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gunpowdertimsleftgun · 2 days ago

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LifeAfterDeath Rant and Headcanons

I've needed LifeAfterdeath content for a week straight, because I enjoy bisexual polyamorous Reaper and his two lovers not only with unique history, but with a few screws loose.

This rant may be unorganized too, but I think you'll live. I got tired of seeing this hanging around in the drafts and I can't be fucked to look back and fix it.

Considering how popular Reapertale is, I'm impressed Reapertale Soriel and LifeAfterDeath aren't more popular, and I'm not saying this to shame anyone. I'm just appalled. I didn't expect this outcome even though I should have considering this fandom's history with shafting Life to the side and ignoring her importance to Reaper, characterizing Reaper as a perverted scumbag that doesn't respect Geno's fucking boundaries, and characterizing Geno as a sopping wet cat that wouldn't attempt to beat Reaper's ass or yell at him in self-defense at Reaper's attempt to collect his soul.

The mischaracterizations in favor of shipping never fail to piss me off, just as a general statement, especially in terms of who Geno is in canon because in truth, he has become a twisted and manipulative son of a bitch on part of his trauma, death, watching Chara complete genocide after genocide after genocide from the Save Screen, and especially on part of his own goal. Before Sans used Papyrus to get to him, Geno had a plan to destroy his entire timeline in order to stop that cycle of genocides, and there was still a part of him that didn't believe Sans's little plan would work in place of his own. Geno is also characterized to be extremely stubborn on top of that, DETERMINED if you will, unwilling to hear Sans out until he brings Papyrus with him the second to last time they met up in the Save Screen.

I imagine even after Geno is freed, he carries a lot of baggage, and with time, his prior decisions and reality of what he almost did and could have done if Sans hadn't stepped in begins to weigh on him. Even though he is free and he has a support system and two brothers to fall back on, I don't think Geno would be truly happy with the life he's living. This was implied when Error's origin was revealed, that Error was created because Geno fucked around and found out with another stock of DETERMINATION and ended up in the Anti-Void.

Geno is the kind of character that would benefit the most from adequate support, therapy, and perhaps some anxiety medication, NOT tsundere wubification and fetishization on the part of fuckass pervert Reaper so desperate for love he's willing to violate the first bitch he can touch with no consequence to them even though Life is right fucking there and has been there for AGES. He already has a source of affection. He already has an escape from the job he absolutely despises, and he's had that escape for centuries longer than he's known Geno exists.

And that's another thing, Reaper keeps getting turned into a sex pest that doesn't know how to keep his hands to himself when in reality he is the exact fucking opposite. Reaper isn't even that fond of physical touch to begin with, as touch-starved as he may be. He avoids making connections with people most of the time unless it's to reap souls. For a long ass time he has known that whatever he touches will wilt away and die. For a long ass time he has known that the vast majority of the other gods do not like him or his brother for the possibility they introduce: that gods probably can die, that life might not be eternal for them. Reaper and Grim weren't even born from stars like the rest of them; they came from black holes.

Reaper has a very depressing complexity and unlike Grim, who befriends the others to the best of his ability despite the social struggles they face, Reaper does the complete opposite and isolates in a sense. Whatever happiness he has in something else is few and far between, and once he meets Life by hanging out in her secret garden whatchamacallit, that is when their interactions start to establish a genuine connection, that even though they hated each other at first, interacting on their own terms and in an environment completely separated from the people they both don't like gives them a common basis to grow off of.

Reaper starts to learn more about life, and Life, more about death. They grow to respect one another, they grow to adore one another through this mutual understanding and growth, and when Chara kills Life, Reaper is absolutely devastated. Aside from his brother, he just lost the one person who bothered to give a shit about him and understand him, and regardless of conflict (surrounding Reaper's connection with Chara's death and "rebirth"), Reaper works tirelessly to find Life, and at some point he does succeed in reviving her or something using a glass flower.

But no, the only established part about Reaper's character that everyone knows about is he suffers from loneliness and social isolation, but now that it somehow impedes his ability to know what's appropriate or not in interacting with Geno even though he has free access to the rest of the multiverse and sees a bajillion social situations all at the same time simultaneously. He's so isolated from most accounts of living and culture that he can't be blamed for his stereotyped and fanonized behavior. Suuuuuuure. Fucking sure.

Good fucking job with that. What if I told you he's competent despite his isolation? I get that the majority of social interaction he gets has to do with his job, with collecting the souls of dying or already dead people and that most of them are difficult in accepting their deaths and letting Death the Elder take them to the Underworld, but the Reapertale gods are also capable of existing in many areas at once across the multiverse. There is no way Reaper wouldn't know better and there is no way his pain should be used as an excuse to treat Geno like a side-piece against his will. If you want a rapist villain in Reaper, then fine, whatever, but don't fuckin romanticize this shit like it has been for the last eight years. It's fucking deplorable and go have a seat in the corner over there, you asshole.

God you fuckers make me livid, and I don't even know you.

I despise how much Life is shafted off to the side as if she's one of Reaper's normal every day friends, like he has those in the first place. You are mistaking him for Grim in that regard, and I didn't think that was possible considering how different they are both in design and personality.

The history with Life mirrors a lot of themes from Classic Toriel. Asriel and Chara get fucking bodied and everything goes to shit, she leaves her husband, yadda yadda yadda. But with Life, on top of her children dying, she is furious at the creation of the very concept of death and is horrified at Asgore enforcing that. She loves all of her creations dearly and the idea that they all have to end at some point is a reality completely alien to her as a goddess, an immortal being.

This, on top of the deaths of Asriel and Chara, were Life's first introduction to death. There wasn't any peace to be seen in those things, no benefit, no bite. All she understood was the pain they felt. This is why she hates death in the beginning, both the people that are death and the very concept of it, and interacting with Reaper the way they were in her sanctuary and over a long passage of time was one of the best ways she'd understand what death really is and why it is necessary.

Life and Death coexist because an excess of either one is a disaster waiting to happen. An excess of Life would mean overpopulation, little appreciation for life, and the depletion of resources. An excess of death would mean little population and resources. In every literal way, they balance each other out.

Before meeting Life, Reaper felt as if barely anything life had to offer applied to him, that he had nothing to look forward to since he destroys all of it anyway. His meetings with Life over time showed him that there is value in what exists around him, even if it's still little. And when Life made him that glass flower from her flames, that is what that gift represented.

Over time, Life showed Reaper that his existence (and that of Grim's too) is not a curse. And in turn, Reaper has found someone else who values him.

But how would this apply to Reaper's relationship with Geno, since in this post I said Life and Death were an item before Reaper met him? I don't fucking like that this significance of Life to Reaper has been replaced by and glued onto Geno. And no, I'm not saying that as some kind of ship war whatever the fuck it's gonna be assumed to be; my claim is the characters have been skewered, when genuinely, Reaper can value Geno for different reasons than he does Life.

Geno could be many things to Reaper on top of being another lover. Reaper could really like him because Geno is a mortal or mortal-adjacent being that doesn't fear him and treats him like he does everyone else.

Reaper could experience things he hasn't before through Geno, like finally having a relationship lacking in fear or apprehension towards him as an individual, and also whatever fixations Geno would have about science or fiction. Just because Reaper knows about mortals and all the weird shit they believe and do doesn't mean he's done anything to experience it. Knowledge and experience of the same subject are two different things to have, and Geno being the closest equivalent to Reaper understanding mortals perhaps a little better would be very interesting to write.

Maybe Geno could also be Reaper's polyamorous awakening.

Of course, I could also say Geno is Reaper's bisexual awakening or both of those things at once, but I think Reaper would have already picked up on that given he sees people all the fucking time. I could also say that technically, in Reapertale, polyamorous gods are the fucking norm, but I don't think Reaper would have thought of how that applies to him given he's only had one lover up until this point and he's limited in every other relationship category anyways.

He knows the concept, he knows it exists, he knows/knows about people who are polyamorous, but he hasn't dedicated any thought to it beyond that, if that makes sense.

I also think it would be interesting, calling back on the idea that Geno is not happy with his life on the Surface, which is what leads to him experimenting with DETERMINATION again and landing his ass in the Anti-Void. I'm aware this might be bending canon information on who and what Reaper can kill via a simple touch, because Geno might not have that immunity anymore once he's free from the Save Screen, but I don't give a shit today. I'm tired of Geno always getting cornered in the Save Screen anyways, I need a change in setting and circumstances, and he can be just as much a glitch outside the Void as he was inside of it.

What if Reaper and Geno first meet in the middle of Geno's experiments, and his appearance and attempt at reaping Geno's soul is what distracts Geno from completing the events that would have led up to the discovery of the Anti-Void? While Geno is enraged, Reaper is beyond confused, perhaps a smidge horrified as well, considering the only other living thing that could resist his touch was Chara/Chaos. And since I'm working off what I know of the True Pacifist timeline of Reapertale as well, because I FUCKING CAN, Reaper does have the comfort of knowing Chara is no longer corrupted and no longer a threat, and since Geno has no sign of corruption, that must mean his resistance to the death touch comes from something else.

And there we have an issue between Geno and Reaper that makes more sense than Geno being an uwu baby tsundere and Reaper having his actual personality and history with other characters acknowledged and how that will apply to how he interacts with and becomes interested in Geno now.

Just because it ended well with Chara to some degree, as the new Demigod of Faith, does not mean there wasn't centuries upon centuries of devastation leading up to that point, and Reaper of all people could still be reeling from that as one of Chara's primary and personal victims back then. In this light, Geno and the Demigod of Faith have some similarity I doubt anyone in this equation is happy with, even though that similarity could be driven to the extreme in Reaper's mind and only Reaper's mind on behalf of the associated trauma.

Of course, with this taken into account, there is always the possibility that Reaper would resort to using his scythe on Geno anyway, but Geno is a case he doesn't know about yet and Geno is beyond PISSED that his life was threatened by this floating goth dude in a dress.

Geno would have just as much against Reaper as Reaper would have against him, since he has died before and the Save Screen was basically his purgatory for who knows how long. Geno has been tormented not at all by Death himself, but by dying and his own version of Chara as well, forced to watch the genocide of his loved ones over and over again. Dying was used as a tool against him, and there's more complexity in that area than I think we as a fandom gives that credit for, and I'm sure Life would be able to relate with that since she's had trauma related to death and has been killed before as well.

In a manner of speaking, Death and death is what brings these characters together. Life saved Death (indirectly and from his own perception of himself), Death saved Life, Death saved Geno from fucking up his own life (indirectly), and Life could advocate for Death.

Hell, if you look at the job Reaper actually does, even though his touch can kill, you will notice that he's moreso cleaning up after death than going out of his way to enact it, and Grim is much the same. The difference is what kind of souls they interact with and whether they'll cooperate in going to the Underworld or not.

If you look, all three of these characters have connections and experiences in common, whether from Chara-related trauma or dying. They could also have the same/similar interests as well, as Reaper, Life, and Geno are all fond of puns and some mode of sciences as well, such as Life with botany, Geno with the multiverse theory and DETERMINATION experiments, and Reaper most likely with how organic matter breaks down following death and other nuggets of information he picked up from time in thousands of AUs.

But regardless of how the gods in this equation can connect to other realities, whether though just existing as concepts or through social media (which is a headcanon for how Reaper keeps up), I doubt either of them know nearly as much as Geno would considering they live by a rule of not interfering with the lives of mortals beyond what their work requires.

So Geno is going to blow both their minds and maybe get them addicted to The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, because he is that kind of nerd to me. He'd fixate on looking into Surface mythologies after his interaction with Reaper and then be absolutely fucking confused and a little frustrated when none of them end up being a perfect fit to what Reaper is. He'd brew coffee as a peace offering to Reaper whenever he shows up after he finds out the dude likes caffeine.

I'm thinking Geno is the one who accidentally establishes a connection of genuine interest between himself and Reaper instead of Reaper constantly coming back to harass him for attention he already fucking has.

And all the effort Geno would go into to try and understand Reaper as a person, something more than a concept on paper, would be perplexing for Reaper to find out about, because most people either give up or attempt to escape whenever running into him. But Geno isn't doing that. He hasn't done that since the start regardless of whatever fear he might have. In this case, Geno's stubbornness and Determination would be mistaken for bravery or the closest thing he can get to that, and that plus his curiosity is admirable.

And if anything, it's Reaper who left the first time around in reaction to Geno's rage and inability to die from his touch. I would assume it was more out of shock than anything else as well, and Reaper couldn't think of an alternative to deal with him in the heat of the moment.

No one surprises Death itself that easily, especially not mortals, but Geno is no ordinary mortal and he would continue to surprise and amuse both Reaper and Life for the remainder of his days.

-- Sarco

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