Give me mer or give me nothing.

People’s attitudes towards the Altmer are fascinating to me because like. Everyone hates the Altmer, but at the same time in doing so they swallow a lot of the propaganda that the Altmer ruling class have been putting out for as long as they’ve been on Tamriel.

It benefits the ruling class of the Altmer to portray their race as monolithic, united in their opinions and their ideals. Similarly, it benefits the dominant Altmer ideology to present their entire race as being cold-hearted, rationalistic and disdainful of all other races. Partly because this way they can portray other races as being primitive and unable to overcome their base instincts, but I suspect it’s also because teaching such strong disdain for other races - and earning the hatred of those other races - means that potentially rebellious Altmer don’t have the option of leaving and seeking a new life outside of Alinor. Which, in turn, encourages them to fall back in line.

As far as the monolithic nature of the Altmer is concerned, there’s a wealth of evidence showing that this is far from the case. The Chimer (now the Dunmer) *became* Chimer in the first place because they were Altmer who completely rejected the ideology they’d been raised in. It’s also commonly believed that the Ayleids were originally Altmer (or Aldmer) who left Summurset due to ideological differences. Success, for Altmer dissidents, has usually meant leaving for Tamriel and establishing an entirely new society. Failure, meanwhile…

Well, there’s probably a good reason we don’t heat much about failed Altmer dissidents, and I doubt it’s because they don’t exist. If an Altmer wants to step out of line, they have to choose between abandoning their home and staying, probably to be killed (or at the very least, marginalised by their peers).

As far as Altmer racism goes, while they are pretty heinous on that front, they’re no worse than most other races on that front. The Nords committed genocide of all the elves in Skyrim and on Solstheim in retaliation for Saarthal’s destruction, and the Dunmer are notorious for their enslavement of Argonians and Khajiit, as well as their general disdain for “outlanders” of any kind. Generally, most races in Tamriel conduct themselves under the assumption that they are inherently better than all those other rabble. The Altmer are just very upfront about it. It’s therefore not unreasonable to speculate that, like other races, individual Altmer may be capable of (and even willing to) overcome their prejudices by spending time with members of other races.

We meet a lot of Altmer in the series, and they’re not all the same. Overall, they display the same wide spectrum of personality and emotion as any other race, and while their culture does, of course, colour their ways of thinking and expressing themselves, it is not their sole or even necessarily their main defining feature.

Anyway, all of the races in TES are complex and interesting and I don’t like seeing any of them reduced down to simple stereotypes. Especially not when the most interesting characters tend to be ones that challenge those stereotypes in one way or another. Stay moist.

like c’mon the thalmor aren’t nice but they’re probably respected and loved in the dominion I want to see an altmer dovahkiin freaking the fuck out because of all this weird nord shit going on wandering into the college of winterhold and almost crying when they see ancano in his thalmor robes because holy shit they’re not alone in this frozen wasteland where everybody hates them anymore The khajiit caravans passing thalmor patrols on the road and stopping to have an amiable chat, maybe pass around some wine imported from home and complain about the harsh weather and the harsher nords, the constant fear of attack while traveling, they may be thalmor but they’re still mortal and they still have people they want to go home to, swapping stories and reminiscing about the way the sea sparkles in the dawn light and wondering how their families are doing, letters take so long and often won’t even get all the way there a bosmer arriving in markarth after struggling through these rocky valleys and hills full of forsworn, sometimes even stormcloaks, and imperial forces, who at least don’t try to kill them but they’re hardly friendly, and trudging up to the jarl’s keep to deliver whatever they were told to deliver and be greeted with the sight of those familiar robes, faces that look like their own, familiar voices, later joining them in their quarters and feeling freer and safer than they have since they crossed into this awful country less evil racist supremacist aldmeri dominion more three dimensional relatable actual people aldmeri dominion

All elves have a birth right to punch Ysgramor in the jaw

We only want what is best for Tamriel. Surely, the rebels will accept peace when they realize this.

Has this been done yet?

REBLOG IF YOU LOVE ELVES.

If you don’t, you’re a liar.

It's true

while I’m here:

Eridan things the fandom likes to forget

-Eridan did not have a consistent black crush on Sollux, rather the other way around (See Kanaya: return to the core)

-He can hold on to his lusus with his legs alone

- he doesn’t actually like to swim and has probably never visited Feferi

- He is concerned about the aquatic environment (though this feeds into his bigoted hatred for landwellers)

- He knows millitary tactics

- He likes history

- He was gossip buddies with Karkat to the point where Feferi thought they were something else

- He actually did have friends prior to SGRUB despite what a little bitch he is ( these include Karkat and Kanaya)

- Karkat was the one person Eridan considered a “true friend” 

- Karkat (who had just witnessed the deaths of his friends) revokes his friendship from a past Eridan BEFORE he kills anyone. This possibly feeds into him going murderous in the first place.

- He had red crushes on Feferi, Nepeta, Jade and Karkat

- He had a black crushes on Rose, Vriska and possibly at one point Sollux which may have been abandoned like the other ones.

-He wanted Terezi to be his auspistice which she rejected immediately

- Eridan was probably the most “socially functional” troll based on what we know of Alternian Society. A useless trait in the game, but probably increasing his odds of survival prior to the game.

- He actually prioritizes his old friendship with Feferi than any crush.

- Feferi had no intention of staying friends with him which he admits feeling hurt by, but getting somewhat over it

-He’s not a Nice Guy, he is 13 and feels hurt but understands his feelings aren’t reciprocated and he can do nothing about it.

- Eridan killed Feferi in self defense, she was going for the kill too.

- Same with Kanaya

- Eridan didn’t start the fight with Sollux and actually wanted to avoid it but took part in it on Sollux’s insistence.

- He doesn’t believe in Magic. At all.

- Vriska has blocked Eridan multiple times on Trollian

- Eridan took Gamzee’s advice at one point.

- Eridan dislikes Gamzee and finds him irritating

- He did think he was doing something wrong prior to his murder spree

-He felt lonely and ostracized 

- He is 13.

Eye Body Language: Reading Basic Eye Movements

Heads up: If someone is a nervous person and is not good with eye contact, then these don’t really apply. Instead, a nervous individual will avoid eye contact or look in every direction over the course of the convo. 

Reading the eye body language is not without risk. If you can look at someone’s eyes, to find what’s really on his or her mind, that person can also see your eyes as well.

Most people are concious of this, and will look away when their gaze is caught… Yeah, admit it! You do it too! You, however, will have to overcome that, because you cannot read somebody’s eyes, without looking at them.

These are the basic movements of the eye, the classics of eyes body language!

Keep reading

Multilinguals Experience Personality Change When Using Different Languages

People who are bilingual have been a source of fascination for years, with various studies revealing that they are more accepting, tolerant and open-minded than others. The far-reaching impact of multilingualism does not end there, however, with recent research suggesting that the behaviour and outlook of bilinguals also changes according to the language that they use at any given time.

Keep reading

The difference between the two ‘Villain’ troll players: Eridan acted in a lethal manner purely as self defense, yet was condemned Gamzee showed his true colors, murdered two people, but was pacified

thank you andrew hussie

Half the things you read on Tumblr be like

Eridan

Since all the ghosts who woke up in [S] Terezi: Remember are the pre-retcon ones, it means that was the same Eridan who was in Erisolsprite, and likewise with that being the Feferi who was in Fefetasprite. Or at the very least, Eridan and Feferi ‘remembered’ what happened to them as sprites in the previous timeline due to Terezi’s mindy thing. To cut out a lot of confusing circumstantial details, in essence: Eridan apologized to Feferi for what he did and then Feferi came along with Aradia and Sollux to visit him in the dream bubbles.

Vriska was also shown to genuinely care about Eridan, pointing out how he would have loved to be part of the treasure hunt and having recruited a large number of alternate timeline Eridans. And post-retcon, Vriska decides against prototyping his corpse- not out of malice or bitter memories, but because she “can’t personally say that any [of the remaining dead trolls] is more deserving of life than the others“ and “[doesn’t] want to 8e the ar8iter of Eridan’s value as a person 8ecause of the mistakes he’s made”. In fact, she stands up for Eridan against Terezi who is adamant he doesn’t deserve the opportunity of resurrection.

I’ve gone into discourse before about how I view Eridan as a tragic character, one who was an antagonist because of social conditioning and a culture that was too deeply ingrained in him to simply let go of. Not unlike Vriska in that manner. Also Equius, in a more benign manner. Gamzee is a bit of a wildcard and people have speculated that we haven’t gotten a true reading of his character and motives, but he only seemed concerned with his heritage when he went insane for no less than four separate reasons. Point being that Eridan was unable to unlearn the toxicity of Alternia which only seemed to have been an issue for upper class trolls. Barring the empress and heiress who essentially had a carte blanche to do as they pleased because it would have been heresy to oppose them, Eridan was the one standing at the top. He was as high as you could get while still being subject to scrutiny, essentially standing on a pedestal under a spotlight. His primary motivation was to be seen as a mature adult, the quintessential sea dweller. We’ve all known that haughty kid who wanted to hurry up and be an adult. Shit, I was that kid while growing up. But for a troll- particularly one of the nautical aristocracy- being a mature adult meant being a bloodthirsty tyrannical conqueror with an active love life in all four quadrants. And with that shock of blood-colored hair, he was already something of an aberration and probably felt even more pressure to prove himself as a result. Eridan built up this “fearsome warlord” persona based on all this and lived the way he was taught he should, under threat of culling. Consequently, he was never true to himself.

From the moment we meet him, it’s shown that he’s not being honest about his feelings and desires with the way he’s in the “moirail zone” with Feferi. But that was only the beginning. His genocide complex was little more than bravado since, as he himself pointed out, exterminating the land dwellers would have been as easy as slacking off in feeding Gl’bgolyb. And at one point it was implied he played it up for the sake of spending more time with Feferi in their moirallegience. But most egregious and plot-relevant is how he wasn’t honest about his love of wizards and magic. Right off the bat, he espouses magic as fake while waving a wand and wearing a wizard hat. And upon witnessing Rose’s majyyks, he is unable to be forthright about wanting to know her secrets. Even when Kanaya alchemized him a magic wand which he loved enough to abandon the riflekind specibus and Ahab’s Crosshairs, he still felt the need to conceal himself and insist his new weapon was powered by “science”. 

As we learned through Jake, the aspect of Hope is an energy- one that overpowers that of a first guardian when fully tapped- which makes things less fake when you believe in them. Eridan’s wand was powered by his belief in magic, a belief so strong it allowed a literal toy to exceed the strength of the legendary Ahab’s Crosshairs. And also one-hit-kill Feferi whose blood meant she had the highest fortitude of any of the 12 trolls. But Eridan’s belief- his passion- was one he tried to hide at all costs, implicitly due to feeling it was silly and therefore a sign of weakness. He was still fighting the demon of not living up to society’s standards even after the death of said society. He couldn’t let it go the way everyone else could, because that was his whole world and it was all he knew. He was a product of his environment; the child of everything wrong with troll society; the embodiment of the tampering done by Doc Scratch, the Handmaid and Lord English on Alternia. Without the world he knew, he had nothing. And that scared him. It led him down the path of nihilism, killing the girl he genuinely loved behind his facade of wanting to fill quadrants, and destroying the matriorb which he knew held the future of his race. He had nothing to live for anymore, and his idea of joining Jack Noir can easily be read as a suicide attempt. 

When you truly analyze his character, he begins to look a lot like an abuse survivor who was never fully cognizant of his abuse, and normalized his treatment and lashed out at others as subconscious coping mechanisms. Even when all the societal pressure and threat of culling was gone, he remained in constant fight-or-flight mode. He never once felt safe. It’s not the kind of clean, inspiring “he became a better person because of his abuse” story we all like to hear: it’s messy and it’s depressing. But that makes it realistic. Much like how people have been analyzing Vriska or Yellow Pearl from Steven Universe. Technically speaking, every Alternian troll is an abuse survivor, and it’s only natural that there would be one or two who wouldn’t be able to ‘rise above it’ like some sort of cute little Hallmark glurge. People succumb to their circumstances. People carry scars that might never fully heal. People lose hope. 

However, Eridan’s title can not only mean ”destroyer of hope”, but also “one who destroys with hope”. And much like how his title can be interpreted in a more positive light, Eridan himself may have a more promising fate in store. In Openbound’s exposition on Cronus, we got this rather interesting and direct mention of Eridan in regards to defeating Lord English

which implied that Eridan would either defeat English himself (Harry Potter is what the refrance) or become a mentor to Jake so that he would. The latter became tenuously canon in the form of Erisolsprite. Since [S] Terezi: Remember is the first time Eridan’s ghost woke up and Vriska only ever met doomed timeline iterations of him, it stands to reason that his timeline was despair -> death -> Erisolsprite -> waking up, without any dream bubble adventures in between. Erisol was a sort of purgatory for Eridan in which we saw him acknowledge and lament the error of his ways. But even more than that, he got to share a consciousness with Sollux. Tavros and Vriska were Tavrisprite for a minute at most, and that brief communion led to dramatic character development in both. So Eridan, due to the stable fusion of him and Sollux, had the chance to see things from a different perspective for an extended period of time. He shared memories and experiences with someone who lived a very different life than him. As Eridan himself put it, Sollux was “practically the complementary fuckin color a [him]”. And aside from being impotently and comically miserable, Erisol was kind of mellowed-out. Especially when compared to that fishboy who (attempted-) murdered three of his closest friends and was planning on giving two more the same treatment. Eridan, as part of Erisol, changed. Atoned for his sins, in fact. He even took the opportunity to reach out to Feferi in Fefeta and apologize to her. And as pointed out at the beginning of the post, it appears as though he has been forgiven. It’s also interesting to note that the first time we saw alternate timeline versions of the trolls in the dream bubbles, it was Eridan and Feferi together. In other words, things could have gone differently and didn’t need to be this way. It isn’t as direct in the narrative as with Karkat or Terezi or Vriska (one version of her at least), but more subtly it has been shown that Eridan is receiving his own character arc. One in which he now has the chance to start fresh. A second chance to let go of his culture’s burdens, heal the scars of abuse, and finally be himself. To finally join his friends, both figuratively and literally.

For the first time in the comic and possibly for the first time in his life, the Prince of Hope might actually have hope.