Another Thing To Add Is That Igon Is Physically Forced To Admit He Cannot Hunt Bayle By Himself. For

Also, sorry more Leda posting, the line "Have you been taken in by the plight of the hornsent? Foolish… But hardly unexpected. Man is a compassionate animal, for better or worse." fascinates me so... there's no justification there, if anything she acknowledges that what she's doing in attempting to kill the hornsent is the bad, the non-compassionate thing to do. And from other lines we know she feels empathy, respect, regret, the "weight of one’s deeds"... She may be overly paranoid and violent and murderous, but it's not that she's without emotion, she's just capable of entirely steeling herself against those emotions. She'll carry those burdens willingly, Miquella's dogged blade, so he needn't sully his hands.

Although at the same time... she's so arrogant about all of it, to presume she knows Miquella's will better than anyone else! She has the authority to say who is or isn't undeserving of serving under him, and she has the power to execute the ones she judges dangerous. When I honestly can't imagine that Miquella, at least previously to shedding everything that made him himself, would've approved of any of that. She would never betray him, true, but there's a reason he still put a charm on her as well (and I kinda have to wonder what the reason he kept her around at all was...)

The Hank Pym drama is one of my favorite parts of marvel content tbh

Didn't know which one fit better so i made both versions

Hey what if we were both depressed young teenage boys with no sense of self-worth pushed forward by a single-minded drive that was born in october from our mother' deaths and we both severely repressed our childish interests in order to seem more mature and respectable so that the older people around us wouldn't try to stop us from doing what we have to do in order to make everything feel right again because they could never understand it (because we don't let them try to) and we put the brunt of the blame on an older male figure who has to be responsible for it all and should only receive unilateral scorn because otherwise nothing in our lives would make sense anymore and we were both child soldiers who only joined in order to pursue our own self-destructive goals more easily and we both liked to use spears, would that be fucked up or what ?

october 3rd. october 4th. same thing

After a bit of time and a hefty amount of thinking abt the lore, SOTE really brings this post to my mind.

It's like. Miquella did love Malenia and Godwyn, but couldnt cure them the way he was. He did want to better the world, but it didnt help him as he retraced his mother's footsteps.

Midra did love, and was loved, he endured for ages in memory of the love he shared with Nanaya, and her entreaty. This didnt stop the inquisitors from ramming the sword of damnation through his throat.

Messmer did love his mother, and he obviously cared for her people. He cared for his knights, even when they betrayed him. He even seems to have cared about the hornsent in some capacity, judging by the amount of hornsent culture that remains preserved in the storehouse. And yet, despite all that, he still is responsible for the slaughter, and utter genocide the hornsent suffered. He still couldnt save the jar saints. He still couldnt get his mother to answer his pleas.

Marika did love Messmer. The amount of blessings she gave him is proof enough. She did love him, but it didnt prevent her from sending him on an endless crusade.

Marika loved her people. It didnt matter.

"Marika bathed the village of her home in gold, knowing full well that there was no one left to heal." "What was her prayer ? Her wish, her confession ? There is no one left to answer, and Marika never returned home again."

By the way, small addendum that is only somewhat related bc i dont want to make a full post abt it

The shaman village ost is the elden beast theme with only the harp, without the grandiose melody.

"Only the kindness of Gold, without Order."

The IHNMAIMS radio drama monologue comic is finally done after - checks calendar - FOUR MONTHS? If you spot any style inconsistencies, that's why haha.

Anyways, I love a good disembodied, analogue cluster, cable mismanagement horror AM :)

You guys don't even know how desperate am for any and all Leda content

Ledaposting again, i want to study her under a microscope

When you show up to the clinic to get a new blood vial after killing Gascoigne and Iosefka's voice sounds different

Alia Atreides written in the style of Disco Elysium with the skills being represented by her ancestors in Other Memory, hit post

The Professor Case - Three Sad Faces and Three Dead Men

There is a man in your life you love, admire and respect more than anything. Your greatest desire is to follow in his footsteps, and to eventually make him proud. However, before that can happen, he tragically dies under obscure circumstances. You’d do anything to know what happened; to give him some sort of justice. But the more you know about the truth, the more you realise that maybe he wasn’t as noble as he always appeared. Before his death, he left you a letter that you didn’t receive.

Are you Barok van Zieks, Asougi Kazuma or Gina Lestrade?

The heart of the drama of the Professor case is made up by this series of cascading tragedies, where each is both a repetition of and directly caused by its predecessor. The cycles of betrayal, disillusionment and grief play out in delayed motion across time, the same story with different characters wound to different speeds so they all come crashing to their endpoint at once. The spiral of repetitive continuation joins the three tales both into one continuous history, and also the same tale interposed three times upon itself. Kazuma’s story cannot begin without Barok’s coming to its first temporary end, just as Gina’s cannot without Kazuma’s catalysis. Yet as we line up Gina, Kazuma and Barok, we see the same face, displaced across time – tearful and shocked, furious and vengeful, bitter and resigned. In the same way, we see Klint layered over Genshin layered over Gregson: deeply loved, sharply fallen, and dead.

This triangulation, more than anything else, emphasises the game’s thematic throughline that the past cannot be put to rest without the truth. Klint’s lies become Genshin’s lies become Gregson’s lies, just as Barok creates Kazuma creates Gina. Past, present and future collapse into a grief that endlessly reproduces itself. The impossibility of moving forwards when the threads of bewilderment and doubt remain manifests itself in the literal reiteration of the event, again and again. Time loops between the courtroom and the graveyard. The years pass. The years do not pass.

In this temporal overlap, Gina articulates the grief that wells beneath Barok’s bitterness and Kazuma’s sharpness, while Kazuma’s single-minded vengeance is a warning as to how easily that grief might be shaped into a sword, and Barok shows by example what lies at the end of that path: ten years later still unhappy, still chained. As they come together in the courtroom, Gina in the witness stand, Barok in the dock and Kazuma at the prosecution’s bench, it is a symbolic trial of not the self, but the role. To leave one of them still trapped in the morass is somehow to leave all of them – their shackles, after all, are the same. The question that passes between them, from corner to corner is this: is it a crime, to have grieved so deeply that your grief became a weapon? The outcome of the trial doesn’t quite answer this question. It asks another instead: is grief grounds for justice? And crucially: who was holding the weapon that grief made of you?

However, of this unhappy triangle, Barok is the only one to have actually completed the climactic, mistaken, mistrial of justice. He is the only one to have received closure at the cost of integrity, and to have lived with the aftermath. He is the only one to not only have believed he knew the truth, but also that he had delivered justice. While Kazuma stands on the cusp, and Gina is literally at ground zero, Barok has both the advantage and misfortune of hindsight. Hindsight – and reflection. He hasn’t escaped his story. But he has walked out the other way, into what he believes is the long epilogue, when it’s in fact just the sagging middle. It’s what allows him sharp, pointed insight into the other two: he recognises himself in their faces.

Van Zieks: I say nothing of whether or not I'm the Reaper. That's the task of this court to decide. But there is one thing I can say unequivocally: That girl is no detective.

Gina: Eh? Wha...? Nah, that's right, I ain't. I'm an inspector!

Van Zieks: Repeating rumours heard around the Yard... Reading entries from a notebook of unconfirmed origin... That's not testimony. It's practically a script. No doubt the rest of this trial will go exactly as you've clearly planned.

Kazuma: .........

Van Zieks: Your hatred of me is understandable. In your mind, I'm sure I am the Reaper...who sent your father to the gallows all those years ago.

Kazuma: ...!

Van Zieks: But you're in danger of becoming a far more sinister Reaper yourself... ...by attempting to have me condemned with this feeble excuse for testimony.

The ease with which Barok identifies the truth is striking. This is a scripted trial. Gina’s grief is causing her professional integrity to fall apart, a fact that Kazuma is using to indict Barok. Kazuma’s anger is causing his professional integrity to fall apart as he treats the courtroom like his personal arena for revenge. Kazuma’s anger, Barok demonstrates, is something he understands, deeply. Gina’s grief is something to this day he mirrors. Yet, Barok harshly points out, emotion is no excuse for a miscarriage of justice. It’s a show of both deep understanding and scathing judgement. The cool-eyed detachment with which he evaluates the situation is admirable. It is also something Barok from ten years ago would not have been able to do.

However, there is a fatal flaw in all this, which is that it’s much easier to recognise when an accusation is false from one end than the other. As ever, Barok stops just short of applying the same tier of insight into the events of ten years past, looking just to the left of the gaping wound that the trial left. Even as more and more irregularities come to light, it is only at the final push that he truly faces to the idea that this one trial could have been a massive pile of lies. This is an incredible blind spot, coming from the man who espouses he ‘trusts no one’, who has the both the suspicion and the deductive ability to find out Gregson’s position as the Reaper. It is an incredible blind spot, coming from the man who had the clarity to suspect, even for a moment, his own, dear, brother.

It's here that we see Barok’s true weakness – and the damning piece of evidence of how deeply he is still chained to that moment, ten years ago. Can a prosecutor of Barok’s calibre truly never have suspected, if not at the time, then ten years later? Even as Sithe’s lies came to light, even as Gregson’s involvement in the Reaper became apparent? But as Barok rejected Klint’s guilt, so he rejects that the events were not as he believed them to be: on the basis of evidence, to be sure, but evidence given disproportionate weight for how much he did not want it to be true. Even as Kazuma desperately links every piece of evidence, no matter how unfitting, into his certain conclusion that Barok is Gregson’s killer, so Barok takes what evidence he receives and slots them neatly into the narrative he most wants to believe: this man died so my brother cannot be guilty, the ring was found so Genshin must have committed the crime. He refuses to entertain alternative pathways, even as doubt creeps in. Even as things stop fitting. Until the very last moment, when he is forced with damning evidence to change his stance, he clings to his brother’s innocence. Within him grind the cogwork of his truth-seeking logic machine mind against the bloodied flesh of his heart. After ten years, that flesh is wearing thin.

It's this that brings him to the exact same level as Kazuma and Gina, who fight for Genshin and Gregson’s innocence respectively. However, it cannot all be true at once. All three cannot be innocent together: something has to give. As each of them beseech Ryuunosuke for comfort, they find instead the truth.  

But let’s step back a little. The similarity between Gina, Kazuma and Barok make the differences in how they are treated startling. Barok, on displaying a lapse in professional integrity following the worst events of his life, receives full prosecutorial authority from Stronghart to go head-to-head in the trial of his brother’s death. Meanwhile, Stronghart allows Kazuma to slide in sideways, using Gregson as a cudgel to pin Barok for Genshin’s death. But Gina, when she breaks down in court and cries out that Gregson is innocent, is harshly reprimanded and told to hand in her badge. Why the difference?

The answer is obvious: a noble young prosecutor is a much more useful tool to Stronghart than a barely literate pickpocket from the streets of East London. The debt Barok owed to Stronghart protected Stronghart from suspicion for nearly ten years, while enabling Stronghart to centre an entire conspiracy around Barok in the blind spot that debt created. Similarly, Kazuma is a useful tool to wipe out the Reaper conspiracy’s last members and exonerate Stronghart once and for all while being easily disposed of as a foreign exchange student. But what’s Gina got to give? What value does Gina have that Stronghart might find useful? The answer is: nothing. Gina has nothing, and so it’s her that Stronghart lets loose on his distaste, his condescending dismissal. It’s her that he belittles and talks over – that his true feelings for those he has used comes out.

Barok is the first and most perfect paradigm of the narrative that the other two emulate. Immediately after his brother’s death, he seeks out the culprit (so he thinks) and prosecutes him successfully in court for the crime which he seeks vengeance for. Kazuma is a little shakier: ten years after his father’s death, he seeks out the culprit (so he thinks) and prosecutes him on the basis of an unrelated crime while barely hiding that his real reason is his father’s death. It’s with Gina that the real tears in the fabric show: disoriented and grieving, she’s dragged into court and gives emotional testimony that implicates someone she’s not even 100% sure is guilty. She isn’t even the one doing the prosecuting. These are different stories, with the difference in perfection scaled primarily by how perfect a tool Stronghart sees in them. But they are also the same story, dressed better or dressed worse. And they reach the same ending.

When the dust finally begins to settle, we zoom into how each of them react to the momentous change in their understanding of their own lives. Standing before Klint’s portrait, Barok takes the painful step to acknowledge that his brother is truly ‘no more’, even as he wears his prosecutor’s badge with mixed feelings to the complex legacy left behind. Kazuma entrusts Karuma to Ryuunosuke with the promise to retake it after mastering the violence he suddenly realised he was capable of. But Gina, surrounded by her friends, takes back Gregson’s pocket watch and vows to uphold his legacy by becoming a great detective herself.

At first glance, this raises a lot of question marks. Has everyone forgotten that Gregson was involved in a double-digit number of murders? Well, to some extent, yes. However, from another perspective, while Barok has to grapple with the person he became in upholding a false legacy, while Kazuma has to grapple with the person he felt the potential of being in chasing a false vengeance, Gina had not yet taken the steps towards becoming an upholder of falsehoods herself, wittingly or unwittingly. It is with this uncomplicated sincerity that she can take on Gregson’s legacy, since it never yet had the chance to twist her into bitterness or hatred – as it did to Barok, and as it did to Kazuma. While she may have to grapple with Gregson, she does not have to grapple with herself. In the worst time of their lives, Barok had Stronghart, who plunged him into a ten-year long darkness and scapegoated him as the Reaper. Kazuma had no one, only memories, and anger enough almost to kill. But Gina had Ryuunosuke, and through him, the truth – for all.