Gilears Voice Is Slightly Different - Maybe It's Just That Brennan Hasn't Done That Voice In A While,

Toph: I am not out of control! I'm a law abiding citizen!

Aang: Really? Name one law

Toph: [pause] Don't kill people?

Aang: That's on me. I set the bar too low.

PALADIN KRISTEN. i will die on this hill.

i don't want kristen to lose her faith entirely. i think back to prompocalypse, talking to the ether the gods get their answers from, and saying into the ether that she cares. she wants a god that cares, not just about her but about all the good people she wishes she could help, because if there's nobody more powerful that cares then it's her responsibility to care for them and she's not a god. she couldn't trust her family to care, couldn't trust her church, couldn't even trust her god, and she had to step up and be the person who cares even though she's just a clumsy kid who got her girlfriend newspaper-copying putty for a joint anniversary/birthday gift.

[and then she makes cassandra, still desperate for that perfect god that she can trust to protect people for her. but cassandra, just like yes, is created and controlled by her and thus entirely dependent on her and her ever-changing ideals. kristen still only trusts herself to do right by people, so the only god she will accept is one that she designs to be just like her and indulge her every phase and that means without her there to decide what the god should be there is no god. there is no morality to a religion that bends to your every will because your actions don't have consequences - cassandra and yes weren't created to be good, just to give power to kristen when she wants it. and that means that all of the responsibility still falls on kristen to be good.]

because the alternative would be being complicit, and kristen cannot rest unless she is doing everything possible that she can to help people. and so she never rests. even doing nothing, she's wandering labyrinths in her head trying to be better and find the answer, and she can't let herself take a break from trying to be better without being plagued by guilt. she can't push let go of the guilt because she's seen first-hand what happens when people don't feel guilt or question themselves.

and in the summer starting junior year she and tracker break up and the guilt becomes unbearable and suddenly she can't remember why she let herself feel it. so she stops feeling guilty. she forgets to heal her friends, she devotes herself to her own body (my faith is mostly physical, tracker had once said, kristen doesn't remember what she meant by that) and she breaks all the promises she made to protect cassandra. she stops caring.

until she sees bucky again. until she sees her parents again. she remembers why she wanted to fight to stop bad things from happening to good people, and more importantly she remembers what happens when you don't question yourself. how mac and donna follow their beliefs blindly and never questioned whether they could be wrong if they could be better. how they promised to love her and left her to suffer, how helio let the people he swore to love suffer, and how she was leaving cassandra to suffer. and she doesn't realise until after that cassandra wanted to help. cassandra was always encouraging kristen to grow the church not just because she couldn't rely on kristen to keep her alive but because she knew kristen couldn't handle the responsibility of keeping her alive on her own.

kristen chose to be a cleric of cassandra because she thought cassandra was good and wanted them to have a religion. it was the only way to revive her, but if she can grow the church then kristen would be free to work on herself with cassandra being free to take care of her, not the other way around. as a paladin kristen could take an oath she will always believe in - an oath to care and love her friends, perhaps - and trust that cassandra's church will still be helping people on a large scale even when kristen needs a break. kristen can get swole and learn to fight and know in her heart that what she's fighting for is right. she can trust that cassandra wouldn't bless her if she didn't deserve it, and in that trust she doesn't have to worry so much about being a perfect person because she knows she's good.

listen. listen. as a pastor kid ex-ministry person who left the toxic religious group they were raised in. it’s not about cassandra being rad or not (she is i really think she is). it’s about whether or not kristen can make peace with what being devout means. if she can take that leap of faith. if she can really settle in on a belief system and ask others to do the same.

i think this arc is gonna be about kristen giving up on cleric and reclassing (my guess on barb) because this is about kristen finally FINALLY giving up on how she was raised. she didn’t need to a different god. she needs to reject, wholly, that lifestyle and figure out the best version of herself and what she needs. maybe she doesn’t need to be a cleric. maybe trying to force herself to be one is perpetuating the harm she escaped. maybe she can step back.

i think this will have HUGE complications. but it really feels like ally is interested in explored why kristen has struggled this whole time with this. maybe she doesn’t want to be a cleric at all.

all i do is win (except for all my other guesses)

ik it would fuck so much shit up probably, but if they faked wanda's death next to lucy and yolanda's bodies they might actually have convinced ruben to change sides...

had a dream where dimension 20 released a new safari-based campaign. zac oyama was an elephant and spent 20 minutes trying to reach a high tree branch, with giraffe brian murphy providing moral support but not helping while lou and ally killed and ate a bunch of people as lions. i kept thinking 'wow, they really haven't done anything this session', and then watched them all have graphic, cinematic deaths one by one over the course of several years.

penelope's line from prompocalyse always stuck with me - 'i let them put my best friend in that crystal'. i can just picture her lying in her bed before prom wishing she had her best friend there, possibly the only person penelope ever actually loved, but knowing that she would never be forgiven for giving her up in the first place. sam wasn't a means to an end, in her eyes sam was a sacrifice that had to be made to be queen. sam was a shred of goodness and hope and happiness that penelope gave up for power, not only because sam herself would be sacrificed but because the sam that loved her, her best friend, would cease to exist.

i don't think she liked sam because she was pretty or talented or famous - i think she liked sam because sam loved her. it's both more and less meaningful, because in being loved by sam penelope could and did love her back but didn't anticipate that one day sam would stop loving her. she's left with this feeling of empitiness and loneliness that she doesn't even attempt to mend because she knows that nobody would ever compare to sam, so all she can do is cling to her crown and try to fill the hole herself with everything she thought she admired about sam.

sam was strong. sam was beautiful. sam was fierce and independent and powerful. penelope could be all of these things and more, and yet never be able to fill the hole sam left because she wouldn't let herself care. penelope loved that if she said the right thing sam would be hurt, because sam cared and penelope could always exploit that weakness. there was a kind of sick pride in not caring, because even if sam was stronger than her at least penelope didn't care. at least she could nurture that love and dependency without ever having to be burdened by reciprocating it.

penelope never anticipated that one day sam wouldn't care. and penelope would be forced to acknowledge that she cared, that she had cared all along, and that now sam didn't.

I’m thinking about nightpetal again and specifically thinking about the “I don’t love you anymore.” thinking about it from penelope’s perspective, if that actually was penelope. thinking about her taunting sam like she always did, except now six girls rip through time and space to take sam’s hand and take her away. six girls who have clearly fought through some shit to come get sam, six people who love sam and aren’t afraid to tell her, to show her. I just wonder how she felt seeing antiope taking sam by the hand and telling her she loves her so openly. I wonder if, as sam told her “I don’t love you anymore,” surrounded by people who would clearly do anything for her, if penelope regretted not being that for sam. I wonder if it hurt her to know that she didn’t have someone like that, especially because she knows that, for most of her life, she did.

extremely underrated trope is the villain's sacrificial lambs that weren't misunderstood or being kept in the dark or mind-controlled when they were evil but are forced into a redemption arc because the villain betrayed them personally. former villains who only stopped because they failed or were caught. grunts that are discarded and switch sides only because they have no other choice. people who need to be force-fed morality to stay alive on the good team. people who improve but are never absolved. people who wanted to raise hell and only change their mind when they, too, are burned.

can't believe jace was condemned to hell/prison because people think he's banging porter

i've been pretty distracted by all the sapphics this season so maybe someone pointed this out and i didn't see it but - jace was murdered and brought back under porter's control with a rage star, he was never evil at all as far as we know. but even before brennan said jace and porter are a 'duo' people have been shipping him with porter, so everyone just accepted that he was evil because yeah he's banging the evil guy. the bad kids burn a couple of him alive, one of them is arrested (and then also burned i think?) and his only crime was choosing to come back to life to worship a rage god which yeah after getting murdered by your coworker i think that's fair. he didn't know porter would control him because ankarna didn't know that porter was controlling anything, he was on that devil's honey.

imagine being brutally murdered out of the blue by your coworker, a nameless god offers to revive you if you'll worship her and then you come back to life only to realise it was the same fucking coworker who can now mind control you. and then you get murdered four more times and you stop being mind-controlled but no one wants to bring you back because they think you were fucking your murderer. the life of a twink.

it's not that cassandra is feeling neglected imo bc kristen is actively rejecting her lmao, but i think there's something to the idea that cassandra is a reflection of kristen. she doesn't act like kristen (not even any previous iteration of kristen) but she does look like kristen and represent a time in kristen's life that she maybe doesn't want to think about, possibly because of a certain someone tattooed on her neck that's not here anymore👀👀

ok ok ok not to uh. get up in weeds about the whole cass and kristen thing but i keep seeing people say like ‘i feel so bad for cassandra’ but an important thing that i feel like we need to remember that brennan has emphasized throughout previous seasons about the gods is that they are the reflection of their followers. cass looks like kristen because they are kristen.

when cass is feeling neglected and shunted aside do we think maybe it’s cuz who kristen actually is is being neglected? they have spent the whole summer trying to save the world, that doesn’t leave time for them to like process what they’ve gone through and who they are so maybe cass feels dejected cuz kristen doesn’t know who she is either

just. food for thought

this is all i needed ty

me walking

Showing how the Knight can jump on every square in chess