GLORY & GORE (ap)

so uh. i see myself in a lot of villains because listen, i’m horrible. this may come as a revelation to many of you and i realize this might not be the best thing to say after all of my friends are #Rekt over lotor being a bag of shit but yeah uh….here’s another good person ruined i guess. i fantasized about killing people. i fantasized about killing my abusive parents. i fantasized about torturing people. i fantasized about triggering people i hate until they kill themselves from it. i’ve actually attacked my mom and threatened to kill her multiple times and back in january during my last suicide attempt i was 500000% ready to lure her down to the beach so i could kill both her and myself BUT LUCKILY THE COPS CAME and let me tell you in hindsight i’ve never been so glad to see those institutionally racist motherfuckers in my life. even though it’s been many months since i’ve had those thoughts/actions on a regular basis, i still get ridiculously attached to characters who do nasty, nasty things because um. relatable. extremely. when thanos said that life would be better if half of everybody died “dude i can relate” was literally my first reaction even though in my heart i also knew he was wrong.

but when i saw lotor. holy god damn hell. i fucking saw myself like never before. literally almost everything he’s done or been through, i’ve also done or been through and that remains the same even throughout season 6. physically abused as a child? check. told to dismiss part of my heritage? check. shitty parents? check. uh let’s see what else…lied a lot? i do that sometimes to people in positions of authority, check. lashed out against best friend for a betrayal? all the damn time. spied on by my mom? she’s insatiable, of course i’ve been and the reason i lash out at people is literally because they help her. handcuffed? been there, done that. temporarily lost sanity while tripping over power fantasies? unfortunately, i can relate. 

and then i saw the hope that he could be redeemed. that someone who was like myself could be redeemed. and i fucking latched onto that like a dying woman clutching at a straw because i, too, want to be redeemed. like honestly? despite me still occasionally wanting to kill my abusive mom, i still think i’m a better person than some people i’ve seen on this website. i’ve seen rapists, sexual harassers and racists on here and i still have enough morals to think they’re trash who deserve to get dragged like trash bags across a searing bed of concrete. and i mean i actually feel things?? for people like i obviously still care about my friends and i’ve seen people who can’t even pretend to do that so congrats to everybody who treats others like dirt for no good reason, you crossed a line that somebody who actually plotted to kill her own mom would never cross. (we could be up all night debating morals about how sometimes bad people can still have good morals but uh…for now just give me the benefit of the doubt here.) i feel like i’m getting my own redemption arc in my real life--i’ve had good pills, good therapy, and over the past few months i have grown to be the happiest i’ve ever been since the summer before college. even so, sometimes those thoughts sneak back in. throughout those months of improvement i still felt horrific urges to just dump my entire life over the rails and do something really, really stupid.

now since i can’t think of a better transition between paragraphs, here’s where lotor comes back in.

throughout those months there was also the fear that he wouldn’t choose the right path that he seemed like he was going down, the fear that he was going to throw it all away and crash and burn and be like the people who raised him. a fear that echoed that i would throw everything away and crash and burn and turn out worse than the people who raised me because i had come so close to doing just that. this was something that i fucking lost sleep over. and now that my worst fears have been more than confirmed, i…well at first i didn’t feel completely fucked up by it, but the more it set in the worse i started actually feeling because god fucking damnit it was like i just saw MYSELF choosing the wrong path YET AGAIN and it brought up all these terrible feelings and memories and i…………

for some reason there’s a part of me that likes that shit. i don’t know why but as someone who has lost control over myself before i can appreciate the accuracy. i will probably not be rewatching lotor’s sanity slippage anytime soon because holy fuck wow that reminds me of how i was back in january and sdflkgjfhdsds that is Triggering but there was legit another part of me that saw lotor go insane and ENJOYED it even while being HORRIFIED by it i basically went GOD DAMN FINALLY SOME GOOD FUCKING FOOD THEY PULLED THIS OFF SO WELL?????!!! because uh. once again. relatable. i’ll fight anyone who says he acted like a “caricature” (i legit saw this complaint in the lotor tag and i was like no) bc as a real person who has done something similar i can 3842398472389% assure you that’s basically how it went.

i hate that they did this to him.

i hate even more that they got it so right.

and i mean i’m still going to 5000000% have a verse where i play shitty canon lotor because i love playing twisted fucks who have a skewed sense of morals. i love playing them because and i will straight up say this--it’s cathartic since i get to do things that i can’t get away with in real life. but at the same time i also know what the consequences are if i choose to just throw it all away and self destruct and i find a weird sort of release in playing that too, maybe as some sort of reminder to myself that no it’s not okay to kill people or force them on their knees to beg me like i’m a god for mercy while i torture them and i have a lot of better things to do with my life than that. i know that if i do some fucked up shit i’m probably gonna 1) immediately regret it afterward or if i don’t, pay for it hugely and 2) have to live the rest of my life with that  but that sort of harsh lesson learned is not going to be his mainverse because just like investing in my own future through therapy and medicine, i’ve put too much energy investing in timelines for him where everything actually ends up either “all right” or at least “less bad than it could have been.”

so yeah tl;dr i actually kind of like what lotor turned out to be because canon lotor taps into my impulse to harm people and compulsively destroy everything good. but i also fucking hate what he was made into because it denies me my other equally strong (i would say somewhat stronger?) wish to protect good things and preserve them and see that everything turns out the way that it should be.