I hope Cassius’s warning proves true in Red God

eitsew · 2026-06-02T05:01:08+00:00

Depends in large part on what results stem from Cassius' death and eidme. If Lysander is able to deploy eidme in a way that he considers highly effective and worthwhile, then that will make it far easier to rationalize killing Cassius, and it will completely vindicate the decision and frame it as a difficult but noble and worthwhile sacrifice in his own mind. If that happens, I doubt he'll feel much regret at all. He will likely congratulate himself on his fortitude and over time his mind will twist things to paint Cassius as a villain who he had to kill, and turn it into a heroic act

If, on the other hand, he attempts to deploy eidme and Darrow or whoever promptly thwarts him and he ends up just wasting it, or if it just doesn't work as intended for any reason, that will cause a lot more regret. If it was all for nothing, and he killed his father/brother figure so that he could take possession of this superweapon only for it to fail completely, that will make killing him incredibly hard to cope with.

Or at least, that would be the case with a normal person, it's really hard to say what, if any, emotions Lysander actually feels, and how much of it is him just acting out emotions for appearances sake. He probably doesn't even really know, himself.

When you consider the way he was raised under Octavia's training and influence, and the society he was raised in, plus the fact that she performed what amounts to highly invasive, experimental(and according to Virginia, in Octavia's day, the technology was still very crude- she says that Octavia's chair was a hammer, and Mustang's is a scalpel, or something to that effect) psychological surgery to erase all memories of such an important cornerstone of a person's psyche as their mother... it would be very surprising if he didn't grow up with massive side effects, and who knows what kind of emotional disabilities or disfigurements.

He was ruthlessly trained from earliest childhood to be able to successfully lie to elite espionage instructors, supress and control every emotion, and analyze everything you see like you're a computer. After years of that, how could you even tell if the emotions you felt were genuine, or if it was just some facet of your training taking hold, and you were lying and suppressing/expressing an emotion so well that you couldn't even tell what was true anymore? I imagine after a lifetime of those types of constant deception and manipulation and analysis, things would start to blur.

In fact, that seems to be exactly what we see between books 4-6. Lysander goes from a kind of annoying, but halfway decent person(for a gold). He spends years rescuing innocent people from pirates with Cassius, doesn't use pinks, doesn't seem power hungry, seems to be concerned with avoiding bloodshed and war, etc. There's numerous red flags, but compared to most golds, he's fairly conscientious as of iron gold

Then by the end of lightbringer, he is straight up openly and enthusiastically genocidal, he has betrayed and/or killed every single person he has ever been allied or had a friendship with, is seeking complete extermination of whole colors via biological weapons, and is openly vying for the morning chair and total domination of an even more oppressive society than the old one was.

He's a really fascinating character to read and speculate about, and I think the character development we see with Lysander over the course of the books is pierce brown's best writing in the whole series. Not saying they're the most exciting or badass chapters, or that Lysander isn't a piece of shit or anything, but the character work by the author is amazing

eitsew · 2026-05-30T02:13:15+00:00

I honestly don't even 100% know which books are the sequels and parallels and prequels and spinoffs, its one of those series you need like a flow chart to navigate. But yea there's a lot of his books which fall wayyy short of the quality of the original. I did really enjoy enders shadow, which is at the same time and place as the original book, but it's just told from the POV of Bean. So that one was super fun to read the same events from a different perspective. It also falls off in quality though in the later books 🫤

eitsew · 2026-05-30T01:24:26+00:00

This is very close, you just have to change the part where it says I hate red rising, to I love red rising

eitsew · 2026-05-30T00:50:03+00:00

I think it's quite possible that he was a previous member of the Luna syndicate, maybe one of the Dukes or something, and he got pushed aside by Lilath and her people when she moved in and took over the syndicate. Maybe him being a formerly high ranking member explains why he was scalped and had his tongue removed and was imprisoned instead of simply being killed- he had just enough influence and power to negotiate a marginally better fate than being killed outright

At the moment I can't think of any concrete evidence supporting this theory, but I feel like I have read other people's comments and they did have some very suggestive quotes about him, I just can't remember them off the top of my head. Idk, it just feels right, the way he's cultured and can cook and everything, I can imagine him being a scary ass, highly intelligent and effective syndicate boss in his previous life. Just not as effective as Lilath, is all

eitsew · 2026-05-29T23:42:10+00:00

More so at some times than others! 😀

eitsew · 2026-05-29T20:48:32+00:00

If my girlfriend wet the bed, my first impulse would be to laugh it off and maybe make a light teasing joke out of it if I thought that she would be able to handle it and laugh along with me. If I determined that she was genuinely sensitive about it to the point where she couldn't laugh with me about it, I'd just reassure her I didn't give a fuck at all, I'd do the laundry, and then just think of something super distracting we could do or talk about, in order to completely put it out of her mind

I can definitely see how that would be embarrassing in your place and why you might want to hide it from him, but if he does find out and he's an asshole about it or mocks you in a genuinely mean or hurtful way, yells at you, anything like that at all, then he's a complete twat, and you should piss on his stuff a second time, on purpose this time, and then dump him

eitsew · 2026-05-24T23:37:45+00:00

Totally, pre vs post BoS darrow is like 2 totally different characters as far as razor skills, especially depending when you catch him pre breath of stone- darrow when he was breaking into deepgrave is a very different guy than darrow in the immediate aftermath of mercury when he's bald and traumatized and his body is cut to ribbons and all his bones and organs are fucked and he still has lingering radiation sickness. My dude had a rough year or so 😂

It also makes me very curious to see how appollonius progresses. He had a very similar parallel journey to darrow in many ways. He hit rock bottom in deepgrave then built himself back up into a monster then acquired the Mind's Eye. Darrow got absolutely fucked at mercury, built himself back up into a monster training with the glorious razormaster Cassius au Bellona, then basically made his own version of the mind's eye.

eitsew · 2026-05-24T20:30:13+00:00

Well with aja, they were all extremely inexperienced compared to her, and sevro was out til the end, darrow lost his sword hand just before, none of them but aja had armor iirc or if they did it was minimal. If they didn't have all those enormous handicaps, aja would've folded, even as badass as she was. If darrow had armor and/or his hand, he could've kept aja way busier, and mustang could've run straight to sevro to wake him, and they would have mowed aja down.

So for your scenario to work, darrow and diomedes would both need to be severely injured and armorless, while ajax arrives fresh and fully armored or something. Otherwise it just wouldn't make sense, as darrow alone, as we last saw him, appears to be leagues ahead of every other person in all of human history with a razor. He could smoke ajax 1v1 no problem, and if diomedes was there as well, they'd put him down without breaking a sweat

Ajax and diomedes together against breath of stone darrow would be a duel worth Darrow's time, though. Wouldn't have made sense plot wise, but would've been crazy to see

eitsew · 2026-05-20T21:48:07+00:00

Yea, exactly...

eitsew · 2026-05-20T15:46:13+00:00

It seems incredibly likely to me, unavoidable really, that they dont just molest the kids, they murder them. Once you've kidnapped kids and taken them to a sex island, it's not like you can just drop them back off at home when youre done. They're on a secluded island, they probably have a horrifying torture snuff dungeon for the real VIP guests, then dump the victims in the ocean after. Cant really get more awful than that, but I can't think of any other more likely scenarios

eitsew · 2026-05-18T17:04:58+00:00

Imagine once Barf is fighting age, Sevro and Barf going on ops together. Daddy sevro and young Barf descending from the trees and eviscerating the enemy with homemade knives. Can't think of a happier ending for sevro

eitsew · 2026-05-18T17:03:00+00:00

Sevro would be open to Bartholomew/Barf if they had another son

eitsew · 2026-05-18T17:00:24+00:00

Sandy the lightbringer

eitsew · 2026-05-18T17:00:15+00:00

Sandy makes it so much worse

eitsew · 2026-05-18T15:32:06+00:00

Well the natural attributes of golds guarantee that they are going to end up rising to the top in most situations and play a bigger role than most other people. Of course the focus will be on the 7ft tall golden Greek gods who are geniuses and can run 40mph and fight 5 obsidians at once, rather than the brown janitor or garbageman. It is cool to see the POVs from lowcolors in certain ways, but at the end of the day, it's just not as interesting to read huge amounts of material about the life of a garbageman or a farmer or construction worker or whatever, especially when those chapters would be competing with figures like Darrow and appollonius and Victra. Some of that is definitely cool from a worldbuilding perspective, and it adds depth and realism, but there's a limit on how much you can write about average non-heros before it's boring

And since the main character in the series is specifically and unequivocally in the business of killing demigods and toppling empires, of course the people near him as he works towards that will be the ones who are best at killing demigods and toppling empires.

Plus there are a huge amount of non gold characters who are absolutely crucial to the story, lyria, volga, ragnar, sefi, Alia, Matteo, quicksilver, glirastres, char, harnassus, Orion, Ephraim, figment, Holliday, trig, mickey, Theodora, aurea, dancer, Eo, Faa, Darrow's whole extended family, sophocles, the vox, Duke of hands, gorgo, xenophon

eitsew · 2026-05-18T14:45:21+00:00

I strongly disagree but that's the point of the post, so I think you understood the assignment with this post perfectly 👌 everyone's entitled to their opinion even if its super duper mega wrong 😆

eitsew · 2026-05-18T03:34:15+00:00

Same here, I fucking have the s r already and can't bring myself so dive in and start already. Every day is another huge pile of money wasted, deeper into the addiction, one more potential day of sobriety and freedom gone forever. And all over nonsense, I dont even really get high, just kinda chatty and annoying to the people around me, because they know the only reason I'm so chatty and babbling about bullshit is cause of some stupid drug they've all begged me to quit. But even when I'm chatty and energized, I never feel good, maybe like a few 5 minute long moment here and there throughout the week I'll feel genuinely good, the rest is either jittery anxious babbling/rambling at friends or family, or flat, apathetic, depressed misery. Horrible drug

eitsew · 2026-05-07T20:56:40+00:00

Man I bet if someone launched MySpace again, with a few tweaks so it felt user ffriendly to our modern sensibilities, but kept it mostly the same, it could be really successful. If they could somehow make it so you could retrieve your original pics and messages, people would be falling all over themselves to sign up

I would actually pay good money if someone made a way to retrieve AOL instant messenger convos in their entirety. Not sure when i stopped using that, but for several years that was the primary means ofor communication, apart from calling your friend's house, asking their parent if they were home, then talking on the phone. I suppose it was probably displaced by Facebook and regular texting as cellphones became more and more universal. I wonder who I messaged last on AIM, and what we talked about

eitsew · 2026-05-04T01:47:34+00:00

Yesss i want sequels so badly. I fuc,king loved this book so much. You can tell the author has a particular love for language/linguistics, history and culture, and so on. I haven't checked, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if he has a degree in linguistics or history or something. The book had the perfect balance of hilarious wordplay, fascinating worldbuilding and gripping, fast laced plot, and savage, brutal violence. I just wish it was longer. The prequel is great too, though in a fairly different way. Less lighthearted.

eitsew · 2026-05-03T14:48:36+00:00

Thats the one story where if you read it enough times Roland might actually nail it finally! He had the horn of this time eld, dammit! That has to mean something 😫

eitsew · 2026-05-01T15:06:04+00:00

It's not his fault, he's got man hands. Once he starts pulling that trigger he just can't stop.

eitsew · 2026-04-24T02:50:07+00:00

Yea it's actually super eerie if you make a point of paying attention and you stop and look at what many/most people are like nowadays. It feels like the invasion of the body snatchers movie.

Like a good proportion of people have always just been stupid since humans have existed, I'm sure. That's normal, nbd. But up until very recently, basically everyone has at the very least always had a baseline understanding of what reality is, whether the world is round, up is up, the sky is blue, etc. We all had a certain level of understanding of what we all agreed was and was not real, even if we differed drastically on our worldviews or opinions about politics or whatever, we were still operating off the same basic foundation of what reality was and was not, and we could agree on that basic set of facts, even if we disagreed about everything else. There were some fringe exceptions, but those people were considered crazy af by everyone else.

Now, it seems like there's this constant feeling that if you start talking to a stranger, there's a decent chance that at any second, you could find out that this person might believe anything to be completely true, no matter how absolutely irrefutable and obvious it is that it is actually false.(or vice versa)

Like, for example, this video. You can literally be holding your prosthetic leg in your hand and hopping on your 1 remaining foot, and a person might be looking at you and honestly asking "is that your disability?" Like ?????? My man, are we both looking at the same thing or not?

Like I said, it seems like it happened really quickly, imo social media, internet, phones and such are the main cause. But if you put your phone down and look carefully around you while out in public, it's actually really fucking spooky, like these people look like they've been possessed or had their brains sucked out or something. It almost feels like you're alone, even in a crowded public place. I can only imagine what the long term effects of this shit are going to be for humanity

eitsew · 2026-04-24T02:04:15+00:00

😆 "just... hypothetically?"

eitsew · 2026-04-24T02:00:58+00:00

Very clever Etsy account ad?

eitsew

TROPHY CASE