Day 2 in the Middle School Time Loop: you remember that last time, everyone ignored you at recess because they were talking about a TV show that you hadnât watched. This time, you lie and say youâve seen it. They ask you who your favorite character is, and you donât know any of the characters, and so youâre tongue-tied. They think youâre weirder than ever, or maybe a liar, which is worse (and true).
Day 3 in the Middle School Time Loop: you tell your parents that you feel ill. They let you stay home while theyâre at work. You spend the whole day watching past episodes of the TV Show.
Day 4 in the Middle School Time Loop: Recess again. The same person asks you who your favorite character is. This time, you're ready. You eagerly tell them, and supplement your reasons for liking them with solid evidence from all 4 seasons of the show. But! Tough luck: youâre now too invested. The atmosphere turns uncomfortable. They go back to ignoring you like they did on the Day 1 that you didnât know was Day 1.
Day 5 in the Middle School Time Loop:
You decide to try a different approach and update your style. You've noticed that Ashleigh, whoâs blonde and constantly surrounded by friends, always wears pink stripey sneakers. You try wearing a pink dress. Someone says itâs cute, but you know from how they say it that it isnât the good cute.
âI thought that pink was cool,â you protest, more to the uncaring universe than to anyone in particular.
Your interlocutor shrugs. âMaybe on someone else.â
Day 6 in the Middle School Time Loop: You keep your head down, but still surprise the teachers by somehow knowing the correct answers to every spontaneous question they throw out to the class. You study the outfits of your classmates more closely. You realize that it wasnât the color, so much as the brand that made the difference. It proves the shoes were expensive. You note down Ashleigh's sneaker brand in smudgy ink on the back of your hand, and then after school you take half a year's saved-up allowance and buy a matching pair at the mall. Your mom raises her eyebrows but doesnât stop you.
Day 7 in the Middle School Time Loop: Today you make it to lunch before anything major goes wrong. You think that the sneakers have protected you, and stare down at them lovingly, watching the Barbie-pink plastic stripes reflect the tube lights on the ceiling as you turn your feet this way and that. But then at lunch, Ashleigh comes up, arm and arm with a friend. Her eyes are a little pink, but only a little.
âAshleigh wanted me to tell you that sheâs really hurt that you copied her sneakers,â the friend informs you, nobly, as if it would be too unpleasant for Ashleigh to have to say this herself. Her mouth is solemn but her eyes are gleeful.
âI didnâtâŚâ You start to deny it automatically, even though itâs true. And yet, something wonât let you apologize. Doesnât she see your imitation for what it is: the most sincere compliment you know how to bestow? This is your Hail Mary.
As you meet her eyes, you realize she does know, but this only makes her despise you more.
âI think a lot of people have these sneakers,â you stammer, in the end, and they just sniff and turn away. You go back to eating your lunch alone.
Day 8 of the Middle School Time Loop: even though you do well in every class, you must be so much more stupid than your classmates, to be missing whatever detail it is that they seem to have caught. How do they do it so quickly? Before recess, before the end of homeroom, even, they all just know. Youâve had endless chances to do this day over and yet you never seem to be able to catch up with them. Running to stand still, youâve heard your mother say, when sheâs busy at work. Thatâs you. Running to stand still.
Day 9 of the Middle School Time Loop: you pretend to be sick again, and you realize that if you want to, you can pretend to be sick every day. It's easy to convince your parents: you look tired and unhappy, your eyes small within their dark circles, like some underground creature. You stop watching that TV Show that you never really wanted to watch in the first place, and instead dream your way through all your favourite childhood movies. Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli. You retreat into jewel-colored landscapes, where everyone is magical or beautiful or at least funny, and the heroes always win in the end.
Day 10 of the Middle School Time Loop: You notice that most of the Pixar heroes, the Disney princesses look more like Ashleigh than you. Long hair. Pale eyes. Button noses. And all of them, so thin.
Day 11 of the Middle School Time Loop: you go to school, but you donât talk to anyone. You donât even answer your name at roll call. Your teacher asks you if anything is wrong at school, or at home perhaps. You shake your head, but that evening you hear your father taking a call. You shrug off his worry: itâll be forgotten tomorrow anyway.
Day 12 of the Middle School Time Loop: an unexpected development: your apathy almost seems to make your classmates like you more. When you say, truthfully, that you donât care much for the TV Show that eternally dominates the recess chatter, some people look impressed. They ask you what you think is better. But youâre wise and donât admit to liking anything. "Mysterious," someone says appreciatively.
At the end of recess, the girl who told you off for copying Ashleigh nudges you. âHey. Look, Robert has an Up shirt. Kind of cute, that heâs still into that stuff, right?â
You know that itâs not the good cute.
You stare at her coldly. âThe shirt just has a dog on it. It doesn't say he's from Up. So you must have liked the movie enough to remember him.â
She flushes scarlet, and hurries to catch up with Ashleigh, throwing you a dirty look. Robert glances at you gratefully but you donât return his smile. He wonât remember that you did this for him. Anyway, you didn't, really. Do it for him, that is.
Day 13 of the Middle School Time Loop: You tell your parents youâre sick again. Today, you watch the second tier of Studio Ghibli movies, the ones that your parents always say, self-consciously, that youâll find dull. Only Yesterday, Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There. Youâre only a few minutes into Marnie when thereâs a line that pulls you up short:
âIn this world, thereâs an invisible magic circle. Thereâs inside and outside. These people are inside. And Iâm outside.â
The relief that washes over you is so profound that you almost cry, and then, when the movie's over, you do cry. Ugly sobs that make you sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum at the mall, that make your head pound with a dehydration headache. But behind the tears, there's relief. There it is, the truth that you were searching for, through all these do-overs. Thereâs an invisible magic circle. Of course there is.
But hereâs the thing about circles: the inside is small. The outside is scary, and lonely, but itâs huge: huger than you could ever have imagined before you turned around and looked.
When your dad gets home, he asks if youâre feeling better. âMuch,â you say, and itâs true.
Day ?? of the Middle School Time Loop: Sometimes you go to school, but ditch class and go to the library or the playground and do your own thing even if teachers yell at you. Sometimes you wander around the neighborhood. Sometimes you ask your parents crazy things, like to take you to work with them, or to the beach, or to DisneyWorld. Sometimes they say no. A surprising amount of times, they say yes. You wonder if maybe theyâre trapped in a time loop too.
Sometimes you sit quietly in other classrooms than the one youâre meant to be in, until they shoo you out or even send you to the principal. (He finds you baffling. You feel a deep, slightly mournful affection for him, like you would for an very old and tired dog). Itâs surprising, the amount of different things that are getting taught in one school in one day. It takes you a long time to work your way through them all.
You watch a frog getting dissected a few times before you start to feel bad and donât go back to that classroom again. Your favorite class to crash is art, because the teacher always clocks that youâre not meant to be there but smiles and lets you stay anyway. When you meet her eyes, it feels like youâre sharing a secret.
Day One-Hundred And Something of the Middle School ...Wait.
At some point, time started moving again, and you didnât even realize it.
For so long, the reprimands you received about your future seemed so empty, so laughable. There was no future. Only a more- or less-bearable present. But now, your classmates remember the unhinged things that you do; now, your teachersâ and parentsâ worries about the future have the full juggernaut weight of reality behind them.
You thought that youâd be more terrified. For so long, youâve dreaded this forward momentum. No loading screen, no mini-games, just one single, awful, pulsating life. But things are different now. Timeâs moving again, and here you are, so far outside the invisible magic circle that youâre not even sure that you'd be able to see it any more. You can still feel its power, but faintly, like the pull between two magnets when they're an arm's length apart. Easy to ignore.
âAre you ready?â Robert says, catching your eye over the kitchen table. He comes here first thing so you can get the bus together. At some point, during the time loop, you started to seek him out. He was outside the circle, too, you realized. But even more importantly, not once, on any of those grimly looping days, did you see him try and push someone else out to make a space for himself. In this crab bucket, thatâs something that counts for a lot.
âOur final day of middle school,â he sighs, half to himself. âNever thought Iâd see it.â
"Me either," you reply, getting up to put on your talismanic pink sneakers. Theyâre scuffed and dirty after years of wear, and certainly Ashley would never be caught dead in them these days. Maybe thatâs what you should have told her, all those loops ago: that no imitation, let alone one as unskilled as yours, can ever be perfect, and that indeed the very imperfection renders it an original work in its own right. Time and thought and human care transforms even the most diligent copy into something else entirely.
But youâve been through enough time loops to know that that sort of explanation wouldnât go over very well.
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Some of ya'll severely underestimate just how much Minthara loves Karlach. Out of all the companions, Karlach is the only one that Minthara has no negative opinions about. She doesn't have a mean or cruel thing to say about or to Karlach. Now, she's pretty kind to Shadow and Lae'zel, but she can still be an asshole to them from time to time. Most of Minthara's comments about Karlach is praise and approval.
If you do the Karlach origin and you have romanced her, she will urge Karlach to return to Avernus. If Karlach chooses not to, Minthara will cry. This is the only scene in the game where Minthara cries and shows that level of emotional vulnerability. Lol, she didn't even cry when she was being tortured in Moonrise and thought she was gonna die! She tries to persuade Karlach by basically saying, "I'm going to personally throw hands with Zariel regardless on whether or not you're with me, so you may as well come with me." That vengence paladin in her is really shining through. And Minthara is a paladin of her word. Even if Karlach does choose not to return and dies, and enraged and heartbroken Minthara will walk right into Hell and invent a new flame so hot not even Zariel can resist the heat.
If you do the Karlach origin in which you go to Avernus but do not romance Minthara, she will be excited to see Karlach at the reunion party alive and happy. She also says that once she reclaims her house, she has every intention of joining Karlach in Avernus and she does this completely unprompted! Karlach does not even ask and Minthara is just offering her an army once she has one, and she will provide it free of charge. Karlach can ask Minthara why she's doing all of this. Minthara kind of not so subtly admits that she's in love with Karlach, but, of course, won't use the words "love" and she dances around it.
Romanced or not, Minthara is willing to go head first into Avernus on Karlachs behalf to demolish Zariel. Do you have any idea how huge that is? Minthara has been nothing but power hungry the entire game and is constantly clawing to get more. But in this moment, she is putting all desire for power on furlough just for Karlach. She is going to wage a war against Zarial and all of Avernus for the life of just one person, a person who might still die in the end. If Karlach does not romance Minthara, she is still putting her own ambition and desire for power on hold to help Karlach in which she'd gain no benefit other than Karlach being alive.
You cannot convince me that Minthara isn't canonically in love with Karlach.
PS: even the VA for Minthara, Emma Gregory, ships these two. In almost every interview Emma Gregory has done, she specifically mentions the romance with Karlach and its impact for Minthara's overall character arc.
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it always struck me as kind of hilarious that you have to pass a 30DC check to convince shadowheart not to kill dame aylin but if you're just like "sure do whatever lol" she chooses not to kill her anyway. tsundere ass fuck. killing is bad unless it's out of spite. i have morals unless you try to tell me what to do
but i just got to that scene in my new replay and it made me realize that that's not what's at stake at all
because the persuasion check isn't "don't do this". the persuasion check is, your life is whatever you make of it. you don't have to do something just because your goddess tells you to.
convincing shadowheart not to kill dame aylin is easy. she knows it's wrong, and she doesn't want to, not really. if given the choice, she is literally unable to go through with it even if she clearly wants to, or wants to want to so badly she can't tell the difference
the problem is convincing her she has an option in the first place
the problem is convincing her that her life is her own
shadowheart has never belonged to herself since she was captured. not in body, not in soul, not in mind, not even her memories. she quite literally doesn't know who she is in more ways than one. she doesn't know her past or her family, she doesn't know who her loved ones are (including the sharran loved ones, like nocturne), all she really knows about herself is a fear of wolves that's been implanted into her by lies and an attachment to a flower she can't remember the details of. and a mission. always a mission. the will of someone else she has to carry on, that is not for her to understand or question or think about. she can't even want to serve shar, because she isn't allowed to pursue her intention to become a dark justiciar. she is supposed to be well and truly nothing, empty as the sharran doctrine
(oh, and pain that she doesn't know the reason of. no matter what, she must bear the pain)
how can she see herself as more than her goddess, when she quite literally doesn't know anything about who she is other than her devotion to shar? how can she choose her own destiny, when she couldn't even choose how to devote and give herself over to her?
she can't, which is why, unless you have infinite rizz points and/or roll a nat20, shadowheart attacks you. not dame aylin. you. and she never argues about whether or not it's the right thing, because she knows. what she's rebelling against isn't the idea of letting dame aylin go. what she's rebelling against is the idea that she could leave her cage and belong to no one but herself. because the idea is scary and she quite literally doesn't know where to begin. which is why her obsession becomes to find her parents, even though she doesn't remember them at all. because maybe they can tell her who she's supposed to be, and she can have the comfort of having her path laid out before her again
(which is also why she has to kill them. not because of some hand hurty curse bullshit. but because she just wants them and selĂťne to become the new shar, and she has to let that go if she truly means to claim herself again)
and now im sad. because it's easier for shadowheart to do turn against shar and everything she's ever had on the grounds of saving someone else than on the grounds that she deserves better than to be a puppet. even if you do nothing, saving dame aylin, to her, is easy. saving herself is a wholly different matter, one she's not sure she has any right to, or wants to, even if it's what she really needs. accepting a selĂťnite's humanity is easier than accepting her own. losing everything is easier than gaining her own autonomy. and she will fight tooth and nail to be allowed to stay in her own, metaphorical soul cage
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