#bootsmeta

[agoddamn]

Tales of Duviri is a storybook written by Euleria Entrati for the purpose of teaching children how to handle the manic flood of emotion that comes with Void exposure.

I pose a question: why does Euleria feel so strongly about this?

Her interactions with her own children are... let's call them wanting, and dialog implies that the negative aspects of their relationship--her denigrating, controlling nature, the distrust, etc--did not begin only after the Infestation brainrot set in.

We also know that she holds her father in extremely high esteem, but Albrecht did not think much of Tales of Duviri (see: him talking about his previous disdain for it in his own Duviri notes). Euleria put resources into writing Tales of Duviri instead of more traditional science, and Albrecht did not think much of it.

So why did Euleria write Tales of Duviri?

Let's rewind a step. Void exposure-induced mania, the whole thing Tales of Duviri is written to help manage.

How was that discovered and studied? It clearly was studied, enough to be a recognized condition and for the Orokin to build the iso vaults and for Euleria to write Tales of Duviri. But who would they have observed this mania in if Void research was an abandoned dead-end line of study?

Perhaps...the man obsessed with the Void who'd survived an unshielded Void dive?

Euleria had patient zero of Void mania sitting at her dinner table. Albrecht is the character who's undoubtedly had the most Void exposure.

Albrecht himself must have exhibited the Void mania and mood swings that Tales of Duviri exists to teach caution of.

And that's why Euleria wrote it; she had this gyroscope of a mood swing at home. She admired Albrecht too much to consciously deride his lack of control as irresponsible and so she channeled her energy into writing Tales of Duviri instead.

The emotion spirals of Duviri are loosely based off of what Euleria witnessed in the Entrati household and particularly Albrecht himself.

I don't believe that any courtier is a 1:1 translation of a member of the Entrati household, but more that their toxic interactions and dramatic heights reflected things that Euleria herself saw--or lived.

This reading of the Duviri characters and story--that they mean things to Euleria specifically--gives us a fun new lens to look at all of the chapters with.

For example, Mathila.

"Two children, and no memory of her husband. Poor Mathila."

Two children like Euleria herself, eh?

Mathila loved her husband. He also textually does not exist. He's not on the screen or in the text. He is a memory, and one that Mathila herself cannot even remember. There is no portrayal of their love.

Pivot to a writer's perspective. You need to write a loving relationship. You look to real life for inspiration, right? If you're a married woman needing to write a married woman in love, you naturally look to your own relationship.

And if you can't find anything to base that love off of? Well...move that character offscreen. Just tell about the loving relationship, don't show. Actually, do you even have anything to tell about? Well. Move the entire loving relationship offscreen, then. She's got amnesia. Nobody needs to talk about the love to sell it or make it feel real now. The narrator can simply mention it as a fact and it need not be challenged. Euleria doesn't have to imagine a loving family life between a husband and wife and their two children and question why that's hard for her. There. Problem fucking solved.

Another parallel that fairly started screaming at me once I started considering that the Duviri courtiers had meaning to Euleria specifically: Luscinia.

"I was created to be Sorrow, written into being, to serve as a lesson... can that change?"

Luscinia knows that she is a tool. As much as she dreams of being more, she knows very well that she is a tool--both a literal narrative element to teach a lesson and within the story itself Thrax's servant (his personal songbird).

Is there anyone in Euleria's life who might have some angst over their position as a tool? A servant who wants to escape the limited definitions of their role?

And so... here I am, back to my old role. The diligent servant. Albrecht would have smiled at that, I think.

Loid. It's Loid.

Luscinia: "This structure and I share much. Both of us once useful, both of us discarded, both of us now derelict. Both forgotten." Loid: "How might this relic make himself useful today?"

Both Luscinia and Loid are also capable of surprising amounts of ruthless violence. Luscinia has no hesitation telling you to kill the Dax or otherwise wreak vengeance on her jailers. Loid's Necramech lines feature him ranging from being excited for ensuing violence to coldly promising the Murmur regret.

The Duviri Tales were a subconscious form of therapy for Euleria herself as well, allowing her to write a story where emotional explosions were a problem that must be addressed rather than a social struggle to be suffered through at the whims of the more powerful.

[agoddamn]

@cardinalgoldenbrow not quite. Something else fell into Duviri.

Not a whole person, but a piece so significant and meaningful that it kicked off the entire paradox meltdown sequence.

The Lotus's hand.

The Lotus had enough conceptual weight to her to give the Drifter the power of the Void, a power the Lotus herself never even had. She is so strongly connected to the Tenno that she connects the Drifter to them by way of her own hand.

Why, then, wouldn't that be conceptually powerful enough to birth a denizen of Duviri?

Gender? Means nothing. Thrax is male and can be spawned from a female Drifter all the same.

Timeline? Duviri experiences time in a way that isn't linear to the Origin System. We already know this thanks to Teshin having been living in Duviri a long time by the time the Lotus's hand lands even though they fell at about the same time.

Let's look at the major beats here.

First, why is Ballas the Warden to Kullervo? "Because he's an Orokin, he's a ruler, the Drifter saw his portraits as a child!" Yeah, plausible, but by that logic Tuvul should be the Warden. Tuvul drove much of the Zariman project. His statues are all over it. The Commons are even named for him. If the Drifter were unconsciously reaching for any authority figure, it should have been Tuvul.

Speaking of authority figures, Executors don't rule Duviri. A king does. Kullervo's texts talk explicitly about Executors and other things about the Origin System in a way that doesn't match Duviri's canon. Why import Ballas as an authority figure and then demote him to Warden all while acknowledging that he ought to be an Executor?

Let's read Kullervo's story.

Hated Kullervo, did you truly believe he could love you? 

Oh, huh. Kullervo was in love with an Executor. One of the Seven. That's--rare. Who would love one of those assholes?

Kullervo's criminal trajectory is most strange. He was in love with an Executor, killed an Orokin to prove it, obeyed a direct Orokin order (why does an authority figure call this a crime?), killed someone like a mother to him--an Archimedean he was trying to rescue from Orokin custody, odd detail there--then attacked the Orokin again, then orchestrated the Night of the Naga Drums.

Man's got loyalties like a ping-pong ball, huh? Why?

The children's rhymes tell a rather different story.

An enslaved warrior torn from his mother. He was born to fight, eventually learned a truth of his birth, saw his home lost. He bursts into a rage, murders, and then kills himself.

This is much much much more straightforward. You'll notice that the children's rhymes don't mention Origin System concepts like Executors, either. Nothing about love.

Why all the complication?

Two distinct narratives, both tossing in details that beg for more elaboration. Why do this, as a writer? Why spend the voice actors' time like this?

I can only think it was done on purpose.

Two different stories, two different readings on the same person. One from Ballas, one from children.

(Huh. They say Kullervo is a friend to children, don't they?)

The Lotus lived very different lives from the perspectives of Ballas versus her Tenno.

Natah was born to war, a mimic spy with a purpose. She left her family--not by choice--and killed her fellow Sentients as the Lotus; a betrayer. She then orchestrated the Night of the Naga Drums; a betrayer twice over, the mother of a bloodbath.

Ballas sees her as a betrayer, someone who loved him and threw him away.

We see beats of Margulis's story here, too--an Archimedean that was like a mother, killed in a struggle that wouldn't have existed if not for the choice of resistance.

Kullervo isn't literally the Lotus, but I believe that he was conceptually born from her.

His stories contain the major beats of her life, only slightly twisted by perspective. Those details are so specific--in love with an Executor? Betrayed their own kind, and then their 'ruler'? A mother figure (so specific! Why not just have her as his mother?) who was an Archimedean, killed because of resisting the authority that ruled them both?

Kullervo is made up of her pieces, like a collage.

I believe that Ballas's presence and the sudden mention of Executors when that doesn't match the rest of Duviri are supposed to be clues to us that something from the Origin System has leaked in to birth Kullervo, that he is not simply an independent figure that existed in the past. When Teshin and Albrecht rolled into Duviri, they did simply that--they entered Duviri and adopted its ways while they lived there. They didn't come with an entire chapter of a story that isn't from the Duviri Tales.

Another point to Kullervo being born from Duviri is that he is treated like he exists in Duviri. Nobody says that he suddenly appeared like Albrecht or Teshin. Acrithis talks about him as if he's a part of the story. They all know his history. It's only the Warden who relates such a different history.

I think that the name Kullervo probably did exist as some minor character in the original Duviri Tales. The Drifter's subconscious applied this to the tangle of trauma that the Lotus conceptually exists as.

tl;dr Kullervotus

[agoddamn]

TOS McCoy (and specifically TOS McCoy, not AOS) strikes me as the sort of person who overacts being acerbic to either hide or compensate for the fact that they're really easy to take advantage of.

Because, look at the way he acts! Look how he folds to beings who he knows want to hurt him (salt creature, Mirror Spock) solely out of his own sentimentalism/nostalgia. Mirror Spock wasn't even asking for help--McCoy just could not allow himself to leave.

And he knows this on some level, I think, which is why he leans into the curmudgeon act--he can't stop himself from folding like wet paper when someone else wants something from him, so he makes the pre-emptive effort to push them away by being a massive bitch. People can't take advantage of you if they don't realize you're an easy mark, right?

(He is also just naturally inclined to grouching, I think.)

I think this helps explain his thing with Natira, too--for someone primed to give and overgive like McCoy, someone not requiring anything from you is like a fantasy. There was no personal history on the Yonada, no connections, nobody needed anything from him. It was the perfect hiding place for someone running from himself and his own failing to make everybody happy.

[agoddamn]

The fact that Loid struggles so much to accept/believe Albrecht's last words makes me think that Albrecht was being unusually tender/explicit in their last scene. But...the text in Albrecht's Notes I've seen so far is also quite tender.

Thoughts:

First, hypothesis that the Notes were not written contemporaneously and Albrecht's more affectionate internal narration reflects his attitude later in life moreso than how he acted at the time. Albrecht does admit on the tapes that he never said the words Loid wanted to hear; I think Loid isn't getting his fears of being manipulated from nowhere. I think that "my Loid" from Albrecht at the last minute was new and Loid went to his cryosleep second-guessing everything.

By the way, let's go over some of Loid's canon duties:

Personally nursing Albrecht back to health after the Void melted his face off (if I'm understanding the Note right he even read poetry at his bedside)

Taking care of Albrecht's child and grandchildren (Mother is noted to get her habit of dumbing things down from Loid and Brother mentions piggyback rides from him)

Stanning Albrecht in academic circles (that bit about trying to deflect public criticism of Albrecht onto him)

Sourcing endangered animals (the antelope endlings were acquired by him)

Taking charge of the Cavia

Taking charge of the lab's defenses (he comments during mirror defense that he worked on the defense system)

Smashing Albrecht's body with a hammer

Giving up his entire life to dedicate himself to fulfilling Albrecht's "break glass in case of doomsday" plan

Loid was around (though apparently not physically present) for the Void first contact experiment, a time when Albrecht notes that his assistants had dwindled away and he was nearly in academic disgrace. For all that he's called a servant, all this looks more like the behavior of a partner than anything else.

You know, I had thought before this update that Mother and NecraLoid had a really strange relationship; why is she so suspicious of a robot servant? She's infested-crazy, yeah, but NecraLoid's only secret actions at that point were selling the player necramech parts, which is something Mother indirectly wants to happen anyway. She should think he's nothing.

But if Mother knew Loid as a family mainstay, an "uncle" who'd been there for decades that worked hand-in-hand with the glorious father she admired--now her confusion and suspicion as to the changed power differential between them makes a lot more sense. Loid was never just a butler and a purely manservant robot version of him makes no sense to her.

And if Albrecht is half the notoriously cold, science-minded manipulator Loid's grumblings make him out to be--and Mother knows that--and Mother thinks there was something more to Albrecht's disappearance, and that Loid had something to do with it (which, she's right about both of those)--now her thinly-veiled hostility to NecraLoid makes a lot more sense.

[agoddamn]

IMO...

The MadaTobi vibe is "destiny took a hard left." Madara and Tobirama are not the fated pair set up by the story and an eon of reincarnation. Hashirama is the one who's Madara's equal in battle, he's Madara's meaningful friend, Madara is his man of destiny. Hashirama and Madara are mutually obsessed. Their relationship is set up as a Huge Thing.

So MadaTobi is at its best leaning into that narrative asymmetry, I think. The curious contradictions. The feeling of "this wasn't meant to happen." They were clearly never meant to really interact in a narrative sense, so you wonder--what if they did get to talk?

They've got those interesting little bits where they espouse ideas that are similar, they have a massive unresolved beef, they have a strange binary star kind of orbit where they're linked in each other's gravity well without an immediate connection. Plenty to build on there. You can even get cute with some (likely unintended) thematic parallels like fire/water, red/blue, black/white.

TobiIzu is more out-of-the-box prepped for you by the narrative (last younger brothers, both left behind by big bro, close in strength, doomed to end in violence), but I think it's actually harder to nail down. Maybe because we have so little canon info on Izuna? And while Madara and Tobirama got to hiss and spit at each other on-page like bitter divorcees Izuna and Tobirama only interact in battle. They can easily fall into a pair-the-spares sitch; you're pairing up Hashirama and Madara so you may as well pair off the other brothers while you're at it.

But Tobirama and Izuna...they're parallels, but they're tainted parallels. Everything that makes the Hashirama-Madara relationship fairytale makes the Tobirama-Izuna relationship tragic. The destiny narrative dooms them to be tools of the story--dooms Tobirama to be Hashirama's bloodied right hand and Izuna to be Madara's tragic backstory.

Because of that I feel like the relationship only truly works when Hashirama and Madara aren't together. Narratively, Tobirama and Izuna need to be in a story where they're finally the important ones. Their relationship working is inextricably tied with the idea of them making selfish choices over their brothers, I think--both are improbable and need to be carefully set up.

They are otherwise bound to live--narratively and literally--in service of their brothers. The traditional supporting character relationship is more like codependency when looked at with a more realistic lens, and Tobirama and Izuna are prime examples of that. They need to be hewn away from their fraternal supports in order to develop something new. They cannot be retreading the ground of Hashirama and Madara.

(Personally I think some tbiz goes too far in the fanon 'poor little meow meow Tobirama' direction...although, I have to admit that in a world where Izuna somehow fell in love with Tobirama, I think that his perspective on Tobirama would definitely be "my poor little meow meow" lmao that sort of disproportionate "everyone is bullying MY poor woobie" kinda possessive protectiveness)

Without a Softness Showing is my gold standard for Tobirama and Izuna interaction. Blew my tits clean off and it's not even romantic.

(This post brought to you by a lengthy mental ramble of mine where I bemoaned the lack of porn where twink Izuna mating presses 6-ft Tobirama and lamented that I don't have the chops to pull it off myself.)

(Anyway, someone ought to write that.)

[agoddamn]

Absolutely wilding that Tobirama's take on ending war is "people should just stop having feelings." I mean, it is a very nine-year-old take but it's pretty clear he holds that stance close for the rest of his life (may not be great at following it, but holds the idea). I like the interpretations that have him semi-parenting his other siblings; we can see that he's already got the "just shut your mouth and do what needs to be done because nobody else is going to" philosophy of parentified kids down.

I mostly don't like the interpretations that stretch sensor types to basically empaths because I feel like it loses some of what makes the idea unique to Naruto (the active choice to sense, the limited nature of the ability). For Tobirama, though...it feels fitting to me that he'd have a hypersensitivity to aggression. Not reading feelings as a whole, but just aggression/violence.

It helps paper over a few inconsistencies regarding how good sensing is supposed to be, and for a kid that ended up playing promoted-parent, that's exactly the skillset you end up with--hypersensitivity to when things are about to go bad, because it's going to be your job to head that off at the pass. That trained hypersensitivity can also set you to jumping at shadows or making people think that you're looking for a fight, because, well...you are, in a sense. You never trust, you're always looking for how a situation is going to go bad and how you're going to get out in one piece.

Notice I didn't say win, I said get out. In the scene with Kawarama's grave, Tobirama lies to and appeases Butsuma even though his personal feelings are the opposite. His goal was not to prove the rightness of his philosophy, but to get Hashirama (and Itama) out of the funeral without further violence. Even for a shonen manga with bloodthirsty nine-year-olds, that's thinking a lot of steps ahead with a lot of subterfuge--and it's not even a canon-typical level of child insight, because Itama and Hashirama standing right there fail to defuse the scene.

In spite of running jokes about how dumb he is working up a lot of steam, Hashirama is not incapable of subterfuge or thinking ahead! He suspects Madara's identity from the first five minutes they meet, identifying Madara's stone-skipping as identical to shuriken-throwing. He recognizes this, recognizes that there would be negative consequences if he let on the truth about what he was seeing, and played dumb. And it worked. Hashirama absolutely had the skillset necessary to talk Butsuma down in the funeral scene and had already demonstrated skill with it.

Hashirama wanted to win against Butsuma; Tobirama wanted to survive.

And I think this behavior tracks neatly with his lifelong paranoia about Madara; even when it's sabotaging himself, he cannot stop fixating on how things can go wrong and how he can contain the damage.

[agoddamn]

1) interesting choice of oath when Tobirama both has beef with his father and never has children

2) Madara trying to force Hashirama to kill his brother or himself also very much explains Tobirama's grudge lmao unlike Izuna, this wasn't even mid-battle; Madara just wanted Hashirama to kill Tobirama out of some abstract cosmic punishment.

It also seems like Tobirama never gets validated in his feelings here; Hashirama just gives him a cajoling "be nice to the Uchiha now!" at every turn and considers it no harm no foul, but man...

If the positions had been switched, if Hashirama ordered Madara to kill Izuna or himself to earn forgiveness, nobody would blink at Izuna carrying a grudge about that and talking shit about Senju even through peacetime.

And since Tobirama never gets his feelings validated, they fester and he tries to rationalize it as "Uchiha are just crazy" because the alternative is "my brother loves a man who tried to force him to kill me" or even "for a moment I really thought my brother was going to kill me" and he's not confronting those without a level of therapy that doesn't exist in Narutoland.

Any time Tobirama complains about Uchiha in general, it seems more like he's actually talking about Madara specifically and trying to cloak it in generalities. The democracy convo--he goes right from claiming Madara is unelectable to saying that the strongest Uchiha eyes are most dangerous. He hasn't actually changed subjects; Madara has the strongest Uchiha eyes. Threatening Sasuke--he says trying to destroy Konoha is just like an Uchiha, but the only Uchiha who's ever done that who he's aware of is Madara.

[agoddamn]

Stranger Things is a show about the 80s.

I don't think this is a thesis I have to prove, right? It's in the damn Netflix summary. The Goonies, Stephen King, Star Wars, arcades, Reagan, Cold War--it's very purposely an 80s show about 80s stuff.

With that in mind, it feels very purposeful that its antagonist is a product of the 50s.

S4 foregrounds the theme of time very literally: people are stalked by a clock, for Christ's sake. You can't get more blatant than that. Brenner is obsessed with trying to regress Eleven to an earlier time, a child he could easily control.

As far as we know right now, there's no mechanical reason for Henry Creel to be twenty years older than all the other subjects. He didn't need to be the child of the Greatest Generation, a returning WW2 vet. There's no reason Creel couldn't have been a child of the 60s, or even early 70s.

But they made him a child of the 50s.

The 50s are typically associated with innocence, paradise, "a simpler time," "the greatest generation." WW2 is "the last good war," to the point where even modern comic books still rely on Nazi bad guys for uncomplicated villains.

Henry Creel's motivation is disillusionment.

He peers into his father's mind--his decorated hero soldier father, his good guy Nazi-killing father--and instead finds a man murdering a family, a man lighting a baby on fire. He can't stand it. He can't cope with it. He can't reconcile this man's continued existence with his murdering a baby.

He peered into his mother's mind and finds a woman planning to get rid of him. And although he couldn't have known the extreme extent of Brenner's cruelty at that point, I don't think it's far-fetched for Henry to have known that asylums were not kind places.

Henry Creel is a child of the 1950s because he represents a disillusionment with the 1950s. The idyllic image people have of the 1950s is categorically false. Even the "last just war" was full of atrocities on the side of the good guys.

Thematically, this is also why he doesn't re-emerge until the 1980s; after the growing revolution of the 60s and the liberation of the 70s, the 80s are associated with cynicism and the death of the American dream (remember all those Reagan signs?). If Henry Creel represents the fruit from the rotten tree of American nostalgia, naturally he should bloom during the 80s.

Bringing things full circle, Stephen King's It features seeds planted in the late 50s blooming in the 80s. As much as It is clearly a huge influence on Stranger Things, I think this is a case of parallel evolution moreso than purposeful nod. The rot from the 50s sends it all tumbling down in the 80s. That's just how America works.