Have Y'all Read @somerandomdudelmao Comics? Cause Hoooo Boy, I LOVED This Scene And Had To Try My Hand

baby learning object permanence

thank you to @stormanbates for the prompt!!

I spend a normal amount of time thinking about the scene at the altar of despair

[ID in ALT]

bloodborne girlhood spectrum

Doing this to all of you

More turtle tots for you all 🐢♥️💙🧡💜

I def have a problem it's fine.

thinking about this moment a bit too much

I find it very interesting that ISABELLA thought RAY wouldn’t retaliate

yeah we know the full extent of Ray’s perspective and scheming from the beginning, more so than Isabella, but when she confronts him she knows he is a liar (and apparently a bad one)

Ray thought he was “doing a good job” at lying not actually giving Isabella information

so Isabella thought Ray was a liar just like her

He’s been watching his siblings die and not putting up a fight before so she thought he was complacent

once he lost Norman (his Leslie) she thought he would give up like he did because Ray is her son(whether she likes it or not)

Isabella thought she was giving them the happiest lift possible after knowing the truth by making them give up

but i think what Isabella never really expanded on was Ray being more like her rather than different (aka going out with a band rather than accepting the world they live in)

because ray sacrificed kids to survive just like she did

And maybe deep down she was hoping they were different

that because she had a son and not a daughter she wouldn’t make her child into a murderer that repeats the cycle

idk where this is going lol their relationship makes me too ill to think straight and put this into words XD

Elden Ring, my reading on Marika

Having finished the DLC, I am thinking of this scene. The scene from Ranni's ending, where she replaces Marika as a Goddess and Marika vanishes, finally passing away.

And one of the biggest twists in the game, alongside one of the major unsolved mysteries in the story is the reveal that Marika herself shattered the Elden Ring for some purpose, with the most sympathetic reading being that this was the only way she had to escape from the control of The Greater Will and recover her freedom.

The DLC expands on Marika, giving us an origin for her.

That is, of the horrors her people suffered at the hands of the Hornsent, the same people she would command Messmer to wage War upon them and commit what seems to have been a brutal genocide.

Now, my personal reading is that, after what happened to her people, Marika did a metaphorical deal with the devil. Either The Elden Beast or Metyr arrived to The Lands Between near Marika's village, and she accepted to be a Goddess and a servant of The Greater Will in exchange for her vengeance. and to be perfectly fair to Marika, this was the closest to Justice her people would ever get.

Now, Count Ymir suggests Marika was influenced by flawed advice from Metyr, the Mother of Two-Fingers, who lost contact with The Greater Will. But he also believes the moons are just the closest celestial object to our planet, so he is full of Shit. Because that doesn't yet explain The Elden Beast.

In any case, Marika made that deal and became a Goddess and she got her vengeance. And she fulfilled her duty as accorded, Conquering and expanding and forcing everyone to bow to The Greater Will. Who knows what she felt during this time. If she lusted for power as her empire grew, or if she was horrified and felt trapped by learning what becoming a goddess meant.

Because everything about Marika is always specifically filtered through someone else. Even the closest we get, her very words spoken by her, are filtered through Melina.

The second closest we get is Marika's village, where we see the things she left behind, Specific actions she and she alone did for nobody else but the memory of her village. and I say this because This:

is the closest we ever, ever get to meeting Marika. a broken face of someone who has long stopped being human, he don't see her eyes, we don't hear her voice. Yet you know what I see here?

Marika's Tired. So, so, so, so... Tired.

Was that it? that at the very end, Marika simply grew tired? was she, in her last moments, thinking back and remembering The Grandmother by the tree, and wishing she could be there for one final slumber?

And so maybe, regardless of what The Age of Stars means, on whether it is the "good ending" or not, this is the ending Marika wanted. For someone, any of her children, to hopefully succeed her and let her rest at last.

And what we see is that in the last moments of the Shaman whose entire home village was cruelly massacred (and who delivered blood upon blood onto those responsible and unto the innocent, and whose entire life was now defined to the service of some greater power), she is being cuddled in the arms of her step-daughter (of whom she may be Ranni's biological father), a moment of peace and warm before the end of a long road.

Maybe one of the things the DLC was meant to show us wasn't why Marika did what she did. It was to show us that it was time for Marika to go back home at last

“feeling like a person again” collection

Madoka kaname

Part 11!

A little bit of flashbacks hehe~

Part 1