Shadowgast - Blog Posts

Ludinus your ex correspondant traitor / grooming victim and Ikithons runaway protege are in love now. yeah they're making out. they live in a cottage with cats and have a couple portrait.

look man. look

essek saying "bren" out loud, claiming a position on caleb's side as the mouthpiece of his regards to astrid, did something to me. i can't tell if it opened a wound or punched me or gave me a hug. all i know is that i am feeling so many emotions right now

more under the cut because i'm about to get rambly:

"bren aldric ermendrud" is a separate character from caleb widogast. he's a young boy learning how to make magic. he's a deeply traumatized and indoctrinated teenager. he's the boy who curled up with astrid and eadwulf in a freezing tower for warmth all night.

essek never met bren. he met caleb and he's never known him as anyone else. if i'm remembering correctly, caleb never even said the name "bren" to him during the campaign, and neither did any of the nein.

essek knows caleb widogast. he knows the man who held up the object of his worst crime and then kissed him in the bowels of a ship and made a floor of infinite stars for them to walk through together. he knows the person who healed over bren's wounds—thinly, but enough. he knows the man that the boy has become.

astrid knows bren. she barely knows who caleb is. she still calls him bren after hearing him referred to as caleb repeatedly. she can't know him as the man he is, she only knows the boy. there's some of bren in caleb, but there is no caleb in bren.

essek saying "bren sends his regards" is him gauging astrid's reaction, on one level—if she freaks out, which she did, she's in opposition to caleb's cause and thus a threat. on another level, it's essek delivering a very different subtextual message from caleb: "the boy who loved you is giving you one final warning."

because essek is a threat to astrid. their last meaningful interaction was slinging spells at each other in the blooming grove. and that's funny in a "current boyfriend vs ex girlfriend exclusively fight each other" kind of way, but it's also deeply tied to caleb's recurring theme of transformation. "bren sends his regards" also means "i have healed enough to love enough for someone else to know this name and use it with my consent. and this someone else is your enemy. what does that make you think i've become?"

it also does a fantastic job of communicating subtle offscreen discussions that have happened over the years since the end of c2. we don't have the details of when or how caleb told essek his birth name, but we know that he did, and we know from all of c2 that the name bren occupies a place of immense emotional weight for caleb. it functions similarly to a deadname in terms of who uses it and for what purpose. trent exclusively calls caleb bren to wound him and place himself in a position of power. astrid calls him bren to remind both him and herself of who they used to be—same with eadwulf, though obviously he's not here.

the first time we hear essek say "bren" is on caleb's behalf and confronting one of the narrative representations of caleb's trauma. it's four words that manage to communicate "i, your enemy on a hundred levels, can speak for both the man i love and the boy who loved you, because i know him in his entirety."

astrid knows bren and essek knows caleb, but only essek can speak for both. because at some point, caleb gave bren to essek. and we know this from four words. four IMPROVISED words.

god. this moment is just so fucking good

spent way too long making a shadowgast propaganda slideshow for the tumblr ship poll….. EVERYONE GO VOTE NOW FOR THE BEST SHIP IN THE BRACKET!

Critters, has anyone made a shadowgast pet name compilation? If so, please send it to me 😭 I just want every moment Caleb called Essek “dear” 😭

Alright, I'm just gonna go out and say it: Stop using AI to write quick fanfiction. It's extremely noticeable that you've just had the program to do all the work, it doesn't read nearly as well as you might think, and it just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Like, we already have AI stealing fanfiction. Are we really going to clog up the good fics with your AI trash?

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Pros to having the wildemount gays all live together: 

Gardening buddies

Empire sibs collectively dying from queer exposure

wlw mlm solidarity

xhorhass gays get to welcome empire sibs home after a long workday and honestly, i think we all need this

collective couch snuggles probably.

THERE ARE LIKE TEN CATS AND DOGS COMBINED HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THIS CONSEPT I’M-

Cons:

There are none.

Everything is as it should be. UwU<3

I see you all and you are all Right and Valid

I like Shadowgast as much as the next person but…what if, by some miracle of fate, they managed to get Molly back.

I like Shadowgast as much as the next person but...what if, by some miracle of fate, they managed to get Molly back.