#emfyo

[howlsofbloodhounds]

i wonder if color ever forced himself to eat things that caused him discomfort because of sensory issues. like post-void maybe out of a fear that this stuff is gonna disappear and that he has to. hm...

I wouldn’t be surprised. Especially if he relies on food for comfort, even as his it also causes him discomfort and pain.

[edwardsallow]

HOW have you come to understand these characters so well. your writing awes me holy smokes

Thank you!

Well, the narrative left a lot of room to build on. Lanius is a stunningly well constructed figure; he’s not even technically just one character so much as three dudes in a spiky golden trench coat, lol. He’s also attended by a cadre of unnamed blind slaves, in addition to being a practitioner of what seems to be the Legions religion. (Which involves human sacrifice, ironically, even though the Romans famously disdained the practice! I bet that was intentional.) There’s so much room to insert original characters into his storyline which I really appreciate.

I got attached to Edward as soon as I finished his introduction, tbh. In a game defined by bombastic, fantastical personas, he stood out by just being like. A very conventional archetype, despite everything, as was once said of Tony Soprano. He reminds me of many people I knew in real life, plenty of whom weren’t white or men, ironically - with his stubbornly maintained repulsion towards victimhood and disdain for softness, his rampant projections and shallow rhetorical justifications (Heyo,) the way he forbids all his kids from saying his former friends name. His backstory is extremely sparse, which makes sense given his role in the story, but I looooooove that it happened when he was a baby and I love that the actual circumstances of his dads killing are so vague that your mind has to try and fill in the blanks itself. How does a toddler survive that? Not unscathed, certainly, for all his posturing Edward has serious problems he lacks the skills or desire to tackle, so of course he’s chosen this ideology to fling himself into. I like that his canonical passions are dogs and traveling, cus what else are coastal American fascists ever interested in. He strikes me as a more honest rendition of archetypes that are typically considered heroic in western media. Love it love it love it.

Joshua, I mean. He was canonically a cult member but the narrative won’t tackle that. He’s got a weird combination of being afforded a lot of attention by the story but being situated in such an area that the writers blind spots and prejudices altered the context his character exists within unintentionally. He reminds me of Corporal Betsy, in that sense: I find it hard to get through her dialogue about female raiders, knowing what kinds of people those factions are a stand-in for, and I don’t think that sense of unease was included purposefully. But he’s well designed and well acted so we can have fun with him nonetheless.