"Who heals me? is more emotionally devastating than What's my mother's name? ever was," I say into the mic.
The crowd boos. I begin to walk off in shame, when a voice speaks and commands silence from the room.
"She's right," I hear. I look around for the owner of the voice. There in the fifth row, in tiger-striped onesie and face paint, he stands: Sam Riegel himself.
this is a rant about my goat pike. this is also my personal blog that gets an average of maybe 5 occasional notes so please do not take a fat shit on my opinions because I will cry
wow. holy wow. oh shittings. well we can for sure know now that some people will beg and beg and beg for morally grey characters and then vomit and scream and cry when pike trickfoot pulls up to the function with 3 vestiges.
holy shit the amount of stuff I've seen on here just straight up DRAGGING her is insane dude. suddenly complex characters dont exist and the second one does something people dont agree with they're rampaging like bulls stuck in a red room.
dude i get it. obviously I do; Pike's actions were shitty as HELL, MAN. struggling with depression and alcoholism and repressing your emotions the entire time is gonna do that to you. she's a hypocrite at times, like blaming vm for never visiting but never visiting wilhand herself. choosing to follow the WO despite how his actions resulted in grog and wilhand's deaths after repeatedly showing her disdain and hatred for him [WO]. mourning over being rejected by scanlan even though she pushed him away at first in s3, causing him to lay off.
but that. is. the. point. she's switched places with what she hated. all her anger and vengeance led her to a point where she became quite literally what she was angry at. it's a perfect way to showcase self-hatred by literally growing into the person you once would've judged or looked down on.
not to mention the WO is super manipulative. every single cult leader is, that's like the main fuckass point of most cults: having a super charismatic leader. she did not trust him in ANY way at first, and pike at the beginning of ep10 would probably hate pike mid ep12, when shes fully lost it and gave in to the WO because she wanted her friend back. if I was in Pike's position, I would've chosen to help him ascend for the price of getting my best friend and possibly the father figure who raised me for all my life back too.
Im less mad abt people judging this specific decision as opposed to shitting on her Healer's Lament, because sacrificing essentially the whole world and (in)directly causing Vax's death just to save Grog is what makes her the perfect morally grey character and an imperfect victim of the WO's manipulation. it also makes her pretty unlikeable from a moral point of view because aw shit there goes exandria. world's fucked anyway. but being less mad does not equal to not being mad, because some people lack media literacy!! and a lot of it!!
pike's arc being completely new and different from the campaign makes it expendable for the writers and unexpected for the consumers; people are mad because she's not the same person from the campaign. essentially, mad because she's not 'perfect little pike', so it's safe to say her lament is well enough directed towards most of those people too. you gotta at least try and read a little into the lines before you run her over with a truck because poor girl is FINALLY getting a unique and interesting arc.
zerxus arc was cool but lasted one episode and only showed up again during that season like maybe thrice?? this arc lasts the whole season. a whole season of her being down in the dumps because she knows she's not good enough. she knows that vox machina use her for healing (she's right, in many ways. genuinely cannot remember the last time someone other than grog or scanlan had a meaningful uplifting conversation with her that actually lasted over two sentences) and just wants someone to heal and protect her in the way she does for others. specifically her. and this sucks for her because she most likely doesn't realise she's shutting people out too much to be helped and won't show her emotions. she doesn't want to be weak.
this is getting long so I'm wrapping it up here lmao. she's good representation of morally grey characters, and just the absolute immense hate isn't all that necessary and could be toned down a bit if some people just took a second to read between the lines. and that sounds insulting but trust me - this is the bare minimum if you wanna complain or critique, to at least know what you're on about.
Once again this season two time BAFTA winner Ashley Johnson comes in with the steel chair making me first cry my heart out but then also cheer so freaking loud 🫠
out of everyone in this scene, only the two most important people in yasha's life blink. look at beau and molly's eyes. everyone else’s are static. i love when animators leave easter eggs like this; it's a detail that's easy to miss but otherwise significant if you know the campaign lore.
this small detail in and of itself tells me that the writers won't cut corners developing yasha and molly's friendship, despite their reduced time together. i’m curious to see how her relationship develops with beau too, given that yasha will be sticking around with the group for a while, allowing them to have more consistent interactions.
what if we went to your dead wife's grave and we both mourned for the thing we'll never get back. and we were both girls.
(I wrote a little expansion of the ep141 Zuala grave visit! for @cr-fem-fanwork-fest! it's 1,278 words and you can read it here! and also this art fell out whoops!)
travis' yasha: Beau if you read this im free on Thursday night and would like to hang out. Please respond to this and then hang out with me on Thursday night when I’m free
the thing that keeps fucking me up is that they knew obann could charm people. it played out in the overcrow apothecary as a classic scenario, basically the same one they faced with the succubus and the incubus before. nott got charmed and attacked her friends, they noticed she was acting different from her usual self, and they briefly interrupted the fight to get her back. jester even used dispel magic to do it. they knew. they watched it happen. nott felt it happen. but when they lost yasha they still debated whether or not she wanted it. because nott was always close and authentic with the nein. her fears were loud and clear and specific. but yasha was just... distant. she kept leaving, didn't she? she never told them what was going on with her. she never got close enough to make connections. on a mechanics level, she rolled like shit on her initial stats and had trouble catching up, so she was always just a little behind. she was an aasimar who didn't know what an aasimar was and never even had access to her wings. she was distinctly, obviously different. and so when she froze and attacked and became completely distant, it wasn't like nott, who was so obviously not herself. the nein didn't recognize a self that yasha could be distant from. and the thing is that it's completely understandable that they didn't. most of them (including yasha!) had really substantial trust issues that made it difficult to handle any kind of betrayal. it was an overwhelming environment. obann was, in theory, dead at that point. they had so many reasons not to trust her. but they knew obann could charm people. they watched it happen. and in the end it didn't matter, because they didn't understand yasha enough to trust her.
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