The play may be over, but the show goes on

Loki was the one to lure Idun out for Thjazi in the myth, and he turned into a falcon to retrieve her when the gods found out. Mara inspo perhaps?

It's here. We've entered the Seekers (1.0) arc.

It's funny that I feel like I've seen maybe more complaints about the Seekers than either of the other arcs but it's definitely my favorite when I look back. Loved the NPCs, loved the tension between the party members, loved exploring the body horror of what had been done to Occtis. Everything about it is peak to me.

(but I am a horror fan, so I suppose that needs to be taken into account)

But first we start with a flashback. 18 years ago (less than a year into his marriage with Aranessa), Thjazi Fang came to his brother with a crisis of morality. Just to do a quick age check: at this time, Occtis was two years old, Azune was ten, Julien and Wick were eleven years old.

Wicander would get to be a sheltered child throughout the Falconer's Rebellion, while both Azune and Julien would become soldiers in it.

The fact that Bolaire is LITERALLY a "subhumanoid" person is literally the ONLY thing some of yall have against him. He kills human traffickers and genocidal maniacs and so far only in self defense despite literally being created only to kill and be put away after he was made, he is a theatre mask weapon turned theatre producer and so Taliesin gave him charisma based spells that a director would have and some are freaky and violent and Bolaire didn't pick what magic he got, and he made the guy who was cutting up people's souls with his brother watch as his brother was killed by the person that was supposed to be their next victim unable to step in to save him because of his greed destroying him from the inside out.

Self defense, being *made* as a theatre mask weapon, appreciation for dark poetic justice. NOT inherently a serial murderer, intentionally of his choice manipulative, and an evil sadist. Like if that's what an evil murdering sadist is, 90% of every character in every dnd campaign and action movie is an evil murdering sadist.

Also, we KNOW that Bolaire doesnt just use whoever he wants whenever he wants, Misha was not told to put him on and Bolaire needed to be a part of the conversation and figure out covering his tracks before letting the party decide whether they carried him out of the city or found him a vessel. He literally never once has acted entitled to WHOEVER. He in fact has only chosen one of his hosts to our knowledge, and that was still out of two people he was given the options of and he chose the body that would be most similar to the one he had not chosen for himself. He is not "picking bodies that are the perfect height for Hal to lean on" he isn't fucking picking them at all???

The fact that he has had no way to be supported by a group of friends who take turns allowing him freedom for a few hours at a time rather than relying on the lowlifes that will try to kill and steal him is in fact Thjazi's fault if Bolaire was going to reach out for help through Hal, which I truly believe he was going to do and that's why Bolaire's so upset that Bolaire finally trusted someone but Thjazi wouldn't let him. Even if not, given that Bolaire was being threatened into silence with the people he trusted, the fact either way is that Bolaire has not been able to progress to a healthier and less violent coping mechanism for the things he needs to exist as a person with free will, and this is by and large because Thjazi literally believed Bolaire to be less of a person than himself and Hal, and that has not been disputed in canon whatsoever by anyone including Thimble and Azune. The closest we got was Thimble trying to say *Bolaire knew* Thjazi didn't literally own him, not that Thjazi never claimed to.

As for the rotting food being proof that Bolaire is intentionally not feeding the bodies regularly, Bolaire is explicitly based on dissociation and specifically derealization, and I deal with that so what did I think of? There is in fact a bag of celery in my fridge from last summer because whenever I genuinely think about forcing myself to finally clean up that beyond rotting food I dissociate so hard that I lose hours, and I also would then forget to eat and fill up my food storage with rotting food that I didnt know how to bring myself to deal with and it got so bad that I lost 40lbs in 2 months living alone and this is a big reason why I live with my dad and am considered an adult dependent instead of being solo and on disability benefits. I eat upstairs, not down in my basement apartment. Also, he was on a rotting body that had been grey for MONTHS. gee I wonder how much food a mask thinks a person goes through in a month and whether he'd feed a ROTTING BODY??? There's potentially 90+ days of food there because that's how long he was on a dead body not because he was torturing Aubrus Drime like he tortures all his other bodies. Bolaire is living with a bunch of rotting food in his house because he has to pretend to be something he isn't or people will either effectively kill him by putting him in a museum as an exhibit or fucking destroy him. And people are looking at that and, knowing it's a dissociation and derealization thing, and saying it's him torturing a person but he can't be the victim because Bolaire's not a person he's just a thing?

Yall can say that he needs a new way to have his freedom and talk about his cold butchering of the first body and discuss whether the fact that he kills a living being to sustain his own life isnt analogous to eating because he doesnt need to do it if he just rotates bodies frequently enough and whether that's forced veganism because Bolaire's subhuman or why you think it isn't, but you do NOT need to misrepresent Bolaire simply because you don't see him as equal to the humanoid players. There's so many interesting discussions raised by Bolaire's character, especially philosophical discussions. It's absolutely the opposite of uninteresting, and imo it only can be considered uninteresting if what youre actually saying is that saying he's analogous to minorities flattens his story rather than adds depth to explore.

Is Bolaire enough of a person to deserve autonomy and life is not a question we as the audience should be asking. Taliesin is a player, we're not going to come to the conclusion Taliesin's character is inherently evil and was always going to have to die, especially in a campaign so explicitly centric around the concept lf breaking free from slavery. Ask instead what does the fact that Bolaire IS a person entitle him to do in order to live a free and autonomous life?

Does Bolaire being a person entitle him to eat and therefore does that entitle him to kill? How must he kill for it to be considered ethical eating if his sole "edible" food source is humanoids and he does require it? How does this morally differ from eating either a carnivorous diet or even a herbivorous diet, especially in a world with Awaken and speak with metal? How frequently can one kill if it's to improve their health as opposed to bare necessity? We know that Bolaire feels better on fresher bodies, but he can go months on a dead or dying body and potentially longer if he feeds it properly, so does he have a duty of care to his body's autonomy and does it come above or below his own? What happens if he has a disagreement with his host, who gets final say on their combined action? What is the burden on the host to keep wearing the mask until Bolaire can be transferred? Is there one at all? How do we equate his position to the real world equivalencies and what does that mean about how we see dependent minorities and eugenics?

“I'd like to kill your father, if that's all right with you. Get in line. Yeah, but I'm going to do it with his own knife.”-Wick/Occtis

(C4E7) (C4E31)

The only two characters he seems to have had prior relationships with outside of Thjazi are Bolaire and Thimble, which we know that Bolaire is his dealer and he had some kind of bad experience with Tyranny she keeps bringing up where he started crying that Bolaire is aware of, so it makes sense for him to not want to get very cozy with people he absolutely cannot risk being vulnerable in front of.

He also just had the second worst day of his life hanging around with Bolaire and Tyranny, but also Wick, which then makes Occtis the only other person from a noble house he's around right now (and Julien is a bit of a snob). Julien and Occtis also both very much have their worldviews shaped by the broader caste system they were raised in, so they are the most similar in how they speak to and interact with others. They speak the same language in a way even Wick doesn't because he was raised so religious that the way he was raised to engage with other people is very different from how the children of the other houses seem to behave.

Occtis also knows better than to push Julien, because their upbringings were similar enough that they both understand not to ask questions the other one doesn't want to answer. Occtis has previously been pretty meek anyway, but he's also just not a person who is going to ask Julien about his trauma responses because he doesn't want to invite Julien to ask about his. This part of the dynamic is subject to change fairly easily, but at this moment I think they're both way more interested in dealing with the right now than they are the past or future.

Julien did try to bond with the other martials, but then pretty quickly realized that they had all been on the other side of the Falconers Rebellion and were close friends of Thjazi, so he can't default into the only other world he's comfortable in (being a soldier) which means he's retreated back to being a noble, putting him squarely back in Occtis's orbit. Plus Occtis doesn't have the same deep connection with Thjazi most of the others do. Thimble and Azune will get defensive and angry if Julien talks shit, the worst Occtis gets is annoyed because while he's grateful to Thjazi and I think feels indebted to him, it's not that deep love some of the others have.

Then throw that in Aranessa is gone which puts Julien at sixes and sevens because he doesn't have his anchor of being able to protect someone (his liege, his subordinates, etc) but Occtis is someone who is smaller and physically weaker and hey he's a noble! So Julien can default back into his comfort zone - the thing he was literally raised from the cradle to do.

I also think that proximity to Occtis desensitized him to the dead thing, plus his field trip with Bolaire where he's like "never mind I think I prefer the horror that is within my comprehension" have helped. But also, he has (for lack of a better term) forgiven Occtis for what his family did. After the thing with Tertia and seeing what the Tachonis are comfortable doing to their own children, he's warmed up to him and I think it's because it allowed him to start seeing Occtis as another victim.

In a big way, Occtis is the only tether Julien has to his old life right now. He's an heir with no house, a soldier with no battle, an instructor with no students, and a knight with no liege. He can easily slot Occtis into at least one of those roles in a way that allows him to continue with a familiar pattern of how to interact with the world: he's shielding Occtis the way he had done with Aranessa because Aranessa isn't here and Occtis is the only one he can rationalize doing that to.

"My life is in your hands." (C4E22)

It's so interesting to me that Teleghen wasn't (at first glance) monstrously evil like I kind of expected. The artesans seem largely content, working hard for a giant corporation to be sure, but not ridiculously exploited.

However, I think it so telling that when their employees start pushing back against the system, even in a very small way, the benign facade starts dropping. Honestly, "pushing back" is too strong of a term; really it was just exerting agency in any way. Chee (and Hannah and Ikat before her) were trying to do something something small, that would have been a net positive for everyone.

And for, as far as we know, no other reason than it wasn't fully in pursuit of profit and and Teleghen wants to clamp down on employee agency (and "you don't leave while you are still profitable," but Chee wasn't even suggesting she leave), they respond to this tiny proposed change with a decisiveness and harshness that eventually made violent revolt the only way forward.

This feels very telling and relevant to our world. There are absolutely corporations and systems dealing in monstrous, obvious evil. But often it looks like Teleghen. If you never even give the illusion of "stepping out of line," you can often go with the flow and not encounter the ugly, violent underbelly of a system. But even one toe outside of expected boundaries, even or especially when you are trying to make positive change, can lay bare the violence and coercion at the heart of a system.

Welcome to our fair city. I hope that you enjoy your stay.

the more he respects or admires or loves a person, the more i think he falls in the mistake of trying to present himself as who he thinks they'd like him to see. for thjazi he was the useful asset, for members of the torn banner he wants them to see a grown reliable soldier after all these years. he was very focused on protecting hal now that thjazi isn't there to keep him out of this anymore, and luis has mentioned on multiple accounts that he tries to keep a lot of the person he was for thjazi hidden. he keeps bringing up to murray, who has very strong morals and convictions, that this, who he's pretending to be, isn't him.

comparing it to vaelus, who they had a very important scene together but don't really know each other. that this was the language of his people. or bolaire, who at best they knew each other in passing prior to the schemers arc. he gets his questioning about people and things. his more philosophical questions in general. he gets the correct pronunciation of his name. the less he feels like there are expectations, in a way, of him the more he expresses himself more easily.

his way of attempting to gain julien's trust i think is very telling on his attempt to maintain trust with everyone. 'i will tell the story you chose to tell.' he rarely corrects or contradicts people. he's suppressed his individuality or myriad of reasons. he is to be useful always, for what people need of him. and it shows why his relationships are either so fractured or distant. he does have a hand in creating that distance without realising it.

It's unclear exactly how putting Termina into the Coffin of Olbalad would transform her into a plowshare in the Cloak's original plan, since our local godkilling queen is on the loose and still very much wants to kill gods, but maybe that means it simply didn't work. Maybe because Termina is sentient and didn't agree, she could not be "transformed" from her original purpose/nature without her consent. If that's the case, I think that's fitting. It reinforces the sentience of the Panto masks and that the Cloak did not fully understand their nature.

Bringing this around to Bolaire: a plowshare is a powerful weapon whose purpose is transformed from destructive to creative/cultivative, and by doing so gains new power. And anyone can make plowshares. Shadia transformed the god-killing Pariah Blades into plowshares by painting them and making them harmless props in a momentously inspiring stage play. If Bolaire could truly accept the fact of his own personhood and agency - actually believe it - he would be materially transcending his original design as solely a god-killing weapon. Bam! Plowshare who also happens to also be a little guy. And in this unique event where a plowshare is also a person with thoughts and feelings, rather than an inert configuration of materials, it makes sense that what would transform is how he thinks/acts as opposed to how he is "used". Choosing to build a bridge to free dead souls is also creative rather than destructive. Making the choice to participate in that could make him a plowshare even if he's still figuring himself out internally.

As I write this, I was just hit over the head with the realization that Brennan is pointing at Bolaire to be the plowshare, too, in literal neon colors. Per Mara, the Coffin of Olbalad is "the paint" in the trinity of plowshares needed for the bridge-building ritual (a halfling Panto mask the second, a demonic anchor is the third). Mara and Thjazi originally put the pieces of Termina inside the coffin, intending her to be the plowshare. The magically painted Bolaire-and-Figment (technically created of a plowshare themselves!) traveled to the surface of the coffin and wanted to get in. Painted!Bolaire also rejoices and says he's not alone, prodding Bolaire to look at how he as a person fits into the world and community around him.