You know Blue Poison is an incredibly unsubtle character to me. Which may be why she's the first Arknights character I actually became completely obsessed with.

Literally made a touch starved weirdo, who everyone assumes is literally poisonous to the touch, even if she isnt... and then gave her a trans flag color scheme!

Anyways there is no other operator with a similar color scheme in anyway! And definitely no-one who has a character arc about coming to her own with the people who care about them deeply, causing me to come to a relatively similar character read! Wait who's that?

Has anyone considered that Jack may not exist and could possibly be a cover up for Celia frequently sleep walking

oh something is DEFINITELY UP with celia bro is acting sus af

celia: hey gwen, ever heard of mr. bonzo?

gwen, freshly back from her outing: WHAT.

celia: well, there was some talker about the guy who made him? he almost seemed to imply mr. bonzo owned him or something, how silly!

gwen: yes. how very humorous. i have to go lie down now.

Celia acts like a self-insert OC in one of those “oh my god I fell into an alternate reality and holy shit it’s actually [insert book/show/etc here]” fanfics. Do you understand.

Reaction to most recent tmp episode?

Considering I listened to it in class, it was mostly all internal. Here’s an emoji timeline of my inner thoughts, with a small description.

1. Wtf Celia 😀

2. Sam and Celia having an actual conversation about things instead of ignoring each other for 4 seasons 😁

3. “You’re okay. It’s okay.” 😀

4. “It was me, but it wasn’t me.” 😀

5. “From the look of you, you’d probably benefit from it.” 😒

6. Therapy guy and receptionist guy 😲🫢

7. Doctor David, part 2 (my interpretation) 😬

8. “Magnus Institute Outreach Centre.” 🫢🫢🫢

9. Hospital + new home 🫠

10. It’s not me, it’s my basement /ref 😦🫠

11. “Not exactly the same, though, is it?”/ wtf Celia, part 2 😀

12. Alice and Gwen talk 😄

More spoiler-y reaction under cut

So of course, I love my healthy dose of what the fuckery. This is one of my favourite episodes so far, I’m obsessed with the idea that this could happen irl.

I love the fact that Darrien had to grapple with the fact that this person was “him.” It wasn’t him, but it was. This man in front of you is acting out an idea you’ve had in the back burner and is now asking you to do the same. In the back of your mind, you’re capable of this level of revenge.

Something happened in therapy gave me Wonderland / MAG 177 vibes which I adore and is one of my favourite Spiral episodes.

Also I saw a post by someone talking about how Martin Norris wasn’t gonna budge and let Alice work unless she and Gwen at least considered talking about their feelings which I also love.

Overall, love the episode.

Casimir is interesting in that he doesn’t ever really seem to want to be a villian.

Like, he promised his dad he’d ascend to the throne so he’s gotta, and he’s certainly power hungry, but there’s a certain going-through-the-montions feeling to it. The only moments I can remember him being truly angry are when Celia humiliates him and when his media ploys backfired. He doesn’t even seem to particularly like having followers. He just convenes them because it’s the most efficient way to achieve his goals. Honestly he could have had a good life as a politician and just called it there. He enjoys toying with public perception and definitely gets something out of being well-known and (temporarily) well-liked, but it’s not like he needs to do evil machinations from his evil castle to live that lifestyle. And now I’m thinking about all the times he passed up on doing evil deeds himself - someone else kidnapped Celia, someone else kidnapped her family for that matter, someone else put her in the dungeons, someone else read her mind, someone else beat Quiroz to death… we don't actually know he was the one to wipe Sam Gemynd's mimd… he's kind of bad at the whole villain shtick. I wouldn’t call him a tragic figure, because he’s not, not quite, but he’s certainly… not fitting into his shoes perfectly if you know what I mean

just finished reading seven husbands of Evelyn hugo and the complexity of emotions I'm experiencing is beyond human understanding, an absolute femme fatale she was.

I forgot I doodled these two the other day. I love having them interact.

I had to, it was necessary.

So Jack is quite obviously real, but I was kind of right about Celia using him as an excuse

Edit: wow I’m an idiot

celia is trying to look into "dimension switches and time travel stuff" huh. well then. that's.......

we know what you are celia

oh no one is getting sleep in that office huh

That old tik tok sound thats like “I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE UPSET” that was for Alisa and Rosalind

The thing about Twilight is that it awakened a small but powerful portion of the global population to their own feral hunger for predator/prey dynamic in media. We saw a predator whose drive to love and consume are inextricably linked and the one loved took their fragile life in their hands and drew close again and again and pressed it into their palms, knowing every time could be the last time, that this could be the moment that it all falls apart but every time it hasn't has been so worth it so they ALWAYS roll those dice for both of them even though the predator begs them again and again to stop risking it, and the agony of the one hunting, always right on the verge of being the thing that destroys what they love most in the world but unable to force themselves away... Between Twilight and Alien vs. Predator, I really don't know why people are so surprised that our generation is so dedicated to monsterfucking, what else were we supposed to do with such a tasty, tasty power (im)balance dynamic?

You know what, fuck it, I’m going to say it:

If Episode Final had revealed so much as a hint as to who Michelle’s parents were and what her heritage was and just left it hanging, unanswered, I would have been absolutely fucking livid.

Here’s a girl who’s spent fifteen years of her life where nothing in particular remotely happened, nine of which were spent raised under the care of a man whom I honestly don’t think is related to her at all who taught her medical science in a little village by the sea in Sheep Country, and tells her she’s definitely not this “goddess of healing” everybody else has been calling her as of late because those artes may as well be miracles performed in the flesh and that she shouldn’t be so dependent on them. She doesn’t know who her parents and where they are, other than being doctors that were born outside of Sheep Country, but they’re not in her life and haven’t been for as long as she can remember she can’t even put a name or face to them, and the one person who does have the answers for them keeps putting the talk off for years until one day he gets to hear said girl tell him that no, she’s not staying put and letting the adults get the ingredient they need to heal the Random Joe that got poisoned by a beast that shouldn’t be so close to their little village by the sea, she’s going out there, and she’s doing it with her artes - the same artes she uses to help heal people with, except this time they’re weaponized, he had no idea where she had learned to do all of that, and by Origin she’s hitting the coast and getting that damn flower whether he wants her to or not - and she gets it. She gets it with the help of a soldier passing by and makes it back home in one piece, none the worse for wear. (And isn’t it so strange that a girl raised among sheep is using a wolf in her repertoire of magic? Isn’t it just so strange she’s using the shape of not only one of the sheep’s most fearsome predators but her country’s - and her faction’s - greatest enemy, as well?) But even as she goes back home to help make the medicine that’ll save her patient, she never stops asking the questions she spoke out loud in the Salty Cove: What were my parents like? Were they worried about me getting hurt when I was a child? Which one of them did I get my artes from? Did I get them from both of them? How come they never came to see me?

Here’s a girl that’s running the counter at the clinic like usual, a normal day in a rather normal life, and one day the man that’s been raising her for almost ten years decides to tell her that lunch can wait, there’s something more important they need to do - that he needs to do, something more important that she needs to hear, and he lays it out to simple and clear: he’s going to tell her everything about her parents, the people she’s always wanted to know about, and put all those questions she’s been asking him and to herself to rest. No more secrets. Here’s a girl who’s this close to knowing, this close to having the truth be revealed, and in a fit of cosmic irony - be it out of a sense of morbid humor or cruelty - they get cut off. They find out a man’s been injured; he’s in dire straits and he needs to be tended to and fast. Here’s a girl that’s ready to tear through the house for medicine that might ease his pain when there’s a knock on the door, and it’s the lady soldier from before at the Cove. She tells her that a guy got attacked not by beasts but people and showing signs of a disease that infects the person with a change that turns them into something other, more demon than man, and he needs to be found ASAP.

And then her grandfather gets bitten. The change is already taking hold of him. And then she finds out from the soldier that once it happens there’s no cure. There is no saving someone from infection, and that’s there only recourse, and that recourse is death. Death before the virus can spread. And suddenly all the answers that she could have had about her parents, the family she never knew, are ripped away from her. Suddenly the man that held those answers, the man who raised her and gave her a childhood, is on death’s door, and there is no saving him from the infection that is going to rob him of his will and thought and turn him into a monster whose only goal is to kill and keep the virus going. Suddenly the soldier, the medic who’s been traveling the countryside searching for the group that was infected to put them down, is drawing her blade with a remorseful look in her eye. Suddenly, the life as the girl knows it comes crashing down, just like that.

She snaps. For the first time she’s not using her artes to heal but to hurt, to stop the soldier from killing the only family she has - the only family she has left and has ever known - and gets him out of there, passing him off to a friend with the promise that he gets her grandfather as far away from the little village by the sea as possible. And then she turns her sights on the soldiers that accompanied their captain, these people that have the nerve to take away her family from her. And so she turns the wolves on them, and in their shock they’re driven from her home, and that is good enough for her. It’s good enough for her to run and catch up and find her friend and grandfather. Except when she does he tells her her grandfather managed to get away, making for the Salty Cove. And so she runs, Federation soldiers and their lady knight hot on her heels.

Very briefly, she considers bolting for the north, the land of her enemy. Very briefly, she considers finding refuge and hope and solace within the Land of Wolves, where the sheep dare not tread.

Here’s a girl that finally finds him, worse than he looked before at the bite’s onset, and the knight corners her. There’s nowhere left to run. She tells her it has to be done. Doing it hurts her just as much as the sight of the man suffering from his infliction hurts the girl. If there was a way to save him she would do so in a heartbeat. But there isn’t; the choice has already been - she must kill him. But so has the girl. The girl tells her she won’t let her take him from her. And the knight agrees. She knows what she’s about to do is awful and is going to stick with the girl for the rest of her life - for both their lives. She does not condemn for her feelings. If that is how you truly feel, she tells the girl, then show me your resolve!

And so they fight. Neither will back down. And yet, despite the reaction the girl had at the little village by the sea, the knight tells her that in doing so she had saved everyone from suffering the same fate that’s befallen her grandfather. That by removing him from human contact, she has effectively put an end to the threat that would have hung over them. Through her, the disease will be vanquished from the face of the Land of Sheep. And here’s a girl who denies it, that she didn’t do it out of altruism. Here’s a girl that denies she did it for the man who is her only family and not for others. Through him she was given a purpose. Through him her life was made valuable. And still the knight does not condemn her. Still she tells her that even with things coming to a head as they are now, her feelings are not wrong. She loves her family more than anything in the world.

And then her grandfather gets up and charge when they’re at a standstill. And then the knight moves, too fast for the girl to see, and runs her blade through him. And then they learn that he wasn’t as far long as he appeared, that he made the choice of his own free will, and spends his final moments in the girl’s arms, voicing his regrets. And then he lets her go. And then he dies - and with it all the answers she could’ve had. All the value and purpose she had been given in her life has been rendered null - just like that.

Despite it all, we never get any more information on her family beyond that. We don’t even get a mention of there possibly being a note, something, that Ollie could have left behind to at least give Michelle an idea as to where to start looking. Could she have found it at Aedis? It’s possible; after all, Grace was the one that gave her the admittance letter to pack up and leave the only place she’s ever called home. It’s at Aedis she finds a new family to call her own, friends she has only ever dreamed of having and a school she has always imagined herself being in. It’s through Aedis she would have found a new purpose and find the value she thought was lost - or, rather, perhaps she thought was never there.

Can you imagine what it would’ve been like if the game decided, out of blue, to tell the player the names of Michelle’s parents, or showed them in silhouette, and never brought it up again, because the game shut down? Can you imagine getting just that and only that and nothing else because the game didn’t make enough money to justify what was being put out on an MTX cash shop that it didn’t require?

I would be livid. I would be furious. I would be just as blue-balled from the beginning as I would’ve been toward the end, because despite the parallels Michelle doesn’t quite get the same closure that Hugo gets at Episode Final. While her backstory entertains the idea, she - given what little canon has showed us and as far as it’s considered - chooses to forego leaving the Federation behind and defecting to the Empire as he did, even if the reasons might’ve ended up differently (although I wager, if not for Grace and whatever conclusion Michelle arrived at - to get her into the mindset of - between accepting the letter and deciding on leaving for Silvayer, she would have settled on throwing her lot in with Gildlla, if not out of a desire to protect the people of Bazine, then perhaps for one where she would find purpose and value over there). However, in Hugo’s defense, he doesn’t have the question of who he is and why he is like Michelle does hanging over his head, because that wasn’t what he was introduced with from the onset. The game at least decides to answer why he chose to side with the Empire and is doing what he has to do to protect his friends and family across the border, even if that means his decision comes at the cost of inevitably coming to blows with them and potentially damaging those ties he has with them forever.

But his is an easy mystery to solve, because among all the other mysteries that linger in the background finding out why a student from Aedis betrayed the Federation and is now fighting for the Empire - the same Empire that set Anthwan on fire and razed Le Sant, his hometown, to the ground - is a rather easy question to answer. Traitors are a staple to the Tales franchise, and what would be more enticing to learn the revelations and reasonings of a marked traitor than the person that was designed to be in the role of the traitor in mind from the very beginning?

Of course, the topic of parents - and the lore behind them - are just as essential to the Tales narrative as the traitor archetype, and it’s Michelle that has that question, and many others proceeding them, that go unanswered in the end. Who are they? Where did they come from? How are her artes related to them? How important are they to the story and the Greater Scope Plot, and what is it about them that made Ollie hesitate so much he couldn’t bring himself to tell her until she told him she was going to go out into the wild and use her artes to protect herself from the beasts and monsters that would have gotten in her way?

Who knows! Because at the end of the day it’s money that makes the world go round and money is the lifeblood that flows through an IP, especially in an entry that’s made on a mobile phone. We might never get an answer to those questions that the narrative, and even Michelle herself, proposed, and with it the character arc - positive or negative - that Michelle could’ve had as a result.