#yea its been a whiel since ive said anything abt lore in my own posts so i thoughtmay as well

[dykeninthdoctor]

hm okay. trying to put all of my feelings from the stream into words. (everything is c! unless otherwise specified)

i will say i think it was BRILLIANTLY done and i loved it. i really fucking loved it.

i think eret was both the best and worst person for wilbur to hear a lot of these things from. on the one hand, eret is the only person who understands what it means to do a horrible thing to people you love and then have to atone for it, to make up for it, and do it in a way that doesn’t destroy you. that being said, wilbur and eret’s betrayals came from such fundamentally different places that it’s so. hough. ESPECIALLY when wilbur’s “betrayal” was, in a very important way, caused by what eret did to him. and that’s not to say that it’s all eret’s fault, wilbur’s actions were his own but they also weren’t considering his mental state but like. god. some of the first cracks in the walls, in wilbur’s mind, occured the second that door opened in the final control room and that cannot be ignored. and eret did not acknowledge it enough! i very much wanted an apology from eret to happen before wilbur even uttered the words “i’m sorry” and that didn’t happen. and i know that eret has atoned, attempted to make up for their actions to the other people they betrayed, but emphasis on other! all of the forgiveness eret earned came after wilbur’s death. he is still afraid of you, eret, he is still traumatized by you. eret’s apology should have come first and i think that’s one of my biggest upsets of this. 

back to eret being both the best and worst person! eret knows what it means to be forgiven for the hurt you’ve caused but eret does not know what it means when that hurt you’ve caused is very much tied to your own suicidal and destructive beliefs. and so, yes, wilbur needed to hear that an apology is not a box to be checked and that he can’t just leave, he needs to stay and see it through, and i think eret was the right person to hear it from. what wilbur did not need to hear was that he was the cause of every bad thing on the server essentially, and that the nation he tried to create to keep his loved ones safe was in its very essence what began the destruction of the server and that is also why i’m soooo upset cc!eret retconned their original reason for the betrayal because “you had power and i didn’t and i wanted power so i took it” is like. much more of an acknowledgement of what l’manburg meant as a nation too and if eret’s redemption from that betrayal reason instread had then come through realizing that l’manburg was not about power but about protection that would’ve been. so much more interesting and not just an add on to “let’s all shit on l’manburg!” it also would’ve been way easier to acknowledge wilbur and eret as two sides of the same coin there then! wilbur is someone who had his own struggle with power and it destroyed him too! it’s a big missed opportunity and that just :( makes me sad

i think. the power dynamics at play here were also reallyyyyy fucking interesting. the choice to have their conversation be a lot of. messiness and yelling at each other was SO GOOD until it wasn’t because eret started hitting where it really truly hurt and then went past that to where it wasn’t even true but was very much so the destructive things wilbur tells himself. and that’s when wilbur stopped fighting back and that made it a lot less “we air our dirty fucking laundry with each other” to “you keep saying things that i tell myself every night and i don’t know what to do anymore.” and like. FUCK. i LIKED when wilbur was unsettled and didn’t know what to do with himself and was clearly out of his element because i think he needs to get unsettled to find his way back to himself but i didn’t like why he was unsettled. he was anxious and withdrawn because eret was voicing the same things he believes about himself. wilbur needs to be unsettled by someone telling him that he is still worthy of being loved and that the hurt he’s caused does not make him a bad person, just someone who did bad things. like! fuck up his worldview! 

and then the physical representations of the power dynamics? wilbur back to needing to be taller as a return to how things once were, and then them on equal footing, and then wilbur consciously stepping down to be below eret when they were on the bridge? that is something. that i have been rotating in my brain. and i think it goes back a lot to how wilbur withdrew! i do not think he should have been below eret! i think they should have ended on equal footing! they needed to have ended on equal footing! the equal apologies and subsequent forgiveness mean nothing if wilbur is viewing himself as lesser than eret after everything she said to him about l’manburg and his actions. also. ugh. wilbur did not need to apologize to eret at all i think. i feel like. the equal footing could have been a result of eret apologizing, eret talking to wilbur about apologies in general because i REALLY think wilbur needed to hear what they had to say about apologies, and then wilbur forgiving them but still acknowledging the hurt eret caused—and then acknowledging the hurt he caused and i think that is also. kind of. the point of these streams too. wilbur is apologizing for things he does not need to apologize for, almost, continuing to take the blame for things that he does not need to, and he is just. getting more and more withdrawn and tired because of it. it’s a corruption of a healing arc because he isn’t healing really! these aren’t making him feel better! and i really hope the culmination of these apology streams is him apologizing to himself. 

something i also. am very much stuck on. is the crown/tnt moment. i cannot decide how i feel about the “i demand” phrasing of it all. it’s like. i think this pushback is really what wilbur needs. he needs to hear that he can’t just leave after an apology, he needs to hear that he NEEDS to throw away the thing that’s caused hurt to others and himself. wilbur needed someone to tell him to put it down. to throw it away. like. gahhh. i don’t know! but i think the “demand” was very much on purpose and i liked it and i think it was necessary. and like. the crown with the tnt. ough. it was very. like. genuinely my favorite moment of the stream. there is something really beautiful about wilbur throwing his explosives into the water that is normally used to counteract them, letting the thing he’s used to hurt himself the most go, and eret giving up their crown in front of the person that they betrayed to get it in the first place. i feel really fucking crazy about that.