#popgo

1. just me sorry

- animal (large cat/polar bear/orca)

- ik he's gender:unknown and in his case i parse that less as he/they and more as he/it

- trained itself to behave properly in order to receive chunks of meat; intimately familiar with etiquette but will still eat any idiot that wanders into the enclosure out of opportunistic instinct

- not necessarily suited to be an onmyouji but huge and buff enough (and clawed enough) to compensate for any lack of talent. can you imagine if it had decided to seek power through something less detail-oriented and reliant on rules as onmyoudou? if it had chosen animalistic violence instead?

- chose the path of adhering to strict rules because it has something to prove through the refined approach, so it humbly requests that you stay out of the enclosure and do not place your head in its jaws

- would probably blush if you listed all this out

realest imageset on earth btw

you could stick your fingers in his mouth just to watch his eyes bug out while he tries not to chomp em. and afterwards he will politely request that you operate with more restraint in the future so that you don't die, because if he were to snap and bite down in that instant he would probably immediately start eating the rest of you too.

no matter how excited he gets [with you close to him] you don't really need to be afraid. it's when his face loses all expression in the middle of whatever you're doing that he's about to bite your head off without realizing it.

i don't think oberon is compelled to lie about everything intrinsically. if you ask him coffee or tea he can pick one. if you ask him what color the sky is he can tell you blue. if you ask him who won the superbowl, he's not googling it just to make sure he gets it wrong.

vocabulary for this post

vortigern: abyssal worm that destroys and loathes

faerie king: who he pretends to be

oberon: both/neither, just the fastest way to refer to the unit as a thinking being/practical reality

the nature of his lies comes from his existence as a walking contradiction. the faerie king is perfectly suited to faerie britain on the surface - he's friendly and silly and popular, and he enjoys playing pranks and entertaining people. he's never experienced any major loss like murian has, and he's as loyal to his wife as aurora is to melusine. the fairie king as presented by shakespeare doesn't have anything substantial going on between his ears. || the destroyer of faerie britain has always been disgusted by every part of it. he's keenly aware of how it was made; he's the will of britain trying to kill itself rather than limping along as this colossal parody propped up by moronic culture thieves. and just like the place itself, he's being paraded about as some kind of clown - hell, a cheater to boot. he's a walking insult to his own dignity, and he will only feel peace when it's all been blown to pieces.

this of course creates his cynicism. his experiences on the surface befriending the welsh forest faeries allowed him to feel real love for parts of this place, which heightened his disgust for all of it. surely he lamented in an irreconcilable way when barghest, the monster he created, [destroyed part of britain] and killed the friends he had made. and as his perspective becomes more disjointed in a way that can be understood, it all becomes even shakier when you add in that the faerie king is inherently unreliable, frankly just insubstantial - because any strong emotions the faerie king expresses are written to be ploys and no more, the being that is oberon-vortigern cannot voice sadness or anger, lest they be taken for the faerie king's crocodile tears. forget feeling responsible and conflicted, he can't even grieve because his strongest emotions are labelled tricks as soon as he shows them.

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beyond that, it's really important to remember that oberon is an actor. he describes "the faerie king" as a character many times (titania too!), but you and he are not side characters - he calls the two of you spectators, i.e. not actively serving as characters at all. when he is participating, he plays a role. when he is with you, even though he as a person is still tricking you, he's not going out of his way to act like a silly faerie king and entertain you. it might be easier to understand this if you think about what he was pretending to be for you: a PHH faerie fitting in as a lostworld faerie. he's undercover, and even though the guy you talk to is still a faerie king, he's here with a more serious mission that differs from his public face.

him being an actor is crucial for how he was summoned in the first place. vortigern is a writhing mass of hatred for what britain has become. it can't love britain. it can't belong in britain. things that don't belong in faerie britain, like holmes and nemo, are weakened there. if it's going to enter britain, it needs a body that won't hate britain. it will hire itself as an actor to play "the faerie king," and read its lines dutifully. this isn't something vortigern manifested before doing and decided upon, it's something that had to happen as a premise of the summoning itself, to allow vortigern to manifest at all. for the duration of oberon's existence, from summoning til nonexistence, he is there as an actor. that includes while he's being vortigern. look at vortigern's sprite: do you see where his bug feet and bug hand connect to his body? not clearly, no! hell, his legs actually black out so we can't see whether the pants cover insect legs or turn into props. they appear to be melded to his clothes, but those aren't gloves and shoes. they're connected to his body, but they're something as removable as an actor's prosthetic.

all that is to say, [vortigern] [is an actor playing] [oberon] is a statement without removable parts. all that can happen is shifting the order into [oberon] [is an actor playing] [vortigern]. and just like the faerie king's love for the welsh forest faeries was just lines read off a script by vortigern, vortigern's vitriolic disgust for those same faeries is just lines read off a script by oberon. if the "actor" part was optional, vortigern's body would be a hell of a lot more fucked up.

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i've previously likened oberon to an experience i have when i'm discussing something i dearly love with people who also love it, but i mention something i really hate about it. for me, this happens because i get nervous, but i end up panicking and trying to reassure my friends that i really do like the thing in question. so, i end up walking away feeling dissatisfied: i either didn't properly convey my unhappiness with That One Thing, or i did a disservice in expressing how much i love the overall product. when this happens, i feel i haven't done justice to myself.

i don't think oberon has self confidence issues (though obviously he does hate himself), so he's not going through it the way i am. but it's also true that when he's talking about things that really count, nothing he says can do justice to the multifaceted emotions he has about things. furthermore, the automatic devaluing of his most emphatic statements that comes from him being the faerie king is incredibly disheartening.

his options are either be noncommittal and insubstantial, or be sarcastic and dismissive. he's black and white in one, but not grey, instead a checkerboard. he's the ultimate "and" statement. to force an opinion out of him is to pin him to one side, but since the other side isn't less true, whatever he says becomes false. if you use a command spell to make him only speak the whole truth, he will fall silent.

and we go forward with the resolve to defeat morgan. maybe we can't reach her with our ideals. maybe we'll be very lucky and somehow spark an impossible glimmer of recognition in her eyes at the very end. but we need to put her to justice, and it'll be the first kind death she's ever had, because unlike before she'll be killed by people who really understand and empathize with her. it'll be a tragedy, but a poetic one, and there will be justice. that's why mash went back in time, narratively, in the first place. to meet aesc.

and i think the beauty of that setup is that we as readers fall to the exact same thing that aesc keeps falling for. we just expect it to be better. it'll be a little different this time, because we were there. do you think aesc is stupid? that she just said "better luck next time" every time they beheaded her? no. every century, she encountered someone or something that made her wonder if things could change. she never expected much from them (she told mash there has never been a faerie that understood her), but maybe this time her death would make a little bit of sense. maybe this time one person would send her off with a smile.

we assume that this will be a sad story. so does aesc, every time. but it's not a sad story. it's a mad story. there is always some spark of a coherent narrative forming around aesc - she's a sane faerie with a prophetic calling. and that spark will always be trampled, and she will always be torn apart by wild animals. you thought guda and mash could bring her to justice. maybe morgan's story permits justice, but aesc's story does not. you would never have gotten there in time. she was always going to be torn limb from limb by people with no respect for her. they were always going to forget her by the next day.