attempting to manifest 2013

she/her | 23 | ending my lurker era 10+ years after tumblrs heyday

[petrikara]

the worst thing about all those 2000s-2010s queerbait couples is it gave me a delusional obsession with trying to replicate the “more than friends, not quite lovers, but a secret third thing” dynamic in my real life

[kiddokori]

baru cormorant is awesome if you love watching women destroy the economy fuck nasty and then engage in self destruction so severe they start hallucinating ghosts. who is doing it like her

[briannyssey]

im thinking about Baru and Svir again. The best written lesbian & gay man interactions in all of fiction. The Helbride is a workplace comedy

[thematicparallel]

I think the reason Baru works for so many people is that she's not attempting to be something for everyone. She's very specifically herself. She has very specific problems that are protagonist problems, which are not necessarily created by her being a colonized person or being a lesbian, but intersect with those identities in ways unique to her. So the fact that she's very calculating and really tries to maximize her own agency until she gets really depressed and can't do it anymore is a trait of her as a person. It's not something that everyone's like, oh yes, all lesbians are calculating Machiavellian manipulators. [...] I think the reason people like her is there is no part of her that can be taken in isolation from any other part of her. And the parts of her that go out into the rest of the story, like the outcomes of her choices, cannot be taken in isolation from who she is.

— Seth Dickinson, In Media Les (S1E19)

[polari]

grounding tips for the stressed aspiring tyrant: acknowledge 5 people you can sway to your cause, 4 methods you can use to persuade them (2 violent, 2 nonviolent), 3 people in positions of moderate power you can manipulate and usurp in order to gain access to 2 powerful institutions to destroy, and 1 foundational lie

[petrikara]

currently reading baru 2 and apparitor is so funny to me like i know he’s done some scheming and misc war crimes from the first book and the masquerade has him on the ropes but this man is so earnest and emotional that i have no idea how he’s survived this long among the likes of farrier and hesychast (and baru herself)

[beroebluejeans]

Apparitor is my new favorite because I love a bitchy melodramatic character but also because in this case he’s the closest thing to the voice of reason.

“Baru Cormorant, you fucking asshole, do you realize what you’ve done?”

‘“Fuck my fuzzy red nuts,” Apparitor breathed. “You really are his little creature, aren’t you? Those poor Aurdwynni bastards. You’ll ruin them.”’

“Ooh, I’m a feudal peasant, I just can’t wait to sell my shitty grain and skinny donkeys on the open market, ought to be fair competition with the Radascine Combine and their fields of golden plenty—”

‘“Sailors are intrinsically fashionable,” he sniffed. “Choose! Just pretend the outfits are dukes and duchesses who adore you, and thereby eliminate them one by one. Oh, blast”—he snapped his fingers—“ but that would leave you nude, wouldn’t it?”’

[spiribia]

It is unfortunately really funny to me apparitor’s backstory because they kidnapped a random gay prince and forced him to be president of homophobia otherwise they will kill his boyfriend and then they saddled him with a baru cormorant who's not even nice to him and steps on his foot on purpose

[cosmic-malware]

how yuna hollander was moving in episode 6:

[manichewitz]

ever since i was a little girl i wanted to be a man with a homoerotic years long incredibly intense friendship with another man

[hellishfig]

i was writing a post about worlds beyond number ep. 53: the queen of swords, but it was turning into a retelling of the whole episode, so instead i'm going to talk about what i NEED to talk about: steel.

steel is one of the most compelling villains i've ever encountered. the brilliance of everyone at the table is clear in this story, but this episode was the culmination of a dance that aabria and brennan have been performing since the very beginning of the children's adventure.

suvi and her mother. sky and steel. the fact that aabria introduced suvi's justification machine far earlier in the story, and now we finally fully see where she got that from and how deep it goes.

we were realizing this whole time. since bracken. and every moment since we have known that steel manipulates. we learn that she lies, keeps secrets, ties off loose ends neatly and with layers of subterfuge. the geas on silver confirms it. sworn's fear confirms it. steel will not hesitate to eliminate complications.

then, the final straws. now we know just how long steel has been planning this. the curse on ame was always from the citadel. furthermore, not only did steel have a hand in suvi's parents' deaths, she was attacked by suvi's mother. the spell of wounding requires touch, and leaves white scars in its wake. they fought close. it's very likely that steel killed her best friend.

and the worst part is that it's so easy to follow steel's logic. the acadator discovered that the league of whispers was not betraying the citadel, but was in fact the whole point of the citadel. soft and stone knew it was wrong, and therefore the citadel was wrong. steel knew that the citadel couldn't be wrong, so whatever it did had to be right. and that's how she's conducted herself since.

i wonder how she justified it to herself. if she felt like they betrayed her first by betraying the citadel. she was taken there as a child. she has nothing else. the citadel has given her everything, so she must give everything to the citadel. any who believe otherwise are threats.

steel had a promotion and new scars when she came to fetch suvi. she was rewarded for stopping traitors.

maybe taking suvi and trying to mold her into the perfect soldier of the citadel was one last fucked up act of love for her friends: trying to save their daughter from their fate. maybe it was spiteful and calculating, to undo soft and stone's attempts at protection and to keep the person who inherited their brilliance brainwashed and stuck. i wonder if we'll find out in two weeks.

i'm talking in circles. steel makes me feel so much. character of all time.

[booksandstuffsthings]

"I don't have to kill you, I just have to make you different. I spent my life turning you into the woman she should have been."

I've just been fatally shot 50 billion times.

[petrikara]

[spoilers for www ep54]

as usual thinking about steel and i think it really is so appropriate that ame’s truth curse spell failed on her because her machinery is so finely tuned that from her perspective a) she believes everything that she’s saying and b) there isn’t really any truth left for her at this point. i also think it ties in w what aabria has said that to suvi “great sprits are basically the same as people” bc steel herself is effectively a great spirit of military/bureaucratic imperial power. anyway there’s so much i love about how steel and the citadel as a whole are constructed and developed by brennan and the pcs.

[leftoverrpgs]

There was so much incredible stuff in the last episode but I am, as ever, totally fixated on Steel. Specifically the way that Brennan, together with Aabria, has managed to twist so many of Steel’s seemingly best features into something much more sinister, without any betrayal to the character. We knew how much Steel loves Suvi, and then on the Epiphany we got to see just how messed up that love is (echoes of Angwyn “What is love without expectations?” Abernant). She’s always been relatively respectful about spirits, but it’s now made clear just how much that has to do with power rather than any sort of reverence.

The kicker for me, though, is her attitude toward war. Steel, for all she is as the Sword of the Citadel, has never come across as particularly warlike. We’ve seen her as a strategist making difficult decisions in a difficult war, we’ve seen her as a terse commander, we’ve even seen her eradicate an entire bloodline (complete with a cold one-liner), but in all that she never struck me as a conqueror. She somehow manages to give off the vibe in her private moments with Suvi that leading the war effort is just her day job, and necessary to protect her home. But now we know why conquest isn’t the goal, and it’s not because Steel is the better person. Her goal is to remake the fabric of reality, and that requires time, and time can be best bought through largely defensive fighting.

With time we win.

[ancientghostgirlie]

“She’s looking at something that should be second nature and instead it’s a riddle or a puzzle, this anger from not understanding something that she thought—there’s so much she has to think about and she’s looking at something she thought she could rely on and it’s gotten complicated. Why did you dare get complicated?”

Brennan casually summing up the parent-adult child relationship.

Suvi and Steel’s relationship is one of my favorite things every time we get it.

[rain-dere]

Suvi and Steel are killing me. What if you loved your mother so much and it was never going to be enough to save her from the road she's been walking down since before you were born. What if she only fought so hard once she knew she could save you but it's too late for her to go back and shelter you from the world she will stop at nothing to build. You love her but you cannot follow in her sunk-cost fallacy footsteps. She loves you but she cannot close your eyes once they've been opened. The love is there and it will not save them from the pain they'll cause each other. But the love is always there.

[petrikara]

started listening to wbn a couple weeks ago and finally all caught up and let me just say i’m completely obsessed/transfixed by the wizard steel. it’s like whenever she’s presented with some quandary or moral dilemma you know she’s gonna say and do the exact right thing to keep treading the line but i love seeing how she does every single time. her shelf will never break, her justification machine never stops running, and in a lot of ways she is the machine. i truly believe she could find justification for any war crime or any act of treason if she had to but i’m curious if/when/how there will be something she truly can’t come back from.

anyway super stoked for these next few finale eps