Eco's spoiler blog. Readmores will not be used; if you're here, I am assuming you either don't care about being spoiled, or you have Tumblr Savior (or some other tool that can properly handle tagfiltering). Speaking of which, I will tag with both #spoilers and #[fandom] spoilers, for easier Tumblr Savior application. I'm also perfectly happy to tag with any content warnings you might need; just let me know! Fandoms currently available herein: Revolutionary Girl Utena Umineko no naku koro ni Puella Magi Madoka Magica Eversion Over the Garden Wall Fresh Pretty Cure UnderTale DeltaRune Heaven Will Be Mine Fallen London
Baroness Auravei is my favorite character in Blue Prince and one of the reasons is that, even though there's only like 2-3 documents you can find which she actually wrote, once you've read them you can start getting a sense of what kind of person she was by looking at her interior design decisions.
Take the Chapel, for example.
We know very little about how the people of Nevmora practice their devotion to the Ajeran Angels, but we do know that there's theological debate over their "natural order": that is, how to order them in a way that represents natural law. Baron Herbert makes his own opinion on the matter clear in his Will, and chooses a sequence that feels... traditionalist, as befits a man who always felt bound by tradition.
In particular, it's clear how much that sequence reflects Orindia's terminally monarchy-brained culture. Hierarchy holds primacy: first the Paragon of Royalty (Orinda), then that of lesser masters (Lydia), and only after that do we get to the Angels who represent the actual day-to-day labor that sustains life. Terminating the sequence in Mila and Draxus even forms a kind of "valar morghulis, valar dohaeris" couplet.
But Auravei's Chapel redprint, and her modifications to the Sinclair family Tomb to integrate it with her husband's excavation of the Underground, paint a different picture.
To the architect of Mount Holly, where does a "natural order" that puts hierarchy above all lead? The alcove where the Baron left Mary's rough drafts, which to him was a place of honor, but in structural terms is a dead end.
To the architect of Mount Holly, what "natural order" is worth honoring, because it leads to a deeper truth? An order that begins first in the natural world, and then passes to technology and industry, and then to service, and only at the end – when all the real work has been done – does Mastery enter in, and from there Royalty, and from there Death.
As a theological position to hold in a place like Fenn Aries, this is downright iconoclastic... but perhaps to be expected of the woman who once lamented "how little regard is often shown for that which I hold sacred", and who accepted her title of Baroness only reluctantly, and who pledged her allegiance not to any king's banner, past or present, but to the color that represented, to her, the twin virtues of creativity and truth.
i love that ralsei is a serial people pleaser with the weight of the entire world on his shoulder a la “if i made one wrong move, everything will fall apart.” and then the first time he lies for personal gain after loosening up just a little bit, he nearly drives an innocent man to death. this is an excellent depiction of how when a deeply repressed person finally comes out of their shell, they’ll often try things that were previously considered off-limits, like expressing negative emotions or lying. there are a lot of moments when ralsei is pushed to his limits in this chapter, and times where he seems confused or even ashamed by what comes out of him.
and in doing that experimentation, somebody who is used to repressing their feelings and desires will inevitably have times where they go “too far.” i really enjoyed all of the raw, volatile emotions that ralsei showed in this chapter. this is another important hurdle for ralsei to clear in his journey of self-discovery. when missteps like this happen it’s easy to feel like maybe you were better off in your cage, but i think that having kris and susie by his side will allow him to forgive himself enough times to keep pushing and, hopefully, lead him to a more colorful existence.
Ralsei was so excited to make fun of Orange with Susie. Like they visibly try to correct against that impulse when she doesn’t want to, and end up being mean mostly due to some combination of stress and thoughtless mouse jokes, but that first “humans don’t have TAILS, right Susie??? :D” was the delight of someone 100% ready to try this Mean Girls thing, right around when Susie herself decided to give up.
it occurs to me that, given the whole earlier-chapter running joke of "it's ambiguous whether Susie has a tail or not", this put-down in particular was especially doomed to fall flat
[touga voice] "you know why we can get along Nanami? because you're the kind of girl who doesn't have a tail"
so on the topic of that bad ad that's going around right now
there's a person on the umineko subreddit who is absolutely infatuated with lambdadelta. like, she's his waifu in the traditional sense of the term. but he sometimes mentions that he uses one of those LLM character emulators to talk to her and I just want to pick him up and shake him like a ragdoll and yell in his ear THIS IS UMINEKO YOUNG MAN, WHY ARE YOU OUTSOURCING YOUR SUMMONING RITUALS TO THE FAIR FOLK, YOU LOG OFF AND GO GROW A TULPA OF HER THIS INSTANT LIKE MARIAGE SORCIERE INTENDED
vis LRB I would be utterly insufferable in that thread. the undropped shoe in PMAS of "wtf is Coobs plotting while all this happens" is like the #1 threat going and everyone is arguing about offering it a treat it hasn't even developed the taste for yet in this timeline??? when they could instead co-opt it in record time simply by going after its actual desires????
thinking about all the wish fulfillment fic everyone writes for canon woobie characters like Homura and Mami and mentally transposing that onto fanon woobie characters (Miss Kyubey)
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema as written in the world where Questing Beast is the canonical sequel to the original 12-episode Puella Magi Madoka Magica anime. 2000 page perpetually unresolved flame war about whether it's okay to violate the """egg prime directive""" and forcefem a cabbit if it might get Mitakihara Kyubey to stop fucking with Madoka and be Mami's friend for real
