Kitchen And Craft Wix Corner (Exciteable Bird, Enter At Own Risk)

marisela + juice

 

horty (any flavour) + responsibility

 

Spoiler: this is v dark and gruesome, emotional manipulation, gore, murder, food? mentions ig?

It was a beautiful summer's night all told, the crickets chirping, the sun setting late, and Curia's white linen suit was almost entirely reddish brown as he watched his family rip eachother apart over the dinner table, glass of wine laced with blood in his bejeweled hand, watching with disinterest as one of his auntie's goldplated forks was driven into someone's heart with serious intent. A cousin, he thought, though it was hard to tell with the state their face was in. Someone's claws had done their work there. It would have been so easy to extend the peripheral members of the court the mercy he offered his children, sending them away in a tinted glass limousine at sunset before he began his work, disowning them, telling them to run if they wanted to live. He would never see them again, he hoped. Truly he didn't think he himself deserved to live through what he was doing here. Maybe Hunters would get him one day. Or a rival of the family would track him down. But he needed to do this. None of these demons deserved the kindness of a clean, quiet death. If they were going to be insatiable monsters only obsessed with his ability to embrace strong stock, to carefully steer, to entice, to manipulate and to pull the trigger on a carefully laid plan -- Well. Their first mistake was chosing someone who was smart enough to think for himself for this. The second was forcing him to turn who he was attached to. The third was only taking time to dull his emotions enough he wouldn't object to a massacre, but not enough he wouldn't care about who he sent to it.
So now they went to reap their rewards, he thought as he twitched to the side to dodge a plate, blood splattering onto his face for his efforts. And he would not even take advantage of this and absorb his grandsire's powers for himself. No. This was to be an example, he thought, sipping his wine and watching with narrowed eyes as one of his uncles began tearing at another's flesh. He would not let these people have mercy.

 

i want to note that i was on the previous page and thought of this exact prompt and then clicked through and started laughing

aulus and escape

 

Spoiler: cw: antivan crows and Orlesian Bards :') (spy/assassin training)

Lessons always started without warning. They would work less well if they had forewarning, but that was fine with Marisela, usually. Made it a bit hard to function after though, starting at shadows, however small the reaction, however hidden. It wasn't a way to live, not really. At least that's what she told her beloved Mistress gently, in those first few weeks after she had returned from Orlais, shaken and unhappy, colder than she used to be. It wasn't hard for Marisela to draw the right conclusions there. She had heard about what Bards got up to, and Signora Montilyet was smart, strong, competent and wickedly clever when it came to business, but she wasn't the type to have a stomach for business. Euphemisms and all, useful as they were, would not soothe this hurt however. And so Marisela took it upon herself to protect Signora Montilyet. It was easy, sneaking little morsels of food from the plates to make sure no poison was introduced, to take a tiny sip of her drink. And if the first lovely sight of the morn was the scion smiling at her and pressing her lips to the same spot of the cup Marisela had tasted from, to sip her morning juice (a compromise. She did not like eating solids in the morning, but a business woman like her needed more to leave the bed at dawn than simply coffee), well, Marisela was a simple girl, and who would not be affected by such a lovely sight.

Spoiler: og flavor, just after his mother's death

His head was full, his heart bursting with grief and loneliness, but there were expectations now. Always expectations. The Empire-- it needed a strong hand, a noble figure to lead them, dutiful, devoted to His Eternity, to Faust herself, to the crown and the office and the project. He was finding many holes in that story, things his Lady Mother had... delayed. Not out of malice, or gods forbid carelessness, there must have been a strategic reason, but she had not kept detailed notes. He knew that. Notekeeping was a security risk after all. tablets, parchments, papyri, all of them could be stolen or destroyed, to sow chaos or toacquire intelligence. But keeping it all in his head it made his thoughts spin, it dizzyed him. The inevitability he would fail, somehow, would have a lapse in judgement... And his advisors were forceful in a way he despised. No, he needed to keep only his own counsil, and so he found himself, more often than not, wandering the inner gardens in the depths of night, finding the small hidden spots he kept his notes and diaries and writing, purely to try and remember what he needed to address soon, what was causing issues, who he could trust (no one) and whose council was valuable (everyone's, but not all for the same reason). Every day since the funeral arrangements and the planning for his own ascension to the throne had begun, his headache grew worse. He knew Asherah was worrying, but this was not something she should bother with. He would not subject her to his anguish in such a selfish manner. No. He would find another outlet for his moods. There were border towns that he had been brought whispers of rebellious sentiment from. It would keep the plenum of generals busy and distracted. Happy even, maybe. They were simple men, if one just sufficiently flattered their sense of masculinity. So long as they could conquer and destroy something they would be thinking they had Hortensius in their court, had him on strings to make dance. It wasn't yet time to correct them about this.

 

You know what i would love to do? I would love to write longform video essays about dragon age and mass effect
what i would probably do is approach each character arc with either a genre intertextuality analysis (linking them to the tropes they embody and the kinds of genres they pull from and what their arc is informed by) or a more cultural studies analytical lense (linking the character to discourses and cultural dynamics and what they reflect about culture)
i feel like i could actually do something with that
but yknow. eternal anxiety i will be seen as ~shouting down people~ because i like working to academic standards. lol. and also having energy for shit like this is hard.
but i would like to do that.
i would love to talk about morrigan's White Misandrist Girlboss Academic nonsense. Like she's *such* a pointed critique of a certain type of violently toxic white feminist in academia. But i've legit never seen her criticized under that angle most of the discussion focuses on her issues with motherhood and that whole struggle, or her role as a hedgemage and like those are all important but there's so many angles to her right?
i want to talk about how thane's Edgy Sci-Fi Noir framing and his tragic backstory and how terminal illness and the exploitation of a people forced into dependancy interacts with a character trope, the hardboiled detective that is so informed by speaking from a position of relative privilege and how that privilege is inaccessible to the noir trashfire in question often times due to performing masculinity in a toxic way.

 

Actually you know what I want to do?
Samara And Thane contrasting and comparing the way they (fail to) perform their gender in view of privilege, disability, parenthood and social position being defined by violence, the way they approach spirituality and their own moral worth
the differences in the way they failed their children and reconnecting/failing to reconnect to them

Like is it in many ways far worse for Thane given he is actively dying of lung rots away disease and his people are in a really uncomfortable dependancy on the Hanar that is honestly exploitative as fuck? obviously! yes! His situation is HORRIBLE.
However there's a certain level of unimaginable pain in the way Samara consistently blames herself for giving her daughters a genetic aberration that she could not possibly know about and how much that would have ostracized her had she not become an assassin nun. And the way her conflict with her daughter plays out is uh. It's really painful! It's fucked up and painful and there's probably also something there where the whole Ardat Yakshi thing is uh. It's not a cool framing to have the only woman with this Invisible Disability be a gleeful serial killer tbh. like i know the whole thing was more about a black widow femme fatale type thing, i know mass effect is pulp sci-fi and loves its trashy tropes, but that doesn't mean i cannot spin a whole thing out of this anyways :P I don't think bioware hates people with gene defects obviously, and they more consistently include disabled protagonists than any other game company, but i still think it's worth talking about how that writing has some bad implications but also really interestingly contrasts with one of the other big major people whose story is informed by disability and their offspring.

 

YES YES YES YES i wanna hear the things!!

 

i may talk about it in rough sketches on thursday's stream if i remember because it's like. There's definitely something for sure about the heightened drag queen femininity of Samara too, like girl is out here with her entire tiddies hanging out bless her, and her whole thing is Being A Failed Mother and aspiring to a saintly judge-jury-executioner-matriarch standard and it's so informed by being femme unapologetically to the point of parody, AND YET her arc in western story canon is much more reflective of one that usually is given to failed fathers right? The whole 'My Offspring Became An Evil Failure And Thus It Is My Job As Patriarch To Discipline Them', that is commonly a male coded arc. And yet there is no way to deny samara's overt, violent femininity like she has So Much Cleavage and she wears heels for no fucking reason and she wears so fucking much makeup and this isn't a bad thing i think she's hot as fuck I love Samara but holy shit that character design sure is designing huh

and then on the other hand you have Thane, an assassin embodying a presentation trope of an incredibly masculine coded genre (the memory monologues are so Noir Detective, the way they're shot is so hitchcock, all of it is Very Rohrschach We Live In A Society) but then he is soft spoken, sweet, sensitive, he openly admits insecurities and lacking answers for spirituality, his pain is so very focused about the private familial and that he wasn't emotionally open enough with his son, he is so much more a failed caretaker than he is a failed Father (tm). And the drell don't even have gender nonsense going on like the asari to inform the way he is subverting the masculinity expectations. But here he is. Loving and emotional and quietly pained and trying to be less disconnected. does that make sense?