formerly an essay in tags but - billie lurk. half-nameless, misremembered woman. her powers derived from the things taken from her, without any catharsis or empowerment. the rat charm, tied with deidre's hair, her lover's voice in the mouth of rats. her arm and eye, taken, given back only to cause her chronic pain, then lost again. foresight seems a cruel gift for a woman who botched the timing of her takeover of the whalers, and bet wrong when it came to delilah.
she never bore the outsider's blessing; his first visit to her was more like an assault. every other dishonored POV character gets the choice to be selfish, and for that selfishness to mean something, but billie's actions have no effect on the world at large, either, in a game without a chaos system.
some say that corvo is the ghost, but he can reach out and change things. billie's buried herself twice and come back and nothing she does seems to matter - she is less a protagonist, more a convenient full stop in the narrative.
try this: open doto, start a new game. sit in her cabin. notice how little of billie there is. even the woman she loved more than anyone has the face of another named character.
she sits amongst the assets of other games: empty canvases and a dressmaker's mannequin that wears nothing.
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to kind of elaborate on a tangent off my last reblog i was talking recently about An Incident that occurred a few years ago in a discord community i used to be a part of, that was primarily run by a twitch streamer. long rambling post about arguing and shit-slinging to follow.
to make a long story short there was some long-term resentment building between the streamer and some of their moderators and popular users. this eventually broke out into a large, extremely public argument that lasted multiple days (it was a server full of leftists, so... people loved to debate). the argument ultimately lead to about half the users (a couple hundred people) leaving the discord for another community.
at the time i was heavily involved in damage control. it was probably the most i ever got involved in that community, ironically- i spent a lot of hours staying up extremely late talking things out with people, trying to sort out who had said what and when, what we could learn from that, how we could make amends and move forward. i ended up giving up after the users in question all either left or got banned, and the streamer seemed too defensive to change in any meaningful way.
i think i, at least, learned something from all of that mess. there were so many accusations being slung around that basically boiled down to "you made me feel uncomfortable, and i didn't know what to do about that". i'm not trying to downplay the seriousness of that- when negative feelings like that fester with no outlet, it can have a serious effect on your life. i've spent years in a precarious living situation with people i have to appease to ensure my survival. like, i get it.
however, people really liked to take this and spin it as clinically as they could- as if it were a moral failing on the streamer's part. i saw a lot of terms being used like "emotional abuse", "toxic relationship", "abuse of power", etc, that i honestly feel were exaggerations. in fact, a lot of the people i saw making these claims went on to act the same way themselves in the future... one of the moderators who claimed the streamer was abusing their power by making unilateral decisions did the same thing to me when i was in their server, overriding their mod team to punish me directly.
i don't think they were power tripping or abusing me or anything. i think they just didn't like me, and were willing to compromise their own principles to get me to stop. sometimes that's... all there is to it, really?
it feels better if you have a "good reason" not to like someone or something, and that can drive people to come up with excuses but, at the end of the day, sometimes you just don't like a guy! that's okay! you can find someone fucking obnoxious without having to have a reason for it! you don't have to spend hours debating whether them making a joke at your expense one time was an act of abuse or not. you don't have to dig for dirt on someone to justify blocking them on twitter. you don't have to find reasons not to make an account on a website! you can just not do that! you can just not like a guy!
i think the internet would be a better place if more people had this mindset about relationships. a friend invited me to their personal discord a couple days ago and i met their friends and we talked a bit. we had a lot in common but we didn't quite click... someone picked a fight with me, i made some jokes that didn't land, people didn't really seem to like me. after a while i realized that i had started only reading the server out of a sense of obligation, at which point i questioned why i was even doing it. i barely know these people. i don't owe them shit. i can just leave! i can mute the server and never talk there again! it can just end there! and, again, i don't think any of them were bad people, or being malicious, or anything like that. i don't think they truly caused harm to me in any way. we just didn't get along. that's fine. you can break ties with people without a callout post getting involved.
hell, it would probably even have been better to get confrontational about it. air the bad feelings out before they have any time to fester. that's also an option. a lot of people are too scared to say anything when they have a problem with somebody... i know i've been there. you can just talk it out. what's the worst that happens? it escalates and now you have a real reason never to talk to each other again? seems better than pretending to not have an issue for months or years while slowly building up to a huge and very public fight.
i think people get kind of attached to this idea they have in their minds of... being able to tell their whole side of the story and have everyone support them. see all of the little ways that they have been done wrong by this other person and agree with them, tell them at last "YES you're right that's so bad! that wasn't your fault!" and then just have it all be over immediately, their antagonist fleeing into the sunset never to be seen again, humiliated at having been so thoroughly exposed for their shameless behavior.
nothing is ever that simple. most of the time, the people who are making you feel bad have no idea they did it. sometimes, YOU'RE also making THEM feel bad. but people try to stick to their narrative anyway- i'm the victim here, these are my complaints, anything i did to the other guy was justified by them being worse than me. nothing they did could possibly be justified at all. please agree with me so they'll have to leave me alone and then i'll feel better. it's sickening.
you can't carry around grievances like that. being frustrated with other people is a normal part of life and you need to find an outlet for it. find friends you trust who you can bitch to when you're having a bad time. learn to actually talk to people, or just learn to leave and move on with your life. do something besides stockpiling bad experiences to use as ammunition for your callout posts.
and yes, before i get some smarmy comment, obviously there are actual cases of people doing shit heinous enough that you need to make the general public aware of it or need help dealing with the situation. most interpersonal conflicts i see online are far pettier than this and could be easily solved with better communication. use your own judgement.
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