one of those load-bearing things i believe i read on twitter over the summer was about how the things in dess' room show a disregard for the care of her property.. not in a morally wrong way, just in a flavourful way. that post was about all of her instruments being damaged ("they all look very expensive, and very dented"). but also she has a box of junk including burnt lighters, expired rations, and rusted knives... she has an excess of things because she's rowdy but she's also rich. she could ruin her violin and stock her closet with human sneakers because there was no material consequence, there was always more stuff. she has at LEAST 6 instruments in her room: the violin, flute, microphone (if you count it), guitar, trumpet, and drums. even if she didn't have a good relationship with her mom, at the very least she was never in want of anything relating to her hobbies. compare to susie's presumed room which has a chair, a bed, and a poster and that's it... this difference in having things is relevant insofar as it colours how both of them act in regards to the dark worlds (presuming dess is the knight, come on now).
susie who treats jackenstein and tenna's light world selves as indivisible from their dark world selves and refers to them by name, who refuses to treat darkners as things, versus dess who seems to exploit darkners' weaknesses in the name of enacting the prophecy, and who also slashes tenna's arms off to kill him, not out of hatred of tenna but because it simply doesn't matter to her that he's a person. whatever her goal is, justifiable or not, what matters is that the lord of screens gets cleaved red by the blade.
this is all i thought about when we got that line, "when you have a bat, everything looks like a ball."











