whar

mmmmmmmmm,,,, vault elder I mean hi

alt!calliope is technically more “successful” than calliope. she’s stronger, smarter, less vulnerable. she dominates caliborn and takes his blood color, instead of the other way around; she’s a fully realized god tier, and in the end, she’s in large part responsible for the success of the session. she creates the new world. she saves everybody. and yet she clearly isn’t happy. she is calliope without any of calliope’s self-consciousness issues, the calliope that calliope wishes she was, but that isn’t enough. it’s chilling: no matter how “useful” or technically capable calliope is, the feelings of emptiness and despair remain. maybe she’ll always feel that way. 

even more brutally, alt!calliope literally tells her that she doesn’t serve any purpose except to prompt others to be helpful. she says flat-out that calliope isn’t “relevant” anymore.

that’s got to be incredibly hard for callie to hear, given how desperate she’s always been to help others. being trapped in a state of passivity for most of her life, not even always in control of her own body, calliope clings dearly to the hope of someday reclaiming agency, and helping others. that hope probably resonated with a lot of the audience, too. to hear a more confident, more successful, more competent version of herself tell her that she isn’t useful at all is a brutal move. for someone with depression, especially, that could be a devastating thing to hear.

except here’s where the conversation shifts. instead of using this to insult calliope, alt!calliope turns this into something else, something uplifting: she says that not only is calliope’s irrelevance not a mark of her character, but that it gives her a unique and incredible opportunity. 

alt!calliope’s speech rejects the idea of an existence defined by one’s utility to others, and says instead that regardless of how useful calliope is, regardless of whether she realizes her full potential, and regardless of how much she contributes to some epic scheme, her life still has worth. the very fact of her existence gives her infinite opportunities to take chances and do things that alt!calliope, for all her competence, never could. 

it speaks to a very deeply rooted fear in a lot of people, i think: that somewhere out there is an alternate version of yourself that’s done everything right, and done everything better than you, and anything you do is fruitless because it’ll never be as good as it could be. that sentiment generates a lot of despair and self-loathing, and can make it hard to get motivated to do things you love. alt!calliope is that person, for callie, but this conversation says that it doesn’t matter. this conversation says that the one crucial difference between you and that theoretical person is this: you exist. you have the chance and the choice to do whatever you want. even if it isn’t perfect, even if it isn’t grandiose, even if you never change the world. your life is enough. you are enough.