#tragedy tag

[jadeandquartzes]

aranessa royce & thjazi fang + "the three laws of tragedy" (original post by tumblr user @/annabelle--cane)

[bisexualastronaut]

andor (2022) // aeschylus “the oresteia”

[tisafinedayforsimping]

PFFT- NOT THE DEADBEAT EX-HUSBAND OH BOY-

LISTEN they just have "divorcees who unfortunately still share a workplace" energy. To me.

[xebenkeck]

decided to give my tav a new set of clothes and wanted to draw a fancy pose to try out some color stuff, so! hello, here is Tragedy! they/them great old one warlock and my first hero for Baldur's Gate 3!

[cobra-creampuff]

tell me more about angel wn pls

Angel's character arc is, thematically speaking, primarily about grief. Grief for the community he was denied, grief for the relationship he couldn't have with his maternal figure, grief for Dido/his relationship with Dido, grief over his own failures, grief for the relationship he couldn't have with his children, grief over the potential futures that the past has killed.

His arc basically follows, vaguely, the 5 stages of grief, as well as (even more vaguely) the 12 steps of recovery. (Eddie's arc is similar, but is more about recovery than grief.) The bulk of Angel's story is Denial.

He also is a representative of grief in the other characters' arcs. For Eddie, Angel's narrative presence (but in-universe absence) in Curse The Messenger is used to illustrate her grieving for her lack of childhood as well as her more literal grief for her parents and her guilt and regret over people she perceives herself to have failed to save. For Fred, Angel in CTM also illustrates xyr grief for a lost childhood, as well as xyr grief-driven fear of abandonment.

He's not in Gilded Verdict at all. Incidentally, the main characters in that one either don't have anything they grieve (Evan) or project their feelings externally to such a pathological degree that they don't feel grief so much as things like resentment or unfulfilled entitlement (Lily). A character is a symbol just as much as any blue curtain.

In The Vanishing Point, Angel has only negative character development, spiraling deeper and deeper into avoidance. He can't bear to acknowledge his losses or his mistakes, and makes them immeasurably worse by obsessively denying them. This is the bulk of his on-page character arc, really, and it is entirely in the Denial stage of grief and well out of reach of the "admitting he has a problem" stage of recovery. He ends the book at the lowest low achievable in the witch noir universe, the ultimate and rockiest of rock bottoms.

For Dido in TVP, Angel represents her grief over the life she thought she'd have before her schizophrenia onset. She continues to grieve herself in other ways, with Angel as the narrative proxy for her feelings (just romantic lead things) throughout the book. At the end [SPOILER] more literally, thus making Angel also the proxy for [SPOILER].

In a slightly more literal sense, every single character who interacts with Angel will lose him. Every single relationship he ever has ends.

Then at last in Latchkey Craft, Angel gets to have his own POV. LC is basically Angel speedrunning the 5 stages (because he is still firmly in Denial even at the beginning of this book, 13 years after hitting his rock bottom). There are three other characters in LC that aren't in the rest of the series at all because [SPOILER], and each of them represents a different direction Angel could go from here.

Clara is the possibility of Angel stubbornly - and now consciously, purposely - staying in Denial and never admitting he has a problem, and the consequences thereof, repeating the same mistakes in the same way forever.

Kapua is - er, actually I'm looking at the 12 steps right now and fuck's sake these bitches be Christian as hell lol, we are ignoring like 8 of these steps because they're fucking irrelevant and also frankly antithetical to the other ones?? anyway-

So Kapua is steps 1 (admitting there's a problem), 4 (naming the problem and facing it directly), two thirds of 5 (saying it out loud), and 10 (committing to face up to relapses and other problems in the future). He also to some degree is Bargaining and Depression. As you can see here, there's a reason why he and Wapo are a package deal.

Wapo is steps 3 (deciding to make a change) and 8 (making amends), as well as stages Anger and Acceptance. Where Kapua is a more internal and less outwardly responsible path for Angel, Wapo represents Angel becoming more diligent and proactive in his life.

Clara, Kapua, and Wapo are all [SPOILER], and my goal is to leave it up to reader interpretation whether or not they are [SPOILER]. For this reason, and because the plot is so Man vs Self, I think LC will be the hardest book of the series to write.

witch noir taglist: @haectemporasunt @jezifster @blackhannetandco @fearofahumanplanet @godsleftarmpit @littlehastyhoneydew @rainbowabomination @antihell @isherwoodj @marrowwife @ashen-crest @wildswrites @ceph-the-ghost-writer @garthcelyn @muddshadow @cohldhands @unrealistic-android

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[finalgirlguy]

thinking abt how myths and plays are more compelling medias through which we tell tragedies than movies and books (at least to me). bc the fun of tragedies is that no matter how much we talk abt how romeo could have waited 5 minutes and orpheus could wait just a little bit more, the truth is that they were unavoidable. this was always going to happen she's been dead since the beginning. and i think that plays and myths kind of cement that by being told over and over. hundreds and thousands of people had the chance to make this a different story and they didn't. this was always going to happen. meanwhile in movies it's the same frames the same people the same lines. it's only one choice no matter how many times you rewatch the titanic. so it looses a little bit of that flavor

[rosguils]

smth smth the coin landing on heads each time demonstrates the fixed reality of ros and guil’s existence blah blah it was only ever going to be this way fate is ever unchanging choice is meaningless we live a sisyphean life in that despite the outcome being the same (the coin is always heads, the ros and guil will always die, the boulder will always roll back down the hill) we keep going for the smallest glimmer of a chance that something will be different, like guil says, “we’ll know better next time,” etc etc….

[eucharistsamruby]

in a kinder universe mary doesn’t walk in on azazel. she never burns. she and john divorce after a few years, but sam and dean grow up happy for the most part. things aren’t perfect, but they aren’t an endless string of motel rooms, killing people that your father says aren’t quite people before age 10, sips of whiskey far too young while your brother’s shaky hands stitch up a bullet hole in your arm, giving up on making friends because you’ve never stayed anywhere longer than a month.

there’s the mostly normal stuff - teenage angst and blowout fights, slammed doors and blasting rock music, first loves and breakups, and a nagging thought that never quite lets up in sam’s mind that he’s evil deep down, something that twists in his gut at the way mary looks at him sometimes - but everyone’s okay. when sam goes to college, he comes home for breaks and birthdays, makes quick calls to his mother every sunday and and long ones to dean whenever he needs to complain about his roommates. he and john don’t have the warmest relationship, get into biting arguments about politics whenever they talk, but they do talk.

but no universe has ever been truly kind. sam disappears from his apartment a few days before his 24th birthday and is found dead in a ghost town in south dakota a week later. mary leaves identical voicemails to john and dean. “i’m going to fix this.” they don’t see her again.