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Huevember day 4: The Penitent

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O corse of the Locked Tomb, I have loved thee all my life, with mine whole soul, and with mine whole strength. I would to God that I find grace in thy eyes. Destroy me according to thy word, for I love thee. ✨⚔️💀⚔️✨

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c3e92 at 29.47 laudna tells liliana "you ceirtainly had no control over otohan" and ashton says "gosh i hope that's true" with a stare that KILLED ME

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me when I’m a reiloran and it’s time to get crop circle beamed down to the heaven-esque place I only see through abstract interpretation in my dreams for roughly half an hour because the shitty kid of one of the evil empire’s top dogs wants me to to unlock a door or maybe punch someone before I get teleported back to my 9-5 as a Bone Smith.

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"Ianthe was screaming over the comm."

Something about this line just really makes me feel for her in ways nobody should feel for Ianthe probably. She has never been alone in her life before. She and Corona only ever spent three nights apart. And now she's without her twin, and while she does have Harrow, she actually doesn't really have Harrow. The version of Harrow who has any idea of what they both went through at Canaan House is gone, and Ianthe can't tell anyone the full story. So she is in a sense going through this whole experience by herself, for the first time ever. Harrow feels isolated because she's a diet Lyctor, which we know is plenty bad; but Harrow is used to isolation. Ianthe is more prepared for Lyctorhood but way, way less prepared for loneliness.

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Me and my friends are going are going on a mission that is important and could change a lot of stuff, and I feel like something bad is gonna happen. There's doom on the horizon. But I still think it's right that we're going. (for @overnighttosunflowers)

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it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?

like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"

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what makes john gaius a fantastic villain is that he’s so, so close to being genuinely tragic, rather than that which inflicts tragedy. at almost ANY POINT he could have stopped and turned around, and let his regret actually inform his actions rather than his words.

the tipping point wasn’t even the nukes! or any of the events immediately following! if he’d done that, but been horrified at what he had wrought and labored to repair it, he would have been a wonderfully compelling flawed yet penitent deity! but no this man just kept digging even after hitting the earth’s core and fucking eating it.

if i had to guess at one single moment after which he was no longer capable of turning back, of acknowledging his reflection in the mirror, it would easily be what he did to his friends, his family. this is a man who started willing to give everything to save everyone, and he ended up so horrifically selfish that he let half his friends die to ensure the other half would never flee from him.

even now, there are moments where you get it! where he does seem more tragic than anything! his version of the story is blatantly biased, the cracks not at all subtle, but his point of view isn’t impossible to understand in the slightest, at least for the events he described in detail. the truth of the matter is that if it had been gideon who had been given that power, she’d have started killing people much faster and with much less hesitation.

the point is that i want to punt john gaius like a football even as i recognize that his character is completely realistic and even uncomfortably relatable at times. and that’s what makes him the perfect antagonist for this kind of story, in which nearly every character is deep and compelling and worthy of their place in it, and yet is simultaneously just the wettest most pathetic creature to ever creache

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I am alive because they made me alive. 🤖☀️

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I was holding it together until Matt and Liam started crying.

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OK, but I love that Essek might be appearing in the Mighty Nein series before he meets the Nein! It's not just me wanting More Essek (though I do) or wanting to see more of what was going on with his dealings with the Assembly (which I also do). I think this could be super fucking interesting from a narrative construction standpoint.

Because I cannot see how you can include Essek from early in the series and not make it clear to the audience that he's the Dynasty traitor loooong before the Nein find out. Essek having stolen the beacons will not be a surprise. It looks to me like the cast are swapping out surprise for a fuckton of suspense. (Suspense vs surprise was explained to me when I was studying narrative structure as 'surprise is when a bomb goes off that the audience didn't know was there. Suspense is when they see the bomb being placed and have to sit there begging the characters to realise it's there.' In this analogy, Essek is the bomb.)

When we watched C2, the question was is Essek the traitor? In the M9 show, the question for new watchers will be when will the Nein realise that Essek is the traitor? When Essek meets the Nein, the countdown starts ticking; people will know that he is a danger. He is manipulating them. He is going to hurt them. Will the Nein realise before it's too late? But then Essek starts really befriending them, showing more of his loneliness and vulnerability, and... I think the mood will shift. Oh, shit, he really cares about them, doesn't he? What will the Nein do if they find out? Do I even want them to find out? What if they reject him and it makes him worse? He can't keep this up much longer, this is unbearable, they're going to find out - OH FUCK THEY'RE FINDING OUT -

It's such a fascinating choice and I think it goes to show that adaptation is an art form in itself! The actual events in the world will be the same, or at least very similar, but a new format means you can show those events in a totally new way and create a completely different tone! Narrative structure is the fucking coolest! I'm so excited for this show!

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"i have crossed the face of the universe; i poison it to match my grief" is one of the rawest lines in Nona the Ninth. there's like a whole thesis in here but Varun just says it so plainly, and it's so human. because that's what Cytherea did! that's what John is doing! that's what Kiriona, in all her rage and grief and loss of everything she ever had, has fallen down the path of. that's Alecto, the fury of unceasing anger. that's the cycle of abuse!!!

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...and no one was in costume during this major pc death

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matt ruling that the technical damage from the explosion was irrelevant due to the power and weight of fcg’s sacrifice is what really got me. even if sam rolled the max possible number on the dice, it wouldn’t have even brought otohan to below where she was before she took the health potion. mechanically speaking, she should have survived that blast by a LOT of hit points. but this was a player willingly killing their own character, beyond reviving and even potentially beyond resurrection, to give the rest of the party any advantage they could, and he rewarded that with the death of a character that has haunted this campaign from the very beginning. unreal fucking plays by both matt and sam tonight.

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The thing about Otohan is that she had an awesome mechanical build and she served a narrative purpose in that the party lived in fear of her for nearly 60 episodes but she truly did die as she lived, with a personality replaced by frogs and murderous intent. And the thing is I suspect there's plenty of interesting stuff about there. I've been there as a DM, having built a super cool NPC with worldbuiding ties that the party simply did not give a shit about, and I think that's the same situation here.

Legend of the Peaks isn't particularly meaningful since only two party members have any recollection of the Apex War and neither show the slightest interest in the politics thereof and they haven't really been relevant to the story. We don't know why she worshiped the Raven Queen once nor what happened to make her stop while still using that symbol...and it hasn't really been relevant to the story. We don't know if the backpack came from her or was from Ludinus...but it's not really relevant to the story other than tracing the potions of possibility back through Treshi and Jiana. We don't know what specifically drove her towards the Vanguard other than lacking answers as a Ruidusborn - which may have simply been enough - but again. Not relevant. We have Liliana to represent the perspective of a Ruidusborn who went through the Omen Archive study and whose motivations warped and twisted from a place of genuine worry and fear, and we have Ludinus to represent the centuries-long architect of this entire plan (plus he can't stop monologuing about his motivations, and that is a compliment). That's plenty.

And so Otohan consistently fails the Sexy Lamp With A Gun Attached Test, and it doesn't really matter, and I'm sure there was a backstory there but there's quite literally been no reason to care about it at any point, and I think most people do not. Her entire purpose within the narrative was that of a sentient evil Jersey Barrier that ultimately had to be blown up. I'm infinitely more interested in the loot drop that resulted from her death (and obviously the emotional ramifications of FCG's sacrifice) than any of her repetitive zealot bullshit.

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I love Ashley’s frustrated “BITCH”

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420 days. FCG made it 420 real world days before blowing himself up.

We all knew it. I’m surprised he made it over a year really.

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this was really quickly done so not the best quality, but I was relistening to the audiobook and just HAD to draw this scene 👁