using "what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament" to mean "yeah i made an embarrassing reference but you understood it which is also embarrassing" is very funny to me
my favorite part is that absolutely nobody says this except here. so if you use it in public, it's a dead giveaway that you spent the last ten years on tumblr. but then again, they recognized it, which means they were at the devil's sacrament
I tested this theory in the wild the other day at work. I was on a call with my department lead and a few other folks and I replied to an email the DL had sent me, thinking that, because he was on this call, he wouldn't notice when I sent it and would not catch me multitasking.
However, he replied to said email within five minutes, asking a question that required an answer. So I answered and was like "Also, I was going to apologize for answering emails during this call, but I see we're both here at the Devil's Sacrament, so I don't think an apology is necessary."
I watched him read that on screen and try not to laugh. And then at the end of the call as everyone started saying goodbye, he goes, "Hey, MJ, I meant to tell you. I like your shoelaces."
And I looked straight into my camera, stone cold serious, and said, "Thanks. I stole them from the president."
And the rest of the team was like, "What...the fuck...?" before he abruptly ended the call for everyone.
So now my DL and I know this about each other. He could be any one of us.
“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…”
-Jorie Graham, in a conversation
thinking about how the world would be better if more people understood the differences between 'the author failed to tell the story they wanted to tell' and 'the author told the story they wanted to tell, but they told it badly' and 'the author told the story they wanted to, and they told it well, but it wasn't the story I wanted to read'
And if I said Megamind through its three subversions of Superman shows a deeper understanding that the point of Superman is that he was loved and taught to love by good, present parents, and because of that he is able to return that love to a world even if it doesn't always accept it, and he is not corrupted by his power, than many other films either subverting or playing the superman story straight.
Megamind has three Superman subversions. One is obviously Megamind himself. He was not raised loved by the world, but rather was loved by those hated by the world. Because he was still raised with love, he does care about other people, hence his character development. But because he didn't receive wider love growing up, his own is misplaced at first.
Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.
Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.
All three of these subversions, in their negative space, create the silhouette of the superhero that they are parodying. That silhouette is of a space child that came to earth and was cared for very deeply by the world, and taught love through his experience of love, and because of that holds fast to his duty to the world. Which is Superman.
I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.
Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!
Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.
No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.
It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.
Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.
I’m writing an AU about a genderbent Gil and Tarvek (I’m only two instalments and two moodboards in but I’ll get there at some point hopefully), mostly just to make the ot3 a sapphic powerhouse, and I’ve been thinking about what it actually entails
The most obvious change is that Tarvek could be dead before the story starts and that is very likely but it’s also possible that Aaronev might care too much about having one viable heir because nobility are weird like that. So in this scenario Anekva was closest when he finally crossed the line and after that he needed Tarvek to continue the line.
This also adds the element that there is the constant threat of the summoning engine hanging over Tarvek’s head if he changes his mind which is particularly awful. It also adds the element that Aaronev would be very happy to have sex with Lucrezia in her body just like with Anekva which is so extremely fucked up.
Tarvek is obviously intensely feminine in a way that she tends to use to appear non threatening and it works even better than it does for canon Tarvek.
The Storm King thing is a lot harder for her but if she’s clever about it she can work around it with certain factions who support her line and think she would be easier to control.
It is expected she will have a top tier arranged marriage at some point, grandmother said she would take care of it personally which is rare but probably due to her not trusting such an important bloodline with Aaronev. Tarvek knows she prefers women for a long time and equally knows that it doesn’t especially matter because she’ll be marrying a man anyway.
Gil’s story would probably change very little if she was a girl. While most people in Europa would think the Baron having a daughter is a very different thing to the Baron having a son, Klaus doesn’t really see the difference in terms of what Gil’s role in the empire will be.
Basically Gil is still the heir, Klaus is still testing her all the time and obsessive about her training and the relationship is still complicated with undercurrents of annoyed affection.
Something that would change is that Klaus has a very different outlook on female Sparks. In canon he has his own issues with them but a lot of it roots from his concern of Gil making the same mistakes he did, whereas if Gil was one he’d be a lot more worried about where they’re all going.
Gil would have to figure her sexuality a bit at least by the Agatha thing. There are many hilarious ways this could go but one of my favourites includes her realising after she wakes up from her concussion that not only did she just propose to a girl but everyone including her father knows she just proposed to a girl, Klaus being genuinely taken aback that she thought he didn’t know only to be more taken aback that she didn’t know because he’d been operating under the assumption it was common knowledge for years and most importantly a discussion along these lines, ‘You think my problem is that she’s a woman? Gil, she just helped Othar set the airship on fire and she’s a rogue Heterodyne, I do not have time to spend on a sexuality crisis I thought you resolved four years ago.’
a little while back i had the kinda random idea that lucrezia might be/inspired/hijacked the mythos of the skifandrian goddess eshkigax, and now it looks like my theory might have legs to stand on!
additional reasoning:
lucrezia already is/inspired/hijacked the mythos of the geisterdamen's goddess, so it's totally something she would do
she clearly has knowledge about skifander. [though admittedly this particular point is somewhat weak, as barry also knows stuff about skifander, and lucrezia presumably learned about skifander prior to becoming the other since she knew enough to exile klaus there (unless she just set the mirror to a random destination). it seems very possible that the heterodyne boys, et al. travelled there on an adventure, though why that contact never became well known in either europa or skifander is something of a mystery, but i digress.]
more significantly, the geisterdamen have knowledge of skifander. given that both are underground, its possible that they have had some amount of contact and/or cultural exchange, which could include religion
finally we have ariadne steelgarter, who is both implied to be connected to the yajeena who worshipped eshkigax and is shown working with lucrezia herself. while the exact nature of her connection to skifander is unclear, and her alliance with lucrezia may have just been a pragmatic way to gain transport to skifander, it feels like too much of a coincidence not to mention
I have my own little hypothesis about Tarvek. Because here’s his version of events, in which he meets Agatha and she was SO WONDERFUL! And like… was she?
She’s charming, sure. She’s playing the part of Olga, an actress, summoned for dinner, so sure, she’s got her Charming mask on. Tarvek is charmed, but also presumably aware of his father’s plans for her. They flirt over the beautiful Spinet, while he knows she’s about to be killed.
They’re not even really talking, they’re both just playing parts. Olga the charming actress and Tarvek the guy who thinks she’s going to be dead in an hour but still has to be here. That lasts until they get to dinner.
THIS might be when she becomes “so wonderful”. Suddenly Tarvek wants to save her, but he has no plan to do it, and so desperately tries to buy time instead:
Tarvek’s a master plotter, but “Uh, um, shouldn’t we do anything else first?” is the best he can come up with at the moment, because he’s improving here, very quickly. He hasn’t stopped his father from frying any of those other girls, and he hadn’t been planning on stopping this one.
At this point, Agatha’s drugged and then unconscious for most of their acquaintance. So very wonderful. But at this point, he also knows she’s the Heterodyne.
To be clear, I’m not blaming him for what his father’s been doing. He’s trapped. But what, none of the other victims were charming? Playing the spinet was a big game changer for him? Nah.
They then do get two whole pages together:
Masks off, talking about personal things, well done these kids! Maybe this is when she becomes Wonderful to him… except this is already mid-escape. He was getting her out before this conversation happened, and presumably that plan would have continued even if she’d interacted with Tarvek the way most people do and stabbed him.
And then, well…
Tarvek’s immediate reaction to her waking back up is this:
LATER they have time together to scheme and spark out and all that good stuff, but they just HAVEN’T yet. But Tarvek is DEVOTED.
My hypothesis: Tarvek isn’t in love with her yet. His motivation to save her wasn’t love. What Tarvek sees in her is A WAY OUT.
Out of his family, out of this place where his father killed his sister and his sister killed his father and a mass grave of sparky girls is mouldering away somewhere. He wants OUT, and Olga the charming actress wasn’t going to get him there, but Agatha Heterodyne, on her way to Mechanicsburg, just might have enough power to protect him if he clings onto her hard enough.
So. This raises four general categories of questions for me.
1) Logistical:
How did Mechanicsburg manage for so long, without trade or raiding or outlying farms? Is this when they developed their tradition of snail cuisine? Did the Heterodynes just super-science supplies into existence?
2) Authorial:
Is this going to be relevant to the larger plot? It could be just an anecdote of Mechanicsburg weirdness, like magnetizing all the children, but given how important temporal mechanics have been in this story, that seems unlikely.
3) Chronological:
When did this happen? When Franz says four hundred years, is he counting by Mechanicsburg-internal or Europa-external time? How many other dates in the story does this call into question?
Miscellaneous headcanon that nobody asked for: the Heterodyne family doesn't have a concept of "bastard".
Oh, they'll happily accept the description, if you're yelling at them, but they never really grasped the idea of "this child is born out of wedlock and therefore a lesser heir".
Why would they? There's no doubt about whether a kid is a Heterodyne or not - they have a DNA tester in the Castle. It's shaped like a giant evil lion, it climbs out of a bone pit, and it has its drama dial turned all the way up, but functionally it is a DNA tester.
If someone showed up at Mechanicsburg with a kid years after the Heterodyne's forces had stomped through that particular region, and said, "My kid is a Spark and it's your fault, this is YOUR kid and they're trying to turn my village into kumquats", either the Chapel of Bones lion said "yes" or it said "no".
There isn't an in-between state of "yeah OK that's my kid but unofficially". Either the kid is a Heterodyne or they're not.
(For the record, I suspect any "no" verdicts got everyone involved killed very quickly. The Castle doesn't like anyone it sees as a pretender. Including kids.)
If the kid is a Heterodyne - even if their father didn't want another one - I suspect the Castle would go: "Great! Kid is Family. Family is mine to protect. Kid is mine now." And there would be another Heterodyne in the family, no different from any of the rest.
As noted elsewhere, the Heterodyne family is extraordinarily cohesive for a thousand-year dynasty of evil unassailable mad scientists. Even the rival Red and Black Heterodynes seem to have been feuding with each other for the fun of it (probably with a side of ugh, sibling). The family never really split, diffused, or fractured - as evidenced by the fact that by the time our story comes along, there are no half-forgotten cousins or distant relatives with Heterodyne blood.
This tells me that in all probability, the Heterodyne family never shuffled its bastard children off to some less visible place - and you cannot tell me that a thousand years of raider warlords who sacked Europa on the regular never accidentally ended up with a baby they didn't plan on making.
And the whole concept of an illegitimate child is founded on the acceptance of the idea that some higher power told you that you could only have kids with this one person.
...yeah, I'm not seeing any candidates for telling the Heterodynes anything. Not ones that survived the attempt, anyway.
So there's probably a solid Heterodyne family precedent for "all these kids are half-siblings", and absolutely no Heterodyne family precedent for "but this specific one is lesser for it".
What I'm reading from these pages is how absolutely impromptu this whole escape was.
Klaus is running for their lives with the total supplies of one (1) sword and one (1) baby.
If we're feeling generous, they also have one (1) baby blanket. But only one. (Skifander may be warm, but caves - sorry, Jules Verne - are not.) He doesn't have anything to carry baby Gil in (or put baby Gil on) if he needs two hands for something. If he wants to take that torch with him, he's going to have to put the sword away. He doesn't have so much as a water bottle, much less a baby bottle. No supplies, no backup, no plan, no nothing. This man looks like he's lucky he's got shoes on.
That doesn't sound like the Klaus we know now.
And that tells me that whatever happened in Skifander, there was no warning. None. Zero. Not even a rumor. Klaus didn't have time to think about this. He didn't see it coming. He didn't have time to plan for it. He didn't have time to consider other options. He didn't even have ten seconds to throw baby stuff into a bag.
He just grabbed baby Gil - maybe the only baby in reach - and he ran.
I'm convinced he didn't mean to leave Skifander. I'm coming around to the idea that he might not have left baby Zeetha behind on purpose - he just didn't have a baby sling to hand.
No wonder this man is such an absolute control maniac. Emperor of Europa in all but name, and all because back in Skifander, he got blindsided by something he wasn't prepared for.
I imagine that this is the thing driving Klaus. This fear. This moment he had nothing, and he was the only thing keeping his son alive.
I think Klaus has never left this moment. I think he exists here.
I say to myself, "Self, what feelings are we having about Girl Genius this weekend?"
Self:
Mechanicsburg had two generations (let's say fifty years) of consorts who hated them. And then Agatha came home, and she brought Gil and Tarvek with her. And.
And Teodora was there against her will, and she raised her sons to reject Mechanicsburg's monsters so badly that one of the first things they did was burn down the Guildhall. And Mechanicsburg's people trusted them so little that according to the novels, they considered, for one of the few times in the town's history, rebellion.
And Bill married Lucrezia, and Lucrezia scorned them. Treated them as pawns and servants and furniture, and alienated the Jägers so badly they were determinedly marking time until she was gone, because time would get her if something didn't. Despised them so regularly that Piotr knows her from a few words and nothing more.
And then the family was gone. And consorts aren't the Heterodynes, but they are part of the family.
...
And then Agatha comes home.
And Gil walks out before the gate and calls down lightning to defend their Lady's town. And comes back out of the Castle fighting, blazing war through the skies in her name, even against his own people.
And Tarvek falls in with the Jägers and fights beside them. And is on the ground with all of them throughout the siege, up on the wall with the Lady, running laughing and working through the streets with her.
Agatha comes home. And she brings her boys with her. And for the first time in half a century, the Heterodyne has consorts who are willing to be part of Mechanicsburg.
To expand on the timing here: our first indication that Gil and Tarvek know each other is when Agatha says Tarvek’s name and a furious Gil shouts “That smug, condescending snake?!” The next page, with delirious blue Tarvek staggering in to yell at Gil (which Gil ignores to focus on his medical condition) is their first interaction in the comic. Gil declaring that Tarvek is not going to die is the page after that. And the page after that is where Gil decides, without any prompting, to risk his own life to save Tarvek with the si vales valeo procedure, despite Agatha spending that whole page protesting that it’s much too dangerous. Four pages! That’s how long it takes Gil to get from “that snake Tarvek” to “I cannot be talked out of risking my life for him”. As displays of enmity go, it lacks a certain something.
lizasweetling: #'As displays of enmity go it lacks a certain something.' added to my vocabulary#girl genius#that's it: that's the thing here!#like there's a certain idea of their relationship they attempt to present more or less when prompted#that just doesn't seem believable next to their behavior the rest of the time!#like sure. you'd like nothing better than he come to bodily harm and leave Agatha to fall to your charms#but that's not at all how it ends up being looking at their action#Tarvek especially.#like sure: let him have the dance because he's a foot-in-mouth wonder sure to offend (then why allow such a physical conversation?)
One of the things that doing the Feather Summarizes the Silmarillion stuff drives home to me over and over again is just how. much. freight. is heaped onto Frodo’s offer of the Ring to Galadriel as it actually plays out in the text.
For those who only know the movies, or who imprinted on the movies first, it’s almost a tragedy how wrong PJ got that scene; it’s one of a couple things that he seems to have fundamentally misunderstood what was going on, what a moment or confrontation was actually about, and almost by habit (as far as I can tell) leaned on making it Eldritch and Scary, and by doing so actually … totally undercut the actual power (and terror) of the scene.
Because here’s the thing about Nerwen Artanis Alatiriel, the princess of the Noldor we know by the Sindarinization of her epessë, the name given by her husband the first time he saw her and went “her hair is absolutely fucking amazing, I love her” (I’m not joking!): she is old.
I do think that the movie version also works though, less to show us who Galadriel really is, but to illustrate how dangerous the ring is. They talk about it in the extras I think about how the fuck do you turn a piece of jewellery into the enemy in a movie
I’ve watched/listened to the extended extras to the point of memorization (as well as obsessively following the entire film production from announcement), so I’m aware of their take on that one; I still don’t agree (and if anything I think they fail to trust their audience consistently, to the detriment of the overall quality of the film), I think choosing that moment to make that point is a) a mistake and b) part of a consistent pattern through all the movies (including and egregiously the Hobbit ones) of PJ consistently not really grasping what’s actually going on with Galadriel or what her position in the Powers of Middle-earth is (or why she occupies it) or the underlying ethical points.
This, of course, has significant Doylistic considerations attached to it, including the fact that it was 1999 when the films started being made and to say that high-quality high-production-values fantasy storytelling was not something of established pedigree in film or TV would be understating it considerably, so there are other reasons I think they came down on the (unfortunate) side of, effectively, brute-forcing and overemphasizing certain aspects of the text, spoon-feeding things to the audience, and assuming they needed more Flashy, Eye-Catching ~*SPECTACLE*~ over trusting the story to carry itself.
But it’s still unfortunate, to my mind.
MMV, as it always does, but believe me when I say I’m not assessing that scene as flawed due to a lack of awareness of the exigencies/circumstances/decisions of the film-making. :)
I agree that overall the movies have some flaws (they didn’t really seem to know what to do with Gimli, and Legolas with the acrobatics and……) that are symptomatic of some deeper misunderstandings, but for me they still work as an interpretation of the story (esp. if coming from the POV of fanfiction and Tolkien’s meta of his own work with it being stories that have been told many times and translated many times, though it’s still valid to talk about improving stuff).
These tendencies that are apparant in these misunderstadings become relly apparent in the Hobbit movies though, which I couldn’t really get into.
(Also I am very tired after too long at work and you are much righter than me than this sounds)
I’ve already brought up how the loss of glyphs is deeply tragic for Luz on an interpersonal level, given her relationship with the Titan as being kinda found family in a spiritual successor to Manny sorta way…
But on a larger, cultural level? It’s straight-up genocide. Because glyphs were an ancient practice; They were a tradition at one point, as Eda explains. The earliest witches used to learn glyphs from the Titan on her knee, and eventually stopped when that became redundant with the more convenient source of their bile sacs.
But it was still an important part of their history; It was how witches and demons first communicated and interacted with the land and nature, and their ‘god’ in a mutualistic way. It was how they respected their world.
So even if glyphs were evidently forgotten by the Deadwardian Era, they were still available for those who needed them… And in comes fucking Philip, the racist colonizer, and because of his possession of the Titan’s heart, she finally dies and glyphs can no longer work. They’re obsolete now.
They still happened, but now that part of magic, of history and this world, is gone forever. It’s cultural erasure, it’s what Luz alludes to when she mentions how scars from Belos’ reign still remain, like the left arm being permanently shifted upwards; Who knows how many were displaced, how much the local flora and fauna and ecosystems were devastated, with the desert of Palm Stings now colder than even the knee itself?!?
It’s just so deeply painful because Luz really helped to bring back an ancient, lost tradition and unlike Philip, breathed new life into it; Glyphs could be used to help people without bile sacs, who didn’t utilize spell circles as well. We actually saw Luz experiment with using individual glyphs, and figure out the combos; Things she did on her own. She shared knowledge of glyphs with her loved ones, like Eda, King, Lilith, Gus, Amity, etc.
There really was going to be a return of something lost, but now it’s gone forever because of a bigoted old white man who was too bitter about things that are different and needed to feel big and important by standing on the shoulders of others. It’s cultural genocide. That memory where Belos' destructive lies about wild magic drive witches away from the knee that they still had the potential to learn from, leaving behind only ruins in the present-day? With some murdered via the coven sigils that cut them even further off from their own magic they forgot glyphs for? It's truly symbolic of the final nails in the coffin.
And it’s also desecration of the dead, too; Caleb is not the only one to have had his corpse bastardized by Belos, misused against everything he stood for. Belos also misused that corpse, first by stealing the Titan’s name, then misusing her magic, her resources such as Palistrom wood… And finally possessing that body literally, which is what murders the Titan. It’s like colonizers bastardizing and salting the land that locals carefully maintained a proper relationship with, and keep in mind this fucker is a literal Puritan colonist. There’s no respect, not for the dead and/or past. Compare that to Luz, who lives on in Manny’s memory and makes him proud.
I’m just imagining Caleb and the Titan watching, in agony, as their bodies are used to create a vicious mockery towards their actual kin, who remain totally unaware, and in the case of the Grimwalkers, it’s another lineage that is also abused. Meanwhile the Clawthornes remain unknowing of their past because colonialism erases history, hence Belos hiring Flora, and hell even getting Lilith to participate in her own historical erasure, as both Clawthorne and witch!
Meanwhile, King remains oblivious and unconnected to his own heritage. And most of that can also be attributed to the Titan Trappers and Archivists, themselves perpretrators of genocide. So King and Eda go without knowing their heritage for so long, in Eda’s case she may never find out entirely, because it’s part of the many voices who are lost and silenced due to genocide, buried in the past to be forgotten.
And you know one thing more that fucks me up? It’s that I genuinely suspect that Philip initially had it easier with glyphs than Luz, and that he made them more difficult for her. Because based on his dialogue by finding the Ice glyph in a snowflake, and his diary and memory portraits showing him arriving in the isles via Eclipse Lake, at the Knee…
Philip was probably shown his first spell on his first day in the Demon Realm. And it makes sense; The first human, the precedent that the Titan would’ve known by this point, was Caleb; Himself Philip’s brother, who was also raised to be a witch hunter, yet learned better. We know people can view both worlds from that in-between realm, but the Titan still isn’t omnipotent and can only watch through a limited number of cubes at a time, while having to know what and who to look for.
But even so; With Caleb’s precedent, there could’ve been hope that Philip would follow in his footsteps, that he would learn and be more, and actually choose to be better instead of defaulting to Puritan predestination and the like as an excuse to stay the same and absolve him of responsiability. But we know what happened; Philip started off easy, but then made things difficult by rejecting the Titan’s compassion, by misusing her magic for evil and murder and genocide. The Titan showed Philip compassion first and this was how he responded.
I really feel as if there’s an implicit reluctance with how Luz is taught glyphs, one at a time, in separate scenarios, usually as a result of character development and/or engaging with the world around her, which are things the Titan would really need to see to start trusting another human again (and if he knew Luz gave Philip the last glyph, that would also add to the wariness that Belos caused by manipulating her). Luz didn’t learn her first spell until a few days into her journey, and Luz had already had a few perilous encounters by that point! But she continued to brave her way through everything, continued to accept the isles and its messier side.
And so the Titan showed Luz her first spell, and only that, in response to Luz needing it, wanting to learn magic, and most of all humbling herself to be kind to the Titan’s own son, and listen to him; Because neglecting King was what low-key led to Eda’s transformation placing everyone in danger, since he only told Luz about the elixir and agreed to steal it for the sake of getting her attention.
So that makes Luz listening to the Titan for the first time, intentionally, with her second spell –Ice, Philip’s first- so much more hard-hitting. The way she wanted to live out her dream so she went for the wand behind people’s backs, but then recognized and owned up to her mistakes. And she really was just a lonely kid in need of guidance, and not a stubborn adult committed to his cruelty; Luz always had an open mind! She always wanted to learn!
And she got to! She learned each glyph at a time… And that’s all the Titan could do for her, something the Titan had already done for so many others, long ago, before they realized they had bile sacs and didn’t need to rely on the land around them as much. Luz still experimented even when she just had one glyph; She understood how intent mattered. She and Lilith built off of each other’s knowledge to collaborate and create combos. Meanwhile Belos, he agonized because he made things pointlessly difficult by refusing to adapt to the ways of another land, and only got his first and last glyphs by taking the compassion of someone who knew them and betraying it.
Plus there’s what I said about Lilith, her whole thing as Caleb’s descendant, directly abused by Belos and belittled by him, made to participate in her own erasure loss of past, separated from that… Really, one could argue the Clawthornes are like the Boiling Isles equivalent to the Irish; Yeah they're white but that doesn't mean they aren't victims of British colonialism that sought to 'conquer the land' and all that.
The Clawthornes are generally known for big orange hair, with Lilith's curly hair being straightened and dyed dark-blue in an attempt to assimilate within the Emperor's Coven's (AKA Philip's) standards of conformity. They worked with the land via the Palistrom carving and began to lose that because of the trees being endangered by Belos' gluttony, as well as the curse disabling Dell; The very curse created by the Archivists, who also invaded this world, the very curse cast by Lilith because the coven system influenced her to feel shame over wild magic and embrace hierarchy instead.
The curse leads to Eda's loss of bile magic, something very important to her and witches in general, and Lilith loses her own trying to mitigate her own mistakes. So not just glyphs are taken from witches, but even their own bile magic they initially replaced them with, and the other resources of the land. And Lilith is cut off from her family, her real family, as she's taken in by an ancestor who has deliberately distanced himself and loathes her on multiple levels as something to be 'fixed'.
But Lilith gets her hair back and re-embraces it, she gets her family back. She still manages to somewhat retain her past; After all, Lilith gets to go to the Deadwardian Era herself! And she meets, as much as it loathes anyone to acknowledge it, an ancestor, and influences history in a subtle yet personally meaningful way. And Lilith helps re-establish contact with the lost practice of glyphs by figuring out how to combine them, which goes hand in hand with her passion of being a historian, and her additional function as both parallel and especially foil to Philip.
Just… Luz and the Titan. And Caleb. And Lilith. There’s dead people and there’s history and there’s land, there’s bodies and respect. There’s compassion and actually working with people and finding no shame in that, instead of stealing and taking credit. And in the end, even though they manage to regain some things, a lot was still inevitably lost to genocide, and possibly gone forever.
But the effects and legacy still linger, Luz still remembers and holds dear what the glyphs did; And she honors not just Manny’s legacy, but Caleb’s, by bridging the gap between humanity and witches, and showing both can co-exist in harmony. She helped his descendants, and even the last Grimwalker, find happiness and reconnect with their heritage, even if they don’t know just how close it is to them in particular. Luz honored the Titan by clearing his name, finding his son, and ensuring the last of the Titans is no longer alone and in understanding of his heritage. Luz even made amends with the Titan’s other greatest regret, harming the Collector, by making peace; And she proved glyphs were still useful, they were still kind, and that compassion wasn’t wasted.
So even if the Titan’s glyphs are gone now, Luz still honored their memory by sharing them freely and helping, teaching, cultivating. The Clawthornes are rebuilding the Palistrom forests, among them is Hunter who as a Grimwalker was one of the purposes for which Belos devastated those natural resources for. And King… King is beginning to develop his own glyphs! And Luz is learning her first one, Light, from a Titan all over again, because she showed King kindness.
That honors the Titan’s memory by keeping it alive through her son; Who keeps the memory of glyphs alive through the ones he’ll sustain and share with everyone else, and those glyphs will spread to those without and even with bile sacs. And a lost art is brought back, irreversibly different but still intact in the important ways. People are relearning old practices to apply to a new world, because the past is gone but it still lingers and is simply… reborn. Despite the scars and changes it survives and is still itself.
And with how all of this loops back to Luz’s relationship with her father Manny, who passed away, and how all that was based on Dana’s own relationship with her deceased father, who left her a final gift in Pokemon Red that she chose to cherish to this day, and embrace her own creativity and keep it alive. It’s a story about things dying but still managing to live anyway.
