arthur 🌈🖐️🐸

after we wrote all those deep thematic essays out of nowhere yesterday, this was today's scarlet hollow analysis between artie and me LOL

art criticism contains multitudes--

couple commissions are open! 3 slots are available. to claim a slot please email me at kanzler190@gmail.com. thanks!

Book one designs!! #gideontheninth #thelockedtomb

a collage of three of my digital illustrations Left : Cover illustration for "Out of True" by Rien Gray. Two hands are holding onto a disintegrating sword, a dark forest in the background. Middle : A digital illustration of two people holding hands (actually dancing but it's not clear in the painting). One hand is pale and blueish, with long dark claws. The other hand is more human-like and veiny, with some deep scars further down the arm. There's also a frame made of gnarly branches, with the image of a crow, a snake and the crescent moon engraved in the wood. Right : A digital illustration of hands clutching a sword, surrounded by vegetation. One of the hands has a stylized dragon tattoo on the wrist.

hands👏 hands👏 hands👏 hands👏

Genuinely one of my favorite modern poems. Incredibly moving. I have to reread it every time it comes across my timeline

A purple haired elf knight wails on her guitar,, I hope you’re ready to be destroyed 🎸🎸🎸 Prepare yourself for more of my bard warriors 😁💕

Bard Knight 01 🛡️
Dost thou shred? 🎸

requiem for vanished birdsong

sean did you have to agonise me in this way

Whether the tragedy is aborted or not (hah hah) is flexible (well, at least in whether they Live and acknowledge who they are to each other already) and so is the future of smaller, lower stakes things. The community garden can always be used so long as it stands, an outstretched hand can be grabbed

GET you it. It's halfway there, which here is as good as nowhere at all. But ironically they have both reached for each other and... up until a moment where it's almost too late, they don't realise they've been missing each other's hands ;;

It is not enough that Orange Julius (lol) reaches to be nurtured by someone who wants them to live, who is happy to sacrifice for them, because they cannot cross that distance alone. The tragedy in the lives of both these people is they didn't want to be alone, but wanting companionship can't

These are two isolated people with an innate spirit for kindness and community that isn't fostered by THE Community of Scarlet Hollow, by the microcosm of society in the little town that no one can leave. It is not enough that they reached out when no one reached back.

Yesss. I think it's such a meaningful little metaphor that Avery has constructed this beautiful community garden but in their loneliness is also the only one to have contributed... save for Julius, similarly lonely, who quietly contributes when he hears it needs something without wanting thanks.

Actually I'm gonna add - the mining disaster was, arguably, the most Preventable by regular means if she had any knowledge of why it occurred imparted to her. Obviously the Cassandra of it all is possible but... she doesn't even TRY the non-mystical route! That's how engrained she is with Exception.

How enfranchised might the people around Sybil have been (in Scarlet Hollow as we've seen it) if she wasn't... running around up to Some Shit and keeping people in the dark? What Daughter descendent might she have met if she'd used her visions to rally community power and not her own.

On the face of it, it could have been a relatively sloppy "you were aaaall about collective good until you had to kiss your Individual goodbye, hmmm?" gotcha but it just ISN'T, because the dilemma is rooted in Individualism/Exceptionalism! It came pre-poisoned with power-coalescence... LITERALLY.

She's the omelas child that could walk free at any time, but inflicts the pain themselves through a mix of Obligation but also... a lack of trust? In the resilience of their community, of their ability to band together and tackle strife and disaster. It's so interesting!!!

But... everyone bearing a small burden so that One Person doesn't bear an impossibly huge one is what community is for. It's not only saving Kaneeka, but freeing Sybil from the endless Obligation Pit she's in.

Unlike bringing a casserole to a party though it's... messier and heavier and won't be as clean. Maybe you're a bad cook or someone is about to discover they had an undiagnosed but extremely fatal green bean allergy?

...I said that as a joke but actually it is!! Instead of one person feeding every guest, the guests all share the burden of feeding the group!! The potluck is the secret tool that'll help us save Scarlet Hollow.

If the Hollow can be saved and salvaged at all - not just in a doom-to-life way but more existentially as a town built by colonial capitalist who fought, canonically, to continue owning slaves - there is a whole community who could fight for it. Potluck-maxxing is praxis.

And we are of course lead into it with Avery and Julius and even without mechanically having an option it prompts you to ask "why Bo, if he didn't want it. Why JUST one of you, if the load can be shared by the willing". And then Sybil says "because sometimes the One is special". And... fuck that!!

She hears the toll but doesn't attend the funeral or read the obituary. She takes the moral obligation but not the connection. She throws the clod, made of her own hands, into the sea and says "the continent is safe at least". ARGH.

I will always circle around No Man Is An Island as a favourite poem (primarily because I'm not much of a poem-reader) but in this case I can see Sybil pointing to it like "See! I hear it toll and I do my duty as part of the main!!!" but she's not! She's an island!!

and the person is the same. Much like every choice in the game (and life) we don't know what that'll mean, especially without the trait save, but it really is so pointed that Sybil's story never really implies a connection with those she saves.

Kaneeka for her part is the perfect foil for Sybil's disconnectedness: she returned to Scarlet Hollow and sacrificed so much for HER FAMILY. Not faceless numbers or a moral standard, but people she knew and cared for. The choice to save Her in a moment where we can see the consequence

"How can I argue about the worth of the Lives of the Masses if I can ever easily look in the eyes of one and say 'right now, the worth of your live is nothing'. If one life can weigh nothing, it will still weigh nothing when multiplied." I think that's a key part of her not seeing "humans" too.

But even then, there's a different sort of guilt to holding your daughter and telling her "okay, yes, I accept that it's your burden to bear". No matter how the morals shake out in a Utilitarian frame you always have to ask:

This time she's chosen her daughter Existing over the lives of the miners. But she remembers all the Daughters she didn't choose now - their faces so similar - and now has to reckon with the weighing of their worth. The only one she might remember without guilt being the First, who begged for this.

I'm going to have to Write A Thought and then keep reading, then Write Another because I fear I'll forget them as I go lol but YES that superposition of faces... I see it also as the consequence of pulling back from the sunk cost fallacy after you've indulged it too...