of fool's gold that the foreclaimers aren't bad because they don't have empathy, but rather because they based their society on people having a set "value" and killing people who aren't "Valuable enough". Plus they also tortured a god for 300+ years

[angelfrogs]

Considering the latest chapter I am not sure if Yoshida’s dead but I think even if he was in control of himself Denji would not give a damn about Yoshida’s fate. In fact after everything I would not be surprised if he was cool with the idea of killing Yoshida personally, nor do I think he would be the wrong for wanting that!

There’s a lot this last chapter has left up in the air! Yoshida’s fate being one of the major unanswered questions, and genuinely I have no idea if he’s dead or not currently to me it’s about a 50/50 chance. I stand by on what I’ve said on him before, if he’s dead I believe he died full of regret and I think he may have died outright apologizing (though in this state that probably wouldn’t register to Denji at all). If he isn’t dead? He probably will be dead soon, if not at the hands of Denji then by someone else. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next chapter is Yoshida focused for this reason but given how much Fujimoto likes to jump around and slowly weave the scene together I’m not holding my breath. Either way, while I have always found Yoshida interesting and have been waiting for the other shoe to drop when it comes to this character for a LONG TIME, I think that his fate will be, and should be, a vehicle to discuss Denji’s current emotional and moral standing. I do not think Denji, or rather chainsaw man, would hesitate to kill Yoshida. (Though I don’t think he’d actively seek Yoshida out or try and track him down if he ran) There are two ways Denji could kill Yoshida right now and that depends on, like you mentioned, how in control Denji is of Chainsaw Man currently, my first instinct on seeing this version of csm (the version that can eat devils out of existence) is to say that this isn’t Denji at all but Pochita, like what was true before. However the circumstances in which this csm appears are quite different and it’s very possible that through all this emotional turmoil Denji found away to fully take hold of his devil side and keep his own consciousness. So if Denji has/does kill Yoshida as this version of chainsaw man it’s either done unfeelingly with pochita in the “drivers seat” sort of speak… OR Denji kills him personally in his own rage, as you mentioned. To an extent I agree with you that Denji would not give a fuck about Yoshida’s fate, mostly in that I think Denji would not care if Yoshida as a person is alive or dead. I do, however, think that if Chainsaw Man kills Yoshida, that will weigh on Denji. If Denji kills Yoshida mindlessly and without full control? Well then we are back to the conversation of the ways being chainsaw man, being half devil, dehumanizes Denji. If Denji does it consciously in rage? Then I think this would actually be more in line with the narratives of exploring Denji’s sexuality: he would have to face that even though he wanted it there would be no actual gratification in doing this because it’s a stand in for what he really needs. Revenge like this is unfulfilling either way, and while I absolutely agree with you that I don’t think he’d be in the wrong at all for wanting him dead I don’t think that’s the actual dilemma he’s going to have to face, I think it will be the horrifying realization that this carnage means nothing to him. But that’s just my two cents!

And a side tangent while I’m on the subject! I do think that there is a way where Yoshida is completely and irreversibly caught but he still survives: if Asa intervenes. Asa cares a lot about Denji, Yoshida is someone she knows personally, and she is someone with extremely strong feelings about morality (she doesn’t like the idea of killing people so intensely she keeps the WAR DEVIL from doing it) I think if she’d be able to she would try and talk Denji out of it. I think narratively if there’s going to be anything that snaps him out of this spree it’s going to be that but once again I’m not holding my breath on this lol! Especially bc now we have to deal with this no mouth situation….