I Saw Protege C!Tommy Mentioned And That Reminded Me That I Do Actually Enjoy The Concept Of Protege

now there's going to be a funny question: what rational reasons does he have for burning himself in lava? XD

there's nothing else to do obviously 🙄 it annoys the warden and getting a predictable reaction out of him is Useful :) and it's not like it does any real damage soooo. you see he's causing himself repeated pain for very well thought out reasons that he's completely thought through !! knowing how other people will react is Useful. and it shows how not fazed at all he is by pain which is also Useful. and yeah the answer is he's being very rational about it obviously even if it might look like he's not because he's showing sam that he's insane which is important to keeping up the ruse and again the pain doesn't mean anything. so yeah.

c!Dream always told himself he was objective, but he wasn't. He couldn't be. Perfect objectivity doesn't exist; there will always be biases and preconceived ideas about others, and these ideas threw Dream off more than I think he'd like to admit. He was wrong about Sam following their rules (he was wrong about Sam caring). But he was also wrong about Tommy, when he was so sure that Tommy only ever wanted to cause him harm.

those times.

Art by Davood Moghaddami

Art by Maojin.Lee

Wilbur Soot has compared himself to the poem of Ozymandias countless times before. This is something us fans know. 

He’s made reference to it on a handful of occasions, and has even had Fundy read the poem allowed. There was an entire animatic by Sad-ist about him as Ozymandias. 

Ozymandias is this poem about this king, a supposed great ruler of a great kingdom, the king of kings. There’s a catch, and the heavy hitter of the poem. It doesn’t matter, no one remembers it. All that is left behind is a broken run down statue and a name with none of his greatness attached. 

It’s easy to say that Wilbur compares himself and thinks of himself like Ozymandias, a man who may have been beloved by many, who may have had many greats, but left nothing behind that wasn’t wrecked or ruined. He has no legacy that will outlive him.

This is increasingly sad when you realize what c!Wilbur has done over the course of the last several apology streams. He is trying to make people’s last memories of him positive. Whether it’s because of their choice to never speak to him again, or his own. He keeps stating he wants to leave (whether it’s potentially him dying, or simply leaving off on his own), so he wants to leave the people he cared about and wronged the most with some positive memory of him, something that will remain of him, even if small. 

He even says to Eret that he’s left behind and done one of the hardest & most important jobs of all, bringing people together. 

Wilbur is still unable to see how he is the base, the one who brought everyone together in the first place, he’s the one who started it all, and the one that still manages to unite everything and everyone through one seemingly unbreakable thread that is him and his creation and belief in L’manburg.

I think then, c!Eret saying that he doesn’t want to be like Ozymandias, he wants to leave behind a legacy, something greater. He wants to leave behind some positive impact on future generations, namely through history and the telling of it and the preserving of it.

There’s some bit of bittersweet irony of Eret not knowing that Wilbur sees himself as Ozymandias, and how he speaks how he doesn’t want to do what Ozymandias had done, that he wants to be greater (doesn’t everyone?). 

There’s something bittersweet about Eret often praising Wilbur for leaving behind something so great, L’manburg, and being such a large impact on everyone’s lives. Something that Wilbur can’t see himself.

On Dragons (in Tolkien’s World)

The metaphysics[1] of dragons in Tolkien’s world is something of a mystery due to Tolkien’s principle that evil cannot create, only corrupt. So where do dragons come from? Are they just twisted forms of some pre-existing animal? But if so, how are they intelligent and self-aware? Are they corrupted Maiar? But if so, why do they need time to age and grow, as we see with Glaurung?

My theory is that the raw materials of dragons are existing animals[2] that have been twisted, just as the raw materials for werewolves like Carcharoth are actual wolves. (Carcharoth is raised from one of the ‘regular’ werewolves and then ‘he became filled with a devouring spirit’.)

But the spirits that inhabit dragons aren’t Maiar, in my theory. The Silmarillion says that “in the domination of his servants and the inspiring of them with evil [Morgoth] spent his spirit”. I think that, once the dragons were full-grown, Morgoth was splitting off parts of his spirit and putting it into the dragons, so that each dragon is in effect a little piece of Morgoth. It would explain why he guarded them so carefully, and kept most of them until a very last resort in the War of Wrath.

And it would explain the behaviour and power of Glaurung. When he first leaves Angband, during the Long Peace, he basically just acts like an animal. In the Narn i Hîn Húrin, he’s a very different character, malicious and scheming and deadly. And he pursues the children of Húrin like it’s a personal vendetta, which is striking. The other powerful servants of Morgoth either have at least some of their own motivations and goals, like Sauron, or show no distinct personalities, like the balrogs. But Glaurung is very deliberately, and precisely, and maliciously carrying out Morgoth’s goals to destroy Húrin’s family, and he seems to take it personally and revel in it despite never having met them. He’s manipulative and deceptive and very much like what we saw from Melkor back when he was active and scheming and not hiding in Angband. Even when Glaurung’s dying, he’s more driven by finding final ways to hurt the Children of Húrin than by the fact that he’s dying. And this makes sense if the spirit that’s animating him is, in effect, part of Morgoth.

And it explains why Morgoth was so weak by the end of the War of Wrath - he’d split off so many parts of his power that he had much less left in and of himself than any of the Valar did. In all likelihood, most of the other dragons had less than Glaurung, because Morgoth had less power to use by the point that he was making the winged dragons.

It also lines up with something else Tolkien said, that parts of Morgoth’s power remained in the world even after he was cast into the Void, and that power remained particularly strongly in gold. And what is it that dragons hoard? Gold. And The Hobbit states outright that the simple fact of having been hoarded by a dragon makes gold more dangerous and corrupting, at least to people who are vulnerable to it (like Thorin, and the Master of Lake-town).

This also deals with the same kind of metaphysical problem Tolkien had with orcs: how can a sapient species be entirely and universally evil? If dragons are bits of Morgoth, if they don’t have spirits with independent origins they’re inherently evil; you can’t have a good dragon in Middle-earth.

(And another benefit of this theory is that it makes Bilbo Baggins even more of a badass in retrospect for holding his own in a conversation with Smaug.)

[1] Fun fact: this term comes from the title of the book Aristotle wrote after his Physics. It literally just meant Physics: The Sequel and we’ve made a fancy philosophical term out of it.

[2] Dinosaurs, maybe? :D

Queen of Loong by mist XG

i feel like ,,, like we talk a lot about how fear-motivated c!dream's actions are, yeah, because you know c!dream is consistently paranoid as fuck and So Much of why he's like that is because he's too scared to think straight and doing batshit insane shit as a result, but at the same time i think that his ... awareness? of this? can be vastly overestimated. c!dream doesn't like being afraid. c!dream is historically Really Fucking Bad at admitting or acknowledging when he's actually terrified of a situation, because that means he's lost control of it. if he's Worried about a situation he's still ahead of it, if he's Cautious or making preparations or getting things in line to make sure that those closest to him don't get in the line of fire he's still retained a degree of control, but all of that isn't quite the same as admitting he's doing anything because he's scared out of his mind, because scared out of his mind isn't exactly a state that c!dream likes to be in.

and this is why c!dream is so adamant on transactional relationships with anyone that he perceives as having a modicum of real power, because being useful to powerful people makes him less of a target because they need something from him. this is why he is so desperate to convince himself that he's on top when it comes to sam, when it comes to quackity, when it comes to wilbur, and he's saying all of this hidden inside his own hell after hiding there for months having barely confronted c!quackity before getting the hell out of dodge. this is why he scrambles to make sure to show that he's not indebted to technoblade and why he puts himself in foolish's service within minutes of meeting him and why a fucking feeling of power against an unarmed man he could've locked in a box with him with a press of a button was enough to get him to shut up and obey no matter how damn unsubstantiated that feeling ended up being because he couldn't bear to lose it, even just within his own head

and so you know, when c!dream calls c!tommy the one thing out of his control as a motivation for exile during the same time he had to fight off multiple coups explicitly with the desire to do away with him so that theyd be able to "rule the server," like. look. c!dream is just so fucking far from a reliable narrator. i'm sure he could give me an itemized list of how c!tommy has ruined his life, i'm sure he can say all these things about how c!tommy causes chaos and causes problems and doesn't listen to anyone, i'm sure he can go on and on and on about how it'd be a different story if c!tommy just listened to him for once. but let's be real, here--as much as he's convinced himself that he's trying to get control of the one thing out of his control, what's closer to reality is that c!tommy was the one thing he did feel like he could control (hello, the discs) when literally everything else wasn't

sunkissed ✨🍄