can we rest

What physical part(s) of Arsay does her partners find the most attractive! Is it the same for all partners or does it differ between them?

(also optional bonus ask of what part(s) of/about Arsay generally do they love the most, physical or not!)

Meanwhile, if you were to ask the same of Arsay:

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.

honestly i joke about my schlarklez being toxic yaoi but like. with the exception of some college shenanigans + the Initial Adam Incident they’re like. barely even anything. at best they’re a 1 on the toxic yaoi scale. they’re more annoyances than anything which is Not healthy but in the grand scale of things could be much worse. my REAL toxic yaoi is in my majorcaptain bullshit that i never post about but think about every fucking day

Am I the only one wondering what happened during Mr. Hugo paused his pen?

Well, I admit that Mr. Hugo wrote about their wedding night 'in his old fashioned way', Marius is not the guy that would do those things to Cosette.(See their night date scene!) We only see Cosette was with her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were still swollen with sleep after that night. I think this means Cosette was very satisfied, so their wedding night was happier than the average couples at that time. It may rude to them, but I really want what happened on that night. To see how it's different from how Mr. Hugo mentioned.

why are these the same couple

pics? pics of poetry for the soul?

Here she is, in all her glory: Bhaal's pinkest disappointment

and a bonus: The original doodle I did on a sticky tab before I decided to make the character

all this reminds me of eddie izzard pretty downright explicitly stating in her autobiography that she wanted to pursue acting because her mother dying when she was 6 and being sent to british boarding school traumatized her and made her desperate to feel loved. she referred to the praise one gets for performing as a "surrogate affection machine" and thats why before she did acting she did comedy and before she did comedy she did street performing. literally anything to climb the ladder

i’m actually so scared they’re gonna ruin kanthony bc they’re not gonna know what to do with an established relationship dynamic without creating unnecessary strife or disrespect

thinking again about my beloved tracy thephiladelphiastory. what it means for a girl disillusioned by her father to say 'the right time to decide on someone is never.'

actually, upon seeing a totally unrelated post it occurred to me that people in Exandria think of the gods like people in America think of corporate brands, and I'm gonna turn that one over in my mind for a while

You hate how much it tempts you

I actually genuinely ship Mary and Sirius and some of y’all may hate me for that but it’s my truth

I love stereotypes about dogs so much because of how funny it is when they get disproved. My giant Rottweiler who looks like he might have eaten several children in the past and is looking for his next victim giving big sad eyes when he lays his head in your lap 3 seconds after meeting him versus my tiny Jack Russell who until she sees a stranger looks like an innocent little baby then immediately becomes 90% teeth 10% dog, why sir, they are simply doing god’s work

love it when they’re bantering like this 🤭

something something early seasons sam&dean when they were looking for john and wondering if he was even alive and then his death and every horrible thing that comes after it with the caption as “But there's no other explanation. He's gone for good.” “You're lying.”“Am I? Do you remember the twentieth century? Think the twenty-first is going any better? Do you think God would have let any of that happen, if he were alive?” something something