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legobiwan · 11 months

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I find it interesting that king boo and dimentio see luigi as the bigger threat or nuisance in king boos case seems like the most dangerous villains tend to focus more on luigi than mario also what are your thoughts on antasma?

I think King Boo in particular is interesting as he went from having no particular opinion about Luigi (you get the feeling that he would have captured whichever brother had entered the mansion first in LM1) to holding a festering hatred of Luigi by the time we hit the third LM game. You almost get the sense King Boo regarded Luigi as a someone laughable until he actually fought through the entire mansion and beat King Boo. And I think at that point, King Boo just fixated on Luigi as this seemingly cowardly, anxiety-prone, far less famous of the Mario brothers who brought down his ambitions Three Whole Times. By the time we hit LM3 (and I haven't played Dark Moon yet, have only watched some cut scenes for writing purposes), it strikes me that King Boo doesn't give a damn about Mario or Peach or the Toads, only their value in luring Luigi through what I would contend is a drawn-out, premeditated gauntlet of 15-ish levels of ghoulish battle. It's almost like he wants to watch Luigi beat these ghosts who he obviously holds zero regard for, only so he can finally top this nemesis of his and assert his dominance over the ghostly population. Wild stuff.

On the other hand, we have Dimentio, our favorite bastard magic man. Unlike King Boo, the minute Luigi came into his orbit, you get the feeling Dimentio was gunning for him. (Whether or not Dimentio had scouted out Luigi and the gang prior to the Chaos Heart's arrival is up for debate, but it does raise the interesting question of why Luigi was marked to be brainwashed while Peach and Bowser and Mario were left to their own devices. Now, was this the Count's own idea due to what was written in the Dark Prognosticus or was DImentio whispering in his ear? I'm not entirely certain, but by the time Luigi/Mr. L came to Castle Bleck, Dimentio would have been tracking him, to phrase it as Dimentio would, like a bloodhound denied his nightly dinner).

All this is to say, Dimentio was laser-focused on Luigi and worse yet, because Dimentio is a cunning, manipulative asshole, he read all of Luigi's insecurities that got blasted about in his Mr. L form like a child's picture book. For Dimentio, I think, he sees not only a tool but someone who could ultimately be swayed to his side, had he the time. A man of a terrible potential he doesn't even realize, anxiety masking a hundred and one other emotions Luigi either can't or won't recognize. (I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I am 100% convinced Luigi's anxiety is, to a degree, a coping mechanism so he doesn't have to deal with the more complicated, sometimes darker emotions and thoughts whirling around his head).

I have yet to play M&L: Dream Team, but I have seen some takes on Antasma and his relationship with Luigi, who seems play a pivotal role in this game. I'm excited to get to this one (it's one of the next on my list after I finish Thousand Year Door! That and Dark Moon!) so I'll have to report back once I've gotten into it.

But I would say to your assertion that the more dangerous villains are drawn to Luigi -

Let's think about it this way. Mario is a known variable. He's a hero, he's incorruptible, at least according to the stories. His role is to beat the bad guys, to stand in their way, to protect and be the guardian of the moral high ground. The villains want to defeat him.

Luigi, however, is a little more complicated. He shares the same desire to protect as Mario, to be the hero and stand on the moral high ground but...we see the way he acts in the Paper Mario series, the overblown language, the way he wants to be included, the way the Toads treat him, the way he's referred to so often as number two, the way his anxiety is out in the open. Luigi presents as someone a lot more malleable than Mario is, as someone who could not only be defeated, but exploited. And, of course, each time Luigi defies those expectations because he's a lot stronger and braver than he presents (although he's always complicated). And it's the type of thing where I imagine it's partially that the villains feel their egos are bruised by their defeat coming from the "other brother," on one hand, and on the other, there's that promise they see in Luigi, whether or not he'd actually betray his brother, but they see those shades of grey in him, see something they could use and it has to be alluring to them.

(Not to mention Luigi's penchant for magic - the Thunderhand, his weird negative dimension thing in the Smash Brothers series, his dream capabilities - unlike Mario, Luigi's abilities tend to fall into the more fantastical and in tandem with his engineering skills, have the potential to make him so, so powerful. If He Ever Tapped Into That Side of Himself.)

#hello there #ask legobiwan #luigi #dimentio #king boo #antasma #it's very similar to the way villains in the star wars universe tend to obsess over obi wan #when anakin is by all rights the more powerful jedi #different fandoms with different contexts but the idea remains the same

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renegade-skywalker · 5 months

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I stopped posting updates to my fic here but I was feeling oddly proud of my interpretation of the scene where Kreia invades Atton's mind at Atris' academy so here we are🙃:

—

Atton was beginning to think that he’d unwittingly been thrown into purgatory. To have escaped death so many times only to end up in yet another cell, well, Atton wasn’t sure if he was lucky in the eyes of the universe or just the butt end of an inside joke it had with destiny.

Either way, the last place Atton expected to find himself in was another prison. And consoling someone other than himself while confined there, no less. “Take it easy, will you?” he uttered for what felt like the umpteenth time as he watched Bao-Dur hold his horned head in his hands. “Not much we can do in here for the moment, though trust me, Eden will get us out.”

Where his sudden optimism came from, he wasn’t sure. Though his unwavering faith in Eden was without question. Uttering her name outside of her presence almost felt sacrilege, though, and he didn’t know why.

“It’s not that,” Bao-Dur muttered, a quiet anger seething through even the force cages that separated them. “I was over this, I was getting past it. But then first it was Czerka. And then those mercs. And now… this.”

Atton could only shake his head, exasperated, as now it seemed it was Kreia’s turn to look at Bao-Dur with tired ire.

“You did what you had to do to be rid of that place,” Kreia said with some assurance though it came across more as annoyance than anything else. “You protected your work as well as your hide. Not many are capable of such feats.”

Atton wasn’t sure if Kreia was truly doling out accolades or simply expressing her own surprise. As usual, the old woman was hard to read and Atton wasn’t keen on reading between her lines.

“The Jedi were supposed to help us,” Bao-Dur continued, his voice faraway and hollow. “How could one hole up here and call it a mercy when the rest of the planet still suffers?”

“It does not do to dwell on whatever image the galaxy holds of the Jedi,” Kreia said flatly. “It matters not, for one. But to be offended by some ideal fiction is a waste of energy entirely.”

Bao-Dur only laughed weakly, his head now between his knees as the man sat despondent on the floor of his cell.

“It’s not that,” he said. “I was at Malachor, I know what evil the Jedi are capable of doing. Of asking. And of me, no less. But I promised myself - not again. No: never again.”

Bao shook his head more fiercely now, as if not only fending off Kreia’s words of warning but whatever inner demons also plagued him.

“It’s too late for that,” Bao-Dur continued. “There’s no amount of sage wisdom in the ‘verse to soothe my self hatred.”

Atton heard the words, clear as day. Only… Bao-Dur’s mouth had not moved.

A shiver ran down Atton’s spine at the realization, wondering just how long it had been since he’d last eaten something, since he’d last had a sip of water. He wasn’t sure, but he also wasn’t entirely certain he was imagining things, either.

“There’s no use in blaming yourself,” Atton muttered, annoyed but more so at his own muddled mind than he should have been at the present situation, trying to get a grip on it as he glanced about his new cell. “You did your job. The Ithorians’ work is safe. And that’s all you should care about right now.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but he could sense Kreia cross her arms over her chest, watching him. Though why, or for what purpose, he did not know.

“Like I said, Eden will see us out of here. And once she does, I know she’ll be just as incensed as you are. She’ll set it all to rights.”

Kreia leaned back on the one non-plasma charged wall of her cell and watched him, though whether her gaze moved at all between him and Bao-Dur he was not sure. Atton hoped it did, because he squirmed under the imagined weight of her gaze, feeling none too much like himself with her watching.

“Sure,” Bao-Dur said with a nod, actually speaking this time. Atton noted the movement of the man’s mouth and the gesture of his head. Bao-Dur’s pale amber gaze met his and he nodded. After a moment - of both registering the action and realizing that it was, in fact, reality - Atton nodded in kind. “Eden will help set things right. She always does.”

Even if Malachor went sideways.

Atton kept his gaze on Bao-Dur even as the man looked away, certain he heard the words again but now absolutely certain that the Iridonian did not utter them.

It was what we planned, maybe. But the aftermath…

Atton felt himself lean forward, yearning to follow the unspoken thread of thought further but instead found himself yanked back. Both mentally and physically. Just as he was looking at Bao-Dur, he was suddenly thrust back-first into the hard stone of the uncharged wall of his cell. Then his mind clouded with endless dark and billowing thought - none of it of his own making.

He opened his mouth, words poised on his tongue.

What’s happening? Was the first to cross his mind, panic shooting through his every limb and every corner of his consciousness. What are you doing?

Atton could not move or speak. It was just as he’d felt when the half-imagined HK drugged him and waited for him to drift off to sleep before slaughtering every other living thing in Peragus’ paltry medical bay. Before, he’d still hoped it was just a fever dream. But now he knew that the memory was all too real, and worst of all that it was happening again.

Stop struggling, Kreia’s voice entered his mind, slipping between his own thoughts and slithering between them, as if swatting them away in order to make more room for herself.

His vision grew dark, everything in his periphery clouded by a shadowed curtain as if he were on the brink of fainting but unable to succumb to the sickness of sleep, unable to collapse and release his fear into the darkness of unconsciousness. Instead he was pinned to the wall and painfully aware of everything.

Bao-Dur remained on the floor of his cell, head in his hands, frozen in time. Blissfully unaware of it all.

Let me follow the current, Kreia’s voice continued, though he could hardly call it a voice. He knew the words were hers but the words almost felt like his own, as if his own mind were thinking them and listening to them at once, but her essence remained stamped on each sentiment as if sealing her intrusion in wax - setting herself apart from Atton’s own thoughts yet imprinting just the same on his mind as if she were welcomed there. Deep, deeper, to its source…

No numbers, no hyperspace routes, no power couplings came to his aid. His mind was blank, empty and just as pinned to the proverbial wall as Atton’s physical body was in the flesh. He could not move, but he also could not think - instead a helpless onlooker, unable to do anything other than observe in abject horror.

Stop, stop, stop, he wanted to think, and yet the word escaped him. The feeling did not, but he could not will Kreia away. He could not banish her from the domain she’d already violated.

Ah, a sigh fluttered through him, satisfied with a nauseating triumph. With the fear is mingled guilt…

Flashes of memory flit before Atton’s eyes, from birth until now. It took only an instant as well as an eternity. He not only saw them, but relived them, the reactionary emotions inspired by each roiling within him like a sudden sickness.

It squirms in you, Kreia’s voice cut through his thoughts like a knife. Like a worm.

Few images stayed while others faded. All that remained were faces. Those of his mother and father - the dark hair and the disdain he received from his mother, as well the dark eyes and the thrill of the chase he inherited from his father. Then there was Corr Desyk’s crooked smile and sense of adventure, of absolution in the face of utter despair. But among them was also Darth Malak as he stared Jaq down and assessed him, eventually recruiting him to Revan’s cause, an imagined version of the woman herself appearing in his mind’s eye afterward even if he’d never once met her.

And then there was her...

And the why… ah.

Atton’s vision hadn’t clouded entirely, and from the depths of his shadowed sight he saw Kreia smile wickedly from across the room.

And there is its heart.

Of all the faces that stared back at him from his past, the one that shone brightest was hers. Hers. The Jedi that almost bested him. The Jedi that opened him up to the heart of the universe. And the Jedi he slaughtered in cold blood because she had.

He hadn't thought of her face since that day. Atton had blocked it entirely out of his mind. The memory remained, but the image stayed as if behind a curtain, intentionally withdrawn and hidden from him as to save him from something. From what, who knew. Perhaps only himself.

You surprise me, Kreia thought inside his mind, oddly somber. But I should have known.

Bao-Dur remained still on the other side of the room, time not affecting him as it did Atton, living a life’s age and then some within the small confines of his unfortunately still-living brain.

I could not feel it before, Kreia commended, her admiration clear in the intention. Your feelings are a powerful shield indeed.

If Atton could, he would have laughed. Not powerful enough.

The half-thought of his sarcasm sparked and sputtered before Kreia’s dominating mind. He could feel her laugh within his consciousness in his stead.

Do not worry, Atton. If she is a Jedi, she will forgive. And if she is not…

The pause that followed was palpable.

He knew she meant to insinuate Eden. A woman who both embodied and defied everything he ever knew about Jedi. But that wasn’t the part about her that bothered him. Well, it did, but it wasn’t what worried him most.

If she is not, then she will not care.

Kreia asserted this with some finality, as if both for herself as well as for Atton.

“You can’t tell her,” he managed to whisper with a gasping breath. “I’m asking you - no, I’m begging you. I don’t want her to-”

Whether Atton actually spoke these words or merely thought them he was not certain. What was real or imagined was now both one and the same. But he felt the effort in his chest as if he had spoken, the urgency of his words surprising even himself.

Think less of you? Kreia finished his thought for him. She tsked audibly within his mind. I hardly think that’s possible.

Kreia affirmed it with such poise, such confidence, that Atton feared she was telling the truth. Even if he preferred, and suspected, that she wasn’t

Still, there is no shame in what you ask. We all wage war with the past, and it leaves its scars.

His scars remained visible before his mind’s eye in a myriad of memories. Each one lingering longer than he would have liked.

I will not speak of yours, Atton, Kreia continued. But there is a price for such things.

“Price? What price?” he asked as if gasping for air. This time, he felt as if his voice were his own, choking on his own words as he spoke them.

There are those who wage war, and those who follow them.

He thought of Corr and he thought of Malak, each of them men he’d once looked up to and both of them men he’d also seen break in the wake of the same willed woman. And then he thought of Revan - both the woman he imagined her to be as well as the monster he knew she was.

You know your place, Kreia said, as if looking at his memories alongside him. You are a crude thing, murderer, but you have your uses…

Just as Revan’s kaleidoscope persona faded from his vision, he thought of her again. The Jedi who gifted him the world and all its secrets. The Jedi he killed viciously out of fear of her blessing.

You know how important this woman we travel with is, even one such as you can feel it.

The feelings he had about Eden said nothing less. When he met her, she’d been his savior. His undeserving patron. And in repayment, he owed her the universe. If only because he deserved so little of it.

So you will serve her… until I release you.

He never learned her name - the last Jedi he’d killed. And yet her pale face gave way to Eden’s in his imagination, as if remembering them both as one and the same.

“And what if I refuse?”

Kreia laughed.

You won’t.

Atton thought of Eden’s face in the stead of the woman he slaughtered, blood bubbling up from beneath Eden's cracked lips, a satisfied smile on her pallid visage despite the death fast becoming her.

He shuddered, and yet still could not move.

If you do, then my silence will be broken, Kreia warned, the voice inside his head growing tenfold, as if Kreia spoke with the throat of thousands. And then, Atton, you will be broken.

The image shattered - the imagined one as well as the memory. Both dissolved into unending blackness, disappearing into the dark of the void Atton sometimes felt himself longing for between conjuring up hyperspace coordinates.

Whatever fear you hold of the Jedi, know that if you disobey me, that my punishment will make you beg for the death that has long hounded you.

He knew Kreia meant it as a threat, and yet part of him found solace in her promise. Wondering if he were truly so far from the edge or merely toeing the line.

Wipe the fear from your mind. You will not find blind obedience a difficult master… you chose it once. You will learn to embrace it again.

And then all at once, time resumed. Atton found himself gasping for breath just as Bao-Dur raised his head and spoke again, continuing his thought from earlier only to be met with deaf ears. Whatever he said was lost on Atton, and presumably Kreia as well who only sighed, looking pleased with herself.

“Did you say something, Atton?” Bao-Dur asked, his face innocent despite the man’s still roiling inner anger.

Atton shook his head, glancing at Kreia only to find that the woman was no longer looking at him and appearing as if she never had been.

“No,” he coughed, his throat sour and his mind sick. “Not at all.”

#kotor 2 #atton rand #kreia #star wars #my writing #when was the last time I posted something for this fandom here even??? hello???#(if anyone is wondering about the fic itself it's called Out of the Abyss and it's linked in the pinned post on my page)

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