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(1 edit)

Actually no sorry I'm not done sjkbfvjksdfhv

The concept of like, okay we have to start at the beginning because is the introduction scene not the coolest sequence of events you've ever seen?? When I first loaded it and played through that initial CG segment, I immediately went back to the main menu to do it again, because I could not believe how fucking sick that was. 

Being born into another body, waking with eyes that aren't yours--and having eyes at all, because before this you were nothing, you did not exist, and now suddenly you do with a body borrowed. Or stolen, or given, depending on how you look at it, it's not like we knew at that point. 

The art style captures the essence of the character perfectly here, the game doesn't tell you right away that something is off with the envoy's emotions, but just the glazed, empty look in her eyes was an IMMEDIATE sign that something was not right. There's no shine, no light, just a fog of murky pale purple. I love it. The dull expressions, Maisy Kay's beautifullll voice work, I genuinely couldn't think of a better introduction to the character.

It's hard to word specifically, but the concept of being this creature born from an impossible power, being so scary in essence and theory, your sole purpose is to bring the cold comfort of death, of nothingness, of the abyss, and you could do it. It would be so easy, and you wouldn't feel a thing. 

Because when you were called into being, either something didn't quite go right, or the Abyss never wanted you to feel anything from the start. We have Alpheon to thank for that. 

That's the thing that gets me, or one of the many things that get me, because every single thing that happens from that point on, could be attributed to Alpheon. 

He takes the lid off your emotions, he lets you feel, in a roundabout way he gives you your kindness if that's the kind of MC you play. His own empathy is what sets the potential for change in motion, if he were not as kind as he is, he wouldn't have thought that you deserved to feel life.

But you do, so he did, and then nothing is the same, nothing goes as the Abyss planned. 

You start paying attention, you learn about the people who took you into their care, you start to spread yourself out and experience the world, and the world you experience shapes you in turn. You  might have been a rock at the start, with little capacity for change, and then Alpheon made you into clay. You can be molded into a different shape, something other than what the Abyss crafted you to be, or you can render his kindness meaningless and do exactly as you were born to do, you can deny the option to deny your destiny.

Is that not so fucking cool??  How do you get over that??

How do you come back from a story where you're born to be a weapon, many of the characters know it, and the rest will either have to suffer your cruelty or feel blessed to have witnessed your blossoming. It doesn't shy away from the darkness either, you see the grit and the real evil, you can hurt people and it will mean something. It feels terrible. 

I haven't done those endings yet, btw. I probably won't unless I need the context for my fic LOL but the potential for angst is just so high with the quality of writing, and I'm not sure my poor fragile heart can take it.

Marané's scenes in particular capture a specific feeling that I wish I could see more of, when you're comforting her after her vision, and she's awestruck at the fact that you are so beautiful, so horrifying, and so kind. The blood in her eyes when she says it,  Savy's unfairly velvety voice, the music, that moment perfectly encapsulates the beauty of the Envoy as a character to me. 

"Bottomless, ravenous, ever-devouring. And yet gentle and soft in the touch of Its Envoy....Creature of blood and flames, how can you appear so ferocious and yet be so kind?" 

Those lines KILL me dude, her delivery for this scene is so compelling, and it feels so romantic. Even from a platonic view, it's such an intense bonding moment for them, the gentleness coming from what Marané can see is a creature now, one beyond her comprehension, one that demands her blood and her secrets and her shadows just to see beneath the surface. And she's enthralled.

The Envoy is fascinating. 

I love seeing a monster-adjacent character be treated with the severity it deserves. Often I feel horror media is softened for consumption, and this isn't necessarily scary horror, but it captures that feeling perfectly. She is a monster of sorts, she has an immense capacity for cruelty and brutality, and it's by a hairsbreadth that things don't go horribly wrong for the entirety of Carolisé.  

It doesn't always need to be showy, we've seen what she can do, we know what she would do if we allowed her. Our choices are the only thing to keep her in check, so if you choose not to hold her back, then she will become a monster. We know it, and we're not the only ones, which makes it even better. 

love watching the characters who know what she is interact with her, it's part of why I love Ascanio, just because there's so much subtext happening every time they're on screen together.

In the single second it takes for them to wipe their lenses before putting them on, the very first time you meet them in the Halls, I can't help but wonder if it's because they immediately knew they had to hide their eyes from you. 

The way their face changes when you tell them that you're here for a friend, and that means the Envoy sent to kill them is befriending the people they protect. 

When they walk into your room and see that you have a brother of Dawn hiding there, that you saved his life and now you're asking that they grant him sanctuary.

Their very innocent questions with absolutely no ulterior motivates whatsoever, their thought experiments, the scenarios they play out to test what kind of Envoy you will be. 

Wanting your thoughts on regret, on human nature, and every question they ask is so much more loaded with intent when you play it again knowing who they are, what they stand for, and what they might be thinking of you in those moments beneath the moonlight; two wolves in sheep's clothing, but one that wants to protect the herd, and the other that was sent to cull it. How incredible of a dynamic is that?

There's so much you can infer from these interactions, and it's the NOT KNOWING that makes me unable to stop thinking about it LOL but I can't go down that train of thought because i will not shut up.

So on the flip side, Marané, who should be terrified of you, who should reject everything you offer. In any other story you would be the corrupting influence that she needs protection from. She knows in part what you are, and seeks you out, she seeks understanding of you and finds the abyss, she glimpses the unending through you. 

You represent everything Ascanio and [most] of her mentors spent a lifetime warning her away from, and she can't help but be drawn to it; moth to flame.  So desperate for freedom that she's willing to overlook the blood that must be spilled for her to get it. 

But she's not cruel like you could be, she's not the monster you were born to be, she wasn't built to dissolve her shackles with the lives of thousands. She cares too much, you see it even in her pursuit of power, her unbridled rage at being unable to help. How often do you see a woman who initially appears to be the average self-centered, haughty noble mage, fucking crumbling to her own anger, because she is so enraged at being helpless that she'll even turn to forces that will corrupt her. Change her forever. Take away something that she'll never get back. 

And she would, because the festering corruption and avarice that she's fighting against feel just as evil, but it would probably kill the parts of her that only desperately needed to be healed. 

[Or maybe she's super into it and is totally fine idk I haven't tried that path LOL feel free to check me, let me live vicariously through you if you set the town on fire bc im too much of a coward.] 

I just love experiencing a story like this from this specific perspective. If you flip it around, it'd be easy to assign just about any other character an MC role, and you could explore what it would be like to push back against the Envoy sent here by the Abyss just to paint your hometown red. It would be compelling, and thrilling, and probably have a very fulfilling ending, and the Envoy would be a good villain. Apathetic, cruel, but ultimately innocent in the same way the siren is. We would be Charybdis.

Okay i need to stop i'm just gonna keep going and i've been typing this for like 2 hours already LOL I fucking love this game if u couldn't tell 

(1 edit)

N...no...I'm still not done actually....because I got so wrapped up in my tangent that I forgot I was in the middle of making a point...

So, characters that interact with the MC even while knowing she's sent to kill everyone, there's more than Ascanio and Marané, I just got distracted talking about them LOL the downside of loving every character, I could write an essay about all of them. 

Alpheon is crucial here, for reasons I already talked about LOL but more than that, considering he's the only one out of our immediate circle [who also knows exactly what we are, it's a very small circle, everyone say hi to Nessa she's the only human here until Marané joins.] that acts as a moral compass. 

Atri is compassionate, but brutal in her methods, more black-and-white than the rest. She has a strong sense of justice, and for her, she already knows what's right, she doesn't need to deliberate on morals and ethics like we do. We're still developing, we're still learning about ourselves, but she just knows. She's not particularly interested in guiding us, and she'll only push back if she strongly disagrees, so that leaves Alpheon as our conscience. He gets to be the little angel on our shoulder. 

Hilarious to think that Marané would probably be the devil here, or Šlūq. 

I love that he's so much more gentle than I thought he'd be at first, Alpheon is so soft, so lovely, he just wants to be comfortable and provide that comfort for the people around him as well. He has a gentle love of life, not necessarily weak or flimsy, but compared to Atri who loves with her fierce protection, and Ascanio who loves with their firm guidance, Alpheon is content with just a nudge. He watches, he supports, but he doesn't seem to want to influence you strongly one way or the other. 

[Obv take that with a grain of salt since I didn't play an MC that he would particularly want to oppose, but I did try killing Charybdis just once to see Atri's reaction and the way Alpheon felt afterwards destroyed me. Will never do that again, Charybdis has a designated name for every playthrough and it's Halcydon. That's my BUDDY.] 

But at least for me, it's that gentle disposition that makes me want to be kind as well. The fact that, completely unprompted, he saw fit to regulate your feelings to let you experience what it means to be alive, it says so much. He wants so badly to dream, to be human, to trust, that he just can't help himself when he sees that you're lacking the small, precious parts of you that can make you human, or as close to human as either of you will ever get.

Okay wait I hadn't thought about it until just now but now I wonder if it was intentional??? Hold on, LOL I thought it was just an act of kindness before, but like, if he knows that you're here to kill everyone and he DOESN'T WANT THAT, then you having no emotions is a BIG problem. I wonder if he was trying to stop the darkest hour from happening, even all the way back then. We know that he's a lot smarter than he likes to appear, and I don't think he'd be above a subtle tactic like that if it means ultimately everyone is happy. It'd be a risk, but no more of a risk than letting you stay an empty shell that will undoubtedly follow the Abyss with no questions. 

But also, he's allergic to high amounts of pressure and responsibility, and yet that would make exactly this kind of very subtle manipulation perfect, because it's so behind the scenes that someone might not even notice until they're writing 3 essay-length comments describing it.

DO YOU SEE WHY I'M SO CONSUMED?? THERE'S SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT LOL I HAVE TO KNOWWWwwww

 Šlūq is another fascinating character for this conversation, if you've read the notes attributed to him in the codex [not just under his name] there's some really weird stuff going on with him. He seems to want you to bring forth the darkest hour, if you're determined to do so then he hopes that you hold fast, but if you waver then he disapproves. Does he really?

It doesn't look like that's entirely true, or at least, it's not as cut and dry as he's implying. 

I could be totally misreading the codex entries, the cool thing about implied storytelling is that I might not be right, and someone else might have thought something different, and these conversations can be really fun to have. For me, it seemed to imply that since he's friends with Ascanio, he doesn't actually want to see them punished, but it puts him in a difficult position because he is also of the Abyss. That part isn't so much implied as directly stated, but it's his intentions that I want to speculate about.

Because I have 0 fucking idea of what his motivations are LOL that dude is an enigma to me, I love him, I kind of wish we got to meet his siblings too but I know the scale of the story would be way too big. 

His sister mentions hoping that you'll bind yourself to him in a lapse of judgement, and I wonder if it's so they can prevent an all-out war, by force if they have to. It would be going directly against the Abyss' wishes, so I don't know for sure if that was their intent, it could have just been a failsafe for themselves to make sure Banu Javidyar is unaffected by either the darkest hour, or whatever retaliation might come from the fallout of the alternative.

But I like thinking that he just wants to, very secretly, make sure you don't actually start the apocalypse, if only because it's funny to me to have a character that's lowkey trying to push you to do evil, but even MORE lowkey wants to stop you from doing evil LOL watching how they dance around the MC's nature is so entertaining. He would know that you're here specifically to hurt someone he considers a friend, and he might act rather casually about it, but I have to think about the fact that he's on the opposite side. 

In the beginning when he approaches you, it's under the guise that you're the same--you're both Envoys, both have the potential to be gods to these humans, and he makes it seem like it'd be something he's willing to do alongside you in friendship. He's friendly, charming, and seems very very easy-going. 

But to him, we're probably the enemy, are we not? Is he trying to egg us on because he wants to prompt his friend into action? Is he hoping that, by putting you on the path to the darkest hour, Ascanio will have to step out of their shadow and act as the Envoy that they are? Or is he just trying to see how far we're willing to go, is he testing our intentions, and if he is, did he pass any of that information off to Ascanio? I want to know if he was relaying our answers to his questions to them, or if he was just genuinely curious. Maybe he does want the darkest hour to come to pass, and maybe he was hoping we'd be able to persuade his friend to change sides as well. One big happy abyss-loving family LOL

Also man, MAN. KNOWING THAT ASCANIO GAVE HIM THEIR BLOOD?? HUH?? 

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THEY GIVE ANOTHER ENVOY THEIR BLOOD, THAT SOUNDS KIND OF INSANE LOL

It's just so cool, I could geek out all day, I can't express how fun it's been exploring this world and everything it has to offer. I know this game JUST got released and everyone involved deserves so much rest and patience and grace, but I so badly already want to know if they're going to work on anything after this LOL I still want to know what was up with Lyris [I can't actually remember how to spell her name and I couldn't find an entry for her either, but the serene traveler who was looking for her sister] and why the Abyss was willing to allow her to intervene.

I do want to try choosing mortality at least once for Sylas, Malec, and Marané just to SEE what all is different and what answers I might be missing, but I can never make myself turn Ascanio down LOL the chokehold they have on me is disgusting. 

I also got very very attached to Alpheon and Atri, the found family vibe was something I did not expect, and it breaks my heart to split them up LOL but I do want to see what in the epilogue changes, I'm just afraid of the grief that I know is gonna be waitingggg.

So many questions....still so many things I don't know....and I'm still missing like 5 codex entries but I'm too scared I have to do the other endings to get them....

Okay I'm done for real this time LOL my baddd xoxo

[Except I realized immediately after posting that I actually didn't continue my point at all, and instead went on a very long rant just going over the characters in general and giving my thoughts on them, instead of tying it all back into my initial conversation about how fucking cool the MC is and how interesting it is to watch all these characters who know more about her than she does interact. Oh well LOL]