actually begging the people on my tumblr feed to stop mischaracterising the desolation PLEASE we don’t need the incessant fire parallels i promise you’re missing the entire point! it’s about the gradual losing of everything you’ve ever cared about, the crushing sensation that you can never fulfil your potential because there’s nothing left for you, the understanding that the way you claw to keep what you have will just mangle it beyond recognition and either way youve lost
it’s a metaphor for depression in the way the buried isn’t simply because of the numbness of loss as opposed to the crushing suffocation; it’s a metaphor for anxiety in the way the hunt isn’t because of the ever so slight creeping sensation that everything you hold onto will slip away like sand between your fingers, just slow enough that you feel unworthy of your fear but unable to release that fear because you know something is so deeply wrong NOTHING HAS EVER UNDERSTOOD ME AND MY FEARS SO COMPLETELY THAN THE DESOLATION
like please understand the limbo of not being afraid enough to face it, to reach fight/flight, to have the adrenaline to counter the problem, because the problem is trickling in so slowly from so many different places that you can’t find the source of the leak, but being too afraid to relax, the feeling that if you blink for even a single second you’ll have lost what can never be returned, paralysed with the need to stay vigilant, unable to enjoy what you have before you lose it because all you can think of is the overwhelming knowledge that you ARE losing it inch by inch
it’s fuck all about mindless destruction like i saw someone describe it as!! don’t do my bby the desolation like that it’s about infinite LOSS not DESTRUCTION
full disclosure i haven’t finished the show i may completely change my mind on this take but hhh i have so many emotions about the desolation it’s imo the most intricate and complex fear i HATE when people reduce it to ‘fear of fire’
i stand fully corrected actually @reidrev-in-the-flesh
‘I see your point, but for me the Desolation is more "active"
……….
I don't know you and I don't know how you experience Depression, but, at least in my opinion there's nothing "slight" or "creeping" about the desolation. It's violent, brutal, it can be foretold but it won't knock on your door, it will break it open and reduce your home to cinders. Not because it hates you, not because it has a righteous cause. But because sometimes you step outside and crush ants.’
full comment in the replies but THIS, this gets it better than i did
when i wrote my first post on the desolation i think in a way i was projecting my own thoughts at the time onto media instead of letting the media develop my own thoughts, but this last paragraph sums up everything i didn’t say right
there’s still a lot of aspects that i feel are mischaracterised in the fandom’s general perception of the desolation but ‘sometimes you step outside and crush ants’ is a line that’s gonna stick with me for a while