---

stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.

died and came back wrong and no one could tell the difference

died and came back wrong but only to myself. died and came back and nobody noticed i died. died and people think i came back better. died and came back wrong only in a specific sense of "wrong". died and fought like hell to come back and everyone thinks it was easy. died and came back mentally wrong and physically fine and tearing myself apart from the inside. died and hiding everything that went wrong. died and trying so hard to show what is wrong and nobody notices.