#wardblogging

i bald faced lied the other day when i said sveta and rain had the coolest combo move in ward. the TRUE coolest are:

- sveta latching onto the simurgh like a kraken and clockblocker freezing her to create a giant cage of tendrils around the simurgh’s head

- solarstare pouring superheated liquid INTO the simurgh while byron freezes her from the outside

- VICKY AND RAIN FUCKING CUTTING THE SIMURGH IN HALF. on a day where rain’s power is so weak he can’t even throw the blades. remember back when he got his ass kicked in a fight with his unpowered uncle?? and now he’s out here chopping endbringers in half???? my fuckin dude

i love that we get gilpatrick as an objective set of eyes as he clears rain’s house. i feel like in his interludes, rain was really good at letting a LOT of that fallen fucked upness slide right off of him and it’s refreshing and heartbreaking to see gilpatrick move through that same space, 15 arcs later, taken aback and deeply unsettled by the everyday horror that rain must’ve lived through in the years he was with the fallen. 

i’ve talked about this before but wildbow is so good at doing the thing where he writes mundanity interspersed with just. gut wrenching horror. the fallen house that looks *almost* normal except for the framed photo of the near-corpse on the dresser and the “spare the child” paddle hanging on the wall. gilpatrick’s thoughts about his old home life interspersed with memories of cage people and quadruple amputees and dredging a kid up from the bottom of a lake. the dream where he’s shopping for paintings with his girlfriend and she holds one up for him to see, and it’s a painting of a forensics team excavating lucky break from a concrete-filled barrel. the scene of love lost talking happily with her daughter about wizardy powers, with a voiceover describing how she wants to slice rain open and feel his guts hot between her fingers. horrible!!!! awful!!! i hate it!! i love it!! i literally had a nightmare last night!! thanks wildbow!!!

love lost jumping in to fight off the shard wolf when rain was injured. love lost risking her life, grabbing rain by the scruff of the neck and hauling him to safety. the guy who she blames for her daughter’s death! the death that she just saw play again fresh in her mind right before this started! and she chooses to save him. a truly beautiful culmination of her character arc that i honestly wasn’t sure if we’d see her achieve. a million things i could try to say about her but i think the WGW guys really sum it up well: “Nothing exemplifies the moment of her growth more than comparing her action in the dream room against her dream room monster to Cradle and his. Cradle stood by and watched his monster, his trauma, strike out and destroy those around him. Love Lost, on the other hand, says “no”. She steps in and faces her trauma directly, faces down the manifestation of her mistakes, of her choices, of every moment she prioritized her job over her daughter. She faces that down and screams in its face, and tries to save everyone else. It’s just this perfect comparison showing how one character didn’t grow, and the other did.”