#what a little fucked up family Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[lacehartz]

nsfw gif below cut , cw in tags.

camgirl!reader showing off her pretty tits online in the safety of her room, door locked and lights low. tracing her fingers over her puffy nipples as she thanks her number one fan for the generous donation he’s just sent by dripping her saliva all over her chest. little does she know, her top supporter lives in the same house as her, not even two rooms down. rafe of course didn’t know that he was jerking off to his sister of all people, but the visual similarities between the camgirl and you had him coming back every night, cock hard and leaking in his trunks.

[vaguely-concerned]

huh. you know something I just consciously put together for the first time about caterina and lucanis' relationship is that through the game we get to hear them talk about each other a lot, but we get very few chances to hear them speak with each other at any length at all. contrast it with other companions whose storylines have elements of 'believed lost/long time no see relative returns!' like bellara and davrin, where we get to see both of them have several pretty in-depth conversations with cyrian and eldrin. hell I think even rook talks with varric longer in the regret prison scene than we ever get to see lucanis and caterina interact directly.

(and when we do see them interact, it's mostly one-sided -- it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, caterina who is doing most of the talking and giving all the orders, as he ruefully observes is her wont after murder of crows. including jumpscaring him with 'you're first talon now btw' and the shocked pikachu face in five acts he goes through in response lmao. perhaps it's more accurate to say that she talks at him and he reacts, than that they talk to each other much.)

it has such an interesting effect too, because in deliberately denying us direct insight or experience and only having this mosaic of description from each of them to go on, as well as forcing us to pay attention to the negative space of what is carefully not said, it's evocative along the same principle that you never actually show the monster in a horror film. if you've read the wigmaker job you have a clearer image of the more uh. worrying elements at play here going in, but there is something fascinatingly insidious and naturalistic in the way it's 'hushed up' in the game itself. she has his complete loyalty both as a member of her house and, more importantly, that of an abused child to a parent figure. he readily admits several times that she's a difficult person to live with, an even more difficult person to be loved by ("even for me. and I was her favourite")... but never once does he actively blame her nor truly conceptualize that he has every right to do so (that he can be angry with her and still love her, because whether he should or not he unavoidably does), or that she might have acted differently than she did, that she made a choice every time to hurt him. even affectionately he speaks of her as a force of nature, an act of god -- something that can't be reasoned or pleaded with or resisted, something you can only hope to navigate with as little pain as possible and pray to survive. let yourself get carried away by the riptide, resisting it will only make it worse. you don't compromise with a hurricane, you just try to find the best shelter you can and cross your fingers while you wait for it to pass and be calm again.

love is that hurricane. you do whatever she asks. you earn her continued affection day by day by never letting her down. you only want the things she tells you it's okay to want and cut everything else away preemptively. ("A wyvern tooth dagger?? I loved wyverns as a boy --Caterina would never let me have one of these, though." and as we have all wept and gnashed our teeth over, it never even OCCURS to him that he's a like thirty-five year old adult man who can buy himself any dagger he wants at any time. she said he couldn't have one. so he'll never have one. that's just how it works. and maybe if Illario could just accept that and find his peace with it like I have, this whole thing wouldn't be so difficult. oh lucanis.)

such is the price -- and the cost -- of being loved by her, it's a loan on which the interest will never stop piling up. you have to keep paying it down in perfection every day if you want to keep it. who got the worse deal there: the grandson who has abandoned everything else in life to live up to that and mostly succeeded, until the day he's so burned out and broken it threatens to no longer be an option, or the grandson who can never seem to scrape together enough worth in her eyes no matter how he begs, borrows or steals it, how he hustles and plays dirty?

one of the worst things that can happen to anyone is to be loved by a selfish god. another one of the worst things that can ever happen to anyone is to not be loved by a selfish god. (hope that helps, boys!) even in betraying everything else, Illario can't bring himself to hurt his grandmother, because that would defeat the whole point. who would he defiantly be proving himself worthy to, without her. in love, devotion, submission, hatred, frustration, bitterness, everything is defined in relation to her, you can spot the gravitational force of it through how the dellamorte family move through time and space. she -- her love and regard and attention -- is still the sun both of their worlds orbit around, even as adults. the game might never tell you outright 'she used to beat and starve them growing up. for their own good you see, so they'd be strong (and broken down enough for her to build them up again however she wanted but I'm sure that's incidental)', but if you know even a little bit about how these dynamics can work the writing is on the wall everywhere you look and all the more unsettling for it.

follow lucanis' freeze-logic and fraught interpersonal catch 22 irreconcilable mixed emotions problems back far enough, looong before the ossuary entered the picture, and you start to see caterina's ghost around every fucking corner. she is so proud of him. (well, she would be. she made him. she forged exactly the knife she needed and it rests willingly, devotedly, in her hands, it would return to her every time because it doesn't know love as anything but to be a knife. his tama never taught him how to be anything else. his biggest fear with her is that she won't even want him back, the way he is now.) to the best ability of her soul, whatever parts of it survived a lifetime of crow politics and 'five children, eight grandchildren, only Illario and me left now', I think she really does loves him. he certainly loves her, with all the sincerity and artless desperation of a child, of the little boy he was once. and what she's done to him (and to illario, for all his shitty gremlin scar-ass antics lol) is awful. the harm is real, and the love is real, and trying to find a way for these two truths to exist in the same space is driving all three of them their own individualized forms of insane. you know. the way only family can and so often does lol.

through implications and short glimpses and having to put the pieces together yourself, you can have the feeling that there is very genuine mutual love and attachment in this relationship... and that beneath that there is something so profoundly wrong. and the sneaking '...oh shit it gets worse the longer I think about it' horror of that is more effective for me at least than the stark in-your-face presentation of the facts of the matter could have been. the love is here. the love is here. it only ever makes it worse.

[peace-hunter]

tfone au where OP is created as the last of the primes but way after them, a sparkling born at what were thought to be the last days of the war against the quintessons, the beginning of a new generation of peace after eons of war. a child meant to be loved and raised knowing nothing of war nor sacrifice.

he's kept mostly out of the spotlight by his siblings, who don't wish to expose him to everyone's optics so young, and want to wait until the war is done and over to properly introduce him to their people.

except of course the primes are betrayed and murdered by sentinel, the war is lost and everyone who knows and cared for the truth is either banished or outright killed in order to suppress it.

and the high guard, the ones the primes trusted the most, the ones that were supposed to protect them, the ones who failed in their most important duty, have to make a choice. to take the last prime, their last hope, with them to the surface, a hostile environment where there's little to no supplies and where they'll be hunted down by both sentinel and the quintessons as the biggest threat to their regimen.

or hide him in plain sight. place him where sentinel won't think to look for him. one more sparkling among many. and hope it will be enough to keep him alive. pray to primus that he'll protect his last child long enough for them to come back for him when it's safer (even if most of them have already lost their faith on him when he allowed the rest of his children to be massacred like that)

they almost lose their resolve when they realize they will have to take the little one's cog away in order to make him blend in with the rest of the newborns (and oh do they burn with murderous intent when they see what sentinel has done to their people but it's not the time yet-) but in the end they decide an impaired little prime is better than a dead one.

and so in the chaos of thirteen dead primes and a sudden energon crisis, a little sparkling who very few mechs really knew about and even fewer had seen completely vanishes. and in the depths of iacon a mech in charge of a new batch of newborns scratches their helm in confusion as they realize they must have miscounted the first time.

optimus prime is quietly erased from any official records by sentinel, written off as dead when they find a sparkling's frame mangled beyond recognition after an attack on the base of those rebels that insist on being a thorn on his side. killing the sparkling hadn't been precisely in his plans, he probably could've found some use for it after all, but he's not particularly upset about it either.

and orion pax grows up with an ache on his spark that tells him he's missing something far more important than a t-cog and dreams of gentle and loving hands, cradling him against the frames of mechs he cannot recall the faces of.

[skiitter]

love how loyal the bg3 gang is. like most of these freaks are prickly little assholes and yet by act 3 they're all just like "hey [Insert Companion Here] may be objectively The Worst but so are we and we'll kill you for even the slightest hint of disrespect towards them"

[xxplastic-cubexx]

snap's uber cringe vampire cherik rambling !!!!!! read at your own risk of charles/erik origins But If They Were Vampires and more !!!!

very simple makeshift vampire age map for the sake of understanding this vague timeline i have (hint: just multiply by ten) this is all subject to change because time is mean and im indecisive

infancy - 0 - 40

childhood - 50 - 120 years

adolescence - 130 - 170 years

emerging adulthood - 180 - 240 years

older adulthood - +250 years

elderly - +700 years

about dhampirs: they're not immortal like vampires, they just have a (much) longer life expectancy than humans (they really are just like 'weaker' vampires in this, only possessing half of their strengths and weaknesses)

'what's our time period' EXCELLENT question brother.

jk i think the main events will be set victorian-edwardian period (1850's-1910's) but charles and erik are at least a couple centuries old- probably born amidst the late 1500's (1580's-90's more specifically), maybe meet during the 1800's

charles' profile

charles heralds from a wealthy vampire family whos had their influence in england for centuries (maybe established roots during the 5th century), the general public none the wiser to their vampirism. at most there's rumors, but the family's charismatic enough to keep the murmurs at bay

brian is like. a little less evil to charles in this timeline. most of their time together being brian teaching charles how to run the family's business and whatever else vampires do to balance the life of a vampire and a human. at most, brian emotionally neglects charles as he stays vigilant in ensuring the xavier family can prosper for centuries. sharon xavier would be the one to instill all that is good and human in charles despite her own vampirism (most likely turned by brian before they had charles)

brian xavier is murdered by human kurt marko once the latter figures out his vampirism right before europe's widespread vampire hysteria (so maybe late 1600's)- not for any heroic purposes but so he can steal the xavier family's wealth of course.

he holds the xavier's vampiric origins over them until his eventual death (maybe early 1700's).

considering the idea charles' accidentally summons a pack of wolves to the house during a heated moment and they tear him apart- maybe kurt tries to protect cain and charles idk. charles wouldn't realize he caused this until much later while learning about his vampirism, BUT im still chewing on this so don't take this as 100% canon to this au.....

kurt never discloses the true nature of the xaviers to cain while he's alive, but as the boys grow older cain figures it out for himself and decides to dedicate his life to hunting down charles- how much of it is to rid the world of one less vampire or to vent the unhappiness he experienced growing up in the xavier household onto his brother is unclear

while kurt was alive, he experiments on charles in an attempt to understand his vampirism in an attempt to achieve eternal life without the drawbacks of vampirism. but i mean how good can your science be: evidently he fails vjELKJALKJ

as an adult, charles is curious about his own vampirism as he attempts to live amongst humans and perhaps help them (maybe not give them eternal life but at least how to extend life). he doesn't seek to 'cure' himself, only figure out how his biology works to live comfortably and safely: after all, there must be a reason as to why he was born this way, he reasons

he pursues a life of medicine to do this and along the way meets moira mctaggart (around late 1700's/early-1800's), a scientist working closely with the occult and isolated from general society. after some time, he reveals he's a vampire to her and they effectively become partners to further understand vampirism (but not romantic partners)

most of their work concerns why vampires 'need blood' and how to find a suitable substitute ('surely it's not blood itself that satiates vampires but a property within it?'), but they also look to find out why vampires can be weak in the sunlight and why they appear immortal (aka: they're purely scientific in their approach to the vampire phenomena instead of thinking it's magical, charles reasoning that vampires are just humans with a type of evolved biology. time will tell if he's right or wrong in this approach, and brother he has plenty of time)

erik's/max's profile

compared to the house of xavier, the house of eisenhardt- while not as wealthy- still maintained some sort of reputation in east prussia. however, the news of their vampirism easier leaks amidst the mid-1700's heightened paranoia of vampires (probably a domino affect of the rumor of Renowned Xaiver Family being one of vampires expanding after kurt's death), and he finds himself to be the only survivor amidst the violence against his family

fleeing further east and with the benefit of his youthful visage despite his real years, max has no problem using his intelligence and experience to find work to support himself and manages life alone until he eventually meets magda (maybe around the same time charles meets moira, 1790's). with her being human, it isn't long until she and max introduce little dhampir anya into the world

he tells magda of his vampiric origins (after all, if they were going to have a baby it'd prob be best to let her know the baby's gonna be part vampire right..), but whether it's disbelief or not fully grasping the implications of such, magda accepts and loves him. max vows never to feed off his wife, mostly feeding off hunted animals to satisfy himself

for a while, max was content to live in relative solitude with his family: he wouldn't bother the humans, and in turn they shouldn't bother him. but soon enough (talking Ten Years Later soon enough), the true nature of max and his family is uncovered in the quaint town they lived in, and history threatens to repeat itself as a growing mob attempts to torch their home. they can't succeed before max makes a bloody example of the mob- a display that frightens magda and has her flee with anya in her arms. that would be the last time max sees his wife and child. he effectively repurposes the site of where he lost his family as a quaint memorial to them and the grounds remain relatively untouched bar his annual visits (the common people more often rumoring it to be cursed as a result)

max would change his name to 'erik lehnsherr' as a way to bury his past and move on with his new, less-human-sympathetic life. uttering his real name weakens his power if not strips them away for some time entirely, so he's greatly secretive to who he tells it to (spoilers: he never tells anyone). he spends most of his time alone in his castle, going out at night to feed off late-night wanderers in nearby cities

as for wanda and pietro, debating on exactly what to do with them and if they're blood related to erik or not. considering having pietro be a dhampir that maintained his superspeed while wanda's still just a witch. not sure what to do about lorna either. at the very least, if they do live with erik, he's greatly protective and overbearing about them (a possible blend of keeping them close to use their might against humans, and not wanting to lose any more of his family)

The Part People Are Here For charles and erik interacting

How Do They Meet wow great questions today !!!

around 1810's, probably during one of erik's Feeding Nights he bumps into charles and attempts to make dinner of him, charles at this point passing far too easily as a regular human. the ensuing encounter/fight eventually leads to charles having to reveal himself also to be a vampire (probably as a result of having to resort to using telepathy to keep erik at bay and thereafter explaining himself)

despite the rocky start, neither can hide the fact they're ecstatic about meeting another vampire and become fast friends. Yknow. After overlooking the Sorry I Tried To Eat You part

so now charles spends his mornings with moira and his humanly duties and at night he sometimes spends time at erik's abode and with his children (if i decide they live with him of course).

moira can't ignore the way charles lights up when talking about erik (and how could she: even if he was candid with her about his experiences, it was an entirely different feeling talking to another vampire who already understood- and perhaps understood better). as such, she doesn't let charles forget erik could potentially be a danger- something charles can't forget if he wanted to (see again: them meeting the first time. still, he chooses to believe in the better parts of erik)

of course charles tries to dissuade erik from seeing humans as purely food or menaces and encourages him to work alongside himself to find more 'ethical' ways to be a vampire, but of course erik is resistant to the idea and at times admonishes charles for his thinking.

Everyone's Favorite Part: The Divorce

for a while- maybe five years- erik isn't aware of moira's existence. but on a night charles neglects to visit him he spots the pair walking to moira's home. following them, he's quick to discover moira's lab and realizes charles has been cooperating with a human this whole time (how much had he told her about erik? how much of their weaknesses did he expose to her? why wouldn't he tell erik about moira sooner if she wouldn't be an issue?)

enraged, erik doesn't wait for an explanation as he barges into the small shack and barks accusations of betrayal at charles. it only gets worse when moira is puzzled that charles didn't tell erik about her when he was more than happy to tell her about erik, only reaffirming erik's suspicions charles was attempting to doom vampires as a whole

what happens next im still up in the air about, but it'll be how charles loses the use of his legs in this universe

scenario a is while erik and charles brawl in moira's shack, she hurls holy water onto erik and disfigures his face. while he's down, she attempts to throw more holy water on him to at least give her and charles more time to escape only for charles to shield him at the final moment. while he's mostly unharmed, his legs get burnt as he pushes erik out of the way and finds he isn't able to regenerate the damaged limbs

scenario b is moira still gets erik with the holy water, however charles drags them out of the shack and tries to break for the nearest town. unfortunately, during their escape erik finds one of moira's silver-tipped crossbows (or something to that affect: still deciding if he should have control over magnetism in this but Details Details) and shoots charles in the spine ultimate style. going off the myth silver is Not Good for all 'unholy' and dead creatures of course, charles' nervous system isn't properly able to regenerate for Above Mentioned Reasons (his body's so 'dead' the antibacterial properties of silver eat away at him). the cruel irony of it all really (or silvery... heh.. metal...)

as a result of being burned by the holy water, erik would wear his helmet more often- at least until he feeds off enough humans to regenerate the damaged tissue (note: only human blood can restore holy-artifact-induced wounds, which means charles won't regain the use of his legs because of his refusal to consume human blood)

either way, once she and charles escape erik and relocate, moira stays with him for some time- at least long enough for charles to get used to his new way of life without his legs and figure out what they should do next, maybe two-three years. eventually, charles and moira agree it might be safer to work apart from each other and effectively split. probably leads to charles moving to america to keep an eye on vampires on the other side of the globe while moira keeps an eye on europe

after the encounter with moira and charles, erik becomes more active and now seeks out other vampires (or humans to turn into vampires), fully intending on converting the world to become a vampire's (and hell why not monsters in general) paradise

Things to iron out

the difference between animal and human blood

Whats the benefit to drinking human blood: is it tastier? More nutritious? Evidently its restorative properties are more potent for vampires than animal blood

Maybe more animal blood is needed to supplement human blood (i.e. one human may need the blood of- say- five pigs or something yk what i mean)

Maybe its possible for a vampire to live off animals only, it’d just be more difficult and they might not be as physically strong as vampires who feed off humans

Would they eventually cave into craving human blood? Is it a conscious effort to Not feed off humans? Curious….

Perhaps moira tests the effects of human vs animal blood on charles, offering blood from her arm both directly from her and extracted first to then drink. He cant argue its wrong if she’s offering for science no…. Its For Science Charles its ok…

Another thing i want to solidify is time period: on one hand i wanna do this modern-ish period but im also thinkin bout the 14th century…. Shrug i still have a lot of finer details In General ill work out with myself. For now it’ll prob remain around 1700’s-1900’s

A final minor thing i wanna work on is erik’s ‘real’ name and his name situation in general, mostly how magda knew him. Maybe changes his name to ‘erik lehnsherr’ after the eisenhardt incident, and goes by ‘magnus’ after magda, her knowing him as ‘erik’ while charles mostly knows him as ‘magnus’. ‘Count magnus’…. Hm…. Dunno if i wanna reintroduce ‘magneto’ into this or not …… ill figure it out at some point …

Perhaps other vampires and dhampirs saying his real name doesn’t negatively affect him and it’s strictly only if humans/non-vampires say it

[mustasekittens]

congratulations christopher!

self indulgent near-future in which when christopher graduates high school buck n eddie take hiim to hawaii to celebrate and they all have a nice vacation over here. friend n i were brainrotting it a bit and we decided buck definitely hyperfixated on hawaii and stuff (history, nature, geography, mythology, etc)

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Both my parents actually suffer from HORRID emotional dysregulation and are prone to snapping and going into rages. My sister is the same way tbh. I am now realizing this is why they are constantly baffled by the question of whether or not I am mad at them.

I don't have external meltdowns.

I could. I don't let it happen.

I keep my rage on the inside and stay pretty quiet about it. It's just as strong as theirs [physically shaking nose bleed from high blood pressure kind of bad], but like as a kid I saw how terrifying it was to be around [dad breaking dishes, mom putting our lawn chairs into walls] and I just internalized that I wasn't going to wear that anger on the outside.

So my mother genuinely cannot tell if I am just being quiet or if I am silently hearing the dial-up noises of pure rage. This has lead her to both making strong and confident statements like "You are a pacifist who would never hurt a fly U.U" but also acting like I am secretly dangerous maybe... It's because she has never seen me snap.

She knows what her temper is like [throwing chairs through walls], she knows what my father's temper is like [pick up child and toss out door], and she can tell I am being tested, but she doesn't know what happens when I snap or where that breaking point is.

Her -perhaps unhinged- solution to this, my whole life, has been to do things that should obviously enrage me or shut me down completely, like ignoring important boundaries, repeatedly, punishing me for expressing emotions or needs at all, etc... And then to constantly ask me if I am angry with her when I get too quiet [right after near directly telling me to shut up].

It has occurred to me now, they have never once seen me lose my temper, so they literally just can't tell if I am angry at them. My sister is easy, my mother fights and screams with my sister constantly, my mother understands this. My mother doesn't have any grasp of feelings or boundaries that are not screamed at her [apparently, and I fear my sister is the same way]. Her and my sister are close despite constant fucking fighting because they understand each other.

They are trying to get me to engage the same way and it is not working. I realize now that this has been hard for them.

I was so successfully taught to suppress my emotions, by being punished for any outburst, that rage quiet looks the same as any other kind of quiet from the outside. To them anyway.

I did tell her. For the record. I used my words. I did tell her very calmly that my response to rage, in order to avoid doing the things that terrified me as a child, was to simply leave [the autistic urge to GTFO]. When a situation or person causes too much of the dial-up rage noise, I simply extract myself from that situation, up to and including never speaking to a person again. I explained this calmly. I explained it calmly 100 times and I explained that I explain myself calmly as my rage response 1-5 [also pretty much every other negative emotion tbh], and I told her that what came next was me simply opting out and fucking off. I told her this. I couldn't understand why she never took me seriously, or why she never fucking understood.

I couldn't understand what made her like this.

But it's the same problem I have with everyone else multiplied by a factor of 10.

If I am explaining myself calmly, they can't understand that it's actually serious or that I am actually upset. ESPECIALLY because they read me as "female" and women "aren't that rational" so if I am not screaming and crying about something, which I never do, people assume I can't be upset and it isn't serious.

And then after having my boundaries ignored too many times despite having calmly explained how and why it's a problem [shaking inside or not]... I leave. I leave and everyone gets upset like this is unexpected behaviour, even though I told them 50 times that is how I would respond if they kept doing *the thing.*

And for neurotypical people especially, they are expecting there to be a disconnect between what someone says they need or feel and what their actually boundaries and feelings are, and they expect the latter to be demonstrated with emotions. Telling them bluntly you do not function that way somehow never helps?

My mother isn't just looking for normal yelling or a few tears to know I am serious, whether or not I do those either [I don't], she's looking for an explosion to know there's a problem at all.

Fucked if I know how she proceeds through life this way in general or if this is just her expectation of her own kids???

And I couldn't get why my mother couldn't read my emotions and didn't seem to think I have any. It's because she's testing for the rage limit to see where my 'actual' limit is instead of taking my word for it. Never the fuck mind that she could simply *not* test at my boundaries instead of letting me have them. Separate issue.

I couldn't figure out what made her *like this*

She's expecting me to throw a giant meltdown violent tantrum at people when I have 'actually' had enough. Maybe she got away with those being like 5'4" in another time, but I am the size of the average man, I do not get to have giant screaming rages, whether or not people perceive me consciously as a woman, and least of all because a lot of people -at least unconsciously- read me as 'masculine' or at least always "they guy" of the situation compared to all other women and some men [bigger stronger and more rational, more able to just absorb the damage and let it go so the less rational screaming/crying one doesn't have to be dealt with]. Even if it was in me to be willing to terrify people [usually never], there are such limited instances where it wouldn't just blow back on me. Potentially very dangerously.

I am going to be the quiet calm one. You are going to have to let me use my words, bitch.

So she kept ignoring my boundaries until I had to cut her out of my life, and she probably doesn't understand and probably thinks it feels sudden -after 36 long years of bullshit- abrupt and unfair.

But I told her hundreds of times.

I probably should have just screamed at her.

[nightmarearian]

do you think the abyss healed Childe’s scars?

realistically I know it’s stupid graphics & model “limitations”

But do you think his skin looks as normal as it did before he fell.

Cause when they’re hit, an abyss monster.

They disintegrate.

Do you think Ajax’s scars healed like that? In the abyss? After it, too?

Do you think they burned? Or was it numb, as the darkened skin faded away with little, yellow, glowing particles?

That he has no evidence of his suffering for those three months in hell (and his only companion’s silence) but dull eyes no one wants to look at?

Callouses on his hands and feet that no one pays attention to? Takes care of?

That he shows his prowess and uncanniness and abyssal hunger because that’s the only way how? Yes. he is hungry and wants a fight. Look at him. He’s off. Broken now.

Look at him.

Please.

[gxlden-angels]

I love getting validated on small things that I didn't even consider like it's always a treat and this time it's Gender

The Fundie Baby Voice™️ has been popping up a lot in ex-christian spaces lately and I actually had one in middle school and part of high school! I learned when and where to use it and how to turn up my southern accent just enough. I can still do it but it sounds weird after 3 years on T. The main place I used it was at church cause it made me sound sweet and polite. I used it for old ladies when I worked at a grocery store too. My family didn't like it when we were just all together cause they said it sounded like baby talk, but loved it when I used it at church cause everyone would tell them how sweet and soft-spoken I was

My therapist said it actively made him feel uncomfortable when I used that voice. He couldn't quite put his finger on why it made him uncomfortable (other than him only knowing me on T) but he very much did not like it and he's so so right for that

[thescreaminghat]

There’s so much to talk about Arcane S1 and S2, and what I want to focus on for this ramble is the issue I take with Singed being Corin Reveck. I’ve said this before, but this was one of the choices that I was worried that the writers would make back when s1 was airing. I actively dislike the idea of making Corin and Singed the same person, and not just because I think it unnecessarily humanizes the awful, awful person that Singed is both in League lore and Arcane while taking away what is a tender and mournful story revolving around two relatively unimportant characters in the broader world and stakes of Runeterra (namely, Corin and his only daughter, Orianna).

My two main gripes with this writing choice are as follows:

It makes the world so much smaller and less interesting than before. In the most recent iteration of Orianna’s game lore, Corin was a famed artificer known for building prosthetics in Piltover (this could be seen as a "doing good work for the people" kind of job, even if he is running a business). This background in itself wouldn’t be too surprising even if directly transposed to Arcane Piltover and Zaun, as even prior to Hextech improvements, we see that body augmentations/modifications are accessible to members of the council (though I much rather prefer League’s idea of Piltover and Zaun as having all sorts of inventors and academics exist in both cities, with Zaun having its own Academy of Techmaturgy, rather than having a handful of named characters be responsible for much of the city’s technological development as we see in Arcane). However, to me, what makes Corin and Orianna’s story so compelling is how easily it can be overlooked amidst all of the grander narratives in League P&Z, the in-fighting between chembarons and the class hierarchy enforced by Camille, Jinx being Jinx, etc. Corin has importance as an inventor, but there are so many of his type—perhaps not specializing in prosthetics, but another field of study—that he really feels like another “ordinary citizen” of Piltover. There is no world-ending stake involved in his and his daughter’s story, but that is precisely why their narrative is so compelling to me—when Orianna rushes to the site of an explosion in Zaun, in secret, to apply the skills she learned as her father’s apprentice in order to save others, and returns home with irreversible lung damage, I feel as though I am witnessing a ”day in the life” of someone stuck within the conflict between P&Z. Corin and Orianna are still privileged, and their situation is vastly better than the actual Zaunites who Orianna made it her mission to save, but Orianna’s biography suggests that despite Corin’s renown, he and Orianna were left largely to their own struggle following Orianna’s illness. I.e. they did not have the kinds of resources and help presumably available to the houses with even greater authority in Piltover.

When Corin devotes himself tirelessly to saving his daughter with his own skills, and Orianna is watching herself lose bits and pieces of her own body, I feel as though we are meant to understand this as a small blip in the overall circumstances of the world, that there are far greater events demanding the attention of the many, and a father’s grief over his child, and a child’s horror at how her body no longer looks the way that she remembers it, is relegated to a quiet, personal tragedy to be shouldered by the pair alone (even though it shouldn't be).

When Corin and Orianna relocate to Zaun, after Corin spends everything he had in order to save his daughter, I can imagine the kind of small relief that father and daughter perhaps felt, realizing that as long as they had each other and their passion for their craft, then that was enough for them, regardless of what happens in the complicated landscape of P&Z. When Corin subsequently falls ill due to the toll that his stress has taken on his own body, and Orianna is forced to make a deal with a chembaron to obtain a hextech crystal in an effort to save her father, we are left wondering how many Zaunites and Pilovians alike may have fallen into similar circumstances, how many secret meetings have taken place between desperate people and good-for-nothings in positions of power in P&Z. And when Orianna ultimately saves her father by giving him her last, healthy organ, the physical embodiment of her emotional core—her heart—and decides to leave her home as a machine powered by hextech, there is no fanfare, but we do get the sense that a tragedy has occurred, that even if there was no “fatal flaw” or twist villain, that something unjust has taken place in these sister cities. And that is how it was meant to be, I think, in Orianna’s story. These are characters, who, by interacting with the world of P&Z as we know it, give us insight into how this world works for its citizens. Their stories don’t need to lead to a grander narrative or tie into timeline-changing events; they are meaningful because they allow us to see how a character could live and thrive and struggle within the backdrop of the world. And that allows us to imagine other stories that could organically come from the politics of P&Z, and other ways its citizens could envision change (e.g. what if working-class Zaunites were given better protections, and Zaunite industry designed to be safer for its workers, so that explosions like the one that was slowly killing Orianna didn’t occur? What if Piltover had better medical support systems so that Corin wouldn’t have to destroy his own health in order to keep his daughter alive? Did Corin’s initial attitudes towards Zaunites change? After all, Piltover effectively failed to assist them, and he and Orianna were forced to move to Zaun in order to continue their business, something that could be regarded by more elitist Piltovians as a “decline” in one’s respectability, regardless of the quality of work produced by Corin and Orianna for their clients. Etc. Etc.)

By making Corin the same person as Singed, the possibilities that Orianna’s narrative opens up for an exploration of other people’s lives in P&Z are removed. Because Singed is so closely tied with shimmer, with Warwick/Vander, with Viktor, with the trajectory of the arcane, with the surgical “creation” of “Jinx”, there is little room to let a backstory of a father and daughter breathe, let alone introduce an audience to the non-plot-related interactions that this duo could have with the richness of the world. It also, in my view, makes the world so much smaller/more extreme (e.g. we can only have a scientist who engages with grandiose, unethical experimentation for the sake of his child, because that is what we would commonly think of when we are presented with a scientist father; we cannot have a father who also happens to be a scientist, where the focus is on his introspective, personal mourning on how his field of study and his community of peers have, in many ways, failed him, but despite that resentment, he continues with what he has, representing one path in a set of circumstances that could drive a different person down another path). And I get that Arcane s2 in particular literally opens up the idea of the multiverse and “other paths,” but that felt somewhat hackneyed, and I much prefer the idea that the multitude of paths that an audience can explore is right here, in the world we currently see, as different people live through their different circumstances.

2) Singed being Corin Reveck removes so much of what made Orianna’s dilemma—whether she is a “machine” or a “human”—so interesting. Orianna, by having her limbs and organs slowly replaced with artificial ones (I emphasize this because the nature of Orianna’s transformation becomes a “ship of Theseus” question), also loses her sense of what it means to be human (e.g. the unbridled creativity that is suggested to have previously animated her craft seems to be gone, and she instead produces “masterfully tuned mechanisms,” rather than “works of art”). She becomes “disconnected” from herself, presumably both from her internal sense of self as well as her physical body, even as her care and love for her father lead her to literally give up her own heart to keep him alive.

One can see the parallels between League Orianna and League Viktor, and how they potentially contrast (or complement!) the other. Viktor claims to have replaced his flesh with metal in order to rid himself of the weaknesses inherent to having an organic, decomposable body, while Orianna is forced to replace her limbs and lungs because she is experiencing, real-time, what the limits of that organic body are, even though she obviously does not want to experience something like this. Viktor claims that it is humanity’s emotions that leads them to make errors in judgment and hinder efficiency and progress, but Orianna’s love for her father leads her to perform a successful operation and save his life (and Corin’s love for his daughter leads him to “create” the kind of mechanical being that Viktor would praise, as part of his ideology). Viktor’s actions suggest that he believes it is necessary to move beyond “limiting” emotions like fear (e.g. his injection of that experimental serum into Naph) while Orianna’s whole struggle is trying to replicate, once more, those feelings, trying to indulge in sentimentality and romance (e.g. When she tells the automaton, Fieram: “I like to ride the Rising Howl at dusk to catch the last of the day’s golden rays,” . . . “From the very top you can see the harbor beyond the sea-gates, and the endless glistening ocean. From up there, you can imagine the smell of faraway lands.” – are these the thoughts and language of a machine, or of a human? And when she desperately destroys the casing around the automaton, believing herself to be freeing a boy like her, are those the actions of an “efficient” consciousness, or of a child encased in steel?). I can imagine, in the world of League P&Z, scientific and philosophical debates regarding the nature of Orianna’s existence (what makes her more human than machine? More machine than human? Is it her lingering connections to memory? To emotions? Or something else entirely?).

All of this to say, that there are some interesting questions to be explored through the way in which “Orianna”, whether she is an identity, a physical being, or something else entirely, emerged through Corin's gradual and necessary removal of her physical body. Making Singed and Corin Reveck the same person strips away these complexities.

Both League and Arcane Singed are awful people. That is undeniable. Regardless of his reasoning or emotions, Singed did unspeakable things to Vander, and was a catalyst for much of the violence, or its escalation, in Arcane, particularly with his production of shimmer in line with Silco’s aim of weaponizing and distributing the substance in the undercity. The circumstances of Orianna’s creation, with Singed noting that everything he had been doing was for his love of Orianna, are thus tinged with a layer of ethical wrongdoing so thick that not even Jesus Viktor could remove it. Similarly, Orianna was not replaced slowly, with the mechanical equivalents of her limbs and organs. She appears to have been yeeted back into existence with the magic shenanigans in S2 Act 3. Any interesting questions about Orianna’s identity, in my opinion, are overshadowed by the starting premises that, yes, Orianna should not have lived or been brought back to life in Arcane, if it meant that the horrible things that Singed, whether directly or indirectly, had done to the people of P&Z could have been avoided, and yes, Orianna in her current form may literally not be herself because we have seen the hexcore/multiverse/ascended hivemind Viktor shenanigans play out already. And this doesn’t even touch on the lack of agency that Orianna has in Arcane, as an unconscious thing for Singed to show the audience for sympathy points, versus the Orianna we get from League lore, who consciously made the choice to disobey her father to help Zaunites and was conscious and present throughout the entire process of her body modification/replacement.

The League lore also sets up an interesting exploration of how patriarchal power is used and its relationship to the mechanical female body—Corin comes off as not only overprotective of his only daughter, something that could also stem from class considerations towards Zaun, but as a sort of “Prospero” figure, guiding and warning his daughter to never venture outside of their neighbourhood in Piltover (like Prospero’s warnings to Miranda), while only permitting her to indulge in fantasies that he approves as “appropriate” for her (e.g. theatre performances). Even when he builds Orianna her artificial lungs, Corin keeps the key to these lungs in a safe, to prevent Orianna from leaving his sphere of authority.

When they do move to Zaun, Orianna not only takes on the traditional role of the breadwinner due to her father’s ailing health, but is in some ways able to gain more agency in her interactions with other elements of the world, such as the chembaron. When Orianna decides to make the choice to save her father, she takes with her the last object that he can use to maintain some form of control over her. While his control is not framed as intentionally abusive, it does lead to questions about how Orianna’s feelings of “detachment” from her sense of self may also be tied to the control that her father exercises concerning her physical agency.

None of this was explored in Arcane, and I never expected the show to focus so much on these kinds of issues for minor secondary characters, but that’s exactly the problem. By introducing us to Singed as “Corin Reveck,” and effectively tying him with Orianna and the intriguing possibilities available through the existing lore, Arcane, which has now ended in terms of its story, ends up failing to deliver any sort of exploration of these issues. Orianna and Corin could have been left as a side story in an Arcane spinoff, or as a cinematic like the Annie origins cinematic, etc. but because the Arcane writers seem to want to make everything “interconnected,” it just feels like we missed so much potential, and even if we did get something on these issues, it feels, from the path that the showrunners have gone so far, that they would narrow these possibilities to whatever can fit the ”interconnected stories” narrative.

Not everything needs to be tied to something else to be good, it can just be good—tying Singed of all people to Orianna’s story was the strangest of these kinds of choices made in Arcane S2, especially when we could have just explored Singed as Singed (i.e. exploring ethics in science from a broader perspective), and hopefully I’ve been able to explain why.

*Note: the above is just my opinion, so please ignore if you feel so inclined.

[ruvviks]

"The outer reaches of space remain unexplored by humankind to this day, but its greed is relentless. We grasp and yearn and hunger for knowledge— answers to questions we cry out into the endless void expecting to understand, expecting the stars to respond. The stars will not, but one day something else will— and we will not like what it has to say." — Rome Solomon, Beyond the Exosphere (1965)

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[sofia-not-sophie]

Help I’m thinking too hard about the unexplored world building implications of the seven kisses lead to pregnancy in a world where there seems to be/have been a patriarchy and also somehow it works interspecially despite humans and akiridions having entirely different modes of existence/bodily function

[pkmoth]

having swap au thoughts. *slaps roof of claus* there's so much mental illness in this guy. im gonna blow up everyone in the room and then myself

[leatherbookmark]

"I know why you want to return to our world, Meggie! You just miss your boyfriend! But we haven't seen everything of this beautiful world yet!" Mr Mortimer sir your wife was enslaved for working as a scribe disguised as a man. In this world women are punished for learning their fathers' craft and your thirteen years old daughter would be already married if she was born in this world. I know the books are very pretty but Mo your wife is pregnant. I don't think they have c-sections here :(

[bruiisedfawn]

☁️

[sergeantjessi]

dealing with death/dying is a really strange & fucked up thing huh

:)