is this old religion, are we calling it love?
{sweet movie, alisha dietzman / @gaphic / tiktok / @iamalivenow / on earth we're briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong / @manywinged / these violent delights, micah nemerever / the reader, bernhard schlink (trans. carol brown janeway) / hestitations outside the door, margaret atwood / a self-portrait in letters, anne sexton}
[ID: ten images of text together in a litstack
1: Confession: I will think of you forever
2: a post by gaphic: It’s only tragedy if you convince yourself, for even just a moment, that everything could be ok, despite knowing it won’t be. Tragedy lies in ‘so close, yet so far.’ It’s avoidable because it would only take a tiny alteration to prevent disaster, but human nature is in the way- not maliciously, not knowingly, despite trying so hard.
3: a tiktok comment and answer: Are they lovers? / Worse
4: a post by iamalivenow: gay sex won't fix this. it'll probably make this worse. that being said don't you want to see how much worse it can get?
5: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.
6: tags from manywinged: #technically they know and understand each other better than anyone else alive #but they communicate that in the most fucked up insane unnecessarily complicated way and think thats normal
7: I don't think you've ever felt anything that didn't hurt you. / We've found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?
8: "I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do."
9: Should we go into it together / If I go into it with you I will never come out
10: of course the love is there. / still, / still, / still.
end ID]
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Scar feels numb when he hits the succeed button.
He stands alone before the Secret Keeper, staring up at it’s blank face with an equally blank expression. The shock is still in effect, his brain still attempting to process it all.
He’s alive.
But no one else is.
He stands at the monument of the server, the center point of everything. The wind blows, and it feels wrong. He gains five more hearts. A new book appears before him. There is no one to cheer as he hits the succeed button. There is no one to yell ‘fail’ in his ears for someone else.
It’s just Scar, and his task, and a graveyard littered with holes. Pearl’s voice is still ringing in his ears, the way she sounded up until she died.
“How did the guy with no friends win?”
He doesn’t know. The Secret Keeper made him the villain of the server, he had no friends, no matter how hard he tried. His tasks always got in the way of it. Maybe it was easier that way, not having any true alliances. He knows first hand what it does to someone when they have to kill a partner to win.
Scar is alone now, truly alone. He turns around, keeping his back to the Secret Keeper as his eyes survey the spawn before him. It doesn’t sit right, the lack of people gathered around. Sure, their numbers had dwindled a bit during the last few sessions, but it wasn’t by much. The group got smaller, and now it’s just him. Just Scar, the villain.
A laugh bubbles out of his lips, and suddenly Scar can’t hold it in. His task falls out of his hands, hitting the ground and his arms wrap around his stomach as he doubles over with laughter.
“This is— this is one heck of a funny joke guys!” He’s laughing so much it’s hard to breathe. “I wasn’t even trying to win!” That’s what he had told Pearl. He didn’t think he’d survive this long. That’s only happened one other time and…. Well.
His laughter dances on the air, filling the space of nothingness. If he pretends, he can hear the others laughing with him, alongside him.
“You did all that to make me the bad guy. You kept me from making any friends!” A hand covers his face, holding it as his laughter shakes his body. “You guys made me the villain of the server and somehow I’m the last one standing!”
It’s so ridiculous. Maybe there’s some kind of irony in there, Scar can’t be bothered to look.
“How did the guy with no friends win?”
He doesn’t know, but it’s kind of funny. Scar stands alone at the end of the world, with nothing but the things in his inventory and a server full of craters. The big statue behind him stares down at him, but he doesn’t care about its gaze. He continues to laugh, because if he stops, he fears what’ll happen.
“No one thought this would happen, everyone doubted me.” Scar was with them. He didn’t think it’d happen either. Him? Scar? Winning a Life Game? Three hours ago he wouldn’t have believed it. “But what do ya know! Villains can win too, sometimes!”
He’s not sure if he can call this a win. He’s alone on an empty server, with no one around. Scar thought he knew what loneliness was, a cold mountain with deepslate walls and wooden ceilings. But this? This is real loneliness. There isn’t another person around for miles. Every base is destroyed and empty, carnage left behind.
There is nothing here for him.
Scar’s laughter slows to a stop. His stomach hurts. So does his face. He straightens, standing tall as he takes a deep breath. He looks down at his task on the ground.
Win Secret Life.
“Is this what it’s like?” He addresses his question to the sky. There is no one to answer him, but he knows his question will be seen. Scar looks back to the server.
It doesn’t feel much like a win at all.
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There’s a moment where you see there’s still deep attraction here.
Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice // Brennan Lee Mulligan, Fantasy High: Junior Year // Lev St. Valentine, THIS IS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU // Lev St. Valentine, HOPE YOU’RE WELL. PLEASE DON’T READ THIS. // Mitski, I’m Your Man // Siobhan Thompson, Brennan Lee Mulligan, & Ally Beardsley, Fantasy High: Junior Year // Trista Mateer, You Couldn’t Just Leave? // Steven Espada Dawson, Elegy for the Four Chambers of My Brother’s Heart // Natalie Diaz, Wolf OR-7 // Ally Beardsley & Brennan Lee Mulligan, Fantasy High: Junior Year
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the symbolism of revolutionary girl utena is key to understanding what it’s even trying to say narratively and thematically. if you remove the symbolism, if you remove the ways in which the narrative obfuscates itself and abstracts what it’s saying, then what it is saying changes dramatically. if rgu was like ‘yeah lol and did you guys know that incest is bad’ or ‘maybe gay people are good’ or ‘hey did you know that csa victims are Real and Alive and Have Interiority’— like those are all paraphrases of things that it says, but the way that it chooses to say them is so powerful and conveys so much nuance and complexity that those simplistic statements don’t. it provides an incredibly meaningful commentary on the way that systemic violence and abuse are covered up, codified, made part of our culture that supposedly resents those things. it’s examination of incest, the incest taboo and how that impacts incest victims— it’s all so incredibly considered and layered because the show chooses to convey what it’s saying through symbolism, through its metatheatrical framing, through allegory. it retains the reality of these issues; it shows them to us only when we’ve already bought into the system’s lies to make a point about how that operates, how that works to make us all complicit in that violence. nanami. nanami.
dont even get me started on how the movie uses its symbolism to demonstrate how the abuse anthy and touga experienced is simultaneously built into the world and culture they exist in, and always obfuscated and abstracted for the sake of their abusers (also specifically the way that it engenders shame and prevents people from seeking help. rgu is so damn good at understanding how and why people don’t ‘do what they should’ in abusive situations: the systems in place don’t fucking work bc they are an extension of the system built upon that abuse). anthy is the model in all the paintings, the symbol of so many undesirable things, the canvas on which they are painted. her likeness is used as an approximation for all of these awful things, many of which are a part of her in a way, but such that her interiority, her feelings, are never regarded, never seen, never understood. she’s the model. akio is never explicitly named as her painter.
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