dusk’s hidden fear of the encroaching night

If I die, remember that I begged you and asked you for a small donation or to share my post. I will not forgive anyone who sees this post and does not support me with a single word or a small donation and ignores me.

Im writing this post with tears in my eyes from the intense pain I'm experiencing. I've suffered from severe pain and multiple fainting spells this past week due to my severe anemia and my inability to afford all the medications I need because of their high cost. All I wish for is to never faint again, so I hope you will stand by me and help me buy my medications quickly. Please stand by us.

Worse still, I was injured when our house was bombed while we were inside (700 days ago). I was hit by shrapnel that is still embedded in my body, and I need urgent surgery to remove it. Throughout this time, I have been suffering from constant pain. My surgery is very expensive, and I don't have enough money for it. Now I can't sleep because of the intense pain, and I can't afford my medications and painkillers to stop the pain because of their high price, I don't know what to do!!!

I need your help to stop my pain and save myself as quickly as possible. Please, I don't want to die. Please help me raise the money for my medication and surgery as soon as possible. Please stand by me. And look what's happening to us

closet-keys

Please help my dear friend Fadel <3 He really needs funds for his medications and painkillers. No one should endure such an intense pain for so long. Please give him the gift of relief from pain. Help him to survive this genocide.

Hey everyone, please don't stop sharing this post and look at me with compassion. Please stand by me and see my situation. I desperately need your help and support. Please don't ignore me.

having a “and one more thing!” about pjm fans, but the way fans talk about yi sang and gregor as composites of their authors and the books they’re based on as well as the historical reality both authors lived in is frustrating. Most fans briefly acknowledge that canto 4 is an allegory for japanese colonialism and ignore it, and I’ve already talked about how fans balk at discussing antisemitism. It’s actually annoying since functionally they end up doing the same thing: ignoring the author’s background. Yi sang and the rest of the guinhoe barely get talked about out of disinterest and discussing european antisemitism in regards to franz kafka of all people is verboten because the holocaust is so Bad that even acknowledging the circumstances that led to it ruins the mood and pollutes anyone who hears it unlike japanese imperialism, which is minor and did not literally fracture the korean peninsula so it’s not worth dwelling on

I was talking with a friend the other day (in regards to this being very much a Korean game and how much of that element is ignored) how even when it's something like folklore (geseundae abnormality recently) people don't even bother looking it up? It has a very obvious Korean name, it's being associated with a historical Korean figure (the poet Kim Byeong-yeon), it shows up on the bit of story where you fight a famous Korean general (Im Gyeong-eop). Like. I'm not asking anyone to know these things beforehand (I wasn't familiar with most of it) but yknow. Have some curiosity? I've seen people commenting on the boss theme in specific with timestamps referencing specific historical moments too, but they were all Korean players.

With Gregor I see people lean a lot harder into the disability reading which is fine but the author was still Kafka, and it's lame to ignore that part of the source material when discussing Gregor. Was the whole thing with Obviously Not Italian Soldier Valencina talking gleefully about torturing "vermin" like him not enough? It's like they're taking the roach thing literally, like that one awful review of the Metamorphosis everyone laughed that. Certainly, they're not ignoring all the symbolism and metaphor as well, right? right?

(I have my complaints about how they're handling Gregor, like how he's Obviously Jewish but still gets christianity-associated things like Signs of Roses EGO or the Priest ID, and I'm looking nervously at what the fuck are they doing with the arm because that's one or two words away from being ultra nasty.)

#sylph no hanahime #the flower princess of sylph #manga #yuri

The way english pjm fans treat Gregor reminds me of that one tumblr post where western fans will casually joke about a character being a war criminal, but become deathly seriously if said character is associated with sexual violence. It’s not that they actually care about sexual violence either, it all boils down to discomfort. Real life imperial war crimes are a blip on their radar while sexual violence is closer to home so it all gets dismissed. Gregor is jewish, ashkenazi to be specific, and the main concern of fellow Ashkenazim in 20th century Europe was antisemitism. For whatever reason, and i notice it comes from white/non jewish fans, they insist it’s possible to talk about Gregor being jewish without actually discussing antisemitism or the Holocaust. Which is downright insulting since as I’ve said both of those are key parts of Ashkenazim history; even Kafka’s family died in the holocaust. If Limbus didn’t want to make Gregor an ashkenazi jewish man why base him on an ashkenazi author who was involved in Jewish activism? Why make his most distinguishing feature a conspicuously placed tattoo on his forearm that says “Vermin” in German? It’s the same with valencina and kromer, and how fans revolt against seeing them as narrative agents to convey the allegorical antisemitism in the world because it makes go from being generic bad guys to actual commentary on bigotry, which is scary. It’s ridiculous. Sometimes it’s exhausting being educated and nonwhite in project moon when a majority of the fans are incurious white westerners who just want games they can shut their brains off and play.

(Also link to the Korean fans pointing out the historical leitmotifs in the music?)

hotwaterandmilk

The recent success of Love Bullet demonstrated the power of the global yuri fanbase when united. However, the short-lived serialisations of bold, unconventional titles like SHWD highlight that there's still progress to be made in finding the audience for WLW titles and continuing to support manga that don’t conform to more "commercially appealing" tropes.

That brings me to the manga I’d like to recommend today — a series that evolved from Twitter posts into a full serialisation. Despite its brilliance, it struggled to maintain its serialisation and ultimately concluded after just three printed volumes. Fortunately, it lives on once again as a self-published work, sustained by the dedication of its creator and a passionate fanbase. Now that all three official volumes are available in English and accessible internationally, there’s no better time to talk about The Flower Princess of Sylph — a powerful meditation on love and grief.

Sylph no Hanahime (The Flower Princess of Sylph) by Kamejiro

The Kingdom of Wind has long been ruled by a dynasty blessed by the wind spirit, Sylph. Natalia, the newest monarch, has just ascended the throne following the death of her beloved brother. Overwhelmed by grief, she clings to Sylphide, the sacred sword passed down through generations of rulers. Torn between her duty to present a flawless image to her people and her personal need to mourn, Natalia encounters Sister Sara, an irrepressible nun who takes it upon herself to help the young queen heal. But are Sara’s intentions as selfless as they seem?

achillesinhighheels

André 3000 photographed by James Dimmock (2000)

#andré 3000 #outkast

pussyhoundspock

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

nonevahed

prev tags:

literally ok so not a funny story but kind of funny? when I was nine I encountered rape in a book and I was like hey mom what’s this mean and she explained it and I was like oh. gross. and then like two weeks later a girl on the bus abruptly disclosed her csa and we were all like ????? what ???? but I was like wait hang on there’s a word for that ☝️🤓 and explained what it meant and that it was illegal and that you could talk to a teacher or my mom if it had happened to you and everyone was like ohhhhh I see I see and very somberly comforted the girl (she was safe she was removed from her home and living with my neighbor at the time so it wasn’t Urgent)

zarohk

And this is a perfect illustration of why it is important for kids to read or variety of things, and why abusers don’t want them to.

with canto 10 around the corner i’ve been thinking. downplaying limbus as “just a gacha” feels like i’m dismissing my own feelings so as someone who grew up within the african muslim diaspora i think white/american (europeans do it too) limbus fans are painfully ignorant of how religion is used as a vector for racialization. Specifically with n corp and how people say they only represent religious persecution with no reference to racial/ethnic discrimination (and everyone knows germans having a stellar record of respecting all races /j) people know antisemitism is bad, but they don’t think deeply on the mechanics behind it: why it happens, how it’s enforced in service of white supremacy, etc. i was extremely aggravated 3 years back when ppl argued the crusades/inquisition had nothing to do with race and was purely religious. They are actively entrenching themselves in ignorance on how medieval antisemitism/islamophobia is connected to modern iterations of it and racism because they don’t want the germanic enemy faction associated with the most infamous germanic enemy faction in real life: nazis

Something that's always in the back of my head is that nazism and fascism won on a cultural level.

What I mean by that is that people's understanding of conflicts of this nature and art are still following that same nonsense logic of "people fight because they're different uwu". Like, no, the crusades were absolutely using racism as fuel, and it was in turn for material reasons.

Do we think maybe european colonizers at the americas had more reasons than "they're just different" for the genocide and brutal extraction of resources? My country is named after the metals they were taking out. They came up with new levels of race science to justify it too! hashtag religion.

I mention art because usually a "defense" of "it's not about that" in media is the notion that it doesn't "count as art" unlike some other notion of "real art", which is, yknow.

And like, N Corp is very intentionally alluding at these things, as you say. I find it fascinating how they're incorporating censorship into the setting (because of long standing usage of "stories" as meta), and the fact N Corp isn't exclusively German in design.

With their execution of this, I feel it misses something. Admittedly I lack context that I assume C10 will provide, but the whole thing about prosthetics feels too... arbitrary? to make sense. A Certain Sinclair implies this upcoming war also includes Distortions as "not human anymore", so we'll see how they do that, and hopefully it's not "just because they're different uwu" because that's completely toothless and boring.

Even before limbus library of ruina was about Angela expressing her humanity in a citystate that strictly defined and enforced who is and isn’t human using lethal force. Robots and other fantastical species being used as stand-ins for a Minority™️ is its own trope, usually a trope that is poorly written and ends up legitimating the fear of the Other by giving the marginalized group some scary power that terrifies people. Despite the insistence of Camus and scholars his work is about race and colonialism; even if he isn’t talking about race, presenting white colonial occupied Algeria as a romanticized paradise free of the indigenous population pushes the French imperial fantasy. I feel like somewhere in PM’s writer room they are aware that the white supremacy that fueled the rise in German antisemitism is the same white supremacy behind French colonialism. Camus even lived in Nazi-occupied France for a while so I think having a new npc named Heinrich Kramer after a German inquisitor and even name dropping his antisemite treatise (Malus Maleficarium) is connecting the two. Do I think they’ll do anything substantial with all of this? I kind of doubt it so my main annoyance is fans vehemently denying the game is even trying to comment on 20th century sociopolitics.

annabelle--cane

I will be honest if someone posted "I'm a tutor and everyday I watch zoomers try to double tap on books to open them" thousands of you would reblog it and tag "😱 it's so scary that this is what all kids today are really like they're so helpless and stupid omg!!! those damn kids need to get off their phones!!!!"

annabelle--cane

things a concerning amount of people aged 25-40 on this site believe about today's children:

they don't know how to read and this makes them mean and dumb. also even though their meanness and dumbness are the result of poor education, they are still personal character flaws that deserve to be mocked.

they are responsible for wide scale censorship in schools and on social media. because, as we all know, children are famously politically powerful, never want to see horny or edgy content, and love it when books are banned in their school libraries.

they love to spread misinformation around so they can all armchair diagnose each other and act like they have learning disabilities in order to excuse their laziness about doing school work. obviously they are all liars and just need to just get their acts together and grow up instead of shirking responsibility for their actions like this.

they are uniquely cruel in comparison to past generations, and this is because of Phone. and also TikTok. no one has ever been cruel like this before.

they would all be much better off with their parents monitoring their internet usage. if they're closeted and their parents are homophobic then, well, sucks for them. kids being abused out of sight is better than them being annoying where I can see them.

addendum to my previous ask. canto 9 adds a lot to the topic of sex and gender in pjm’s setting since it’s obvious shiomi, ryoshu, and araya are all being exploited for their bodies. araya’s situation is fridge horror in the mirror world with the implication of incest since she’s wearing dihui’s star bridal attire while raising a child with her father. the writing just kind of, sidesteps sex as biology and an act (implying rape) by substituting cloning. ironically enough that just made the theme more prominent since fans already think shiomi birthed ryoshu and the korean and japanese scripts have characters like valencina just say “that’s the child you bore”. playing morimens after this was night and day, hello thais and caro

Morimens is really funny in contrast because it commits to horror and has Birth all over the place. Thais and the chapter centered around her (7*) is all about that, but it's also a central thing with a couple of chapters before, where a priestess tries to revive a God through a ritual that involves a gestation and birth. They take a few steps to the side, like not saying -how- it got in there, and putting the "egg" next to the heart, but also the entire time you're fighting pregnant women and babies. And it's made very clear how the relationship between this young girl and the priestess is fucked (essentially mother-daughter, but her religion has her blinded to the girl's personhood and only sees a path for her faith)

Or like just the fact that Caro has a central mechanic of Eating Embryos. "Emergency Gnosis", the item that lets you retry, has an ghostly embryo floating inside. They just did a collab with Saya no Uta.

They don't shy away from sex in its depiction but it's also not saying anything that we haven't seen before in... most horror that touches these things. It feels like they understand the visceral discomfort of these things, but don't engage in any meaningful way. I've been playing FFXIV on and off recently, and I'm kind of shocked at how many rape allusions it has? and they're not done with any tact. It's either to paint a generic bad guy as Disgusting and Evil with a cartoonish tone, or going "damn isn't that scary? anyway fight Faceless Bandits". It's just. Almost joking. The text is written understanding that this is shocking but doesn't engage at all as to why, nor does it care how it can affect to just throw that on an audience. It's also, coincidentally, really racist.

*warning on how incredibly racist the whole thing is. Like. Disgustingly racist. There's this weird dissonance because there is a character in your team who is gross as fuck the whole time, calling them "uncivilized" and "savages", and it's put in contrast with his "charming" persona, but also the framing of the whole thing is not much better. It's this "brown people from the desert" caricature. Thais as the scary seductive belly dancer. "Inspired in lovecraft" is certainly true.

viewtiful-kim-deactivated202105

Yea, I just finished playing Chapter 7 and it really was the white pharaoh meet and fuck kingdom. The white church lady being worshipped by the backwards brown savages was another salt rock in the wound. Morimens has the same pacing issue as Project moon where they introduce interesting concepts and just zip through it to get to the next new development. Morimens kind of has a pass since the devs thought the game was going to shut down so they wanted to wrap everything up quickly. I’m also slightly more lenient on Morimens since in spite of how censorious China is they went places with the reproductive horror games in more liberal countries hardly do.

Agree on FF14. I’ve been a huge final fantasy fan since middle school and picked up 14 right around the middle of the post Heavensward patches. The game having a revolving door of writers means there’s a lot of hard hit and misses on subjects like racism, misogyny, imperialism (Sighs at Stormblood). For me the games that have a good track record on writing rape are usually visual novels and it’s mainly because they’re novels so they can purely focus on writing.

Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet is a vlogger and all his soliloquies are breakdowns he uploads to YouTube

animatedamerican

… I am unironically here for this

oldfilmsflicker

this is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life

kabesattic

This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, he’s stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, they’re still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but they’re still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewer’s lived experience. They’re still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.

spicedtealeaves

A post about this went round recently, and I’m delighted to announce she’s since come out as trans and goes by Jasmine 🏳️‍⚧️

Actor and Writer

There’s a whole series of the Hamlet videos on her YouTube, as well as a bunch of other films she’s made

#hamlet #shakespeare #theatre

for me a hurdle with discussing pjm games with other people is that they take “race and gender discrimination don’t exist in the setting” for granted so they treat analyzing the games through those lens as forcing discrimination into the story, and not actually verifying the strength of the story of not being bigoted. using canto 9 as an example it’s pretty obvious shiomi and ryoshu are being clonebred because their reproductive capabilities are profitable to the fingers (both their time sensing and fighting prowess) but fans are resistant to that read because that means the story is about misogyny even if the overall conclusion is misogyny bad. the read makes shiomi and ryoshu cis but tbh nothing in pjm have made me think the writers are dedicated to even broaching the topic of queerness

It's silly because even if they state that racism isn't a thing in the setting, the text is written by an author that exists in the real world, and the real world and its languages are thoroughly permeated by racism.

Sure, no racism in the setting, but Heath is dark skinned in an adopted family of blondes and called various variants of "dog" like okay sure not racist? "it's because he's poor". That doesn't matter. We, the audience, live in a world where Dark Skinned Poor Boy in Family of Blondes is straight racism, and that colors the word "dog" as it is used in real life. The visual language we use to tell the story is language from real life!

I don't think KJH and his writers are oblivious of the texts they're borrowing from. They sure did keep the intimacy shared between Ishmael and Queequeg, but I don't think they'll ever say anything with their full chest. It's really hard to not see the racism kept in C6 from Wuthering Heights.

Demian touches gender and sexuality, and we have hints of that with Sinclair. Is Frau Eva ever showing up? is that going to be discussed? or is things like Sinclair wearing the feminine version of the Blade Lineage uniform just going to be left there for funsies?

C11 with Outis has the chance of have actual for real lesbians married, but I don't know if they'll take it. They should. Frame it as completely normal and unremarkable. You can't say "gender doesn't affect the story" anymore, sir.

Why does Sinclair call Kromer a bitch if misogyny isn't real?

Canto 6 is thought provoking (neutral, slightly negative) since the writers thought they could still truthfully comment on Wuthering Heights while negating race and gender as barriers to Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship by just simplifying the conflict to “they should have just talked” but end up framing Heathcliff as in the wrong for running away from a racist, abusive household and hand waving Cathy stating that marrying him would degrade her. There’s also how in rewriting Cathy into a Female Love Interest by sanding her down she ends up becoming the docile white woman to Heathcliff’s angry brown man. I have a lot of complaints about the final 1/3 of C6. There’s just so much symbolism in limbus that it feels like a disservice to handwave all the bridal imagery in C9 as “they just added it because it looks good”

closet-keys

The recent flotilla of volunteers trying to bring aid supplies to the Gaza Strip consisted of 50 boats and hundreds of people from different countries. On Tuesday, Israelis arrested 430 people, and forced them onto ships converted into makeshift prisons. The protesters abducted onto these ships report surviving a number of violent tortures including:

Denied water, blankets, and most of their clothing.

Forced to kneel for hours and kicked if they moved or spoke.

Moved from room to room periodically to deprive them of sleep.

Locked in a darkened container.

Serious injured in their eyes, ears, and rib-cages with tasers.

Beaten by multiple soldiers, breaking ribs, fracturing vertebrae.

Stripped, sexually harassed, and groped.

Sexually violated, anally raped, and forcibly penetrated with a handgun.

This is what Israel did to people who were only under their control from Tuesday to Friday, less than a week. This is what Israel did to people from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and others of the global north. This is what they did to protesters showing solidarity on a global stage who have lawyers and news attention.

Imagine what they do to Palestinians every day.

Please help my friend Mahmoud to support his family in Gaza. His family's campaign is vetted by @90-ghost, shared by fairuzfan, and hosted by my wife @cannilyuncanny. She transfers donations directly to Mahmoud's sister Mahrah (@mahrahpalestine), who lives in Gaza with her elderly parents.

Their survival depends on your support and donations for food, clean water, supplies, medicine, and all the essentials of life. Please support them.

oohyuck

Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. That poison?

boccher

no one with any amount of power brave or enlightened enough to call what the western world is doing to children segregation. children are segregated from public life. children are a legitimate oppressed class

boccher

what else do you call it when third spaces place curfews for when children are allowed in, when public squares hire cops and guards to boot out any kids they find for "loitering"; when arcades and theatres and entertainment spaces mandate ID checks regardless of if their content is age-inappropriate or not; when parks for kids are constantly sold off for more property development, when public transport is gutted and tickets are converted to card-only systems, when micromobility devices are progressively outlawed under the moral panic pretense of "youth hooliganism", when cash is phased out of retail such that children have no legal means of purchasing anything independently? what else do you call it when children are completely barred from sharing space with adults on the internet? if we earnestly believe that children are an oppressed class who require liberation then we must analyse these things using the same language that we analyse all other class dynamics

I know “project moon fans don’t read” is a meme and pretty unfair, but it’s rare find to find people who discuss how the overall theming of the games is exploring the art of storytelling. You’re one of the few people I’ve seen analyze Rien as a form of meta commentary since a lot of people seem really into theorizing that the Index is making another roland for a huge plan. Despite Roland’s role in LoR being an everyman so common that even he knows his suffering isn’t unique

I've seen a few posts saying that people tend to read stories as historical retelling of fiction rather than stories, and so they forego that angle entirely.

The thing is that PM is writing about stories since the very start (what abnormalities are, fundamentally, is archetypal constructs for that: it's language) and even Lobotomy Corporation makes some very straight forward statements about "tales" (particularly in hell week, with the A reflections and the language they use ("you can rewind time, but you can't reverse a tale") and the ordeals of White ("As long as the Head rules the City, the tale of the Nest will never reach its conclusion")). Ruina then does it again both in the context of the Index and the Head, with the former being way more subtle (the basic premise of the Will of the City is that actions create the environment to replicate themselves, which doesn't take a lot of work to see how that relates to Telling Stories) but the head just straight up says citizens make stories in the cultivated environment of the City.

Limbus is getting pretty heavy on that, sometimes direct with C6 (the Erlking being way more similar to book Heathcliff than the sinner, and that the sinner and Dante are very explicitly trying to do something different) and sometimes not exactly that (The whole Don Quixote thing is -about telling stories of your adventures- and directly related to desire). But, like, it's there, and the more you pay attention to how the sinners take the source material and respond to it the more you notice this intertextual dynamic: they're very explicitly talking with the source in mind.

C9 expects you to understand that it's taking from Hell Screen and A Spider's Thread to understand the characters. It alludes very directly in dialogue to both them around the Araya/Rien final segment, but it's asking you to consider what characters and themes from those stories are being used and how. Like "who is Yoshihide" well, Ryoushuu, but it's not just her, because the nursefathers also take from Yoshihide. Araya is clearly the daughter, but so is Ryoushuu herself, and then Araya "jumps into the fire" like the monkey Yoshihide. Ryoushuu is also the painter and the painting. At the same time, who is the spider? who is the sinner? what is the thread? "Hell" is obviously the House of Spiders. Araya has this funny scene using red thread to make a spider's web that turns into a ladder that is so on the nose, but that's it, right? Some nursefathers want to leave, some don't, they're all cast into hell. Ryoushuu is their way out, but because of the mistreatment, they don't get a thread to climb out from hell. Ryoushuu treated Araya like a kid instead of a thing, and that was her spider's thread to leave the house, but that came with its own set of issues- the story repeatedly connects this thread to the red string of fate, and talks about how they tangle and knot with each other. It's never that simple.

It talks to the source and transforms it to say something about, as usual, cycles and stories.

Rien is wearing a mask of a man wearing a mask. They, on principle, do it for the same reasons: (detachment and taking no accountability. "The prescripts said so" - "that's just how the city is") but ultimately end up in different places. Is it absolute or not? Roland said determinism doesn't matter, choose what you want, but he had to reconcile that it means being responsible for his actions in the end. Rien couldn't do that. "The City" still wanted a "Roland". I compared him to the John Wick type of tragic badass dude killing hundreds because they took something from him (wife, car, dog- whatever, it's "his" rather than a person). I think it's worth thinking why this is done in this way, right? And how Rien is in dialogue with that.

Like, there's something to be said about what language is relegated to what parts of the setting. The Ruins are physically below the City (where stories are being made) and the Relics taken from there are all from old mythology. These old stories that the new are built upon.

There's this thing with Mirror Worlds and the nugget of explicit context we get in the Jia Ishmael story- They're not a natural occurrence, they're made by the will of the observer (this is a repeated concept, too, starting with EGO in LC, and it becomes way more prevalent in Leviathan with the recurrence of "gaze" and now in Limbus too). This is also reinforced by an observation Dante makes with the mirror: If it is indeed infinite, how come the results we see aren't? why do they follow a certain through line? (with C6, it was Cathy and Nelly being only able to see themselves miserable)

It's clear that PM cares about "stories" as a concept. Abnormalities ("fantasies" really) are leaning more into the "building blocks of stories" aspect of Archetype and not exclusively the psychological.

Like sure the lore and whatever but how do we interpret the way these things work? Why is Identity such a strong and persistent theme here, even outside of IDs? (Who is Gregor? Who is Rodya? Who is Sinclair going to be? Who is Yi Sang? Who is Ishmael? Who is Heathcliff? WHO IS DON QUIXOTE? WHO IS JIA BAOYU/HONG LU? WHO IS YOSHIHIDE/RYOUSHUU? Who -is- Dante?)

I ended up yapping but they caught me again with C8 and C9 has me gripped once more. I missed PM getting dense with their writing.