My deepest darkest fantasy is that I collapse on the street and I am rushed to the hospital. They perform a bunch of tests and find out I am severely deficient in some kind of vitamin. Then I start taking the vitamin and I become the happiest cleverest person alive because all my problems were caused by this one deficiency
Moreover, everyone gathers around to be tremulously compassionate and discreetly admiring: all this time, you lacked the Vitamin? And yet you persevered?
A couple of years ago I went to my GP and said, "I think maybe I'm a tiny bit anemic?" So he ran blood tests and was like, "You are so anemic that I genuinely don't understand how you are able to work a full-time job." Which was very validating!
And then I had an iron infusion and felt a million times better.
Unfortunately there are still lots of things wrong with me, but maybe ankle surgery will be The Next Vitamin.
Yeah actually being chronically ill is often about finding The Vitamin many times over for many aspects of your life. You might not find The One Vitamin To Rule Them All as a disabled person, but maybe this year you find out oh actually I have asthma and it isn't supposed to be hard to walk uphill and carry a conversation at the same time, then next year you learn that oh I have GERD and I can actually just take some pepcid and not feel like my whole chest and throat and mouth is on fire every morning, etc ad nauseum. Anything can be The Vitamin if you just didn't know you were disabled
i bullied @ionomycin into doing an art trade with me, in which they drew my Essek design and i drew theirs. i was beyond ecstatic to draw io's Essek, his white eyes and white freckles and big cute ears and floppy sleeves have bewitched me. we also align on our white nails!Essek opinions, which is a delight. and the medieval scandinavian vibes are irresistible okay.
i tried my best to do him justice in my art, but you should definitely look at the way io draws their Essek! and please check out io's part of the trade or i will break into your house at night and rearrange all of your furniture
essek saying "bren" out loud, claiming a position on caleb's side as the mouthpiece of his regards to astrid, did something to me. i can't tell if it opened a wound or punched me or gave me a hug. all i know is that i am feeling so many emotions right now
more under the cut because i'm about to get rambly:
"bren aldric ermendrud" is a separate character from caleb widogast. he's a young boy learning how to make magic. he's a deeply traumatized and indoctrinated teenager. he's the boy who curled up with astrid and eadwulf in a freezing tower for warmth all night.
essek never met bren. he met caleb and he's never known him as anyone else. if i'm remembering correctly, caleb never even said the name "bren" to him during the campaign, and neither did any of the nein.
essek knows caleb widogast. he knows the man who held up the object of his worst crime and then kissed him in the bowels of a ship and made a floor of infinite stars for them to walk through together. he knows the person who healed over bren's wounds—thinly, but enough. he knows the man that the boy has become.
astrid knows bren. she barely knows who caleb is. she still calls him bren after hearing him referred to as caleb repeatedly. she can't know him as the man he is, she only knows the boy. there's some of bren in caleb, but there is no caleb in bren.
essek saying "bren sends his regards" is him gauging astrid's reaction, on one level—if she freaks out, which she did, she's in opposition to caleb's cause and thus a threat. on another level, it's essek delivering a very different subtextual message from caleb: "the boy who loved you is giving you one final warning."
because essek is a threat to astrid. their last meaningful interaction was slinging spells at each other in the blooming grove. and that's funny in a "current boyfriend vs ex girlfriend exclusively fight each other" kind of way, but it's also deeply tied to caleb's recurring theme of transformation. "bren sends his regards" also means "i have healed enough to love enough for someone else to know this name and use it with my consent. and this someone else is your enemy. what does that make you think i've become?"
it also does a fantastic job of communicating subtle offscreen discussions that have happened over the years since the end of c2. we don't have the details of when or how caleb told essek his birth name, but we know that he did, and we know from all of c2 that the name bren occupies a place of immense emotional weight for caleb. it functions similarly to a deadname in terms of who uses it and for what purpose. trent exclusively calls caleb bren to wound him and place himself in a position of power. astrid calls him bren to remind both him and herself of who they used to be—same with eadwulf, though obviously he's not here.
the first time we hear essek say "bren" is on caleb's behalf and confronting one of the narrative representations of caleb's trauma. it's four words that manage to communicate "i, your enemy on a hundred levels, can speak for both the man i love and the boy who loved you, because i know him in his entirety."
astrid knows bren and essek knows caleb, but only essek can speak for both. because at some point, caleb gave bren to essek. and we know this from four words. four IMPROVISED words.
still the funniest plot point in all of pmmm that Homura Akemi is a 14 year old magical girl who realized that her sparkly transformation sequence did not come with a cutesy custom weapon like everyone else's so she just went online and googled "how to build a bomb"
the point of s2 being that you aren't ever broken to be loved is so immensely important to me. as someone who suffers from periodic depression and other mental issues, idk it feels comforting for this stupid silly pirate show to be telling you that you aren't defined by your hurt, by your pain. you are still loveable, you are still worthy. you may shatter, but there's people out there willing to help put you back together. you just need to find your people.
it is about love, about family, about belonging. and that's beautiful.
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