The play may be over, but the show goes on

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

Thjazi abused Bolaire and that excuses everything Bolaire has ever done ever. He's Just A Little Guy who only torture-murdered people because he didn't know any better. Uwu.

THE BLEAK (wtf is wrong with you)

Bolaire is lying about Thjazi abusing him because Thjazi is just such a good guy - he would never do that. Freedom fighters never mistreat the people close to them. It isn't narratively satisfying to depict the hero who the DM has explicitly depicted as a Complex Man who, and I quote, 'robbed, killed, and abused people', as actually Complex. Anyway Bolaire is a nasty person so he deserved everything bad that ever happened to him :) In fact, it was WRONG and MEAN of him to kill the soldiers who enslaved him. No wonder Thjazi hated him so much!

THE PEAK

I'm very angry. You should be.

Go in peace. 🌩️

💀"Why are you big?" 🌿"I don't…I don't know!"

Spoilers for ep 22

'god damn I totally get why Hal reacted the way he did to Bolaire wearing Misha, considering what he knows of Bolaire; and why he was so unreceptive to all the accusations Bolaire made about Thjazi during the Convergence. His reaction was incredibly understandable from the perspective of a guy who is already fucking REELING from so many revelations about a man he loved'

AND 'I think Hal was horrified that Bolaire insinuated that because of Thjazi, Hal might technically be his owner if Thimble isn't, and given the history of the Orcs under Azgra, no wonder this instigated such a disgusted reaction.'

AND 'that doesn't make any of Hal's words justified. It was, in fact, incredibly fucked up that Hal IMMEDIATELY aggressively pinned Bolaire to a sofa rather than simply asking if Misha was alright; and was ONLY concerned with Thjazi hurting Misha, not Bolaire, when Thjazi swung for him; and was so dismissive of Bolaire when he was trying to talk openly for the first time about how Thjazi mistreated him and reduced him to an owned object, in front of a room of people who predominantly love & glaze Thjazi'

AND 'this clearly negatively impacted his relationship with Bolaire and I think Hal realised that and regretted it, when Bolaire was apologising constantly and promising to leave the life he had built with Hal at its centre, and when he specifically asked Azune to help him rather than Hal'

AND 'I think Hal has so much on his plate with the Creed and the incredible work he did with KoTher'ai, his fears for his family and his complex feelings for Thjazi, that it's completely possible that he won't acknowledge this for a long time'

AND 'I think they both need time apart so Bolaire can figure out who he is without Hal, and Hal can come to his own conclusions about whether their friendship was 'real' or not'

AND 'the revelation of how little Hal cares about Bolaire in comparison to other important people in his life (Thjazi, Misha) is going to be devastating for our fucked-up little mask guy who has codependently entangled their lives'

AND 'this will be very good for Bolaire in the long run if the Seekers become part of his wider friendship/support network, which will in turn be VERY good for Hal because their whole ish wasn't healthy in any way and Hal has enough going on that he genuinely can't give Bolaire the emotional support he needs right now'

AND 'I think this is all far more crunchy and interesting than if they had just spoken about their problems like normal people and hugged it out'

What Bolaire did to Hal in Episode 22 in the sewers, asking Hal to brutally murder his current body while Hal was still in shock from having been forced to kill someone in battle for the first time in decades, was likely incredibly traumatic for Hal. Something that didn’t have time to really manifest at the time.

So when he walked in and saw Bolaire wearing Misha, someone he knows, someone he loves, someone who is in his house because Hal had to rescue him from prison, someone who does not know about Bolaire and therefore almost certainly did not consent to being worn (which, to be fair, he didn’t, as him picking up and putting on Bolaire was a complete accident that no one else noticed in time), it’s entirely possible that Hal was having Dolby-Digital-Surround-Sound flashbacks of that previous brutally murdered body, now with Misha in the starring role.

So he had basically a kneejerk trauma-driven panic reaction that overrode his still-tentative and honestly rather damaged trust in Bolaire.

It does not make it hurt less. At all. But yeah.

Bolaire purposefully gave Hal an out in that scene, reassuring him that he did not have to be the one to kill his body, in order to try and AVOID traumatising Hal, knowing that Hal was in a vulnerable place - but Hal agreed to go forward with it because.... oh my god he was in that massively vulnerable place where he had just killed someone for the first time in years, and now his closest friend asks him to kill HIM as if this makes up for all the lies he told Hal (or was FORCED to tell Hal, not that Hal can accept it).

Like, to be clear - Hal absolutely made the choice to help. But this choice deepened his own trauma, and Bolaire pitched him that choice in the first place. I 100% agree that we're seeing the fallout here.