#might update in like half a year | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

2hoothoots · 10 months

Text

i was having a chuckle to myself last night about Gristol, and how his plans are basically:

Restore Ford Cruller's memory

Find Maligula

???

Profit

but then... of course they are, right? this is Gristol we're talking about. Fatherland Follies drives home again and again that he's still operating on a child's logic, a warped and reductive version of the world that he never bothered to grow out of. both of his memory vaults center on the images of his childhood, this idealized version of the past that he clings to no matter what. and that's still how he remembers Maligula, too - as this saviour figure, who rushes in to help him when he's in trouble.

[ID: Two slides from Gristol's memory vault, Glory to Grulovia! Left: Gristol clings to Maligula's back as she summons waves to sweep away his assailants. Right: Gristol and Maligula waving from a balcony as the people cheer. Gzar Theodore brandishes a dagger in the background.]

like so much else, Maligula represents a return to this idyllic childhood - to the peace and simplicity of his youth, when he was free from worries and responsibilities. in his mind, he doesn't need to make any further plans - once Maligula's back, everything will go back to normal. Maligula will make everything better.

...is what i thought, but then i remembered this line:

[Screenshot source. ID: Gristol, in Truman's body, bows on his hands and knees in front of the newly-awaked Maligula. The caption reads: "Yes, High Priestess! I am here to correct the mistakes made by my father!"]

and that's kind of interesting, right?

to be clear: this happens directly after Maligula sees Helmut-in-Gristol's-body, and recognises him. her line before this is:

"Little Gzesaravich! Have you come to pay for your father's sins?"

my first thought was that Gristol hadn't expected to still be in Truman's body by the time he managed to find Maligula, and this was him trying to placate her and buy some time until he could explain the situation. but watching the cutscene back, that's clearly not what's happening here. Gristol is answering as himself, and his response of throwing himself to his knees before her is, as far as i can tell, genuine.

so what is going on here?

in Fatherland Follies, there's this line in the ride narration that stuck out to me:

"Why didn't the Gzar help Maligula in her time of need? No one knows, but historians agree - it is Gzar Theodore's biggest failure."

other lines mention Gzar Theodore's "mistake", and it's wording Gristol himself echoes in the screencap above. evidently, he believes that his father abandoned Maligula, leaving her to her fate at the hands of the Psychonauts, and it was that mistake that lead to them being driven out of the country - that mistake which he seeks to correct. maybe he even feels like he has a debt to repay to her for his family turning their backs on her all those years ago.

the 'High Priestess' thing, though - that's kinda weird, and threw me for a loop the first time i played the game. it took me until my second playthrough to connect the dots, and remember how the room in the Lady Luctopus - Gristol's room - was full of Delugionist scribblings and symbols.

[Screenshot source. ID: left, the walls of the hidden backroom in Gristol's hotel suite, covered in scrawlings of eyeballs and Maligula's name. Right, the pinboard from the hidden backroom. On its surface are photographs and newspaper clippings connected by pieces of string.]

i mean, look at this stuff! he had a whole conspiracy board and everything!

we learn very little about the Delugionists and their beliefs as a whole during the game, but i think drawing the connection here suggests two important things. one: that Gristol was in deep with this stuff. i don't know how he linked up with them - maybe via old family connections, or just good old-fashioned digging (we know he's skilled at worming his way into peoples' good graces, after all) - but it seems likely that he's begun to internalise their ideas, maybe even warping his own memories of events. and two: the Delugionists themselves are, if you'll pardon the pun, pretty far off the deep end.

like... i understand why PN2 didn't go heavy on the "mass-murderer cult worship" aspect of things, in the end, but man this is such a tantalising glimpse into the wider mythos around Maligula. Gristol is proud and haughty and thinks himself above everyone else; the fact that his first reaction seeing Maligula is to throw himself to the ground at her feet says so much about the way he's come to see her. he's not just trying to bring back Maligula, his childhood bodyguard. he's trying to bring back Maligula, the High Priestess of the deluge, the semi-mythical figure whose supporters believe even death couldn't stop. he doesn't even flinch at the way she confronts him, and maybe it's because he's bought in so completely to this deified figurehead, this idea of Maligula; more a living force of nature than a person. and it all comes back to the same place: an abdication of responsibility, not just to the person who protected him when he was little but to this avatar of floods and destruction. Maligula will make everything better.

i'd write more about my thoughts on the Delugionists but that'd be taking a hard turn into speculation, and this is already kind of long and rambling so i'd better end it here. but what an unexpected and evocative line, right? it's some of the only stuff we have to go off of regarding the Delugionists as a whole, but i think it does such a good job of hinting at the wider story - at teasing another layer to the mythos surrounding Maligula, one whose ripples we see throughout the game but which never quite breaches the surface.

#psychonauts #psychonauts 2 #bored waiting at the airport so you get more psychonauts meta from me #the delugionists have been on my mind recently (because i Might Just have an upcoming au lorepost about them and also cults are fun)#so tossing my thoughts up here because people seemed to like the last few times i did this #and also it's my blog and i like to talk :)#related vent i HATE drafting posts in the tumblr editor because if you hit crtl+z to try and undo a formatting change #it deletes like half the post you just typed out #(yes i did it again while i was writing this. yes i'm still salty. why do i even bother)#what else... this is just becoming a disconnected thoughts dump #but if you've seen my posts you knew what you were signing up for when you hit the button to expand the post tags #there's new art coming hopefully this weekend if i can get it finished! it's more mermaid au designs #i'm two and a half weeks late for mermay but it turns out starting a new job and moving house doesn't leave you with a ton of free time #but that's okay it's never too late for mermaids #omg and artfight's coming up next month too! geez #i gotta make refsheets for the fsau trio because i would LOVE to get art of them #and this year i don't have a thesis to crunch on so i might actually have time to participate #oh and then in august i'm having top surgery! will make a proper announcement post for it at some point #i say 'announcement'. it's just a life update but it's nice to share #i'm super excited about it :)#i might end up blogging the process and recovery but obviously it won't be going here lol. i'd put it on my main #idk if anyone would find it useful but when i first started looking into surgery i had like very little idea about the whole process #and it's only through joining a bunch of online support/discussion groups that i managed to find more info and resources #so hey it might be useful to share? we'll see #our flight doesn't land for another fifty minutes so now i'm just writing in the tags because i'm bored #alright i'll proofread this and then post it when i land and have signal again. peace out yall hope your pride month is going well

212 notes · View notes

pagesofkenna · 2 years

Text

one of the librarians at work the other day asked me my pronouns and I started thinking of my journey from identifying as a straight girl in highschool who was openly homophobic but trying to be a nice person about it, to identifying as a genderless bi-ace person who has to consciously swat aside both internalized homophobia and a casual disinterest in relationships-in-general to admit attraction for other afab people

and then I started thinking about how this journey basically all happened on tumblr, and because I've always talked about myself constantly I basically liveblogged my way through it??

so I started digging through my own blog archives and I'm gonna compile the posts I find here. this is basically a callout post for myself lol

(Starting dates - I left High School in June 2010, spent the '10-'11 school year almost completely alone and friendless. Met up with some friends in July 2011 who introduced me to Tumblr, and I made an account. Made some Tumblr friends. Started reading Homestuck beginning of 2012 (this is relevant).)

February 28 2012 - "Am I the only weirdo who doesn't think Troll Relationships are that confusing?" I tagged this post with "i like how he defined moirallegience" and follow it up with a post days later about how much I love the concept of moirails (aka platonic lifepartners. I'll talk for years about how jealous I am of queerplatonic relationships)

March 9 2012 - This incredibly embarrassing Sherlock post I actually stole and reposted (??? remember when asks used to not be rebloggable) about how I (and the person whose post I stole) didn't ship those characters because I hated the idea that people couldn't be close important friends unless sex was involved. I'm only including this post because 1) it's clear this was from the time period when I was trying to be less homophobic but obviously failing, and 2) I talk about only shipping characters when it's obvious they're going to get together, like... kid you're ace...

April 4 2012 - I finish catching up with Homestuck and am reading the regular upd8s (originally I'd linked the wrong post, here). I reblogged this DirkJake fanart on April 26 - from my commentary it's clear I was trying to be 'haha cute but not in a gay way!' about it which continues to be embarrassing

June 28 2012 - This is the first post I can find on my blog that mentions asexuality, and it's not even that kind of asexuality (Bill Nye is talking about how reproduction works). I don't remember having a big Asexual Awakening so I'm trying to figure out when I first heard the term at least, and it was sometime this summer at the very latest

July 9 2012 - Homestuck posts the [S] Dirk: Synchronize/Unite updates, which apparently I watched/read while babysitting rip. A lot of complicated feelings go into this! It's the moment I officially start shipping DirkJake, and I tagged this liveblog with "I'm kind of freaking out" to completely undersell what my brain was actually going through at that moment lol. I'm including this because this was a big step for me and also ties into my asexual awakening. Before this I'd gone through a process from 'homosexuality is a sin' to 'I can accept gay people, but I can't support their gayness' and was, blessedly, not liveblogging my process evolving from that. Realizing that I might be ace, that my indifference to sex and romance was a me thing and not a moral failing of everyone else, was a huge part of that. Another huge part was the fact that I latch onto depictions of people having crushes (which I attribute to my asexuality; its the longing, not the relationship necessarily, that moves me). When this update went live, I could not emotionally distinguish the joy I felt for this gay character from the joy I would have felt for a straight character - and thus, hypothetically, as a person who didn't really do crushes, the joy a gay person must feel from the joy a straight person must feel - and it made me reanalyze a lot of things.

August 7 2012 - I liveblogged myself watching a movie that would lead to me making friends with a girl who would eventually be the first girl I have a crush on (who wasn't a celebrity)

September 14 2012 - The first post I can find that I reblogged that uses the term Asexual (as in the sexuality). My tags on this post are hilarious, watch the joke sail miles over my head lol. It's clear I must have known about Asexuality by this point and started identifying with the term soonafter, though I don't record when that happens

October 12 2012 - I tried as respectfully as possible to ask, 'as a cis person', what trans people were identifying with. It's amusing now as both an honest look at the process of shifting the notions we'd been raised with, and as an example of me not yet having the language and self-awareness to say that I had no internal gender.

November 13 2012 - Someone asked about my sexual orientation and I said I'm 'heterosexual with asexual tendencies' like a fool. Past!me was so missing the point, that poor child. From what I can remember from that time, I had crushes on male celebrities, and occasionally thought about sex as an abstract or hypothetical, and figured 'yes this is what normal Straight People think' despite the fact that I had no desire to actually pursue a sexual relationship (and I was also consciously celibate - I was 19 at this point, still very active in my church, and I had honestly thought my disinterest in sex was just because of how good I was at the 'no sex before marriage' rule)

January 11 2013 - I made a textpost asking for anyone to explain 'Gender' to me and literally no one responds. Valid.

(Sometime early 3013 I start working at Target, my first real job. )

February 14 2013 - I breezed over the massive crush I had on Allison Paige by declaring Gigi Darcy (the character she played) as my valentine for the year. In fact I made a bunch of posts about her that year, this is just the highlight (I didn't consciously acknowledge this as a crush; I called her my 'girlsquish'. Looking back it was totally a crush, and everyone who didn't call me out for it at the time is a saint).

June 25 2013 - I made a readmore textpost basically saying 'I'm going to keep calling myself female because that's the only thing I've ever called myself, but I don't understand why anyone should have to be one or the either'. In this post I allude to a message I'd gotten weeks previous, which I never responded to publicly and cannot find in my inbox now. That message, from an incredibly patient friend, asked 'wouldn't you get upset if people started calling you a boy, or referred to you as a man??' I remember that as my 'aha' moment because... no, I wouldn't, because if everyone called me a boy then even if nothing in my body changed I would be a boy (because my gender had more to do with how people saw me than how I felt)

July 20 2013 - I reblogged this video about BMO and gender roles. This on its own wasn't a huge revelation, but there's a series of posts I reblogged this summer/fall about characters I adored and identified with, who I started to realize were genderqueer (see also this post about Hana Kimi 2011, which I was watching at the time (I express gratitude for a character who doesn't see the big deal with another character's gender reveal), this fanart of Momiji Fruits Basket, this post about Haruhi Ouran High School, and this essay on Hanji Zoe, under which I admit to loving Hanji because of their gender ambiguity. I'll talk more about Hanji further down, but I want to point out that if I hadn't realized I was asexual, I wouldn't have been able to categorize my feelings for them as a crush).

September 18 2013 - The first post I reblogged that I tagged with my secret crush tag. Around this time I realized I had a crush on a girl I was tumblr friends with - I was way too scared to ever tell her, and we lived too far away for anything to come of it. I characterized her as a fox and myself as a duck - incompatible, with the very real risk of me getting eaten alive. I made dozens of posts about her in November (the height of the crush, I think?) and by the next June we'd stopped talking to each other entirely. Looking back, I was probably way more obvious than I'd thought, and she might have been trying to dissuade the crush, but 2014 was a rough year for me and this friendship ending was a big part of it.

(January 2014 I leave home for University for the first time, have what I style as "the worst year of my life." Looking back I can see that all my gender stuff was happening that year, so, woof, that was a lot to be working through.)

January 4 2014 - I wrote a long textpost about how I thought my conscious decisions to not date and not have sex had effected my ability to recognize my own sexuality. I ended by tentatively defining myself as 'bi-romantic gray-ace'. Then I followed this up with another textpost about the massive crush I had on fictional character Hanji Zoe. I refer to my feelings as 'aromantic/sexual' and I'm not sure if I meant 'aromantic/asexual' or 'aromantic + sexual' but I probably was being intentionally vague because UHH FOLKS it was definitely sexual (I've since thought a lot about how the sexual crushes I get are only ever on nonexistent/unapproachable people, like fictional characters or celebrities) Later I got a message that prompted more discussion on celibacy and asexuality, and labels.

January 18 2014 - I made another textpost about how important Hanji's gender was to me, in which I admit that I didn't feel comfortable talking about my own gender at that time

February 13 2014 - I made a textpost regarding pronouns, in which I say that I'm still not emotionally prepared to talk about my own gender ("every time I start thinking about it I just nope") but state that I don't care what pronouns people use for me, and I hadn't cared in years

February 14 2014 - Facebook had made a change allowing you to define your gender as something other than 'male' and 'female', and I made this post complaining about the limitation of options. Essentially, I had no problem saying what my sex was, but none of the gender markers seemed to apply. Eventually I changed my Facebook label to 'gender nonconforming' (and, later, 'agender'). (I also briefly mention the fact that it took me years to be comfortable referring to myself as 'female sex', and that learning about gender had helped me feel comfortable with that identity. I'm honestly surprised to find that comment; I was poorly attempting to say that I struggled with femininity all my life, and that learning I didn't have to be female-gender as an adult had made being female-sex easier.)

February 27 2014 - A short textpost I made complaining about how gender didn't make sense ("i dont know how to relate to posts that talk about it").

May 31 2014 - I reblogged this short post and made a joke that I "turned off gender whenever people weren't paying attention"

June 14 2014 - I got a message asking how I identified. I responded that I was "asexual or graysexual" and over-explained that I didn't feel sexual attraction and "I'm not even ready to be in a relationship yet so I don't really think about it much" (friends I was 21 years old). This is also the first time I openly acknowledged I was biromantic to another person (after tentatively using that label in January). I also talk about how I don't understand gender ("gender just seems arbitrary"), and how I'd realized the previous September that 'gender' might "actually be an actual thing that actual people have and feel... and I don't feel it." I state that 'she' 'he' or 'they' pronouns are all fine with me.

July 16 2014 - I wrote a very frustrated rant about how I couldn't figure out 'Gender', saying that since it's a 'social construct' is it not 'real'? Is it a Tangible Thing? A friend responded and likened gender to more of a 'Force', which I responded to here, saying that made much more sense to me (making an analogy to imaginary numbers, "they're only imaginary because we can't quantify them properly").

August 26 2014 - Post in its entirety reads "About me: Gender Edition. Gender: N/A. Pronouns: English." After dancing around it for over a year I believe this is the first time I actually state that I'm agender (or, practically so). I make a few more posts for the next year expressing frustration at sex vs gender terminology but from at least this point forward I'm very openly agender and nonbinary.

(also September 14 2014 - I wrote about how I was "raised pretty gender neutral." I talked about my four older brothers and how my mom didn't make a lot of attempts to raise me 'girly'. I also talk about trying to be a feminist and realizing I didn't notice media sexism because I always identified with male protagonists just as easily as female. My mom later privately responded to this post and made the argument that she raised all her children pretty 'neutrally', inasmuch as she could, which honestly she makes a great case for.)

#about me #i might update this later if I find more #for now I've dug through what I can dig through and I'm embarrassed and delighted in turns #I wanted to look at the timeline and it really is me joining tumblr and quietly working on internalized homophobia for a year #then me figuring out amatonormativity for like six months #im still shocked i never made a 'huh thinking about it' post re: asexuality #and then a year and a half of me slowly addressing transphobia and dissecting gender on the hunt for my own #also now i know i was fully 21 when i started IDing as agender and i didnt realize it was that early?? my first year at BYUI??#I know it would be a while longer before I started using 'nonbinary' and years before 'trans'

11 notes · View notes