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utterly obsessed with this right now

This Town is Haunted👻👻

odysseus and athena

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cytherea tarot i did as a commission for @powerbottomblake <3

Mayhem│Beautiful Destruction │Misdirected Hostility│Disorder by Aaron J Groen

is ilganyag's interactions with the blacktongues out of sync with time and she has to actively look for -when- to screw around with people or does she keep relatively in sync with the living world?

I almost hate to answer this one 'cause it can curtail theorizing, but we're getting close to it coming up in the comic anyway.

Have you noticed that Sette is interacting with the world on her own timeline? She's not reaching through a waterfall and knocking Ssael's hat off. Living entities - human or senet - are bound to their own timeline. It flows down and around them, the lens through which they view and interact with their reality. Ilganyag is no different. She cannot time travel, personally, inside the khert.

Of course she can theoretically look at memories from any time and glean valuable, highly anachronistic information from them, but she herself is a causal being trapped inside the khert that cannot interact with instantiated reality and people from another timeline. This would all be so, so much simpler if she could change history. Instead all she can do is research the future through scavenged memories, and try to change what happens.

It's a really awkward position, I find, but fascinating. To know pieces of the future, to have goals that you want, to change little things over a long span of time and watch how you're nudging the future in a different direction. It's like playing labyrinth, tilting the board back and forth as the shiny silver marble rolls inexorably forward, avoiding pitfalls, riding the edge, red eye on that goal of goals at the centre.

I HAVEN’T PLAYED THIS GAME IN FOREVER BUT THIS IS AMAZING AND I HAVE SO MANY EMOTIONS ABOUT THIS AND I JUST

I mean don’t get me wrong I loved the game but that ending-?????

So yeah enjoy this crappily drawn infinite wall of text I DID WHAT I COULD WITH WHAT I HAD TO WORK WITH

(also please open in new tabs if you want to read anything goddang tumblr makes things tiny)

(p.s. I did another dumb thing as a sequel)

Genuine praise and applause here, you've achieved something unprecedented to me as a reader: I feel shaken and uncertain about a protagonist I once liked, but also still completely invested in their story.

Right now (I've just read 18-80 to 84) I feel you've struck a great balance of surprise (at Duane) and trust (in your story). Perhaps because no single choice of Duane's felt out-of-character, as they slowly added up? I honestly can't predict how I'll feel about him and his flaws by the end of Unsounded, but for once, I'm enjoying that unease! Because of the care you've taken in building your characters so far, I at least still have faith in *you* to reach a satisfying ending.

Oh this should be a question, hmm. Were you at all tempted to foreshadow Duane's recent/future choices more obviously (by character or plot), softening a bit of the impact for a smoother story? Because again, I'm glad you didn't – perfectly threaded needle to keep me captivated.

So glad you're having a good time!

I hope Duane's current state is pretty well telegraphed, though I know it can be hard to remember past instances when the webcomic delivery spaces everything out. He's repeatedly shown himself to be hypocritical and selective in regards to kids. The army story ended with him continuing to train babies in the killing arts and accepting a false narrative that he had never let one of them die. This led right into him turning a blind eye to the Litriya twins for the sake of helping the Aldish invaders get to the construct facility. He felt AWFUL about this - we saw it - and tried to make up for it, but even that very action was already going against what was said in the black water: God is not attainable by transaction. Duane was trying to erase that debt to Litriya. It doesn't work that way! Like Claggart said, you got to acknowledge your mistakes and keep moving.

Duane started to. He truly did, when he spoke to Lori and the Peaceguard, then moved to go defend the shrine. But then Mikaila was there in the sky and all development was cut short in tandem with his poor rotten head.

What did he see when he and Toma and Elka approached Port Morstorben's ravaged gate? Not all the dead bodies. Not a vision of Sara asking him to help defend her people. Instead Duane saw Lemuel and Leysa and Mikaila. The eels have always known exactly how to steer Duane towards his worst self, and they use his best self to do it. They use his blind love for his family, his loyalty towards his homeland, and his faith in God. These can all be fantastic attributes or they can make a monster.

So yeah, I feel like the foreshadowing is there pretty thick. What makes it still compelling, I hope, is Duane's selfishness and reluctance to change are so often counterbalanced by his earnest desire to make things better and to help the people around him as individuals, in the moment. There's not an ounce of real malice in the man, but when Duane stews, he often talks himself into making the wrong choice. When he acts with all the compulsion of a big-hearted protector, he tends towards selfless compassion.

adhd is having super amplified introspection yet zero self-awareness or decision making skills. i literally never stop overthinking absolutely everything but if you ask me how i am? i dont know. am i enjoying myself? i dont know. my opinion? i dont know. my favorite? i dont know. am i lying? i dont know. do i want this? i dont know. trust my gut feeling? it changes every second. which of these is better? i cant breathe. just pick one? eating glass would hurt less