Silmarillisms

i find this super interesting because of some of the side effects of DOOMS. according to the wiki:

DOOMS has severe drawbacks, however, since all sufferers experience extremely distressing nightmares of a singularly apocalyptic theme, which can cause or exacerbate mental illness. While sufferers are more resistant to chiralium exposure than normal humans, they are not immune, and higher levels of DOOMS may precipitate the erratic, suicidal, or homicidal tendencies of the Homo Demens.

demens being a popular/widely used term for terrorists even before higgs begins to make a name for himself as their de facto leader is interesting. i wish that we had more interactions with DOOMS sufferers, cause there are many questions i have regarding it that i'd love to have answered. i wonder if it is not uncommon for sufferers to die early, either via suicide or other causes.

another thing i find interesting is that it was the demens pre-higgs, not higgs himself, who developed the tactic of using corpses themselves as bombs. there are more than a couple times in both games where it is spoken about how the average person is very afraid of going outside in fear of causing a voidout and that humanity is becoming increasingly isolated because of this.

Terrorists, separatists, isolationists— all these folks claim "America" is coming for their freedom. That the old guard wants to put them in chains, make the individual subservient to the collective. They ask what's it all for in a post-Stranding world, when today's triumph is tomorrow's crater.

listening to troy read this is interesting, because even with him reading it, it's hard to tell what higgs thinks of this. i find that interesting given that higgs takes such a sharp turn. at this point, he's not even found fragile (that's next journal). he's just a porter, working with a partner (again...next journal) and just truckin' along.

honestly, though...the demens do have something of a point. not to be all conspiracy theorist and shit but america is...well. y'all saw the game. i don't trust bridges as far as i can throw 'em, even now after 2 or 3 rewatches of ds1. i think a lot of it comes down to having good intentions to begin with and just stepping a bit too far.

makes me wonder about amelie, a little.

Daddy used to spout the same tired lines. Said America never did nothing for nobody. That's why we took to living in a shelter. "Better down in the hole than out there under their thumb." Yeah, he was a real saint, my daddy.

yeah, you can say that again, higgsy. (emphasis mine)

so before i got laid off back in june, i worked for a company that basically did survival shit. freeze-dried food, solar powered products like generators and flashlights, shit like that. honestly, originally it was geared towards campers and hunters that stayed out in the woods for several days at a time. by the time i started back in late 21, it was almost entirely preppers, conspiracy theorists, and people whose beliefs generally (but not always, i will admit) ran very right-wing.

(which was funny cause half the company itself was queer, the owners had a trans daughter and donated to democrats, which was all on record and how it didn't get out, i have no idea lmfao)

when we first started watching ds and when i first learned about higgs's daddy, i joked to finn that he was probably one of my old customers.

look, i have spoken ad nauseam about daddy and the canonical and fanonical abuse higgs has suffered under his hands. i don't reckon i need to rehash it and i reckon y'all are about tired of reading my shit about it, lmfao. so i won't.

Tried to run a few times, but he'd just drag me back inside, kicking and screaming, where he'd put those heavy hands of his to work and remind me what'd happen if I disrespected his authority. But that's love, isn't it? His way of looking after an orphan child he raised as his own. He was only trying to protect me from the evils of the outside world.

emphasis mine. yeah.

I owe him my life— and my powers, too. First time I ever sensed a BT was when I held him, moments before he went necro. Just like when I dumped that prepper's body. My daddy showed me that corpses are precious, powerful things. They're so much more than bombs. Terrorists ought to treat them with proper respect.

another tick on the "higgs is a repatriate" here, i think at least. if he was still around daddy when daddy's BT/ka came to the body, then surely that meant a voidout? i'll admit to not fully understanding how the voidouts work but i feel like that's a recipe for one.

i wonder about the "precious, powerful things" line a lot tbh. there's something there, something in that line, but i can't quite decide what it is. did daddy literally show him this by going necro and blowing up literally in higgs's face, thereby showing higgs that he was a repatriate? if so, then why did he, in later journals, disbelieve that sam (who categorically IS a repatriate) would survive a voidout? and what could they be other than bombs in a post-stranding world, where the only options are to incinerate them or to sink them in a tarpit?

i'd love to know. there's something there in those couple lines but damned if i know what. i'm telling you, i'd about kill for a chance to sit down with kojima and ask him these questions one day.