#LL vatborn

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i'll be over here like vatborn have ✨️ ZOOMIES 😍 ✨️ and then the zoomies will be to Bite Murder Kill civilians

#lorien legacies #LL mogadorians #LL vatborn #they're an entire race of enslaved child soldiers who've been abused all their lives and given nothing to do or enjoy but murder #and yet underneath that they are so much more endearing than the authors meant them to be #and it just makes them that much more tragic. imagine what they'd be like if they weren't put through That #💔 #LL tag #shitposting

[lonewolfshayu]

Mogadore wasn't shown enough in the Lorien Legacies series. We only seen it in John's visions anyway. Like, one, in The Power of Six. If I remember correctly. And other than that, Mogadore is spoken about in detail in I Am Number Four. After The Power of Six, there's really no talk about it.

One thing I don't understand is how the Mogadorians can love Setrákus Ra so much when Mogadore is a filthy wasteland. They should hate the politician who makes them live in filth and poverty. In The Power of Six, there are Mogadorian protestors(trueborn Mogs, I assume, before trueborn Mogs even featured) who get angry at Setrákus Ra as he's boarding his spaceship and he blasts one of them through the fence. That really should've been explored more.

I wish the Garde actually went to Mogadore and fought Setrákus Ra or something. Instead, LL fans got no Lorien, all the fighting happened on Earth, and Mogadore was forgotten.

There were Mogs on Earth. Trueborn and vatborn, I'm assuming. WTF happened to them? How is that not talked about?

#lorien legacies #Books #novel #literature #Reading

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i think one of the biggest reasons i refuse to take anything LL presents to me in good faith morality-wise is that just, everything about the vatborn--completely leaving aside the trueborn or mogadorians as a whole--is a hundred percent on par with what happened to lorien for sheer scale and depth of tragedy and horror. in very different ways, yes--apples to oranges, i'm not going to say one is worse--but on par.

and not only do neither the heroes or the narrative ever acknowledge this. they act like it's a good thing.

[cw: genocide, war crimes, racism, fascism, slavery, torture, child abuse, dehumanization, apologia for all of it after the cut. basically, the usual lmao]

or at least, a totally neutral and casual one (although they will still never call it what it is by name). the vatborn, who are universally abused, beaten, tortured, brainwashed child soldiers and actual fucking chattel slaves, aren't people. they are subhuman. their suffering doesn't matter. they can't be rehabilitated for any kind of peaceful life. they are barely more than mindless animals. they are vermin to be disposed of without a thought, while their actual slavers get far more mercy, compassion, and humanization than they do (which holy shit is saying something).

the only, ONLY person in the entire series who thinks it matters that they're people; that it's fucked up to have been taught that killing them in front of him as a small child was unremarkable; who feels uncomfortable with ordering them around and is worried about getting one of them in trouble; who questions the ideology he grew up in that said otherwise; is a deluded, naive, easily-manipulated, selfish race traitor who is treated with rabid murderous hatred for it for the rest of his life.

they and their culture--yes, culture, we see that they have developed some of their own under the trueborns' noses--are eradicated from existence because they 'didn't know any better,' and no one bats an eyelash before or after. it's fine because without their extinction they'd eradicate everyone else. and the method of their creation, both knowledge and resources, is lost.

there will never be another living vatborn again.

all of this is true, say the writers. all of this is fine. and to that i say: does any of that rhetoric sound familiar?

like. honestly, there are some REALLY strong foils and parallels to be made between the loric and the vatborn, right down to the scars versus the tattoos:

(which, of course, no one has jack shit to say about. in the slightest. then or ever. 🙃)

what they should have done--and i don't mean 'here's a way they might have handled it,' i mean the only thing they could have done, period--to make any of the protagonists actually decent people would have been to make them have a massive group-wide crisis the INSTANT they found out what the vatborn are. that should have been one of THE central conflicts in the series from that point forward. 'we are having to slaughter child soldier slaves, who have no choice in the matter, en masse in self-defense. we have no idea how to make it stop without letting ourselves be overrun. we have been doing this for a long time and we never even knew. fuck. jesus fuck' should absolutely fucking haunt a good majority of your protagonists, even if it takes until after the war when survival mode disengages for it to hit, or else you have a cast full of just plain evil cunts and i am not going to root for them no matter how many planets they save. fuck that.

like. for all the writers and characters hammer on about how ~we're not like them uwu,~ they ARE. the perspective we're meant to sympathize with IS the mogadorians, just reskinned with craft-beer-and-brick-pizza-ovens-appreciate-nature-uwu neoliberal fascism instead of ham-handed right-wing stereotypes.

(which, the 'respect for the planet and nature' thing? bullshit. the entity colonizes and terraforms the ENTIRE EARTH. it does this without asking a single ass human if they're okay with it; marina even points this out, which is immediately dismissed lol. the entity destroys pretty much the entire fossil record of the earth, all the way down. the writers don't give a fuck about respecting or preserving nature. it's just a cover for the sky-high platter of genocidal ecofascism they're trying to push through.)

one of the central themes of lorien legacies is supposed to be 'mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.' and one of, again, the central conflicts of the series from RoS onward should have been the moral dilemma of realizing that the vatborn are some of the living to fight like hell for, and having no fucking idea how to do that without giving everything else up for lost. instead the moral becomes 'fight like hell for the living, as long as they look enough like me and aren't Icky and i don't have any personal baggage about them, and also as long as they came out of a vagina.'

and like. the really insidious thing about how they frame the mogs versus everyone else--how they try to excuse and distract you from the evil shit the protagonists and their buddies say and do--is that they go 'well i mean sure, they're racist and ableist and genocidal and [laundry list of awful], and have less than no basic fucking decency or compassion toward the Acceptable Group of People, but also they're kind and caring and heroic and nice to other people!' whereas the mogs read as the authors having looked up a Traits of Fascist Societies checklist to hammer into their story without actually understanding how fascism works.

actual fascist societies aren't cartoonishly hateful, joyless, loveless, and sadistically rubbing their hands together over their Evil Plotting on every level of society, every day, with everyone around them. like. it doesn't fucking happen. i don't care how cultish it is, i don't care how rabidly hateful you can whip a movement up to be, you can fuck a society and its norms up horrifically but you CANNOT do that with 99% total success rate on that scale. you know what happens with actual fascism? with hate groups, with colonialism, with genocide?

most of them are, in some aspects of their lives, 'good people.' they pet puppies, they're loving spouses and parents, they're kind and respected members of their community. i'm nice, they think. i'm a Good Person. i care.

and they are completely caught off guard when they are held accountable for the other things they did with their lives, because it doesn't fucking matter how many puppies you pet when you make yourself complicit in genocide. you extend basic human decency to your family and people you happen to find likeable and acceptable, and none of whom you have emotional baggage toward as a group? cool motive, still a war criminal, still blood on your hands.

which, by the way, is another vile thing they try to push through here. 'i'm racist because muh war trauma so i get a blank check to commit atrocities, cut me some slack' is, y'know. famously not a justification used for any horrific mass war crimes in countries invaded by, say, the U.S. in the last few decades alone. vietnam? iraq? are those some kind of chopped liver?

and the fact that they try to hide this shit behind 'well they're genocide survivors and teenagers, you can't expect them to be mature about their war trauma 🥺' is just contrived bullshit to get away with this rhetoric, which is even more obvious when every now and then they try to act like the characters are in their mid-20s or something instead of, you know. 15-18. teenagers are not the ones making these calls irl, pal. they're not the ones devising war tactics or taking out tons of people by themselves in one go. they're not the ones making legislation about what to do with the enemies after the war. are there garde who have to wear a bikini for their photosynthesis legacy too, by any chance

(this is an ESPECIALLY bad look in the context of the vietnam war in particular, considering how frighteningly, violently, genocidally racist these books are toward every fucking east asian country in their line of sight lmao. like holy shit dude it's BAD and this is just another shit in the bucket)

(ETA: HOLY SHIT WOW THE VIETNAM PARALLEL MAKES THE THING WITH JOHN CATCHING A LARGE CONCENTRATION OF MOGS OFF GUARD TO INCINERATE THEM ALL WITH HIS FLAMETHROWER POWERS--BECAUSE 'NOW THEY KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE CAUGHT BY SURPRISE,' NO LESS--SO MUCH FUCKING WORSE EL EM AY OH)

anyway yeah, despite supposedly being a critique of fascism these books are fascist as shit, and it is impossible for me to look at the protagonists being Caring and Compassionate, and Fighting for Peace and Justice and Preservation of All Things Good in the World, without just seeing this:

as usual i have many, many more thoughts about this, and as usual they are for other posts because this one is hella long already, but tl;dr the vatborn deserved better and are pretty much the perfect distillation of why my approach to this series' authors and what they are trying to communicate with their story is 'stay back slut' lmao

#lorien legacies #LL vatborn #LL mogadorians #LL tag #LL crit tag #cws in post #i would read the fuck out of a series that actually incorporated the vatborn into its themes without being Like That about it #i have so many thoughts about the parallels and comparisons between vatborn and loric thing man. Fuck #gotta infodump about that if i have the energy for it later #for now. LL Quit Being Neoliberal Pro-Fascist Propaganda Challenge (Impossible)

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so i've never really posted on here about him i don't think, but i dug up some art of one of my motherfuckers, korthec. he started life as a vatborn OC, then got adapted for tales of arcadia years later, and now i'm adapting him back; as a result the only art i have of him is akiridion!korthec, so while i plan to redesign him for LL-verse again, in the meantime have A He.

he is a nasty bastard who loves war crimes, murder, and cannibalism, he is husband, and i love him. thank you for your time

#lorien legacies #LL mogadorians #LL vatborn #OC korthec #OCs #my OCs #LL tag #ToA tag #whosebaby makes things #whosebaby draws #i just [clenches fist] love him he's Foul #gonna have to figure out the explanation for the horns wings and tail part of his design; especially the horns #because the horns especially are a major aspect of his design's composition #and he picked them because i HC his species in ToA-verse to have Customizable Forms and he's an edgelord #something something got augments despite being a vatborn because he is Like That about making these things happen #anyway. gay about him

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of feelings about the vatborn in this chili's tonight, lads

#LL tag #mogadorians #LL vatborn #as usual i Need to Write Up a Post but like. christ they're so fucking tragic #and i'm continually fucked up by the irony of them being considered not-people because 'unlike the [humans/loric/trueborn]' #'they don't have the spark of life from the identity inside them that we all share' #when the vatborn are the closest thing to the entity's biological children there has ever been or ever will be #'no longer my pain to experience' infuckingdeed #it would be an unacceptable atrocity how they're treated either way #what they actually are and where they came from wouldn't change that in the slightest #but god fucking damn dude lmao #entity for worst absent parent to ever exist actually #the irony is even thicker here considering the major mog protagonist whose entire thing is being disowned; abused; and treated like nothing #by his bioparent who didn't want him or think he was good enough; and favored his non-biokid instead #lol. lmao even #it's the omen from ER all over again except Worse #somebody help these poor motherfuckers 💔 #LL crit tag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i love how these books just yeet the mask like a frisbee and say about as explicitly as they can that vatborn aren't people lmao

#lorien legacies #LL tag #LL crit tag #the crit files #LL vatborn #LL mogadorians #LL marina #dehumanization cw #i don't even know what the hell to tag this as lmao #stares into the distance and takes a long drink #smoking is not enough we need ben affleck ripping a bong the size of a dodgeball #fcking Ugh #anyway protect the vatborn. somebody care about them for the love of god please #even more 🙃 in the context of a line from the entity that made me stop and squint #not a /direct/ statement but.... boy those implications sure do smack of some things #anyway god damn it marina i really really want to like you even as a person with dubious morals #who is coping poorly with her trauma and aware of that; and knows that that's not fair to people around her; even Bad Ones #but wow kid you are making it more and more difficult #ffs

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so i was infodumping about vatborn, as one does, and laying it all out i have come to the conclusion that mogadorians as a whole--vatborn and trueborn both--lean heavily toward varying flavors of autistic. and BOY does it explain a lot

#lorien legacies #mogadorians #LL trueborn #LL vatborn #LL tag #i have a lot a LOT of thoughts in me about this #but a tl;dr is that there are one or two very specific and common flavors of autistic that are held up as neurotypical in their society #and setrákus' angle of attack for manipulating them and getting them under his thumb was to use those common traits as an in #see: rigidity; justice sensitivity; and not being allowed any special interests/hyperfixations but war and cult shit and himself #among other things #and once he was in a position of control he proceeded to build his cult to twist and exaggerate those things in horrible ways #and also encouraged them to be Super Fucking Ableist even moreso than before toward autistics/cousins #who don't fit the Respectable Archetype #see: how they treat vatborn lol #which; as much as they try to act like the vatborn are ~gifted~ with different neurology that makes them Inferior #they are severely limiting the actual ways in which vatborn could contribute effectively beyond just being cannon fodder #because they don't work with their neurotypes because they don't want /vatborn/ #they want trueborn who can also be disposable slaves 🙃 #so instead of figuring out how to integrate them most effectively they just have to expend most of their efforts #herding vatborn into Doing What They're Supposed To by playing whack-a-mole with their brand of autism when they can't suppress it #and also setrákus is as good as he is at manipulating mogs in particular bc he is ALSO super fucking autistic in ways that line up with #their Standards for the good and acceptable leaderly honorable neurotype. whereas he consistently critfails at convincing non-autistics #to come around to his views or do what he wants. he has no clue how to vibe with allistics lmfao but mogs are fair game #i could go on but yeah i have Thoughts. i have thoughts #ableism cw

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

ivan's arc and his relationship with adam is such a bitter, quiet tragedy, which is all the more sad, complex, and fascinating for how very hard the writers tried to flatten him out into 'lol stupid bully who's mean to adam and deserved what he had coming to him. which is a brutal death at the age of sixteen.' it fucks me up so bad, man.

[preliminary thoughts after the cut, mostly about adam, because his dynamic with ivan as well as his brand of upfuck in general, is a Whole Long Post; i care him and i'm not trying to character bash, but it is Decidedly Negative, so be warned.]

the older i get, the more i realize that both ivan and adam can be really nasty individuals; adam just got more of a chance to demonstrate his good qualities (in particular, where the audience can see). he's also a really, really unreliable narrator re: other mogadorians, in some ways even moreso than the other protagonists' nastiness about them--for one thing he is ableist beyond belief, jesus--and we only ever get to see ivan through that lens.

adam is really important to me, and i appreciate finally having gotten to the point in my life where i can both recognize the nastiness of his flaws, and acknowledge where they came from without feeling like i'm Giving Ground to the awful intent of the authors. i can unpack them so that he's not just ruined for me. ivan's story and their dynamic with each other are a critical part of putting that together, and it's been cathartic doing it.

but also. holy shit is this kid testing every last ounce of my willingness to give a character the benefit of the doubt, even on a watsonian level. straight up drops a 'speak english, you're in america on earth' to intimidate a member of a slave race with 'little in the way of rational thought' into silence. i am a 5'4 bundle of sticks and do not have Superpowers and i will fistfight you until you are a pulp or i am

#lorien legacies #adamus sutekh #ivanick shu-ra #LL vatborn #LL crit tag #the crit files #i just. good fcking lord kid #adam is a fascinating study in passionate leftists trying to throw off and renounce their conservative upbringing #while thinking that feeling strongly about it is a replacement for unpacking the things you were taught #he really is #but god DAMN #and it is not helped that the narrative does not ever address or question his frightening sadism; dehumanization; ableism; and cruelty #the only time it ever does this is about shit like 'wow ur so fcked up for telling me i should kill your abusive dad' #'who's a leading figure in the genocidal movement that tortures and murders children' #'and has done it to several himself' #'better try to spare him against adam's express wishes just to make sure it doesn't make him sad :<' #in other news forget watsonian vs doylist i just really fcking hate john lmao #ugh #LL john smith #genocide cw #racism cw #ableism cw #slavery cw #abuse mention cw #holds a cold glass of water to my temple #dyn: so glad you're awake #could just as easily call it #dyn: the ableism tango #lmao #lorien legacies tag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

some of the vatborn post-war. don't look at me

#lorien legacies #LL vatborn #LL mogadorians #LL tag #i just. 💔 #music #Youtube

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i'm so mad i made it seven years without getting vintaro brainworms and now here we are. god dammit

#lorien legacies #vintaro üshaba #LL tag #LL mogadorians #on the one hand god himself could not pry 'vatborn as a whole are ND and fixate on things and have Zooms' from my dead hands #on the other hand it has become more and more clear over time that despite the authors trying to use him as an Average Example Vatborn #he is an outlier in a number of ways ranging from baseline personality to specific trauma and brand of reaction to it #to his flavor of being Really Fucking Autistic actually #and if you look at him through that lens he is nasty as hell but also really really interesting #both in his own right and as another layer of 'we are not getting the full or accurate picture about vatborn. what's Really up with them' #puts him under a microscope. puts him under a microscope. puts him under a microscope #LL vatborn

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i keep having Thoughts about how in so many ways LL has so much potential to be a really hard-hitting, messy, no-punches-pulled exploration of what i call moral agency: not the agency to act on your beliefs, but the agency to have those beliefs at all. like, if you're being abused into internalizing a set of beliefs, or indoctrinated in such a way as to make you resistant to outside perspective, or having relevant information withheld from you even if you would be looking for it... you don't have nearly as much choice in the matter of what you believe as someone who isn't stuck in that position.

and like. the central antagonists alone are literally a massive, horrifically abusive cult that spans generations. and i really wish they had actually followed through on that, and done so with compassion for victims who might need to be held accountable, instead of treating them with hatred and dehumanization.

(and also, y'know. hadn't treated some characters who did bad things as if they had much, MUCH more agency, moral or otherwise, than they did at literally any point. COUGH FIVE COUGH COUGH COUGH)

there's just. so so so much interesting stuff to be dug into there, in a way that's deeply fundamental to the narrative where even a lot of stories about moral agency aren't, and i really wish i could scrape enough brain cells together to talk about it properly

#lorien legacies #LL mogadorians #LL number five #LL tag #LL crit tag #the really fucked up thing is how they only make the about-face to #'wow the idea that the mogs had their moral agency stripped away is tragic; evil; and violating' #when that is suddenly the ONLY bad thing that could possibly happen to them that Matters #they can go through genocide and starvation and horrific human rights abuses and be tortured in prison camps for the rest of their lives #explicitly INCLUDING THE CHILDREN. ALL OF THEM #but lol who give a shit as long as they believe the right things now. they deserve it anyway uwu #which gets a hundred times worse because what we see of adam ''giving them the ability to believe the right things'' in the end #SCREAMS cult. holy shit it screams cult so bad #and he explicitly says he doesn't care if his mom is in the camp because she'd suffer too #his reason for not wanting to see her again is that *she might believe the wrong thing still* #and rex fucks me up because his genuine compassion for other mogs and wanting to believe the best of them #ends up with him being presumably the first member of adam's fucking internment camp cult lmfao #which like. we see a dude's initiation involving carving off his head tattoos. rex has head tattoos. connect the dots 🙃 #the way this series handles moral agency is.......... very deeply horrifying. don't get me started on five or the vatborn #anyway. regardless there is so much ground to be explored here and i pray to the heavens for the brain cells to do it coherently #it is especially of interest to me as someone who grew up southern baptist lmao #the crit files #cults cw #religious abuse cw #genocide cw #mutilation cw #self-harm cw #fuck off adam #dyn: but i'm helping you anyway

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

man i fuckin swear to god the inconsistencies in LL are making me want to resurrect @wtflorienlegacies. getting to the end of FoF in my reread and being reminded that they completely retconned five's entire backstory without a word like

#lorien legacies #LL number five #LL crit tag #FoF: he was found by the mogadorians immediately after landing on earth; and they raised him from when he was a toddler #every single other piece of source material since: he had a roughass life and only ended up with them eight months ago #SOWHATISTHEFCKINTRUTH.GIF #like you might say he was lying; because he does lie a lot #but again; this was during his frantic climactic reveal; where he was exposing everything all cards on the table #he did not at all seem like he was intending to lie about this or thought it would help at the time #and this is the series that has casually retconned shit like 'the mogs found The Only Weapon in the Universe that could break the charm' #'and it's a sword being carried by a random soldier' #at the very beginning of the /first book/ #so it is clearly not beneath them but also i am amazed that this one wasn't just poorly handled early installment weirdness #that could be quietly waved off as a nonsequitur #this was like. a major plot point not just that a prominent character's concept was built around #but that massively impacted pretty much every other major character's arcs and dynamics with each other #/bruh/ #they also can't be assed to keep shit straight like the spelling of vatborn; or whether maggie grew up in scotland or ireland #for the space of a single book #truly incredible #anyway i'm gonna write a crossover au where the two versions of five meet; cause each other and everyone else trouble; and make out #watch this space #lorien legacies tag #the crit files #shipping #dyn: five squared

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

hey there, LL fandom!

first off i have been gone for a while, whoops, hello

second, i have been on a huge tabletop dev kick lately, and i am considering whipping up something for lorien legacies! i'm not sure yet how much of it would be its own system vs how much of it would be a supplement for an existing, larger game, but LL has some worldbuilding that i think would adapt really well to RPG format and i thought it'd be neat to give it a shot.

right now the main things i'm planning on adapting in some form are:

legacies, Of Course

charms

the Goop, especially augments and vatborn

chimæra

garde vs non-garde

species (where relevant and appropriate)

whatever is going on with the entity, the spark, and how they relate to different planets' alive-or-dead status

staying undercover vs strategically revealing information

establishing bases, resources, and backup vs being ready to make a clean getaway

guidelines for making/tweaking new legacies, charms, etc while keeping them balanced and fun, as well as leaving room for people to use their own interpretations of the worldbuilding

And So On

it might take me a while to get around to it, and it might turn into a Huge Complex Thing of Its Own, or might just be good for some flavoring and small mechanical twists added on to an existing game. but i think it'd be a lot of fun to work on, and if anyone has suggestions for systems you think it might work well with or other things from the books to adapt, feel free to weigh in!

#lorien legacies #i am number four #ian4 #ttrpg tag #LL tag #LL rpg #It's a Good Fandom Bront and i'd love to be able to contribute something like this to it if people are interested #all i ask is no dnd or warhammer requests; if you want to rejigger some of the stuff that comes of this for those that's totally cool! #they're just massive sprawling systems and they're a bit much for me to learn well enough for this kind of thing i'm afraid #whosebaby makes things #whosebaby does game dev

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

Three-Sentence Fics!

so i have some ideas for LL fics and AUs--and also just characters and ships i am Rotating in my head--but no idea how many of them to sit down and write or where to start. usually when that happens i like to sit down and write some three-sentence fics to get it out, but i'm still having trouble deciding which ones to do first.

so! poll time! pick a prompt you'd be interested in seeing, and i'll do them in order of the most votes.

if you want to vote for more than one feel free to send an ask or put it in the comments, and i'll add it to the final tally.

i'll also put prompts i didn't have room for in the rest of the post (which turned out to be fully two-thirds of them lmao), so votes for 'other' will grab-bag from one of them if no one specifies.

ships will be listed with portmanteaus, 'X and Y' prompts are platonic.

(caveat that i may do them out of order if i'm just particularly vibing with a prompt, and also it's very likely at least a few of them will end up longer than three sentences. rules not guidelines etc)

anyway! i haven't written much for LL in a long time and it'd be nice to get back in the groove. here we go:

Other prompts:

Twovanick, AU, any

Sutekh-Shu-Ra siblings being fucked up and sad, canon or AU

Ivan and Kelly, calling truce (adam why did you ignore your little sister for a year. adam)

Ivan and Adam, trans enmity (NB!ivan, transfem!adam, neither of them realize this)

Adam-centric, any

Rex-centric, any

Rexamus, any

Phiri-centric, any

Phiradam, any

General-centric, any but probably that he Definitely Had a Thing with ivan's dad. diversity win

General and Ivan, not really here

Setrákus Ra, any

Setrákus Ra, before the liberator

Setrákus Ra and Five, gaslighting

Canon!Nine and Ella, killing dragons

LDoL!Sandor and NL!Nine, guilt

A human, six vatborn, a trueborn, and his bodyguard on an unexpected road trip. the second two are gay. they are all OCs and they are all stupid

#lorien legacies #LL tag #polls #LL group tag #look at this list and take a guess which of these have been most on my mind lately lmao #if i get enough unspecified votes for 'other' i honestly might just make another poll when this one is done #in the meantime. rubs my hands together #prompts

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

so there's something that's always stood out to me: whenever ivan kills someone or fights--in training or for real--he's described as having an emptiness in his eyes, or a 'dead look' on his face.

he's always been one of my favorite characters in LL, so i'd be fucked up about it anyway; it says some really alarming things about whatever's happened while adam wasn't around. but it also sticks out because to my knowledge no one else is described that way, except maybe vatborn. (and even then i haven't been able to find instances of that so far, i'm just going off what i remember.) something terrible has happened here, that much is obvious, but we don't see most of it; it's clearly been happening where adam mostly hasn't seen it either, or at least doesn't notice. so what gives?

...then i was looking back through the scenes where adam wakes up, and i caught this.

I imagine all the strength and combat training he’s been doing without me, likely coached by the General himself.

i'll toughen you up yet, he says after injuring adam during a sparring match, the one and only time in TFL where he says 'i' or 'me.' make your father proud.

oh.

#lorien legacies #ivanick shu-ra #adamus sutekh #andrakkus sutekh #adam makes it pretty clear that the general is in the habit of both hitting ivan and hiding it when other people are around #so it's not like there's no precedent of the general being willing to lay hands on him #bad things have been happening to this kid just offscreen and it fcks me up 🥲 #especially when so much of the evidence we see for the ways in which he's been hurt comes from him hurting other people as a result #he was an abused kid whose combination of circumstances; personality; and personal flaws did not leave him the way out that adam got #instead other people pay the price for what was done to him and the guidance he did not get when he needed it #and you get a fourteen-year-old kid dissociating while he murders a little girl because his father beat him so badly he Does That Now #the sutekh-shu-ras and what they do to the people around them are a god damn tragedy to watch and 💔 #abuse cw #child abuse cw #physical abuse cw #child death mention cw #LL tag #dyn: so glad you're awake