the thing about ivan soulsinger is that during the quests where you find out that he is kidnapping the drakes, it seems to imply that he is not himself in a way. his only dialogue implies possession of some sort as he says things like "the flesh is weak" and mentions taking residence in your body. whoever or whatever is talking to you isn't the real ivan, and the real ivan might be trapped in another body somewhere since he also taunts you by saying he'll come visit you once he's taken your body. to me, this implied that you'd swap places, and you'd be stuck in ivan's body while whoever the possessor is would take yours. what would he even intend to do once he had your body and those drakes? what did he intend to do with the drakes in the first place??
and this conflict never gets resolved. upon defeat, ivan doesn't say anything. you never find out where the real ivan is or what happens to whatever is possessing him, and the real ivan's relationship with the drakes is now tarnished by this thing acting as him. if the possesor was defeated, would ivan have gotten his body back? what would happen to him afterwards, as the one of the only other living people in dragonspyre and presumably a Student? would he be able to repair his relationship with drakes after what the possessor did to them in his body? there might be a kind boy who was just befriending drakes out there, waking up to a literal ghost town years after the fact. if he even survived the impromptu exorcism. if he even got his body back after all that. and you just never get a definite answer to any of that
sorry if this is kinda lame to read. erm i just think he's kinda neat and i am gonna stare at him for a really long time
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[THURSDAY]
Buried Alive - Outlived Family - "Not growing old was fun at first, but then everyone around me started dying."
Hi! Hello! We're here, Late To The Event. Technically, we have plans for all these days! We only remembered this event was ongoing halfway through the week, and by then... well, you know how it is. Technically, this isn't fully compliant with the prompt, but it's close enough that we figure it counts, since outliving his entire family was actually slightly less impactful than outliving his husband for our boy.
Fic below the cut, and @species-whump-weekly we sincerely hope this isn't too late to count.
You have been asleep for long enough that you aren't even sure if he'll still be alive.
His swarm finds you before you find them.
Marina gasps when she sees you. She's years older, now - wings worn at the edges, shell thin and flimsy, aged far beyond the young butterfly you saw her as last.
She looks older than you ever have been. She looks older than you suspect you ever will be.
Her father, your friend – your paramour, your years-long companion – isn’t with her. You fear, for a moment, you’ve stumbled upon them too late. You nearly cringe away from the migration them and there, fearful of discovering yet another thing that’s slipped away while you hibernated.
But you don’t have the heart to walk away.
He’s been waiting for you.
He is old, and frail, and dying. You can taste the creeping end in his veins from the moment you step foot into the tent. His shell is pitted with age, now, cracked and chinked in places, brittle enough that you fear taking his hand will hurt him. Time has weathered him, his wings transparent and paper-thin around him, and you… you stay the same, looking just as young as the day you first met him on the stolen life of those who unearthed your grave.
“I knew you’d come back,” he tells you. “You wouldn’t die that easily.”
You hold his frail, trembling claw in both of yours. You aren’t sure how he can say that so confidently. He has always had more faith in you than you have in yourself.
He invites you to drain him.
You hesitate, at first. Every instinct you have picked up over your long, long life is screaming for you to run. To survive, to keep your secret- he knows, and it's against everything you've ever learned to remain, to let him speak, to not preserve your life-
He knows. But maybe he's known for a long, long time.
You take his offer. You take his life.
You know what it is that killed him the moment you bite. The magic of the wastes, the low hum that seeps into your bones, the constant background noise that sometimes threatens to tear you apart - it gathers within him, down to the deepest parts of his shell. There are lumps of flesh in his heart, his lungs, full of the same mind-jarring, skull-shattering buzz.
He has the wasteland sickness.
You think that, perhaps, he has had the wasteland sickness for a long time.
You drain him until he is dry, until every last flicker of the wasteland sickness is gone from his body, until he is stiff and his flesh holds the texture of jerky, and you let your fangs linger on his shrivelled veins until you can't bear to remain anymore.
You are sick, the next day.
And the day after that, and the day after that.
The buzz is in your bones, now - too close, too loud, rattling through your shell like a twisted beast. You have the wasteland sickness, stolen from his dying body, and it is trying to take you the way it took him.
You do not die.
You don't know if it's a blessing or a curse, anymore.
It is energy. It is vitality, the buzzing, throbbing pulse beyond the heart of a beast on a scale you cannot comprehend.
It is life force, and you can stomach it just the same.
A week passes. Two weeks. The symptoms slow, as you digest it. It becomes your life, your energy, it bends to keep you alive, it becomes you, while you lie weak and dizzy and throwing up blood.
It becomes you. You become it, in turn.
It is the last pulse of your husband, and you refuse to waste it.
You stumble out of the tent two weeks later, exhausted and bearing injuries you cannot see with your naked eyes. You are tired, and hurt, and you have burnt through most of the life you had, but you are alive.
His body is still waiting for you.
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the only sort of thing of worth i can contribute to a very specifc discussion that is taking place on here is, vis a vis this weird sort of transmisogny v racism comparison thing that i keep seeing cropping up and also admittedly keep looking into because I'm curious why people think how they do is this:
at the very least people do recognize racism as an axis of opression, even the most liberal of liberals knows it's a thing that happens and that people do experience it, even if they don't take stuff like micro agressions seriously or think that racism is no more somehow because of Martin Luther king or whatever, they still understand that its something that a person can experience and be a victim of, even if they think we've "gone past it"
meanwhile i still see trans fems get hounded for trying to just explain why tme/tma are useful terms and that transmisogny is a genuine thing that can happen. people somehow managed to make the toonimal thing about trans women who didn't know the guy, like huh?
people bring up tme poc as people who would get the experience, but honestly, especially in the cases of tme women of colour, i feel like they are more likely to want to distance themselves from trans fems, they would get offended if they were to be compared to one, I've seen it happen a few times.
like sure terf/radfem ideology is very much racist yes, but you find transphobes are perfectly fine rubbing shoulders with racists if it means getting to paint trans people as 'degenerates'.
people of colour are just as culpable in transphobia and it should be brought up, i don't like to bring it up because unfortunately people can't talk about the homophobia/transphobia in non white spaces without being racist about it."oh well they're backwards anyways what do you expect" how about you fuck off
that's one of the reasons its so annoying to see people of colour that are terfs, like they aren't going to fight for you. i distinctly remember once while i was looking into the radfem tag to block people, i once saw a radfem that was poc, complaining about how racist people within the radfem community can be,and i thought "didn't think the leopards would eat you too huh"
im vaguing about a specific "discourse" that i honestly think shouldn't be even called discourse it's been going on for a lot longer than when i first heard about it. im not involved with it but I've been looking at it from a distance and man, if either of your sides don't seem to involve transfems of colour then your statements talking about either transmisogny along with racism seem to ring kind of hollow. i really don't like how this thing that seems to be born out of one specific incident like 2-3 years back has kept going and morphed into something a lot more insidious. i think people are stiring shit with it too and sending horrible anons and asks to bait drama as well which sucks
i want to see more conversations about those topics that don't circle back to this weird feud that neither circle involved seems to want to keep going on with but for whatever reason there's just something or the other that ignites it every few months. like we're stuck at stalemate here unless someone new comes in to fully blow it up even further.
tbh i don't even blame twoc for keeping their distance on this it's genuinely not worth it, youd just get the brunt of the horribleness of both sides and none of benefits. that's honestly the most i can say, I'm not trans fem, and I'm non black too, as a lot of the specific kind of racism they are talking about is antiblackness, which of course with either topic I'm not the person who can really talk with any authority on.
hence why reblogs are off I'm just giving my 2 cents on this because im finding it difficult to sleep and i have a lot of thoughts
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