#which happened very offer at that time

[wordsofpsyche]

“Is this how it is?

Is this how it's always been?

To exist in the face of suffering and death.

And somehow still keep singing?”

[discard-celestia]

lestat de lioncourt - on the deer which runs faster than itself. Hélène Cixous, Stigmata / Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat / Interview with a Vampire (2022) / Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident / Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 / Louis Moe, Allegory / Ovid, Metamorphoses / Ethel Cain, Ptolomea / The Company of Wolves (1984) / Lingua Ignota, I WHO BEND THE TALL GRASSES / Hugh Parry, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape.

[xbomboi]

apple: briar, remember when we first became best friends?

briar: only when i’m thinking about where my life went wrong.

[wonder-worker]

"Among their complaints [in 1460, the Yorkists] specifically blamed the earls of Wiltshire and Shrewsbury and Viscount Beaumont for ‘stirring’ the king [Henry VI] to hold a parliament at Coventry that would attaint them and for keeping them from the king’s presence and likely mercy, asserting that this was done against [the king's] will. To this they added the charge that these evil counselors were also tyrannizing other true men* without the king’s knowledge. Such claims of malfeasance obliquely raised the question of Henry’s fitness as a king, for how could he be deemed competent if such things happened without his knowledge and against his wishes? They also tied in rumors circulating somewhat earlier in the southern counties and likely to have originated in Calais that Henry was really ‘good and gracious Lord to the [Yorkists] since, it was alleged, he had not known of or assented to their attainders. On 11 June the king was compelled to issue a proclamation stating that they were indeed traitors and that assertions to the contrary were to be ignored." - Helen Maurer, "Margaret of Anjou: "Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England"

Three things that we can surmise from this:

We know where the "Henry was an innocent helpless king being controlled and manipulated by his Evil™ advisors" rhetoric came from**.

The Yorkists were deliberately trying to downplay Henry VI's actual role and involvement in politics and the Wars of the Roses. They cast him as a "statue of a king", blamed all royal policies and decisions on others*** (claiming that Henry wasn't even aware of them), and framed themselves as righteous and misunderstood counselors who remained loyal to the crown. We should keep this in mind when we look at chronicles' comments of Henry's alleged passivity and the so-called "role reversal" between him and Queen Margaret.

Henry VI's actual agency and involvement is nevertheless proven by his own actions. We know what he thought of the Yorkists, and we know he took the effort to publicly counter their claims through a proclamation of his own. That speaks louder than the politically motivated narrative of his enemies, don't you think?

*There was some truth to these criticisms. For example, Wiltshire (ie: one of the men named in the pamphlet) was reportedly involved in a horrible situation in June which included hangings and imprisonments for tax resistance in Newbury. The best propagandists always contain a degree of truth, etc. **I've seen some theories on why Margaret of Anjou wasn't mentioned in these pamphlets alongside the others even though she was clearly being vilified during that time as well, and honestly, I think those speculations are mostly unnecessary. Margaret was absent because it was regarded as very unseemly to target queens in such an officially public manner. We see a similar situation a decade later: Elizabeth Woodville was vilified and her whole family - popularly and administratively known as "the queen's kin" - was disparaged in Warwick and Clarence's pamphlets. This would have inevitably associated her with their official complaints far more than Margaret had been, but she was also not directly mentioned. It was simply not considered appropriate. ***This narrative was begun by the Duke of York & Warwick and was - demonstrably - already widespread by the end of 1460. When Edward IV came to power, there seems to have been a slight shift in how he spoke of Henry (he referred to Henry as their "great enemy and adversary"; his envoys were clearly willing to acknowledge Henry's role in Lancastrian resistance to Yorkist rule; etc), but he nevertheless continued the former narrative for the most part. I think this was because 1) it was already well-established and widespread by his father, and 2) downplaying Henry's authority would have served to emphasize Edward's own kingship, which was probably advantageous for a usurper whose deposed rival was still alive and out of reach. In some sense, the Lancastrians did the same thing with their own propaganda across the 1460s, which was clearly not as effective in terms of garnering support and is too long to get into right now, but was still very relevant when it came to emphasizing their own right to the throne while disparaging the Yorkists' claim.

[carnivalls]

good morning. thinking again of juve and her dog

[thyredwarden]

dorian and inquisitor getting old together is something that can be so personal.....

[arvoze]

*does a gay little dance that pisses you off*

[basofy]

some thoughts regarding joyful (not definitive)

this is more of a personal post about my relationship with this game, but i realized something important a while ago, and it's that, out of the 3 times i've played lisa the joyful, i had never played it again after changing my mind about buddy

yes i disliked her at first im so sorry, i was biased on brad and didnt like others dunking on him GHAGFSGF the first 2 times i played i didnt like buddy a lot, the 3rd time i was starting to take her more seriously but i honestly just replayed for the battles and secrets, didnt even finish it back then.

so i have to say, outside of the new content, replaying joyful felt absolutely necessary for me, after starting to emphatize more with buddy (which ive been doing for like a year and half, still never played again) and not only that but my thoughts on rando. i've been looking wrongly at him since the start becuz i thought he was simply just nice 'rando did nothing wrong' then i realized he, in fact did things wrong, and i had become a bit, hmm, disinterested in him, because i had in mind his flaws too much and it started to feel like he didnt care much about buddy. sorry if this is mean as hell rando fans, but luckily playing again gave me a different view of him. i think rando cares, he cares as much as he can but he cant just agree to everything, there are things that simply just oppose eachother and i think this eats him alive and makes him a little lame in how he handles things. i noticed he mentions the kidnapping at the start quite a lot, which he could be feeling intensely guilty about, even moreso, with the implication that buddy was assaulted, which he even asks her about right after. and even if buddy doesn't bring it up ever again, he seems still worried about this. and i liked paying attention to that. i enjoy not seeing him as perfect but he is still caring

on the topic of buddy, i started to become more and more attached to her over time and it actually pains me to think about her sometimes. much like with lisa, thinking about how they were literally just kids going through the worst makes me cry at times. during this playthrough of joyful i had something strange happen and it's that i'd get actual goosebumps reading some of the dialogue, the things buddy would say to rando, the kidnapping, the flavor text in battles and things the enemies would say to her. i think i finally played joyful like i was supposed to and im happy about that, im rly feeling like drawing buddy and rando now. theyre not perfect siblings but it's good to be assured that they cared about eachother, i needed that

another thing i rly rly needed since a long while ago was to cry for lisa again, i played the brad hallucination fight in spanish (only that part, cuz i wanted to see how the name 'chiqui' got handled) and it made me cry so bad, especially i noticed that right after the dialogue where brad tells buddy to not call him dad, his next phase is literally named 'dad', i never paid attention to that. but anyway it seems this game affects me more if i play in spanish, might be because the first time i played it was the fan translation, very nostalgic. some bits of the new content in painful and joyful made me cry, too, mostly the lisa bits. even if there are some things im not convinced by, i know im thankful for that, idk, i like getting emotional and crying, this game means a lot to me, but for a while i could only cry if at some point i started thinking about it too much, i couldn't cry while playing, so this was nice, im a sensitive and lame guy

[hella1975]

i can’t believe not even 24 hours ago i was in an exam like that still feels like something i hallucinated

[tittyinfinity]

My mother confuses the fuck out of me

[culmaer-sideblog]

please forgive me, but I need to complain and over-share or my brain is going to explode please feel free to ignore

[antirepurp]

"i want to write a stone ocean fic where kakyoin and jolyne get to interact :)" you have planned them three interactions out of the 12 chapters you've outlined so far and your current ideas involve kakyoin not meeting up with jolyne again until cape fucking canaveral

[thedreadvampy]

it's been a strange arc so far

when I was 19-21 and having an extremely imbalanced relationship with someone in their mid 30s I was like 'we are both adults so the fact that this is fucking me up is my fault'

when I hit my late 20s and saw how young people in their late teens and early 20s seem now I was like 'oh wait I was so fucking young I didn't know shit about my own limits or about managing relationships and I don't know why someone in their mid to late 30s would be into that except for nefarious purposes'

the weird bit is now I'm into my 30s - not even that far into my 30s - and while I still wholeheartedly believe that last thing about how young (and self destructive) 20 year olds are, I'm also kind of like 'huh, actually nobody I know that age has their shit remotely together and frankly the reason this fucked me up is because NEITHER of us knew what the fuck we were doing it how to cope, for different reasons and at different life stages, and there probably wasn't any malice or intent to control as much as there was Blind Flailing.'

[ragsy]

MOTW NPC Rach Lombardi, Mark's toxic ex who got ripped to shreds by dogman and then whose revenant ghost latched onto someone else who was on their own dogman revenge quest (player character Tatara)

she's fun.

[variousqueerthings]

i will simply by virtue of who i am read aromanticism into things, but mash really does make it astonishingly easy for me

[toytulini]

god that "morning people are an oppressive class" post annoys me in some way i cant. quite. ugh