joining in the #ENreco posting, in this essay i will speculate that LBF's slow decline as she cedes all her agency to NJ is an ego death in slow motion (a murder in slow motion, maybe, though not in the traditional way) not dissimilar to the constant memory loss that keeps plaguing these brave heroes.
in some ways it almost feels worse? although the memory loss is often spotty, or has troubling knock on effects, it is largely impersonal (traversing universes/time), deliberate (Tam?), or an unintentional effect (Watson). And the underlying bits of the person they were remain largely intact across the change, so far as I have observed (an incomplete view but still-)-
as a story i read once put it, they're still more or less the people who would do what they did and feel how they felt.
but piece by piece little by little all the bits of characterisation that have been built into LBF's underpinnings are being chipped away. Horses in the house, doors left ajar, smith to supplier to smith again, commercial exchange- everything except the same stone still bone deep loyalty that LBF anchored herself to in ch1 to the King- now pointed squarely at Nerissa Juliet.
(separate essay: ch1 LBF was so often mournful of being left behind by her guildmates, at the very start- untethered from her past and memories and identity- until she tied her sense of self to being a Jade Sword, in service to the King. in ch2, a Smith of the Jade Forge.)
(does all of this, then, stem from being shorn of her past and her memories (and her Rosarians and her Justice)?)
(immense applause to Liz for her characterization of LBF and Whatever Her Deal Is.)
(and thanks for pavlovian scaring us with that Sound Effect lately)
anyway, unlike the literal memory loss many people have been going through between or even during chapters, LBF's foundations being chipped away is the very opposite of impersonal.
to at least some extent, NJ knows what she's doing, and to whom- and she's still wearing away at whatever brittle armor LBF has put over the underlying void created by the initial memory loss.
and LBF has tied her star to NJ, so to speak- holding on to NJ with everything she has, and if she has to release bits of the debris of her identity to do that, well as long as she has Nerissa, right? And her vow, her honor.
(in fairness to NJ, sometimes LBF lets go of something not under actual pressure, but under the idea that there might be pressure- possibly later, possibly unexpressed). (from what I have gathered.)
(i would perhaps want to speculate about whether that is consciously or unconsciously based on how, for example, Liz herself has folded early during Among Us as the Imposter when she *thinks* she's been had, instead of waiting for it to be confirmed- but that would be weird to examine further.)
at any rate. LBF is losing the version of herself she'd built up during the first two chapters in lieu (this is a pun) of knowing who she was before arriving in Libestal. Moment by moment she's making little tiny choices to let go as a side effect of swearing herself to Nerissa Juliet so thoroughly.
But she has, I suspect, not looked at the whole situation and consciously said to herself "I am choosing to sacrifice this version of myself, wholly, to be nothing at all but what my lady wants from me."
That's a choice she's going to have to make or deny, I think, before everything is over.
(as an aside, I would put 60-40 on LBF being a complete unresolved mess at the end of ch3, so that she must slowly Become once again during ch4's exploration of Justice's memories- with or without Nerissa's help, depending on how NJ recovering her memories goes.)
(further applause to Nerissa and Liz for making a trope I am generally here for (e.g. Kure Kirika of Madoka) take its most alarming form.)
This whole thing- this ego death in slow motion, this inexorable decline- it contains a kind of creeping terror. Losing yourself day by day until you realize you're nothing like who you used to be. Forgetting yourself.
While I'd largely considered LBF retaining her memories between chapters to be fortunate (due to personal reasons!), I do think that even that repeated cycle of loss would have been kinder than this. Even Tam's or Watson's ill-fated memories, too, may have been kinder.
l await with vague terror how this shall proceed!
titsay
baratheonpilled
izzy806
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
snowghoul
