Fitz : Presses A Button

Fitz : presses a button

Another random sketch hehe

we can argue day and night whether or not Alden and Della were emotionally abusive, if the Vacker kid's lives really were perfect, if Fitz was just born with the coping mechanisms he has, or if they were created etc...

But here's the thing. When you take into consideration WHAT is valued in the lost cities, what is expected of imperfect people, all of the boundaries and barbed wire around what makes someone 'good'- nobody, and I mean NOBODY is coming out of that world emotionally unscathed.

Lord Cassius is not the only elf in the lost cities who cares about the status of himself and his children, and keeping up appearances. We know he has a warped view of his desire for Keefe to succeed being a form of love. We know how he has pathologized his self-absorbed need to keep his ego intact. He's a piece of shit. But part of the reason is that he values what his world has taught him to value. Prestige, sophistication, power etc...

There's a reason Mr. Forkle had to keep his twin a secret his whole life. A reason the Song Twins were rejected. Why Stina was raised to bite before assessing the danger. Because they were born 'imperfect' to their 'perfect' world's standards. They were born with the short stick. The scorn built in. There's a reason the school, Exullium, exists. For rejects, for people who don't meet the standard. Bad matches, being talentless etc... because their world rejects people who are 'chips' in the facade.

which means, that regardless of what you value, your world will punish you for anything that doesn't meet their quota. Sure, there's elves who choose their values over expectations (Dex's parents) but there's still a lifelong social punishment that comes with it.

Which means the threat of this punishment hangs over every elf's head. Which means that there are undoubtedly elves who adhere to values they don't agree with, solely out of fear of the consequences of choosing what they actually care about. This is their world. This is their lot in life.

And good luck trying to kill out this way of thinking and running the world, when elves live forever, and the people in power are the oldest elves in the world.

Now- imagine you're the Vacker's. You are the spitting image of what perfection is thought to be. You are renowned, watched- YOU ARE THE STANDARD. But even the Vacker's know they aren't perfect. Which means that regardless of how they feel about any of it, if they want to avoid scorn- they have to meet impossible requirements.

And to some parents, loving their kids means 'saving them' from that scorn. Which means heaping the expectations of the world onto their kids tenfold.

standards that are inherently abusive.

I don't think the Vacker's could come out the other side anything but emotionally abused. because the standards of their world. Because the standards they are held to, are so unrealistic, and the punishment for not meeting them is so heavy, the only way to meet them is to die a million deaths and not let anyone see that you are a corpse. You either become exactly what the world wants, or you fall, and everyone watches when you hit the pavement, and then they remark how ugly you look, and how you failed to even be appealing in death.

But guess what- that is your fate. Because it is impossible. And this type of pressure doesn't make diamonds, it creates kids like Fitz Vacker, who's fall from grace was inevitable. Because the standards were always impossible. No soul could meet them.

You can't come out of a world like that without some measure of emotional damage. It's a cycle.

Some elves choose to fight the power, but that resistance is futile when the power is literally ancient, with a relative scale for justice, and an 'objective' scale for judgement.

it just so happens that the Vacker's response was to melt their gold exactly into the shapes asked of them, regardless of how wrong it felt, and how much it hurt.

Anyone have ideas on how to fill in the empty space cuz my brain currently is super duper empty (ignore the fact that you can see the shadow of my phone taking the picture lol)

Say hi to Tim the turtle !!

AITA for deciding to stop pressing buttons?

My hands are still shaking, and I don’t know what to do. So I took to this human site. Whatever you say, I still don’t regret it. I think.

How to explain? I (17M) am a member of one of the most prestigious families in our society. I have a sister, B (15F), and a brother, A (25M). A couple of years ago, I got entangled in this whole conspiracy within our world by rescuing a girl from the human world - S (15F). S turned out to be a genetic experiment, which is a whole other thing, but the point is that I and my sister and my friends are part of the rebel group that created her (apparently to “better our world). We’re also fighting another rebel group that basically wants to burn everything to the ground (as well as humankind, they hate those people) as well as rebelling against our own government.

Point is, we were on a mission a while ago finding the cure to a plague that was being used as biological warfare. When we found out that the “cure” was just releasing the plague even more, it was revealed that my brother, A, was a member of the rebel group ours was against. According to him, our family had some sort of “legacy” that stained us. I still think he was jealous of me for succeeding more even though I’m younger than him. He called me the “golden child a lot.”

It completely broke my family for a while after that, and I’ll never forgive him.

We never planned on seeing him again unless we were to fight him, but while on another mission to a facility (that was a copy of another, both were used for human experimentation - basically torture) we found him. He’d been sedated by an incredibly intense drug used by the rebels, and he’d been cut up by an ogre blade (the ogres had rebelled against our government and unleashed the plague, and a small group were still rebelling when the king agreed to cut ties with the rebel group).

It turned out he’d lost his memory. S has incredibly powerful mental abilities, and even she couldn’t see anything in there. A had a trial, and it was concluded that he would stay in temporary captivity in our family home, since it appeared the rebel group had punished him for letting us escape on an earlier mission. It was a stupid idea, and I made my thoughts known very clearly, but they didn’t listen.

Guess what ended up happening?

That’s right. The rebels infiltrated our home - on a holiday celebrated in our world, no less! - and unlocked A’s memories. They then broadcast to the rest of our world a secret hidden in our home. It turns out one of our elders had allied with the troll queen to create experimental troll babies (trolls age in reverse, so troll babies are large and vicious. They wanted to make them even more so). There was an experimental troll hive hidden on our house’s grounds.

We fought, and eventually my sister and I cornered A in the hive. We trapped him in one of the hive’s cells, and it closed up on him, filling with some sort of gel. I’d been pressing buttons to close it in on him, but when it started filling up and I realized he would drown…what if I told you I stopped pressing buttons?

When the hive was investigated later, the cell he was trapped in was empty, but still. Am I the asshole?

EDIT: So, it turns out that A is still alive. S and her friend K (16M) found him. He was practically skin and bones, and he escaped before they could capture him. S told me that he looked like (and told her) that he was going to die, but I’m still mad that she didn’t tell me sooner.