#katerina

katerina saburova so compelling we should talk about her more. please. the insane juxtaposition between her and the two other mistresses -- which is to say, the ghosts of nina and victoria as they exist in the game. they're never depicted as anything but larger-than-life, their actions are described as the actions of squabbling gods or figures from old fairytales, not women who were alive 10 years ago. they're only ever visualized in those ways, too, in huge statues and mural-sized paintings. i can imagine their designs, easily, but not how they might look as 3D, normal human models, standing next to victor or big vlad or their children. there isn't a single painting of katerina, the 3rd mistress, hanging up in any of the games, but plenty of nina and victoria. she's a human described against the backdrop of myths. she's just a mortal, and those two are immortalized in the collective memory. her followers are criminals, the forgotten, and those who have been outcast even from the group of iconoclast outcasts. unlike nina or victoria, she's not beloved or feared enough to be immortalized in the greater collective consciousness. and she can't even produce her own heir, whether to ensure the partial immortality of her existence in that way, or to ensure that her presumably-inherited role amongst the mistresses is perpetuated into the next generation alongside maria and victoria jr. katerina had to get hers from the earth. and everyone is saying there's something wrong with what she brought back from the earth, too. peter gossiping about her sleeping with mummified corpses and rats. she's 30, maybe 35 and she's already getting treated like she's on her way out, she's the oldest living woman in the game. per canon, she couldn't decide whether to be nina or victoria, or a separate distinction, between human and immortal, not that any of them are even human to begin with.