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fangsmyth · 4 years

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i’ve been meaning to analyze the shit out of his poem but..... i’m on break now so i have time

it’s prefaced as “ a poem written in free verse, based on something haunting me as of late reflecting on one of my most complicated and passionate past relationships ” so while i know for a fact i could derive MANY different meanings i’m focusing strictly on this intention

i’m normally really bad at analyzing poetry but..... for Him i will Try ( this is a lot of nonsense rambling please do not mind me i am a fucking idiot if anyone has any other onions i’d love to discuss! ....p-please do not steal;;; )

gaslighting and emotional abuse warning under the cut but who’s fucking surprised

What is the meaning of a memory? A question I oft ponder Intangible and untraceable by anything but the mind Yet so potent as to leaVe one sick As if poisoned or Wounded in a literal sense.

just kind of setting the stage i guess is the best way to call this part? his first fucking stanza is god damn terrible memories leave scars that no one can see i could’ve come up with this in my goth phase

And What meaning is there in regret and longing? Can my lamentations change the past? Will they moVe the future? Shall they amount to much more than What unmoors my here and noW?

p self explanatory imo? this goes into a bit of detail about how despite the relationship being over, he’s still thinking about it and he feels bad about what he did and how he treated them.

‘ Will they moVe the future? ’ implies that despite his regret, he doesn’t feel like he’ll learn from his mistakes since he’s made them so many times before. especially so with the next line ‘ Shall they amount to much more than What unmoors my here and noW? ’

he already feels insecure, and any future mistakes he makes are just going to contribute to that;;

If I restrict my World to that but Which is before my eyes To those Whom I may touch, to that Which I might alter; One Would no doubt conclude that thoughts of You are last among What I could consider to “matter”.

this a really interesting stanza, recognizing that the past and present don’t matter, much less any people in the past that hurt him. he knows he should be looking at the here and now, but he can’t help but feel anxious about what happened and what will happen in future relationships.

( also keep in mind that ‘You’ is capitalized, not as a part of lanque’s quirk despite how naturally it seems to fit with his quirk. i kind of ended up interpreting it how ‘You’ is capitalized like you would ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ implying lanque puts this person on an insanely high pedestal? )

it’s super interesting imo that he chooses to say ‘could’ instead of ‘should’, implying he sees it as an option to stop thinking about the other but not a necessity or, for that matter, the best option he has.

it implies that he recognizes that he has the option to learn from his mistakes, but........

And still You haunt me yet, like a scar, like a disease uneager to abate. Who are You and Who am I, after so long Without You?

it kind of hit me at this point that despite the fact that it was something lanque was recently thinking about, it’s... possible that it wasn’t a recent relationship. he’s clearly fully submerging himself into the role of the victim in this horrible relationship with emotional abuse to the point of forced codependence.

i’m legit having a hard time telling whether this is a matter of lanque making himself out to be the victim ( as emotional vampires often do ) or the very real possibility that he honest to god was the victim of a horrible relationship that left him..... permanently scarred to the point he feels like all relationships are just SUPPOSED to be that way

i’m gonna mainly use language that points towards the latter despite the fact that i honestly believe the more obscure and difficult to explain possibility that this is him trying to put himself in the shoes of someone he treated like garbage ( since idk i feel like he’s really good at recognizing and understanding peoples’ emotions, just not so much feeling them himself )

talking about it as if he were actually the victim just makes this a lot easier to analyze

i’m kind of...... getting ahead of myself though lemme lay down the next stanza

I knoW I don’t knoW I Won’t knoW; What do I knoW but What I knoW and What can it eVen mean to KNOW?

an allusion to gaslighting. i’m bad at writing out definitions i literally just know things my brain is huge and you’re all just jealous so to copy paste from the wikipedia google search result

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.

i *loudly gestures* i don’t feel like i need to explain much further! going between saying he knows and doesn’t know, literally talking in circles and questioning what the concept of keeping knowledge even means!! this relationship kind of fucked him up!!!!!!

knoW, knoW; No!

kind of redundant that this line is on its own, just implies getting fed up and ready to leave?

Agh, though it so Vexes me, Though so little I Valued it When it Was before me, a thing and a You I could touch and see and knoW and hate and Wonder. (reVile/Worship).

AH HERE’S THE GOD SHIT AGAIN I KNEW IT WAS HERE SOMEWHERE!!!

lanque didn’t see this person as such a central figure when he was in the relationship, or it’s possible that he simply didn’t realize how important they were to him. their godliness implies that this person was always above him, that it was a privilege to be graced with their presence alone.

this (reVile/Worship) shit in my mind reads very similar to one of the ten commandments saying ‘we must fear and love god’ or some shit like that, but it doesn’t quite fit. it’s highly probable that it just implies that the relationship walked on a very fine tightrope between kismesis and matesprit ugh i went so long without using homestuck terms i’m sad now.... anyways this is call back to that implication of choice i was talking about earlier that’s built on more immediately

NoW it, and You, are a traceless ghost, and I preoccupy myself With nothing but futile tasks of (RE)definition and (RE)interpretation and circuitous dWellings on that Which I understand eVen less noW.

SUPER obvious but the person in the relationship is gone and lanque doesn’t know what to do without them. goes over how it’s hard for him to tell whether this is a refining of his pre-existing personality or just a brand new one all together. again, a choice as to whether or not that’s how he wants to approach it

the path to this reinvention is brought about through a bunch of rebounds and new relationships, ‘circuitous dwellings’ implying he possibly stayed in some of them for too long and he honest to god has no idea why? like he wasn’t enjoying himself, he wasn’t really being reinvented. it solidifies that it was flat out a new definition as lanque is more or less going through the motions

than in the times When my Wonderings might’Ve been so easily ansWered With a question or a bite or a kiss, or eVen a single Word, spoken honestly.

STRANGE to me how this starts as if it continues the past sentence despite the fact that it DEFINITELY ends in a period i double checked

anyways

he also finds himself having a MUCH easier time following the motions than trying to internalize and understand this relationship. ‘wonderings’ being... pretty obviously just anxiety thoughts like you know how your brain just says things that aren’t true

and figuring out if they were would’ve been easy if he just said something or did something!!

Pressed though I am to giVe color to our bond I look not to onyx nor ash but that Which pulses Within our Very Veins: that so blinding jade, hard as the stone for Which it is so named,

interesting that this sort of starts an outline towards giving the subject an actual identity?

like specifically saying “pulses within our very veins: that so blinding jade” OBVIOUSLY says that it’s another jade in the cloister that this is about?

usually i’d like to say that writers usually don’t do this without reason but despite the praises i constantly speak alone in my room about the endless array of implications in every other thing that comes out of lanque’s mouth i also know v is a fucking hack and a got damn terrible writer

some gremlin at 3am whispered in my ear in the middle of the night saying this is about a past relationship with bronya and i did have some points but bronya is too good so i’m going to tell that gremlin to go fuck himself

tWisted and pulled hammered and forged shaped, unnaturally as if a chain.

there were so many things they went through to try and get this to work, but it kind of just came up as an obviously fucked up mess. likely considering that it would’ve ended/ran its course a lot better if they didn’t even try getting together.

i wish every stanza was this simple

A stricture Within scriptures; a certain so meaningful tincture.

calling back to that whole “easily answered with a question, or a bite, or a kiss, or a single word spoken honestly” and those whole religious undertones that i keep pushing this solidifies that i’m not fucking crazy

GOD there’s so much in this little piece the very fact that his object of affection’s voice and words alone leave him feeling that he literally has no room to speak. the stricture is like a noose around his neck if he talks out of turn, hence the frustration that he knows something his wrong but he simply isn’t allowed to say something.

until he gets his hand on that ‘meaningful tincture’. alcohol gives him the courage to speak up and defy that gospel, alluding to his dependence on drugs and why they’re so important to him! it’s a lifestyle he wouldn’t give up because he’d hate to be silenced again!

Resent You though I must, EnVy You though I may,

emphasizing that shit i was talking about earlier with could vs. should, lanque feels like the right thing to do is look back at this in scorn. he should despise this person he idolized so much and envy how easy it was for them to lock him in such a vulnerable position for so long yet here he is..... thinking about them again

NoW leagues and leagues stretch betWeen us And I make peace With not but What I say.

these lines are pretty transparent. this was never resolved, there was never a proper conclusion to this relationship. they kind of just drifted apart, but lanque can take solace in the truth and completion of this poem. he makes peace with the fact that he acknowledges all of the problems in the relationship, and chooses to make them a part of him rather than something to just scowl and scoff at

You are only that Which is Within me, my blood and my mind and that is at once nothing, and the most elementary definition of eVerything.

i’m tired man i wrote like what 5 google drive pages about it i feel like i’d be repeating myself since this is his equivalent of wrapping it up and tying it in a lil bow

just because it happened and ultimately doesn’t matter doesn’t mean he didn’t internalize it?

this sort of ended up defining the person he became since it just shook him that badly man

do i need to go into more depth than that i just want some fucking chicken

#ginger lemon radler ( ooc ) ;;#angelic voices ( hc ) ;;#are you down? ( saves ) ;;#the heart of he who lives beyond the pale ( poetry ) ;;#GODDDDDD THIS IS SO LONG I'M SO SORRY

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sunderlorn · 6 years

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Got tagged in this big long Describe Yr OC Meme by @chameleonspell because they love to make me suffer as they have suffered, toil as they have toiled. I am more merciful, which is why I am tagging no-one. (Also cos chameleonspell tagged most of everyone I’d’ve tagged anyway.)

GENERAL

Name: Simra Hishkari. Alias(es): Sim. Harmless. Flintfingers. “Hey, greyling…” Lonya, to his mum, but not for a while thank fuck. Gender: Cis male. Age: That depends where you’re reading, doesn’t it? Uhhh. He’s 11 in chapter one of part one, poking his nose around Senvalis’ shop and bothering the poor mer for paper. And now in part three, he’s recently endured his twenty-fourth birthday. Place of birth: Chiming Row, The Rigs, The Grey Quarter of Windhelm, Eastmarch, Skyrim. Spoken languages: Native Level Grey Quarter Dunmeri Patois. Fluent Marchspeak. A flexible range of Tamrielics, from the sort of versatile trade-tonguey Imperial Tamrielic you’ll hear at the docks of any major city, to something like the closest thing Skyrim has to a unifying language: an archaic version of Tamrielic with enough in common with all Skyrim’s dialects that it’s at least mutually intelligible for most people. Fluent House Dunmeris, with a few dialectic oddities picked up and understood. Relatively fluent Velothis. Some Riftspeak. Can curse a bit in Jel. Sexual orientation: Insert a withering stare and a question as to why it’s your fucking business. Practically speaking, bisexual. As in, he’s been attracted to men, women, and in the words of the warrior-poet Fred Durst, people who just don’t give a fuck. He doesn’t really have the terminology to parse that out in his own words though. Probably thinks of sexuality more in terms of activity than identity. Occupation: Murderhobo. Uhhh. I mean…freelancer. Currently, anyway. That is to say, sellsword, bounty-hunter, scavenger. Formerly? Semi-pro urchin. Carrier of heavy things on the Windhelm docks. Soldier-of-fortune. Prayer-scriv. Storyteller and sort-of-kind-of-sheriff at one point. Basically like a literal accountant at another point too. Moral support to more qualified goatherds. Fireman — like, literally, a man who makes fires happen. Quartermaster’s assistant. Caravan guard. Itinerant herder and spokesperson of certain itinerant wisewomen. Bootleg performer of certain Temple rites and duties.

(This is long, so more under the cut.)

APPEARANCE

Eye colour: A reddish shade of amber or an ambery shade of red. Hair colour: Cinder-white. Height: About 5’10” (178 cm or s0). Scars: Oh god I literally have a fucking like reference sheet to keep track of all these. His Velothi harrowmarks: a hornlike curl out from the corner of his left eye, and a tapering line underscored for half its length with a series of dots, curving from the right edge of his mouth up towards his ear. A deep stiff scar through the left side of his lips, diagonal, from near his nostril to the beginning of his chin. A shallow horizontal scar across the side of his throat. A ragged starburst of scar tissue, in the muscle between neck and shoulder, just above his right collarbone and again at the back of his neck, from taking an arrow and having it pushed out. A flat diagonal stab-wound, on the left side of his ribs. A torn right earlobe. A straight raised scar up the back of his ribcage, on the left. A series of silver lines on the outermost three fingers of his right hand, where the joints meet the knuckles, and lightning-scar-looking traces following from those fingers over the front and back of his hand. And a plethora of tiny nicks and burns, mostly concentrated on his forearms and hands. Does a twice-broken nose count? Overweight: Nope. Underweight: At several points in his life, yeah.

FAVOURITE

Colour: Sea colours and shades of bronze. In clothes? Leather tones, slate greys, off-whites, neutral gloomy blues, details and decals in reds, silvers, copper, brass. Doesn’t tend to wear pure blacks or whites, or any particularly saturated colour — they spoil too easy. Hair colour: Statistics suggest red, though he’d be quick to insist it’s just coincidence, not, like, a fucking Thing or anything. Eye colour: Not red. Light-coloured eyes are weird and novel. Music genre: Weirdly he doesn’t enjoy music with lyrics all that much. (In canon, anyway — he’d feel differently in a modern AU or whatever.) Finds it distracting. They can be interesting, of course, but it’s not something that makes him happy hearing it. He likes stringed instruments with an emphasis on drones or echoes and silence. Things like the Tamrielic equivalent of qanun, koto, morin khuur, etc. Side note, but in modern AUs he’s definitely the sort of person who’s physically incapable of doing anything as mundane as laundry or tidying without putting a podcast on first. Movie genre: This is AU stuff, but yeah, he might talk a big game about being into Deep Penetrating Drama and so on, but he’d most often find himself watching the feature length equivalent of all you can eat hi-octane junk food buffets. Fighty action movies, particularly with an emphasis on melee combat. Finds revenge narratives particularly rewarding. Only genres he really considers himself a buff on though are samurai cinema and westerns. He’ll yammer at length about Anti-Westerns too if you get him started. (Don’t.) TV show: Hates the idea of having to watch anything live at a particular time. Fuck letting something as petty as TV schedule and section his life. Will gladly on-demand binge on historical drama, gritty travel documentaries, and twisty-turny political and intriguey thrillers. Doesn’t like cooking shows. Doesn’t want personality with his foodporn. He’d rather wait for the book to come out. Food: The Platonic ideal of Simra food is basically like soft starchy silky carbs with something sharp and heavily spiced on top. Rice porridge and preshta-jan, maybe with a raw egg stirred in while it’s hot. Fresh soft panbreads used to mop up redspiced mutton. Meat still feels like too much of a luxury to have often though, and he has a lot of feelings about vegetables. Pickled carrots, cucumbers, turnips, greens, green tomatoes, soft or crisp, spiced or just salty. Yams roasted in embers, smashed open, drizzled with spiced honey. Dried fruit is a particular pleasure as well, with a special place in his heart for persimmons and figs. Drink: Black tea of any sort – Nordic pine-smoked, Dunmeri fermented, light or dark, toasted or not – taken with sugar or honey. Alcohol of any sort felt like a luxury to be taken whenever luck offers it, back when he was a little younger. He’s got preferences these days, though whether he sticks to them is debatable and down to circumstance. He likes red and dark beers, biscuity flavours in the former, bittersweet in the latter. Hasn’t had either in a good few years though, and mazte compares oddly, to him — too starchy and sour. He once drank some Colovian grape brandy before he realised it was expensive enough that he really should have just sold it, and liked that well enough. He’s had actual grape wine once or twice and liked the idea of being the sort of person who liked it. He doesn’t especially like sujamma except in some freak cases – almondy and subtle vanilla-y wood flavours in that one bottle that one time – but he’ll drink it anyway because at least of all the quietly awful things Morrowind might offer you to drink, you have to drink less of it to know you’ve drunk it. He can’t remember if he liked mezga better or whether he was just less fussy back then. Book: Ideally he would have a larger foundation for reference than he does, but he doesn’t. Still, his basis for comparison has grown a little since he first learnt to read and first got covetous of books, so he does at least have some preferences. He’ll still hoard up and devour literally any book he can, good or bad, because books are expensive and serious business – even the cheap ones – but there are some where he’ll fall into impressed absorbed silence and others where he’ll complain the entire time. He has a thing for treatises on use of one sort of blade or another, not because he really enjoys reading them, or really because they’re very useful. Mostly they’re awfully written and opaque to the point of being very unhelpful. But that puts a sense of the arcane around them, doesn’t it? If something’s hard to read, it must be hiding something worth knowing. Simra reads, trawls, lives in hope that one day that assumption will prove right, but really the issue is that if you never check you’ll never know. Back in Suran he read a lot of pre-Red Year devotional poetry from back during the time of the Tribunal. That and poetry the old Temple couldn’t or didn’t censor and so decided was devotional even if it wasn’t. A lot of that was just wankery – tongue twisters for the brain, either thematically or in terms of its showy prosody – but you’d occasionally get the odd scrap of lyric that was just effortlessly well-turned. There was a third era Dunmeri poetess called Anthiss for instance, the printing of whose work the Temple officially banned which only stoked its popularity. It was only after she died – mysteriously, it’s worth noting – that the Temple lifted the ban and claimed all her work had been religious allegory all along, revealing a conflicted but truly faithful sole. Simra’s pretty sure that, no, she was just writing about her girlfriend the entire god damn time. Between that and tracts on philosophy, interpretation of scripture, hagiography…he enjoyed reading it all but in retrospect couldn’t say he liked all of it. At the heart of what he really enjoys unreservedly in books is escapism. Travel narratives – little holidays for the brain – they’re what put a glint in his eyes and a lightness in his heart without really having to try much.

HAVE THEY

Passed university: Nope, nor has he had any formal education of any kind, yet. Given my headcanons about the state of the Mage’s Guild, for instance, in the 4th Era, and other Imperial institutes of higher learning there aren’t quite as many opportunities for that sort of thing as there used to be. Not in the parts of the world Simra’s kept to so far, anyway. Had sex: Currently, not in a while. Had sex in public: Define public… The tonghouse of the Dyer’s End Few wasn’t a premises as rich in privacy as it could’ve been, but I’m inclined to say no. Gotten pregnant: Please no. Kissed a boy: Yes. Kissed a girl: Yes. Gotten tattoos: Do scarifications count? If so, yes, facial ones. Gotten piercings: Six in his left ear. Mer have more cartilage than humans. One through the lobe of his right ear too, but that doesn’t really count as a piercing anymore — just a tear. Had a broken heart: Don’t ask. Been in love: Something like that. Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Here’s where he laughs in your face and says “twenty-four?” and kisses his teeth for two minutes.

ARE THEY

A virgin: Covered this. A cuddler: There’ve been times. Sometimes being close to someone’s all you want to fill your head with, your time with, your world with, and all you can do is do that. Not many times though. They’re more anomalies than anything else. Prolonged touching, or lengthy physical intimacy — he’s pretty averse. A kisser: Mouth-on-mouthy kissing makes him nervous. Half his lips don’t really work right and he gets very conscious of it. Makes him feel ugly, clumsy, exposed. Scared easily: Terrified, yes. He doesn’t exactly keep a level head on him all that easily. Jealous easily: Statistics would suggest yes. Worth noting thought that this is less in terms of seeing everyone as someone his lover might leave him for and so being possessive and shitty and more like he feels left out easily, left behind easily, and if he sees someone he cares about sharing some sort of positive experience with someone else, he’ll feel a sense of abandonment and sadness about it. It’s not an angry or suspicious feeling so much as a melancholy self-effacing one. Trustworthy: In what sense, exactly? Depends who you are, what you’ve done to deserve Simra’s trust or respect, what the circumstances in both your lives and their mutual conjunctions are, what there is to be gained from breaking your trust, or what there is to be lost by keeping it or sticking with you. Depends how strong Simra is at this point in his life. Uhhhh…this number of variables probably suggest that, Simra is not inherently a trustworthy person by nature. But that doesn’t mean he’s never loyal, or faithful, or worth putting your trust in. Dominant: Uhhhhh. Submissive: Fuckin uhhhhhh. In love: Right now? Fuck off. Single: And ready to mingle. (God can you even imagine.)

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Have they harmed themselves: Not with anything sharp. Thought of suicide: Yes. Attempted suicide: Comments on my fic suggest that a lot of what he does, accidentally or by choose, basically constitute attempts to die. Thing is though, Simra’s pretty much more terrified of dying than of anything else. Any attempts at straightforward suicide would be impulsive cries for help or lashings-out against feeling particularly helpless. The goal wouldn’t be dying. Wanted to kill someone: Wanting to sounds way more personal than he really wants to have to deal with. Appreciating the reasons for having had to do so? Fine. (Yes, yes, yes, but funny how the people he’s really wanted to kill are for the most part still alive.) Ride a horse: He regrets to inform you that, yes, he has ride a horse. Have/had a job: We’ve covered this. Have any fears: Ghosts and bones, yes. Death, or more accurately, ceasing to be alive and existent. Being maimed; no longer being whole. Blindness, deafness, muteness. He has a pretty primal flight-or-fight response to the idea of being caught out in any sort of lie. Oh, and he’s not fond of dogs.

FAMILY

Sibling(s): Yes, Soraya. Does she still count? Parents: Sambidal Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Mabudani nas Zainab, his babu, Windhelm dockworker and former adventurer. Ishar Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Nem nas Zainab, his ammu, Grey Quarter spellwright, seller of medicines, and former adventurer. Children: No. Pets: No. A cat might be good, but he’d get terrified of it deciding to abandon him, and would take it very personally if it was ever gone for very long.

#OCs #Simra Hishkari #TES #Dunmer #Suicide mention #self-harm mention

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