Me And Shipping Presented By Barbossa:

"and genuine hot boi!"

look man. look

essek saying "bren" out loud, claiming a position on caleb's side as the mouthpiece of his regards to astrid, did something to me. i can't tell if it opened a wound or punched me or gave me a hug. all i know is that i am feeling so many emotions right now

more under the cut because i'm about to get rambly:

"bren aldric ermendrud" is a separate character from caleb widogast. he's a young boy learning how to make magic. he's a deeply traumatized and indoctrinated teenager. he's the boy who curled up with astrid and eadwulf in a freezing tower for warmth all night.

essek never met bren. he met caleb and he's never known him as anyone else. if i'm remembering correctly, caleb never even said the name "bren" to him during the campaign, and neither did any of the nein.

essek knows caleb widogast. he knows the man who held up the object of his worst crime and then kissed him in the bowels of a ship and made a floor of infinite stars for them to walk through together. he knows the person who healed over bren's wounds—thinly, but enough. he knows the man that the boy has become.

astrid knows bren. she barely knows who caleb is. she still calls him bren after hearing him referred to as caleb repeatedly. she can't know him as the man he is, she only knows the boy. there's some of bren in caleb, but there is no caleb in bren.

essek saying "bren sends his regards" is him gauging astrid's reaction, on one level—if she freaks out, which she did, she's in opposition to caleb's cause and thus a threat. on another level, it's essek delivering a very different subtextual message from caleb: "the boy who loved you is giving you one final warning."

because essek is a threat to astrid. their last meaningful interaction was slinging spells at each other in the blooming grove. and that's funny in a "current boyfriend vs ex girlfriend exclusively fight each other" kind of way, but it's also deeply tied to caleb's recurring theme of transformation. "bren sends his regards" also means "i have healed enough to love enough for someone else to know this name and use it with my consent. and this someone else is your enemy. what does that make you think i've become?"

it also does a fantastic job of communicating subtle offscreen discussions that have happened over the years since the end of c2. we don't have the details of when or how caleb told essek his birth name, but we know that he did, and we know from all of c2 that the name bren occupies a place of immense emotional weight for caleb. it functions similarly to a deadname in terms of who uses it and for what purpose. trent exclusively calls caleb bren to wound him and place himself in a position of power. astrid calls him bren to remind both him and herself of who they used to be—same with eadwulf, though obviously he's not here.

the first time we hear essek say "bren" is on caleb's behalf and confronting one of the narrative representations of caleb's trauma. it's four words that manage to communicate "i, your enemy on a hundred levels, can speak for both the man i love and the boy who loved you, because i know him in his entirety."

astrid knows bren and essek knows caleb, but only essek can speak for both. because at some point, caleb gave bren to essek. and we know this from four words. four IMPROVISED words.

god. this moment is just so fucking good

if you dont have me on facebook you are probably not missing out on any posts but the comment section is important too lmao

Normalize making transphobes feel unsafe 😌

i think actually the key to successfully doing tumblr (and especially doing fandom on tumblr) is realising that your blog is your little house and you can post about whatever you like there. once you realise you are just living in and decorating your very own silly little online house you start focusing on what makes you happy rather than constantly performing for & compromising your tastes for & placing all your self worth on little scraps of clout, and you will be a lot happier for it

his eyeshadow turns purple when he’s excited…..this boy owns my whole heart now im sorry, i love him

Hank: In light of what you did for me... you can hug me for four to five seconds.

Connor, immediately grabbing him into a huge bear hug: Forty-five seconds?!

Hank, already struggling: NO! FOUR TO FIVE SECONDS!

Hey everyone, I know it's going to be a busy day for a lot of people, but Google enrolled everyone over 18 into their AI program automatically.

If you have a google account, first go to gemini.google.com/extensions and turn everything off.

Then you need to go to myactivity.google.com/product/gemini and turn off all Gemini activity tracking. You do have to do them in that order to make sure it works.

Honestly, I'm not sure how long this will last, but this should keep Gemini off your projects for a bit.

I saw this over on bluesky and figured it would be good to spread on here. It only takes a few minutes to do.

My Therapist: "American-Accent Caleb isn't real and cannot hurt you." Caleb c2e1:

As Other people have been saying, he only had One eye-thing in Season 4 (Also also only one eye-thing on the uniforms) - And Another thing, When he Spoke in the beginning of the most recent first ep.?? HE SPOKE IN THE SINGLE VOICE HE USED IN SEASON 1 EPSIODE 6, WHEN HE WAS SAYING EVERYTHING WAS HIS FAULT - HELLO????? HELLO HOLY GOODNESS??????

WE KNOW ONE-ONE AS, WELL, ONE-ONE, ONE HAPPY AND ONE PESSIMISTIC SIDE - BUT WHATEVER MADE THE TRAIN, HOWEVER IT WAS BEFORE AMELIA’S TAKE OVER. . . WAS IT ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO BE THE ‘ONE’ WE SAW HERE IN SEASON 4? I MEAN, I THINK IT’S CLEAR IT WAS - ALSO ALSO EVERYTHING WAS MORE SYSTEMATIC, WHAT WITH UNIFORMS AND RELIEVING OF PERSONAL ITEMS AND SUCH/THE ADDITION OF THOSE BOOTS THAT CAN KEEP A PASSENGER IN PLACE FOR ‘ANNOUNCEMENTS’ (ALSO ALSO THERE WERE MORE STEWARDS?!?!?!?!) - CLEARLY, THIS WAS THE ORIGINAL INTENTION (as far as we know) ON HOW THE TRAIN WAS SUPPOSED TO BE RUN.

WHAT I WANNA KNOW IS. . . HOW EXACTLY DID ‘ONE’ BECOME. . . ONE-ONE. . . 

there was A Lot to unpack in Book 4 but something I haven't seen mentioned on here is One-One's whole,, situation. He's only referred to as One by the captions, similarly to how Amelia referred to him in Book 1, and he seems to only have one VA. (I can't confirm this, but I'm pretty sure his design is slightly altered here too??) so was. was Amelia TEARING him out of the train what caused his alternating personality?? hello???