In case you were wondering

Cassida dedicating her life to helping the Prime Deities. Wanting to aid them in what she thought was a war they couldn't win. a genuine desire to SAVE the gods that she thought had saved mortals time and time again.

being told that she was wrong for it. being told that she didn't matter. that she didn't and couldn't understand. that she couldn't save her saviors because she was and would always be beneath them. being torn apart for the crime of being mortal and wanting to help.

thousands of years later. those same gods turning to mortals. to Bell's Hells. to a soul born of the world they stole and a weapon of the city they sundered. asking for aid. saying there's a power threatening us and we need your help to stop it. we're afraid. please save us. you're the only ones who can.

(a woman asks "are you worth saving?" and the sun doesn't answer. a healer reforged from the corpse of a weapon asks "are you worth saving?" and the goddess of change says "of course.")

Endless 4SD

Reminder that when Steven Universe ended with Steven managing to fix systemic injustice in Gem Society, people complained about it being naive and too easy and not satisfying enough.

Yup. Some people really think their mission in life is to be someone else's depression thoughts. "Oh, you had a happy thought? Fuck you! Here's why you should feel guilty for it.".

EXTREMELY telling that every argument that pearl-clutches about how everyone watching Downfall is justifying genocide and imperialism relies on the premise that a police state demanding the entire world recognize their might, with explicit intentions to destroy an entire class of sentient individuals (possibly the last of their kind left in the entire universe), is totally okay because the gods aren't really people; and somehow fails to notice that Dehumanize The Target is Step 1 in the Justifying Genocide playbook.

Ludinus: Look upon the vengeance of The Gods!

Downfall: Gods bickering like siblings

Ludinus: … well that’s no hang you guys I swear they’re awful beings.

Bells Hells: ….

orym (of course) not wanting to go. orym (of course) not wanting to follow ludinus. orym not faulting any of his friends for going, not faulting any of his friends for following. he’s not angry. he’s tired. he’s not going. he’s not following. fearne looking not at ludinus or to the others but to orym. fearne simply asking “orym?” fearne asking orym. fearne asking orym what he wants. what will he do? what will she do? orym telling fearne go ahead. you can go. it’s ok. I understand. you can go. go ahead. fearne not pushing, not pressuring. fearne not moving. fearne affirming she won’t go without him. fearne affirming she won’t go if orym won’t go. fearne telling orym I go where you go and fearne showing orym I don’t go where you don’t go. orym giving in because she’s his best friend. he goes where she goes. he follows her. she’s asking. she’s giving him a choice. she’s giving him his choice. she’s giving him her choice. she’ll stay if he stays. he’ll go where she goes. orym tells fearne “you’ll have to hold me up.” and they both know what that means. fearne picks orym up. orym lets fearne pick him up. fearne carries orym. they’re only following each other.

I’m largely happy with the Downfall party splits, except where they separate Emhira from Ash and Ayden. Ash because she needs something else to be sad about and Ayden because I think if we gave them another two hours alone together the Matron would call that tweenager Daddy in front of a mortal audience, just to be mean.

Erathis, back in her divine domain, having died but not before creating Icerock Key-to-Success Goodboy to take her place in the Most Important Mission in the History of Exandria, sipping tea:

"How do you like THEM apples?"

Wouldn't it be wild if Ashton saw/comprehended more of the Tengar part of the recording than everyone else because they've got dunamancy brain?

Like, part of the premise of that part of the episode is that a mortal consciousness is limited in its ability to comprehend the infinite unrealized potential that made up Tengar and the proto-gods. And dunamis is kind of exactly that, all potential and possibility, the things that are and could be and could have been.

And Ashton has dunamis all mixed up with his brain.

“you smell of death”

“thank you. you smell like fur.”

I cant wait till Chetney and Fearne call up Deanna and tell her all about human Pelor

Can you imagine if the BH spread the tale they witness as they travel and the stories spread. They may end up rehabbing a bunch of the Pantheon's*s reputation not on purpose but mostly on accident.

(Mostly on accident. Not entirely. Orym seems the type to pray after all of this even if just to chat up the Wildmother like a penpal about the ongoing situation.)

So something I'm kind of wondering about, just as a tangential thought, but:

What happens if you try to use the Factorum Malleus on Not-A-God?

Like, what if Aeor had the opportunity to fire their doomsday weapon at a rival city? Vasselheim comes to mind if Aeor had actually killed off the gods. Especially given their mantra of "You can't trust the gods, only trust in Aeor" and the fact that Vasselheim is their biggest competition as a powerufl pre-Calamity city.

We have been told by the divine rundown that the Factorum does not kill to allow for usurpment of a divine Domain. It will just straight up erase the god from existence, like what the Matron did to her predecessor but without elevating a replacement into position. It will be like they never were, much in the same way that the disaster at Tengar destroyed the other... proto-gods, let's call them.

So what happens if such a weapon is not used on higher beings of great potential?

I mean, the obvious answer is that they get erased from existence too. Because if a god can't survive it, nothing less powerful is likely to have the correct resistance to survive such a force.

And this question then morphs into how to set a target for the Factorum. Does it lock-on to a single creature/entity? Do you need a piece of that entity to set it as the target? Is it a pulse-wave on the correct wavelength to utterly destroy a certain type of energy within a certain radius? Is it a death laser and you need to lure the target into the kill zone?

If it is a laser or destructive pulse-wave, you can certainly turn it against entire populations. Cities or certain types of creatures, depending. And even locking-on to one entity doesn't guarantee that more won't be taken out as collateral damage depending on how the Factorum Malleus hits its targets.

And of course the most important question in this hypothetical:

Can the Factorum Malleus be used against not-gods?

If the answer to that question is yes, everyone is fucked. Why? Because all it takes is hitting Exandria itself with that weapon to doom everyone on the planet, because the planet doesn't exist anymore.

Like, yeah, at the end of the day the gods were trying to take out the Factorum Malleus to save their own asses. But if we're being honest, they were saving everyone else too. Because Aeor would have become an even greater tyrant with a weapon like that under their control. And that's assuming they don't fuck it up and erase everyone and everything from existence with it.

“I miss you, some days. I really do.”

“Why don’t you come find me? I don’t want to do this alone.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“If I promise to take care of you, can I torture you forever?”

“You already do”

(Brennan and Taliesin have me by the THROAT. What the FUCK was that)

Also, Downfall really is a good look into what was possible with the gods on Exandria before the Divine Gate

The way Asha is legitimately terrifying while also pouting and being all “I miss my wife, Tails” half the time is a testament to the power of sapphics

something something pike's desperation to redeem percy and sarenrae's desperation to redeem asmodeus...

Downfall has only just started, but already I'm deeply curious what Bells Hells reaction will be to seeing it play out. I've mentioned before that I suspect the dislike or outright disdain some of the party feels for the gods - most notably Ashton and Laudna, but also Imogen at times - is in part a product of the gods being so distant as to not feel like real people to them, and therefore being easy scapegoats.

It’s easy to see the mortal victims of Ludinus and the Vanguard as just that: victims. The Hells have met them, have been them. They have not seen or felt the gods suffer in the same way. Laudna even went so far as to blame the gods for mortal deaths and suffering after the solstice, even as the gods are the ones under attack. They feel uniquely abandoned by the world, and it's easy to blame these distant, powerful figures for their hardship. Certainly much easier than to see the mortal systems that enabled their harm, or to actively seek improvement on their own.

But to see the gods now, not just as people but as mortals, with all the flaws and vulnerabilities and fears of any of the Hells, with loved ones of their own and the same desperate sense of self-preservation as any living thing, will they be able to hold onto the disdain that they’ve clung to for so long?