Who's ready for my Master Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss Crepus Theory!!
I originally posted this over at Hoyolab and people there seemed to really like my favorite joke theory that Crepus just tries to gaslight the whole of Mondstadt right after obtaining Kaeya
Majority of this will be the same but with little tweaks for the wonderful tumblr audience
This joke stems from Kaeya's introduction:
and the use of the word "rumored"
Cause it's not like it said beyond Teyvat or the seven nations just Mondstadt
And I mean like c'mon how many families are living off the grid in Mondstadt
(Actually... Don't answer that I forgot Glory's boyfriend is just
Out there in the bush with Razor...)
Initially I had the idea of Crepus walking around the markets one day carrying Kaeya with Diluc beside him running into Varka who asks:
"Who's the boy?"
"You mean my son?"
"Not Diluc the boy you're carrying"
"I have two sons? You know this??"
But then the Caribert quest came out mentioning Kaeya ran away from home near immediately and was dragged home by Crepus just as fast and it became even funnier
Cause imagine you're by the docks one day and richest man in town gets off the boat with no cargo but instead a tiny child you may not have seen before that Crepus seems to be very cross with at the moment and threatening to turn him into a leash kid if he runs off again
In a small town that loves gossip do you know how fast that information is spreading? Cause I do and Varka's knocking on Crepus's door 30 minutes later like:
"Is this what we're doing? We're just taking kids now?"
Both paths lead to Varka asking where Kaeya comes from and getting hit with a
"I think you're a bit too old to still be confused about the birds and the bees Varka"
Varka getting frustrated to the point he just starts demanding Kaeya tell him what's up
Love to see him following in his fathers footsteps of stressing Varka the fuck out
And upon hearing how his birth father left for juice and didn't return Varka went
"Good! That was ALL I needed to know!!"
Follow ups on if his father intended to abandon him or got lost in the storm and needed a search party?
Don't care!! You weren't kidnapped!!
Welcome to the knights! 🤝
Which bringing it back to it only being a rumor
In a town of alcoholics, who's gonna call out the one guy with the winery?
Here's some add ons that got sparked from the comment section 😘
Bonus panels would have included Varka showing up with Rosaria one day mimicking Crepus about "wHaT you ForGot I haD a Kid" sparking a trend within the community of just adopting random children to the point posters are made saying "In Barbatos name: See a child Take a child"
Alice seeing it and pulling a "when in rome" tucking both Albedo and Diluc(who is yelling he is an adult) under her arms and telling Klee if she ever sees someone in need of a mom let her know she'll send over the paperwork right away
And then the last bonus: Venti wakes up, walks in through the gate while playing a tune, and stops when he sees the poster, not sure if he needs to start yet another revolution, or if this one is fine actually
I imagine the posters had to be taken down because visitors were losing their kids left and right and the solution of parents pinning a note saying "not dead & still want custody" to their kids shirt didn't catch on but the saying still lives strong in the hearts of Mondstadt's citizens I mean look Bennett and his 27 dads Mondstadt may have a lot of orphans but the demand is even higher
Comment on original post:
"I have a headcanon where Kaeya fooled first Crepus, then the rest of Mondstadt but.this is too funny!! I want to see this happening!"
Which prompted one of my new favorite lines at the end:
"Wait by fool Crepus first do you mean like Crepus finding him out in the storm bringing him inside to ask him where he lives and Kaeya's just
"? I live here? You adopted me? Are you feeling okay?"
Cause I'm absolutely cry laughing over this that's so good but that also means when Kaeya runs away Crepus is just
"hey no no l'm not misplacing you a second time come home" "
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Forgot to mention that someone got shot at the local mall today.
Like, I get an alert on my phone about the Mall, and to call the police to be escorted out if I am still in the mall.
I was in that mall A FEW DAYS AGO!!!!!!
It was so scary, watching the live Facebook feed about what was going on!
Like, if we had waited until this Saturday, WE COULD HAVE BEEN IN THERE!!!
I really hope the person that got shot is okay.
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Hamlet’s Age
Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesn’t even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamlet’s age is both in-text and as meta-text.
To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamlet’s age:
Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Master’s degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a master’s degree at 23.
Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a “youth” by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use “youth” to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless ‘men’ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)
King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)
Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard
In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamlet’s birth, and that he’s be “sixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.” However, it’s unclear if “sixteene” means “sixteen” or “sexton” (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)
Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says “dozen years” instead of “three and twenty.” This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huh…)
Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravedigger’s expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood
One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamlet’s death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)
Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that I’m fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.
However, it doesn’t really matter what the “right” answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:
Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of “youth”
Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience
The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and that’s the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isn’t otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny
Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, that’s so interesting and cool.
*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Polonius’ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and been very well reviewed. Hamlet’s joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).
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