Watching Tales of the Loop: this sci fi ain’t shi-

The most horrifically beautiful moment of motherhood and time travel I have ever seen in my life with hauntingly beautiful music playing in the background as a little girl contemplates her own mortality.

Me: oh fuck shit no-

Um actually I have something more to say about Kabru and Mithrun’s similarities and relationship.

I think a lot abt how it’s shown a few times how elven culture relies heavily on non-natural ways of doing things, and it’s interesting especially how like our main cast repeats multiple times the three steps to living a long and healthy life. Meanwhile the canaries, the elves, don’t necessarily recognize that stuff as important as it is. I think specifically of the example of Mithrun explaining to Kabru that he has to have medication or a spell otherwise he can’t sleep, to which Kabru tucks him in and gives him a massage which knocks him out cold. His dependency on other methods to fight off insomnia were kinda just in his head, he hadn’t tried anything else. I mean prior to joining the canaries he was fully restrained 90% of the time so ofc a servant would just come in and place a spell for him to sleep every night. And he was like that for years. And then Cithis just replaced all his caretaker servants, then it became her job to make sure he took a pill or listened to her bells every night. I think there’s something there about how there’s a list of stuff Mithrun wasn’t allowed to be around and when he gets separated from the canaries he encounters all of that since Kabru doesn’t know to “protect” Mithrun or restrain him so severely. And it’s interesting because Mithrun doesn’t even seem to have issues with the things, like ofc top on the list was he wasn’t supposed to see goats or sheep. One of the first things he and Kabru eat is barometz. Its something to me that Kabru, who has also suffered so much, takes Mithrun into this dungeon and he has to face head on what’s been bothering him, he has to look his trauma in the eyes. And eat it. He cannot move on until he sees it, understands it, and finally starts talking about himself (“the last desire I had left wasn’t revenge, I wanted the demon to finish me off” “I was scraps left on the plate […] I guess vegetable scraps have their uses too”)

It just seems to me like a more vague and overarching way we see the elven cultural mindset hold him back from properly healing, I don’t think Kabru knew what he was doing at all but the fact of the matter is no one was filtering Mithrun’s view of the world anymore. And while Mithrun believed that didn’t matter to him, nothing mattered, it still made a difference. He was still on the path to moving on, and properly healing, even though he didn’t quite recognize that.

Diamond cutters doodles!!!!! I love them all sm and PLEASEEE I WANT SILVER TO REJOIN SO BAD…….

I think my least favorite thing ever of all time is when I’m reading a fanfic and Basen and Lily are villains like NO my children would NEVER

It’s usually the case in OG Cale fanfic, now don’t get me wrong I love the guy but also his family was not all horrible, and Basen and Lily were NEVERRRR at fault. Lily is literally like, seven years old and Basen is fifteen neither of them hate their brother either. Any child wouldn’t know how to approach their older brother who doesn’t talk to them and is distant(+ is known for having a bad personality) like that isn’t their fault 😭😭

OG Cale distanced himself from his siblings to protect them, there’s no one to fault in this situation for things turning out this way because it happened due to so many combining circumstances. Like IDK! I just don’t like it when Lily and Basen are treated like bad people cause I just find it a bit ridiculous.

Basen and Lily could’ve tried talking to OG Cale, but the real question is if he would let them talk to him ykwim, his act was perfect with literally no flaws. The reason it worked so well was because no one KNEW him and he probably knew that part too. The sadness to their situation is that they all had their reasons and cared for eachother but there wasn’t really any communication

Tbh it should have been Deruth’s job to ask Cale what was wrong, he’s not like the worst father ever okay but he also has extreme communication issues! The Henituse’s middle name is practically ‘communication issues’ like none of them are very good at it I fear. Deruth clearly cares for his son a lot, but he doesn’t know how to approach Cale possibly out of guilt/fear he’ll hurt his son even more. Which is why he just let’s Cale do what he wants

I think it’s important to note that the family did have faith in Cale, they all knew he wasn’t a bad person but they were all just so distant from eachother. I don’t think Deruth would have offered KRS!Cale to go to the capital after like a weeks worth of changed behavior unless he knew that there was more to his son than what the public thought. Again I think the big issue with the Henituse family is their communication

The characters all have complicated dynamics and personalities and it’s just something I don’t like when everything is treated very one dimensional

Okay, we all know being a demigod is a shit position. Its scary and gets you killed in really nasty ways. But I feel like being a Big Three Kid has to be the shitiest position in all the shit positions.

Like, imagine being Thalia Grace. Your dad is king of the gods, lord of the skies. Led a war to get rid of a tyrant. And the only thing you get is his scorned wife AND brother, who both try to kill you (with one technically succeeding), a drunk of a mother, and brother who you thought was dead. Oh, wait, he’s not dead! No instead he was used as an offering to appease your dad’s wife and help fight in a war and prevent mass destruction.

Or maybe you can imagine being Percy. Son of the sea god, the stormbringer, the earthshaker. You get to live with a disgusting, abusive man for around 6 years. Who smells like literal shit. All because your scent as a demigod is too strong, BECAUSE of who your father is. You see things that you aren’t supposed to see and do things that people can’t do and go years thinking something is wrong with you. That your the problem. Then you get to the one place where you’re supposed to be save. But! Here is the kicker! You’re not! Your uncles hate you and you’ve been accused of stealing a symbol of power. A series of events that will kick off a war, and guess what. You’re a center point for it. Welcome to Camp Half-Blood.

Mhm, but then there’s Hazel. Daughter Pluto, god of the underworld and riches. But that doesn’t really change anything does it? She’s still living in 1930s America, in a red state. One where confederate flags still hang if you go deep enough into the city. She go to a school where the kids are supposed to be just like her! They still don’t like her tho. She’s got no idea who your father is, only that he left her with a parting gift. Only it’s not really a gift. Sure, she can pull rubies and diamonds from the earth, all worth millions. But anyone who’s ever gonna touch it will die. She lives with her mother, a woman gone so mad with greed it kills her. And Hazel, by the way. Laying dead Alaska, inhaling oil. But it doesn’t end there! She can’t have her mother suffering for eternity, can she? The answer is no. Hazel gets to spend the next 70 years in the Fields of Asphodel. It still doesn’t end! Because when she’s brought back to life, she gets to fight in a war against giants, her sad story seemingly never ending.

Nico’s a son of one of the Big Three, one of the most ancient and most powerful. But most people look at him as something bad, something not worth taking a second glance at. Something too look away from, mostly. He’s from the 30s, spent years in a magical time casino with only his sister at his side. She doesn’t stay for long though, she dies soon after they discover their heritage. And he doesn’t remember his mother much, a name without a face. A face without a name. He survived an attempted assassination at 2, though it wouldn’t be the only time his was life was threatened. He clings to his sister, even though she’s dead. He’s the son of the god of the underworld, is he not? There had to be a way, and there is. Only she won’t talk to him, she seems more concerned with communicating with the guy who got her killed instead. She chooses rebirth, and he decides to lay it to rest. She’s not coming back, and he has a war to fight in. (He gets stuck in a jar and forcibly outed a few years later, but that’s a lot to get into for now.)

Jason Grace is a pillar of New Rome, their golden boy, their American boy. He’s a son of Jupiter, a natural born leader. He’s been at camp for as long as he can remember, he wants to be praetor soon. He’s had a rocky start, but maybe he’ll be one of the lucky ones. Retire a veteran and live a long life with Reyna in New Rome. Only that never happened. He has no idea where he is, there’s a girl holding his hand, and she’s cute but it feels wrong. They get attacked and people come in and call him a Greek demigod, familiar, yes, but still wrong. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t put things into perspective the way it does for Piper and Leo. He’s goes to a quest to rescue Hera, the name sounds wrong. He nearly dies but at least he remembers who he is. He spends the next 6 months trying to get back home, even though he isn’t too sure on where or what home is. He gets there, eventually, but it doesn’t stop there. He’s dragged on quests and battles and fights in the war but at least he survives it, he’s still there. Apollo needs help, he and Piper give him aid. He gets dumped. He doesn’t get to he a veteran in New Rome. Not with Reyna, not with Piper, not with anybody. He doesn’t get kids or grandkids. No, he gets shot down, another demigod buried.

You could be any one of them, really. Pick your poison, but I guarantee you won’t like any of them. Spending years trying to find a place where you belong, where you feel safe. Only for it to never come.

Percy, who, if you really look at the books, isn’t really all that well liked until he’s at least 2 years into camp. Only to then be sidelined because the courages, brave, fearless daughter of Zeus is back from the dead. Nico, the son of one of the most feared and hated gods. Who has death written all over him, who excludes it so much animals can smell it and humans can sense it, who’s been ostracized and pushed off to the side since he was 10. Hazel, who was treated like disease as soon as she stepped foot on camp soil. Who’s gone her whole life looked as something that’s cursed, that will only bring misfortune, a bad omen.

Shit positions, all of them.

my gma told me that my mom used to wake up, eat breakfast, then study for 12 hours straight. every fuckin day. and my gpa would bring her food and tell her to take breaks bc of how immersed she was. she’s literally my role model forever

i genuinely do believe that lian going down a more civilian, superhero-adjacent path rather than operating fully as a superhero would make for a compelling narrative.

already, lian has a very nuanced perspective on "the life" because of how intertwined it has been with her own life, more specifically, her childhood. she has been privy to the emotional and physical toll it takes on the people involved, and the things that are asked of them day in and day out. of course, she still admires her father and all her aunts and uncles, but she has seen enough to know that being a superhero is far more than having cool costumes and flashy powers (or unparalleled skills, like roy’s aim). she has also seen what it looks like on the other side, as in, she is aware that her mother's life as "cheshire" regularly conflicts with her life as "jade", ultimately making it more difficult to build a life as the latter rather than continuing with the former. her parents’ jobs (albeit different) have been points of contention in the past because there is no true balance between their personal and professional lives, their professional lives often trickling into their personal ones.

what would make the decision to not follow in roy's footsteps even more powerful, to me, is if she chose to experience it for herself and ultimately realized it wasn't for her. from there, she could get more involved with the community while also staying the hero-loop in some capacity. she could go the reporter route like lois and linda, be a public defender/engage in pro-bono work, help develop health clinics, improve conditions of shelters, etc.. there’s many different routes that she could take that would help support the work that is being done by her dad and family without necessarily being directly involved in that part of the fight.

Sometimes I remember that my whole house was so obsessed with the show Merlin, that we named the first tree we planted in the yard Merlin.

When it was given to us 11 years ago it was hardly a scraggly stick, and now it looks like a giant bush

Artist rendition

I love kabru like he’s established as this manipulative and shady person with ulterior motives who could be a major threat to laios’s party, but he also is one of the most empathetic and kind characters in the series and does his best to try and help everyone bc he is one of the people who understands the situation the best. and I think ppl are too focused on the first part they forget the second part. (Anime onlies are ok bc you guys haven’t gotten his character development yet ^^)

Also his party getting wiped out constantly in the beginning was funny as fuck

YESSS!! the whole immaturity thing is so trueee. i dated this 38 year old when i was like 18/19, and in every argument he had to bring up the fact that i’m younger than him. i remember once this woman was flirting with him and i got angry and he said that she was an old friend and that ‘I don’t understand because i’m too young’ like what??😭 then why are you with me if i’m too young wtf. and there r so many instances where i just didn’t know if it his behaviour was normal but then he’d say that i’m inexperienced and should just trust him and what not. (he wanted me to move in with him 5 months into dating so he’d have “easier access” to me😭😭). PLUS HE HAD 3 KIDS LIKE WTH AM I GONNA DO TAKE CARE OF THEM??? he definitely clung onto the fact i have daddy issues bc he would use that against me so many times 💀💀

i met him when i worked as a barista, i was freshly 18 as well. like seriously there were so many red flags i ignored, idk why😭 he was love bombing the fuck out of me, and then when we’d have a argument he’d use that against me and say “i did all of this for you and this how you repay me, thank you so much” THIS MANIPULATION AT ITS FINESTTT. and i would feel so bad as well 💀

so…dilfs are better left as a fantasy 👎🏼👎🏼

😭😭😭😭

I feel lowkey bad for all the teenage girls out there who went through the canon event of dating a 40 year old manchild. Like that man should’ve known better bc why is he dating someone THAT much younger than him? Other than to manipulate her bc she is more naive than the women his age who know better.

And I agree with you, the dilf fantasy is just a fantasy. Most of the time. Bc look, I grew up reading dilf fanfics from like the age of 12/13. I was reading huge age gap fics and I was like “omg yes, I need an older man! They are more mature and better etc” then I grew up and realised there’s a reason I was/am so attracted to dilfs from the fanfics — bc they were WRITTEN BY WOMEN. They are a woman’s fantasy that oftentimes is NOT a reality. In reality, the dilfs I met were always lowkey creepy bc like… why are you interested in a teenager bro!!!??? I could be your daughter!

I realised that just bc they’re older, doesn’t mean they aren’t immature. This isn’t always the case but most of the time it is. Now despite all this, if I met a dilf who acted exactly like he was written by a woman writing a fanfic, someone like SUGAR DADDY ARI LEVINSON, then yes I would marry him in a heartbeat idec he could be 50 lol.

crocheted Brok & Brok

i love my mother so much for making my favourite guy of all time. she is amazing, i love you mom :)

it should be illegal to feel like this on your birthday

begging twitter to stop showing me tweets of people with no reading comprehension misrepresenting things I said but since i was going to make this more in-depth post Anyway .

when i say imogen is better read as a metaphor for generational trauma than she is a metaphor for queerness or chronic pain, i’m not talking about legitimate traits she has as a character. obviously she is queer. obviously she experiences some form of chronic pain (though i would argue her magic better suits chronic illness not pain because she states that it’s Not always painful, but it does always influence how she lives her life).

when i talk about how well she’s understood as a metaphor, i’m talking about when i’m looking at her as a part of a story, as an arc that i am witnessing rather than in the more typical fandom way of this is a fictional person who interacts with exandria as real people do. and that is a fun way to interact with characters, i enjoy it a lot! but when i say imogen (to me, as i for some reason have to clarify on my own blog which implies that these are my own opinions and not absolute fact that needs to be accepted by people on the internet with different experience and opinions than me) is best read as a metaphor for generational trauma, it isn’t a dismissal of her queerness or her illness, it’s just me thinking looking at her from that angle is more compelling.

imogen has been one of my favourite characters and least favourite characters in campaign 3 because i tend to analyse her through a lens of generational trauma and she ends up looking extremely familiar to me as someone with a family that carries their’s heavily which is as comforting as it is frustrating.

for me the main thing that looking at imogen through a queer lens of literary analysis fails to account for is harm. on the one hand - the harm that imogen experiences, not because of how people treat her for who she is, but that exists simply as a factor of her being ruidusborn. on the other hand a the harm that imogen causes. not to say that she is some malicious villain waiting for her chance to harm others, but that there are things about being ruidusborn that very much do incline her towards violence in a way that she might not otherwise be - i think about the conversation after she went nuclear and chet brought up people being scared of her connecting that to her father keeping distance. the only harm that queerness provides comes from society, and that isn’t the case in exandria. even metaphorically, the thing that society fears in ruidusborn people (while it has certainly been exacerbated by centuries of superstition and practices like we saw in zephrah) is a tangible threat. imogen’s magic when not controlled can wipe out a city block, but queerness poses no threat.

that’s why i’m not compelled by imogen’s backstory as a queer metaphor. not because i’m some imodna anti (i very emphatically am not but this fandom kinda makes me wish i was sometimes) or because i think exandria’s lack of homophobia/transphobia means that characters can’t be viewed through a queer lens or that critical role doesn’t contain some of the most compelling queer metaphor i’ve encountered. imogen just isn’t one of those characters, not because she isn’t queer, or because i think her story shouldn’t resonate with queer people, just because i find the generational trauma angle more consistent.

it’s similar with the chronic illness angle, which i will refer to as illness but you’re welcome to emphasise pain, we all have different vocabularies for the experiences we face. but just to give context i’m running off laura’s comparison of imogen’s powers to her own sensory issues and anxiety which while often Lead to pain, fall more into chronic illness in imogen’s context to me. and i do think there’s substantial comparison for imogen’s story as a metaphor for chronic illness, but i think that was much more true earlier in the campaign than it is looking at her from the current context. her beginning motivation being her search for knowledge about her powers really resonated with me as similar to someone experiencing symptoms of chronic illness but who could neither figure out how to treat them or what they were caused by.

but then imogen got more information, specifically about her mother, and her priority became not understanding her powers but understanding her current state as a person - how had she become the person she is, inclusive of her powers but very much emphasising her lack of a mother who became more and more present in the unweaving web of ruidusborn lore. that’s when i was less compelled by the chronic illness reading and more compelled by viewing her as a metaphor for generational trauma. had that not been enough on its own, imogen’s visit to relvin and her recent thoughts on her mother would be enough to convince me.

the part that makes me hesitant about this post is that generational trauma is so intensely linked to the contexts under which it is created and perpetuated. so i can’t really point to specific scenes as evidence of specific things that prove generational trauma is the most compelling and i don’t really want to unload that much of my own experience to clarify my thoughts on a character. but vaguely, i will say that imogen’s relationship with her parents is obviously the clearest source for my reading her as a metaphor for generational trauma. the fact that relvin, the only person in her family without the thing that draws society’s ire, is also the person that she has the most willing anger at is also indicative of this to me. in general, imogen’s rage that so easily transitions into sadness and vice versa comes out a lot in conversations about parents. most recently, i think about ashton’s lovely speech about found family and his distrust about parents and how as they were speaking, laura seemed to be playing imogen as sadly in thought versus months ago when fearnes parents showed up with striking similarities to liliana and imogen’s words of wisdom were let’s hurt them all.

and like. to me that angersadnessvengeancegrief is particularly evocative of the feelings that arise when you are in a family with generational trauma, especially when you are aware of it. because imogen can and has followed the logical steps that have led her and her family to where they are. early on when recounting her relationship with her dad she seemed wistful but understanding of the distance between them. in nearly every encountered with a parental figure imogen seems to be some level of distrusting for the most part, but she’s still holding out hope that her mother will see the good side. and further, there’s the complication of how dire her losing her powers seems to be, and how inextricable her powers are from every aspect of her life. she’s also southern and from a blue collar family. this means nothing except it also means a whole lot.

this is messy and not well organised but if you want a good essay you’re gonna have to pay me money for it but tldr: i say things i believe on my This Is My Opinion Blog and i don’t think i need to explain my thoughts to strangers on the internet but this was already half written in my drafts and if people are gonna shit on my opinions please at least do it in good faith and shit on my actual opinions not the ones you’ve decided i have.

At a point in my life where coming off as racially ambiguous is bothering me bc I want to be proudly Arab more than ever before

always so funky to be reminded that your parents might love you but they don’t actually like you very much