saw someone say they're we're happy Alicent's and Otto's deaths forced them "realize what they had done" and like...
Otto's one thing, I get the animosity. but Alicent? your getting hot and bothered over her realizing she failed, she failed to save her children, she failed to protect them, to them alive? that she tried so hard, so fucking hard, making every hard decision, trying to get between her children and the fate they were damned to by Viserys and Rhaenyra? that she damned her kids, who were already damned to die to begin with, and had to suffer the guilt of them dying to her own hand? that she's going to drive herself mad with grief over her children, her grandchildren?
like... it's not satisfying (especially for show Alicent) watching a woman go so mad with grief it literally kills her because she fought with everything she had to save her children only for them to die anyway. ever since her father's exile, when Rhaenyra's lies took Viserys's favor, when Viserys ignored the Rhaenyra's sons bastardhood at the risk of the whole house, or when Luke took Aemond's eye and Viserys demanded good will; she knew her children's lives were forfeit. then Daemon killed Vaemond and her children's coffins were built, catching cobweb's all the while. she knew and she fought it desperately, taking risk after risk, living in fear until her moment came, she could out Aegon on the thrown, she could protect her kids, maybe, just fucking maybe they'd be safe... only for it to lead to a war that would kill her entire family.
her death, slow and tragic as it was, is heartbreaking. she didn't deserve it, she deserved to feel safe, to feel as though she could allow her past friend take the thrown without her children being at risk to feel as though she and her children weren't being circled by wolves and picked at by vulture's. she didn't deserve to live alone and die alone. she didn't deserve to have her hands coated in her children's blood.
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hey remember when we were discussing how weird the whole cliegg thing is in AOTC. and you had thoughts, feelings and emotions. tell me about those XOXO
(Big TW for this post - I discuss human trafficking, sex trafficking, rape, child abuse, slavery, and PTSD in this post. It's about the realities of slavery and Tatooine and how it involves the Skywalkers.)
Something that I almost never see in any discussion on the Lars family is how sharply the fanon headcanons and characterizations of diverge from the ones we get in the moves. Like, particularly Cliegg and the prequel trilogy. Like - I feel like there's this automatic assumption that the Lars loved Shmi and that they cared for Luke out of dedication to her and her family, and it's this huge found family vibe but like can I be real. Can I be super real right now. It’s something that I find kind of baffling, because when I watched Attack of the Clones, and on every rewatch since (and there have been many), it always seems kind of obvious to me that Cliegg bought Shmi as a slave, presumably as a house slave, if not outright as a part of sex trafficking. And I don't mean in one of those "He bought her to free her, he's a good guy, etc etc". I mean, he bought her as a slave with the original intention of keeping her as a slave. And what's really interesting, is you can get pretty much all the clues about that from the exchanges between Anakin has with Watto, his and Shmi's former master.
Again, I want to stress that, because I think it's crucial that we see this for what it is - not an exchange between a former employee and his boss, not an exchange between a kid and a member of his former community. His former slavemaster. The man who won him and his mother in a gambling game like so many fancy necklaces. The source and object of Anakin's childhood enslavement. Watto would have beaten them. He made Anakin, a child of 9 - and I read somewhere once that Anakin started in the races at 6 - ride in a pod race that no human has ever won before, with the full expectation that he would die. This is a being whose entire life has revolved around the certainty that society is not only capable of functioning, but functions best, when sentient beings can be bought and sold like property. And, to be real with you, because this is a thing that happens to people who suffer enslavement, he very likely loaned them out temporarily for sex trafficking purposes for a quick buck - a practice that is noted historically in virtually every society that operated on a system involving slaves.
It's important to recap that, because I do think it's impossible to understand how deeply horrifying the conversation they have is without that context. Like, let's look at how he tells Anakin about Shmi -
This scene is....so telling to me.
From the outset, Watto said he sold her as a slave. Like, it was a slave exchange. Watto heard about her freedom later - clearly, Cliegg bought her, and behaved in a way - intentional or not - that Watto believed he was buying her as a slave to own as a slave. That part is not subtext, that's just actual text.
"But Mikhayla" some will say "he freed her the second he bought her - he bought her in order to free her."
Except....there is genuinely nothing in the movies, and off the top of my head, the wider narrative, that ever indicates that that's true. In fact it makes no sense in that case, for Watto to have not known that Cliegg was buying her in order to free her. Why would he have to hide that? Watto presumably doesnt care what happens to her, because he's selling her. In the larger materials, its said that his shop fell on hard times, and in the movies, we can see the proof. The script says he's sitting outside his shop, but at that point it resembles more of a kind of beaten down stand. He's still selling junk, but less and of poorer quality - presumably, he's spent all his money on gambling debts. And the thing is, slaves are expensive. He sold her years prior, and I bet he fed himself on that money for a very long time - he was a very motivated seller, as barbaric as that language is to use about a transaction involving a human person. He's not going to be fussy over why the person buying her wants to buy her.
There's also the fact that this is a society that vastly runs on slavery, and large plantation owners would often "rent" out slaves to smaller but still profitable farms. And Cliegg is a moisture farmer with presumably a large tract of land for water vaporizers. If anything, I can see Watto having rented Shmi to her, Cliegg taking a liking to her, and then approaching Watto to buy her. I mean, if he's profitable enough to just buy a slave, then he clearly had at least some money.
"He spent his whole savings!" Show me that in the text.
"He loved her from the start!" Show me that in the text.
"But Mikhayla," yet others will say, "he did free her! And then married her! He clearly meant from the start to free her, and only bought her to get her away from Watto. He could have never seen her as property. Who would marry their slave?"
Except, in the real world, this is...another thing we see across multiple historical records, masters buying women as slaves and then later freeing them in order to legally marry them. PARTICULARLY in societies that operate so heavily on an entire caste system involving slaves - we can look to the Roman Empire, for example. Countless Roman officials, merchants, and military officials bought women, fell in love with them, and freed them in order to marry them.
"But maybe she said yes!" (I know these are not your objections, but as you know, I'm an attorney, which means I constantly have to find an argument to fight against). So, to this imaginary detractor I say: I feel like it should be rather obvious, but I'll say it just in case - it is impossible for a slave to consent to any action they perform at the request of a slave master. It cannot happen. A woman who is enslaved cannot consent to marrying the man who bought her, and who has very likely been raping her up until this point, and wants to now marry her - usually, to make any children he had by her legally his children, and therefore citizens, rather than slaves themselves.
So really, whether or not Cliegg had a change of heart doesn't actually change my mind about his actions towards Shmi. I don't care if Cliegg DID love her - in fact, I'm sure he DID love her. People can and have convinced themselves of all kinds of moral superiority, people can claim to love someone while owning them as property! Shmi could never consent to marrying a man who held her as a slave. Even if he freed her, and she willing chose to stay there for a few years, and then he asked her to marry him. In my head, you can't overcome that power imbalance. Cliegg will never not be a man who once believed Shmi was a thing to be owned. He will never be a man who didn't see her as property.
Like, at some point, it actually becomes kind of more and more unlikely that this is a guy who took up this transaction for non-malicious purposes. Because we simply do not see it in the movie. What I see in the movie is a slave owner saying he fell on hard times and sold his slave to a farmer who probably needed help on his land or in his house - he has no wife, so the latter is probably more likely. I see him saying that at the time of the transaction, he had no idea that Cliegg intended to free her. And for all that Cliegg calls Shmi his darling, his love, his wife - not once do we ever hear of any evidence that Shmi saw this as a love match. In fact, the only thing we find out about her daily life with the Lars family is that in the mornings, she wakes up early and goes to pick mushrooms. You know. A task for the house. An unpleasant task, done before everyone else is awake, that she does absolutely alone. I'm just saying. These implications are not good ones.
I will say though, for all this, do you know what really sells me on the idea that the relationship between Shmi and Cliegg is is not a consensual one, is Anakin's reaction to it. This is a boy whose entire hopes and dreams have revolved around his mother's freedom. You have more excellent writing than me on this, but the moral injury Anakin suffers leaving his mother behind is. Intense. All he wants is to one day free her. In a way, a part of him is always that tiny boy who couldn't bear the idea of leaving behind his mom, who swore, the last time he saw her, that he would free her. And at this moment, all of his dreams have seemingly come true! His mother is free. According to Watto, she's found love, and married. For all he knows, she's had other children. Maybe that could involve SOME complicated emotions, but mostly you would expect that he would feel, at the very least, relieved. Happy. Interested, curious.
Instead, this is his reaction:
He's grim, business like. He is not happy. He is not relieved. He doesn't even seem to acknowledge that she's still alive - the way he reacts is not a man who thinks his mother is out of danger. To Anakin, who grew up enslaved until 9 and knows how this society works, it seems almost immediately apparent that the Lars are just a different kind of danger.
There's also this rather interesting detail:
This is a boy who bleeds, every second of every day, longing for a family. He basically begs at obi-wan's feet day and night, to be acknowledged as a son. His reaction to his wife's pregnancy is radiant joy - his reaction to know she could die, profound existential horror. I mean good god, he basically turns Palpatine aka Satan Himself into a father figure, because he's that desperate for one.
And here, this man is claiming him as his family. He's talked about being excited to see him. He talks about planning with Shmi to meet him. He calls him "son".
And Anakin doesn't give him another moment of his time, the second those words are out of his mouth. It's silence. For a boy who is so starved for intimacy he genuinely falls in love with the very first girl who was ever nice to him, to react to a claim of relationship this way. It's bizarrely out of character for him. Unless it isn't. UNLESS he's disgusted by that claim, instead of relieved by it. If he thinks his mother has been bought and then forced into marriage, of course he hates Cliegg. I remember when we were watching the movie together, and remember I said to you "You can just tell Anakin is thinking, 'Call me son one more fucking time'"
And can I be real, I have so much more to say about this. As you know, I actually have essays of opinions and feelings about Shmi Skywalker and her horrible life, and how Anakin was the one bright point she had in that horrible life. I have feelings about how she gave away her only happiness, because she knew he did not deserve the life of a slave. I had ideas about how you could turn this into a way to actually fix AOTC and make it better, a way you could use it as an excuse to get rid of the Tusken arc entirely without losing the tragedy of his mother's death. But this post is already so fucking long and I'm sure you're tired of me talking xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
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this isnt as long as before but i just cannot stop thinking about this, why i dislike story and lore boils down to these main point
--the ending feels unsatisfying as hell
even if i ignore everything i dont like about how the game treated zelda and ganondorf, the ending itself just feels, despite being presented as super epic an touching, incredibly empty to me and part of it is that it feels like an unearned return to status quo
of course i didnt think zelda would stay a dragon and i actually wanted to help her, which is why i kept trying to hunt down impa since she said shes gonna search for a way for us to help zelda, bc i wanted to!! i was eager to help her!
i fully hoped and kinda expected that thered either be some kind of dragon dungeon (think, the water dragon from okami) tho that would be difficult since you can get items from her so i ended up thinking before going into the end thered be a mission with impa (or at least given to you from her) where she found answers in ancient scripts (that she told you she would look through) and that you need to find a special lil thing that will help zelda undragonfy, like some sort of ultra secret forbidden enigma stone able to reverse dragon transformations kinda deal (golden opportunity to make you go and talk to the yiga bc they might know or even own some ancient texts) that youd keep in your inventory until the very end and after you kill dragondorf (pretty mortal for becoming an immortal dragon huh) you take it out and use it, undragonfying zelda and ending in a similar epic falling and paralel to the beginning way
... and instead impa stays in the house and only has a few repeating dialog boxes and does nothing and you cant do anything bc in the end you just get randomly teleported (and stripped of your clothing AGAIN) into some weird ethereal plane somehow?? with the ghost of long ass dead sonia and apparently not as gone as i thought rauru (seriously i felt sad when he went poof at the end of the tutorial but i guess i shouldnt have) awkwardly blasting dragon zelda with some magic tm and its all reversed no problem (heck me for caring i guess) turns out helping her was killing an evil guy we never really knew and mineru just kinda says lol its bc time and light magic i guess lol as an explanation
like i really wanted to go and help zelda! i was motivated to do it and spent HOURS trying to find impa again but i wasnt allowed to do anything bc zelda gets saved by some deus ex machina bs in the end anyway, what a fool i was, of course killing the evil guy is the solution to everything >:(
(and no i dont care if its meant as in uwu sonia and rauru wanted to help one last time uwu bc it doesnt change how unsatisfying it was to watch it all just kinda happen)
--point two is just how much totk feels like its trying to REPLACE botw instead of being a sequel, its not building on anything of it its ripping out the fundation and building its own thing in its place, like i was so excited to see what happened to the titans, and all the sheikah tech what they mabe had done in all that time now that theres a tech enthusiastic girl as the head of the monarchy, maybe even find out more about them
and instead its just all ... gone with not explanation? theres isnt even a LAME explanation, its just gone?? you never find out what the ancient energy actually was, and why there were concentrations of it in the regions with the ancient furnace (well heck it didnt even have anything to do with ganondorf actualyl bc that would have been too interesting) bc that was so intrigueing?? like yeah where DID it come from and why is it there ?? and oh suddendly hey look theres an even MORE ancient and even MORE advanced civilization thats way COOLER and BETTER than the ancient sheikah now, they also built stuff everywhere and have been here ALL ALONG cant you see its everywhere!! and its the only thing everyone cares about all of the sudden, all evdidence of the ancient sheikah tech was scraped of the earth so there literally only being some guardian parts on top of the hateno lab feels like an oversight now bc everything lese was to thourohgly wiped of the map-
for no reason even?? like im totalls fine with it being useless and not working anymore but .... why remove it like it was wiped from history?? and then they have the gall to mention the happenings of botw like, twice in the entire game but still just give you the most basic summary of it mentioned on a sidenote with again not even a hint what happened to all of it
wouldnt there have been the golden opportunity to use it to access the new parts and map points that changed?? like a shrine thats fallen into the underground, an access to caves and the underground in the broken and collapsed elevator tube of a sheikah srhine?? maybe even a broken interior of an old shrine, like the room you get put into with the puzzle and where the monk once were broken and half overgrown in the udnerground? some left over construction site where you can see oh thats how the ancient sheikah got all that tech underground, bc they all had access to it and built it there to then rise up when its needed? maybe even making use of the old sonau sites since they frequnetly built their srhines within those ruins?? that the ancient sheikah found em and put the ruins to use? to research it and built their own stuff from it? it wouldnt have to have any focus, literally just part of the enviroment even
really everything totk does is like -forget botw ever happend, look how much cooler and better i am, who cares about sheikah stuff sonau are the new cool guys that came out of nowhere but now apparently have been everywhere all along actually-
i LOVE botw and with it feeling much more like its attempting to replace botw instead of building its story and world further every reference to botw i found felt like a slap in the face instead, oh look where the shrine of life used to be isnt even a hint left of sheikah tech somehow, and also right under it is the lake of healing filled with sonau structure bc ACTUALLY they were here FIRST bc they are so cool omg you guys
dare i say it feel a little like they wanted to make an entirely different version of botw basically, but wanted to reuse the map and models so they just said yeah uhhhh its totally a sequel yeah yeha that makes sense, its not erasing botw and doing essentiall the same thing again but bigger cooler and better (tm) its just uuh a ...sequel ye.
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Hold on something's just hit me.
If everyone in the Plex were to believe that Gregory dropped Cassie at the end of Ruin to keep himself from being found, whether he did it or not, wouldn't that make Roxy to one most able to understand him?
As Mimic's guard dog, surely she would know the lengths you have to go through to keep that fucker trapped. A whole team of Raceway construction workers went straight to their deaths down there. Roxy won't let the Raceway be repaired and re-opened in order to keep people safe. She's probably been able to see Mimic and its victims through the floor this entire time, she knows what it can do and what it's done, even if she doesn't know the full extent of it.
She's willing to sacrifice her Raceway and Salon to keep people from finding Mimic. Her pride and joys, basically her whole reason for being built in the first place. They're not worth the risk to her.
Whether Gregory sacrificed Cassie to keep Mimic trapped or not, surely Roxy would realise some sort of similarity. She may think doing that to Cassie was too far, she may think he's a monster for even considering it and she may feel as though nothing could justify what he did... But there's a part of her that gets it. The absolute terror that comes at the slightest possibility that Mimic could escape. She gets that sacrifices have to made, fuck she's made those sacrifices herself. She would never have sacrificed someone for this, that's why she ran headfirst at Mimic instead of just sealing the exits again, but there could be that tiny little part of her that feels the need to constantly to remind her that Gregory was trying to do the same thing she was.
The key difference here, is that if Gregory had done it, it would fall in line with almost everything else we've seen him do. The sacrifices he makes, are of other people, and not himself. He sacrificed Roxy, Chica and Monty to upgrade Freddy for his safety and possibly the safety of Vanessa. If he also dropped Cassie, then he's once again sacrificing someone else for the sake of his own safety. Not like he has that much else to lose, but I'm drawing comparisons here.
Roxy on the other hand, sacrifices herself. She sacrificed her Raceway and her Salon for the benefit of both herself and others. Unlike Gregory finding himself in a hopeless situation and hurting others to get out of it, Roxy was given this job (probably) and chose to give up what little she has in the world to keep the situation from happening. Even when Cassie deactivates her and ends up face to face with Mimic, Roxy jumps straight at it to buy her time to escape which could have easily killed her.
So now you have Roxy, who unfortunately does understand Gregory's choice to drop Cassie (if she believes he did it which yeah she probably does) but has absolutely no sympathy for him. She couldn't care less about him. There's potentially a fearful little voice in her head that she's the same as Gregory that fuels her anger towards him even more. She hasn't ever sacrificed someone else to keep the Mimic at bay and she's been doing it for fuck knows how long, what gives Gregory a free pass? Maybe if he hadn't stolen her fucking eyes she would have been able to stop the whole thing from getting that far anyway!
I'm not saying this to frame Gregory as a villain or anything. I don't think he dropped Cassie and I still think it was entirely Freddy's fault for what happened to the others in SB. I just think this is interesting from a character stand point. The one person that could understand the choices they've made to keep Mimic from escaping is each other, but they're both too hateful of each other for it to affect anything... If they were ever to settle their differences, I think it would have to start here. The only common ground they share, is the one thing no one else does.
But Gregory didn't even fucking do it so I bet that goes well lmao
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