question: do you think Salem's immortality having an end condition is true? that is, when she was made immortal, it was so that she would 'understand the balance of life and death.' some people are treating it like a typical fairy tale virtue curse- i.e, she will die when she fulfills the condition of "understanding the balance of life and death." i personally believe that it's bullshit. she's just going to be alive, forever, and that's that. your interpretation of things seems to lend itself to this conclusion, cuz I'm pretty sure you've said something about how the gods made her immortal in a way they couldn't take back. as always, sending this just to hear your thoughts! (p.s - do you think she's capable of Ascension? I think she might be, but whether she would do it or not is another question entirely)

yeah i don’t think it’s really a curse in the typical sense. light threw her into the fountain of creation, she drowned, the water’s power revived her and bound to her forever. and then he got sanctimonious about how she needed to learn a lesson.

these two things are connected emotionally but not, i think, mechanically; if light ever intended to make her mortal again i’m certain that the end condition he has in mind was “salem learns her lesson and comes to him to grovel for forgiveness so he can judge whether she deserves to finally die.” look at the way he sets up the ultimatum for humankind! light very much sees himself as an adjudicator. he wants his judgment to be sought and obeyed.

likewise i don’t think “as long as this world turns, you shall walk its face” is a literally true statement (in the sense that salem cannot leave remnant)—first because if this were a truly literal curse then she wouldn’t be able to fly, and second because the verbiage is repeated later when light says that humankind will rise to “walk [the world’s] face” once more, so narratively this is tying salem to the resurrection of humanity itself and tying the ultimatum to salem because it’s ultimately about punishing her continued defiance. “as long as this world turns, you shall walk its face” is a poetic description meant to emphasize the weight of “you cannot die.”

it’s “you will outlive this planet and there is nothing you can do to escape that fate.”

and yeah i have major doubts that the brothers can take it back. like i said, it’s not a curse per se—the fountain of life and creation transformed her just as the pool of grimm did—and the god of light does it to her in a fit of pique. the god of darkness vaporizes her along with everyone else in the end and she just reconstitutes. at this point the god of light is either inventing whole new levels of sunk cost fallacy (it has been MILLIONS OF YEARS and she’s sworn to her defiance!) or he just can’t remove this thorn from his side.

pre-v9 my only real reservation about this line of thinking was that i’m quite sure that part of the narrative resolution will involve salem becoming mortal again, and if not the brothers then…? but as v9 delivered a cosmic force of change deeper and older than the brothers, the brothers being unable to undo it no longer poses a mechanical problem whatsoever.

which is to say that yes, i think if salem found the tree she would be just as capable of ascension as anyone else, and the more salient question is if she would choose to change and how.

as long as the ultimatum is in place, salem has a pressing reason to STAY IMMORTAL, because her immortality is what prevents ozma from immanentizing the eschaton (in which the best case scenario for her realistically is “everybody else is dead and the gods leave again”) and being immortal is the best—really, the only—weapon she has against the brothers. ozma projects his own suicidality onto her; whether salem actually IS suicidal is an open question.

though tbh i think, given the option of ascending, the real dilemma for salem would turn on her isolation and exile rather than her immortality. i’ve touched on this before but one of the main reasons i think she isn’t going to (and shouldn’t) be ‘purified’ as part of her villain -> hero arc is it’s been established pretty overtly that being grimm isn’t what made her evil, rejection and isolation made her desperate enough to embrace being the evil witch in the wilderness. so she needs to be treated like a person before she can be good, and if she has to be ‘purified’ before she can be treated like a person then it means her humanity is contingent on her looking a certain way.

(there’s uhm. a reason the story keeps using the grimm as a symbol for faunus persecution!)

and salem is old enough—and undoubtedly experienced enough persecution when she lived on the fringes of civilization—to grasp that as long as she looks grimm, people are going to see her as a grimm no matter what she does, and if she wants to be treated like a person she’s going to have to bend over backwards to prove her humanity and even that might not be enough. ozma—OZMA, who knew her and loved her before any of this nightmare began, who came back for her and chose to be with her and had children with her—even ozma would not see her as a person; he lied to her and manipulated her throughout their entire marriage and has since decided to pin the blame for all the evils in the world solely on her. is it any wonder that she’s given up?

but, like, the tree could fix that. the tree could take that away. she could be only human again. wouldn’t that be so much easier? to look like a person so she can be treated like one.

only that also really, really sucks for her, because if the only way to get even the possibility of being treated like a person is to ascend, then salem—who she is now, what she is now—fundamentally never had a chance at all and the best she can hope for is that the essence of her will find a new form that other people will judge to be deserving of kindness.

like this is what sets salem (& to an only slightly lesser extent, cinder) apart from most of the villainous cast; to a certain extent her monstrosity is socially enforced by the way other people perceive her, reinforced by thousands of years of ozma’s shadow campaign against her very existence. it’s not that she won’t change—it’s that she can’t change. she can’t make people believe that she’s a person. she can’t make them listen to her. she can’t make anyone care about her. and when she tried she was manipulated into serving the god who did this to her.

it’s blake’s “you could just be a human, or just a cat” trial with the volume dialed up to eleven. it’s “maybe you could be accepted as a person if you shed who you are now to become someone else.” is that an idea salem would ever accept? that she needs to sacrifice who she is in order to mold herself into something other people wouldn’t hate and fear on sight?

(and is that really an idea the tree, universally and unconditionally kind as it is, would let her accept?)

Another BG3-related ask: who would the BoC ROs pursue if they’re playing BG3? 👀

Oooh fun!

Elaine - Karlach

Isac - Lae'zel

Sofie - Astarion

Agravain - Shadowheart

Gawain - Wyll

Galahad - Shadowheart

Nimue - Astarion

This is more of, who would they pursue on a first playthrough because all of them would take an interest in multiple characters lol

i've been dying for a poll option ever since i saw my followers' answers to that text post from february 2022 asking people whether they pronounce beloved as "be-lov-ed" or "be-loved". many people were emphatic about only using one option, and many others use both but were not always able to articulate when they use 2 syllables vs. 3. so out of the goodness of my heart and my insatiable lust for knowledge i have gone through the notes on that post and written down some likely contenders! you're welcome!!!!

BEFORE YOU ANSWER! think about how you would pronounce beloved in the following syntactic contexts:

noun, talking directly to the beloved: hey there beloved

noun, talking about rather than to the beloved: my beloved lives in a pineapple under the sea

adjective in a noun phrase: my beloved x lives in a pineapple under the sea

verb participle: x is beloved by y

okay poll time! there are no wrong answers!! and apologies in advance if i didn't capture your truth, i only had 10 options and life is a rich tapestry!!

I had a dream I got everything I wanted... not what you'd think, and if I'm bein' honest, it might've been a nightmare.

Tuvok-Chakotay dynamic should have gone from two people who are always poking at one another to two people who are always joking with one another - in both cases this is an unspoken thing. They’re playing a game of chicken that gets steadily less hostile. From “I’m not trying to be difficult here.” (lie) to “I’m not trying to be funny here.” (lie)

Me, unable to play, because its been 30+ degrees Celcius for over a week now and my room is absolutely awfully hot even without my PC sweating:

Maybe I should multiclass my Ranger with a Druid 🤔🤔

my personal Media Genres tier ranking and also Neopets Species tiers. put together in the same post just due to being adjacently related because they're on the same website lol

links to the specific tier makers: Media Genres --- Neopets

me then: yes it's more fun for me if my OCs are bi but I'm feeling out the vibes and I'm pretty sure Idri and Aubree are just straight regardless

me now: if gnome culture is overall more queer than not by default and Idri was always at least a little bi-curious anyway then there's no fucking way she was in the goddamn circus for however many years with her high charisma and adventurous spirit and never messed around with other girls and/or other genders entirely. Aubree's still probably straight though. [side eyeing her recent and only ever in-game hookup, who is another woman] ... okay so, the Kinsey scale--

my problem is that my type of repulsion is set off specifically by american 80s tv. the 50s-70s are still manageably repressed, the 90s are awkward but (too) self-aware about it, the 00s-to-early-10s are a mix of irony-poisoned and crisply gruesome, and then anything past that is just back to being repressed&clinical. But the 80s. Brimming with potent and awkwardly inexperienced sexuality. The cheesy mixed with the sincere mixed with shameless commercialism. The medium of tv itself bulging in its mold. 80s tv is unheimlich. it's uncanny valley. And I need exposure therapy :/

I didn’t know Boe was your sona he feels like a real guy to me I saw him in line for the 7-11 bathroom last night

yeah!!! ive got a lot of early sketches of him to prove it too!

the one in the middle is actually the first sketch my friend kikkini made of Boe, with the two on the sides being sketches made about 3-4 months later that were made closer to Boes design being finalized. it's kind of wild to imagine if he still looked like these sketches.

i still think it's nice how Boe turned out, with his final design being a little softer i feel in terms of his skull design and such. a lot less angry vibes and more "huh wuh?" type vibes i think. also i think its funny how he's basically always had skull eyebrows :)

anyway i hope the 7-11 peepee pissing line wasnt too long. idk why Boe was there. he doesn't have organs to peepee piss with.

Bloodstained beaten!!!! The final boss 100% gave me vibes of chaos from aria of sorrow's lol

Fun game tho~ I'll be back later to try out the other game modes and play around with shard setups some more

More on my tma/dredge stuff. Anyway I think the first abberation fisherman!Jon should catch is this. Maybe they’re trying to ignore the fog and the strange red light to the west at first, but barely a day after his arrival and they find this writhing on the end of their hook. And they Know with a capital K that this isn’t of the eye. That there has been something deeply, horribly wrong with this ocean before they even got here. There is another power at work beneath the waves, and god if he doesn’t want to know more.

the shift of Carlos’s character from ‘straight man with an undertone of dread’ to ‘manically delighted by everything in the world’ is a fun one; namely i can’t decide if it’s More fun if Cecil was filtering Carlos’s tone to make it sound more dramatic before he really got to know him OR if Carlos had been making an honest attempt at masking before deciding he didn’t need to anymore and throwing all restraint to the curb

im ngl i have been incredibly silly

I keep thinking of that reply in my Odysseus/Agamemnon post about how I regard differently Odysseus' and Agamemnon's actions, while acknowledging that at times Agamemnon is written as a sweet man and Odysseus is always straight up shitty, and how it was taken as some sort of defense for Agamemnon and as a form of pointing out the double standard; and that wasn't at all what the post was about for me, even though I can see where they were coming from. To be honest, given I didn't imagine it would spread anywhere other than my own blog, I didn't explain myself very well (or at all).

The fact is that when I talked about Odysseus not caring about hurting someone else's child to start and end a war I was indeed comparing his actions to Agamemnon's, but my words about supporting Odysseus' wrongs and cheering him in his terrible actions, while in a joking tone, weren't entirely a joke. I do think that Odysseus does some very shitty acts, and some quite terrible ones depending on the sources. That's a fact, that he does is at the core of his characterisation and it's what makes him so much fun; but not even when he is at his most cruel does he harm his family, his own son. Agamemnon, while sweet and loving at times in some texts, at his worst is willing to sacrifice Iphigenia. When readers regard with more sympathy Odysseus over Agamemnon despite both being responsible for children dying, I don't think there's a double standard in this aspect at all considering it's never his own kid Odysseus harms. And that's the key, I think.

Odysseus and Agamemnon have very different priorities, a very different view on loyalty and duty. It could be said that Agamemnon acts out of selfishness, but it could also be read in a kinder light, saying that Agamemnon is ruled by the gods first, and by his role as head of the achaeans; Agamemnon is not entirely himself. In opposition we see Odysseus acting perhaps mainly for himself and his own family and men; yes, he is a king, but he has not the role Agamemnon has. As a consequence, Agamemnon submits his family's wellbeing to the war, to the gods, while Odysseus stops the plow before hurting Telemachus but is (depending on the source) the cause of Iphigenia's sacrifice and Astyanax's death.

Both Odysseus and Agamemnon have reasons to support their actions, and both can be sympathised with; it's fiction after all. When it comes to fiction, at the end of the day which character a reader is drawn to or sympathises with is mainly an issue of personal taste, but I suppose it also implies a certain level of one's own views or preferences on morals, what makes us find certain actions more justifiable, or tasteful (perhaps that's a more accurate word), than others. Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter, no matter how sympathetic or understandable the reason, generally sits worse on people than Odysseus doing the same with someone else's kids, because they're someone else's. This different emotional reaction they provoke has place not just metanarratively, but also inside the very story; it is narratively significant, given it determines how their arrival home plays out, how their wives react to them, and thus their futures. Ultimately it determines whether they live or die.

I think both terrible acts go in line wonderfully with each characterisation, showcasing the role they hold in their world, what they value, what they care for, what they're willing to sacrifice for themselves and the others, how much of their own they're willing to give and bend. While looking at the wider picture it could perhaps be drawn that Agamemnon is the better person out of the two, but Odysseus' selfish actions are perhaps easier to empathise with, especially from a modern viewpoint. Odysseus is treacherous and prone to betrayal, but not against his own; Agamemnon follows the rules of the gods. How fitting in that context that Odysseus doesn't die at the end of his story, that he cheats the death heroes so often are fated to, almost as if cheating the narrative itself, bending the rules of the world he is ascribed to; how fitting in the context of those texts that point towards Sisyphus being his father. But that's another topic, and I've already talked a lot.