brujahinaskirt
Brujah in a Skirt
Personal blog. Literary editor, leftist redneck, activist press organizer. Horsegirl, sword-liker, feral cat rehabber. rednightmare on ao3.
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"pet rent" how about i hit your fucking kneecaps with a wrench
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and i will always, always, be defending the "plot-holes" that are not actually plot-holes at all. i've seen people on facebook complain so many times about the ending of the game - about the siege of talmberg to be more exact.
"just attack it", "just take it down", "why doesn't divish just do it", "ohh his wife he can't even fuck! nobody gives a damn", "henry doesn't even really care for radzig at this point" etc.
and i have to go back to that one solitary thing this game literally cannot exist without: love. it's the main aspect, it's the pillars the story stands on, it's everything.
medieval movies and books like to picture the old times ala skyrim: "my son was very young when he died. but he did so while doing his duty. he fell for skyrim! he fell for the empire! i do not mourn for i am proud!"
"oh, i loved my father more than anything. but he is gone now. that is life."
it is. but. hear me out. people back then - were actually just like people now. we break down when we lose someone we adore, cherish, love, protect. no matter how stoic we may be, we don't take it lightly, do we?
so, if you think about it, is it a plot-hole, when divish refuses to attack his castle because
it's his home and he loves it
his wife is in there
his friend is also in there?
robard would not attack if it were divish in there. radzig would not attack if it were henry in there. hans would not attack if it were hanush in there. istvan would not attack if it were erik in there. captain bernard would not attack if it were hans in there.
it all comes back to love. and wanting people you care about safe.
martin running back to certain death because his wife is in the village when the cumans attack.
both parents worrying about nothing but their beloved son even while they are being brutally murdered.
everyone on talmberg willing to lock henry up just to keep him away from skalitz (for reasons yet unknown).
theresa making a last stand for someone just as lost as her.
the understanding he's met with when henry comes and admits his failure to radzig, the fact that he went against direct order. (nothing, absolutely nothing else but radzig being in debt to martin, or radzig being someone close to henry, could explain the understanding, the acceptance, and the outcome of the whole situation. how do you think henry - who is just a young man, not a hero, not a dragonborn, not a chosen one - would get away with all this?)
henry backed out of the night raid on talmberg because hans was wounded and wouldn't survive long enough for the mission to succeed.
hans (in one of the outcomes) carried him out on his back, saving his fat ass. no time for glory, no time for saving the hostages when it's suddenly your best friend who is on the ground and bleeding out. he might have succeeded with the mission. yet he didn't hesitate when suddenly it was him who was put in the shoes of those who just wanted to keep their loved ones safe. it was stephanie for divish (he approved the raid). it was radzig for henry (he was the one who went first and most willingly). and it was henry for hans (who immediately backed out on henry's behalf). all those actions were based on love.
would you attack talmberg, knowing there was someone you loved? someone you wanted to know better, someone you wanted to learn how to love, someone who could have been much closer if he only tried? someone you only just met?
the whole story starts with love, continues with love, ends with love. it is everywhere you look and you don't even have to romance anyone to see it, to feel it. it is in the npcs' lives, it's the motivation behind so many actions. it's in henry's decisions. in your decisions.
because, don't you just love this game?
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I will never shut up about how Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the most tenderly written game served to the most loutish horde of jackasses. I think it is possibly one of the greatest pieces of popular fiction made about feudalism in recent history, even if it's not always the most historically accurate.
And that's because the whole damn thing is about the profound, authority-enforced inhumanity that self-propels feudal order... but this time, it's written from the perspective of, for lack of better word, "humanity undermines, and humanity wins."
Love wins, if you want to be cheeky.
This was originally meant to be a reply to @feelinungry's excellent post on the subject, but it outgrew itself and got super bloated, so I'm plopping it in its own post to not be obnoxious...
KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
And the reason all this about humanity and love is so important to the core of the story, to the very backbone of the narrative (even beyond the plot), is that it exists in opposition and to the impairment of the feudal system. Kingdom Come: Deliverance means to teach us, by way of deeply dramatic plots following individuals, how feudalism works and why it worked the way it did. And why and how that system fails.
The vehicle by which the game does this is by showing us, over and over, how the stratification of feudal class is eroded and sometimes outright dissolved (either in general, as with Henry and Hans, or when it matters most, as with Radzig and Henry) by plain and simple love.
Feudalism, like most class-stratified systems, relies upon 1. dehumanization of those beneath one's appointed status; 2. fealty (mock-love) to those above one's status, their title-appointer class; and 3. the maintenance of a deep separation between these artificially bestowed statuses, as enforced by church (as in word of clergy, not word of god) & state (legal rules and law). Those words and laws existed to propel the system by divide-and-maintain (of the workforce populace, placing it firmly below the next class in line, etc.) in the service of unify-and-profit (for the ruling class).
Sigismund & his invading army are wholly separated and adherent to the feudal theory, even if they have flouted codes of warfare & inheritance; they are presented to us as the main dehumanizing force of the story world, a wave of Order that indiscriminately burns opposition flat rather than an individual leading a royal coup, a cyclical destruction that paves the way for the next flavor of rule to continue the feudal system ad infinitum. They're thoroughly separated from the story even when they are burning down a village in front of our eyes and generally move as one, with Markvart occasionally stepping out of that mass of Feudalism and its antihuman nature to give it a face. They're more a force of nature than an individual as far as the narrative goes.
And we are meant to understand that in sharp contrast to the "close" story, the cast we get to know and watch as they attempt to answer this force of nature. And the second we see these characters get close enough to each other, by raw proximity, to poke a pin into the wineskin of feudal order as dictated to them by authority, it bleeds--everywhere. Not in the sense of ruination but in the sense that a tiny wedge of empathy cracks open the dam and leads, yep, to rehumanization--and love, the most human driving force there is.
And that changes everything, for everyone. Not just internally, as with a character's personal development arc (i.e., Hans learning why his duties, which he resented and viewed as an impingement on his freedom when dictated to him by authority, are incredibly important for real people who experience pain) but externally as well (as @feelinungry so elegantly points out in the original post).
Over and over, at every stage of the story, it's the rehumanization of and by these decision-makers (at a family level, at a community level, at a regional level, at a national level) that cracks the feudal cycle, even if in very small ways. Hans really brings this back home in a petri dish in late game, after the siege, when he complains to Henry about the noble's code (letting Istvan go) potentially leading to pain and disaster for the common people Istvan's machinations are likely to harm in the future. He chafes--and we chafe, and so does Radzig, and so does Divish--against feudal stratification because he has learned a general empathy through loving an individual, and that has in turn reshaped the way he sees the world.
And that's exactly why and when feudalism begins to fail, and why it thrashed itself the way it did, from the enforcement of sexual mores (though this wasn't exactly like it is in movies) and gender law to terror upon its own populations.
And it's the crucial understanding I think we begin to forget after being exposed to so much Hollywoodification of history, where the oppression always exists for cruelty's sake alone rather than in active and deliberate service to a political construct.
And I think it's why we've "lost the plot" so horribly when it comes to understanding that people in history were still people, not monolithic one-mind entities (as the feudal system demanded they be). And why we somehow forgot that such people fall in love, in all kinds of love, in a way that has never given a damn about authority. And that this in turn undermines supposedly supreme authority, even divine authority, and will always continue to do so, as long as people are people.
This is what it always comes back to. Always. From Henry's parents and their mysterious bond with Radzig informing the protagonist's journey from "the past"--to Henry & Hans falling into stupidly fierce soulmatehood with each other in the present--from Istvan & Erik's destructive fuck-the-world romantic love on the "enemy" side--to Divish's humbling, humanizing realization that he loves Stephanie in some way, he really does, despite the chasm of age/gender enforced upon them by their adherence to feudal order that doomed their romantic love to failure.
People will always love each other, even when the world orders them not to, even when faced with death and worse. People will always, given proximity and shared experiences, learn to see each other as human again. KCD reminds us of that. It's why the "slow" storyline exists and why it works.
And that is why this game is so fucking fantastic, and why the genpop fandom has utterly failed it.
#kingdom come deliverance#kcd#kcd2#henry of skalitz#hans capon#radzig kobyla#divish of talmberg#stephanie of talmberg#redmeta
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its important to do this every time a museum or school thinks this is a good idea
#to teach my company that we needed to stop relying on ai to write#i play a little game with them called Smaller Than the State of Texas#Where we see what we can get ChatGPT to claim is smaller than the state of texas#funniest result wins#i also recommend this for convincing baby journos they will be put through a car compactor if they use chatgpt to research
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Mutt and… Ptáček
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Thank you, @justgerlionstuff, for letting me know about this option. It took me about 391 tries to get this, and about another 14 tries to figure out how to make the scene light enough, but it was worth it. (Quest: Night Raid; Henry getting injured/"killed" before Hans could ever get his ass scar.)
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do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button
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being a fan of a friend's ocs is actually so humiliating....... like yes my favourite character rn is tragically doomed and a pillar of humanity who i think is relevant to the current world. you can find information about them on discord dot com and sometimes in late-night conversations with this guy i know. what the fuck
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I hear y’all roaring about how much you hate writing titles and first sentences, and that’s OK! You hate them because they’re extremely difficult! It’s OK to vent about the hard shit!
Don’t avoid them, though. Writing is a skill – improvement requires practice – and imagination is like a muscle. The more you flex it, the stronger it becomes.
Borrowing from other art to make genuine, theme-relevant allusions that add to your story in a meaningful way is fine. But if your goal (or side-goal, I don’t judge) is to improve as a writer, please don’t let yourself take the cheat route of cribbing a random non sequitur from some song lyric just ‘cause it sounds pretty and titles are hard! You must practice the hard things! Or your creative machine will never get stronger.
Overarching thematic elements (like titles and first sentences and last sentences) are often the things that demand all our complex big-brained writing gears turn at once, they demand we understand our stories at an extremely refined level, and they demand we be freaking pithy about it. They can’t just sound pretty… they have to work and add depth and help readers understand us and shit. It’s challenging as hell! These highest-level steps of writing are messy and stumbly and make us feel inadequate, and we hate them ‘cause we’re not good at them yet. But the more you practice, the more you’ll start to get good. You WILL get good. It WILL get easier. And it might even, dare I say it, get fun.
But you can’t cheat your way out. Let Hozier and Florence rest. TRAIN AND FIGHT!
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🪶 Common Backyard Birds of Midwestern America 🪶
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we popping the BIGGEST bottles when hans dies choking on his own blood in henry's arms after being shot down in the full flower of life like some kind of commentary on how freedom was always unattainable to him due to the unnatural rigidity and dehumanization mandated by feudal order as well as a metaphor for henry's lost chance at living a joyous life unmarred by warfare like his father wanted for him ry happens q4 2024
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No matter how I looked at it, he didn't like me.
Star (starling) am Max-Eyth-See, Mühlhausen.
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Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.
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