#I think that's good.

[panoptical]

Kevin is a Corruption avatar and I will die on this hill. The themes of being consumed by something that loves you, being twisted and warped by an overwhelming force that creeps in and overtakes you, changing you into something completely unrecognizable. And it loves you. It loves you, it shines its light upon you and it burns you with love.

There's a direct parallel you can draw to how Prentiss was lured in by the hive with singing, "There is a wasps’ nest in my attic. A fat, sprawling thing that crouches in the shadowed corner. It thrums with life and malice. I could sit there for hours, watching the swirls of pulp and paper on its surface. I have done. It is not the patterns that enthrall me, I’m not one of those fools chasing fractals; no, it’s what sings behind them. Sings that I am beautiful. Sings that I am a home. That I can be fully consumed by what loves me." "It’s more of an everywhere. A feeling. Are you familiar with trypophobia? That disgusted fear at holes, irregular, honeycombed holes. Makes you feel that itch in the back of your mind, like the holes are there too, in your own brain, rotten and hollow and swarming."

The Smiling God is described in similar ways: "Beyond her, no longer just on the horizon, much closer than that, is a light, spreading across the desert. The light is alive and malicious and vast and encroaching. It buzzes and shines and everything about it hurts those who are close to it and destroys those who are within it." "Orange triangles, growing bigger and bigger as I traced my way deeper into the spiral. There was a soft light just around the edges of the triangles. When I looked at them, I felt the light in my head and it pounded like a migraine against the back of my eyes. I could not look at them. I could not look away." "The beautiful majesty of living as one under the unrelenting love of a Smiling God[.]"

How she describes the dichotomy: "Perhaps I’ve always heard it. Perhaps the itch has always been the real me, and it was the happy, smiling Jane who called herself a witch and drank wine in the park when it was sunny. Maybe it was her who was the maddened illusion that hides the sick squirming reality of what I am. Of what we all are, when you strip away the pretence that there is more to a person than a warm, wet habitat for the billion crawling things that need a home. "

And Tryptich: "What they did to me. I’m not myself anymore. I’m a smile, and a twitch of the wrist. It has been years, Cecil. I’ve drifted away from myself. Sometimes I am one me, and then again I am the other. What they did to the sentient heat trapped temporarily in my body. [...] The power of the Smiling God is an endless flow. It ebbs, like the tides. But, like the tides, it returns."

Now, you could argue that the Smiling God as a whole is more Desolation coded, with all the talk of devouring and ceaseless appetite. The All Smiles' Eve story shows the Smiling God destroying everything the Good family knew, a senseless act of destruction done swiftly and unceremoniously. Kevin talks about how the Smiling God will devour us all, stripping our flesh and making us pure. I think that aligns less with the loss of the Desolation because it's all about how the devouring changes you for the """better""", not about the loss that comes with it. There is of course the Flesh aspect with the gaping maw and devouring of flesh, but I think that's shown less in the main show than it is in supplementary materials that I don't own, so I won't pull any quotes out here. However, it's worth mentioning the Smiling God has multiple angles you could touch on.

But Kevin specifically, and his Congregation, are aligned with the Corruption. The way they sweetly manipulate you with kind words, luring you in and changing you so completely. He describes greeting a newcomer: "He missed his friends and family, but everyone here in Desert Bluffs convinced him that we were all his friends and family now. Just look at our smiles, we shouted as we surrounded him." There's a lot more I could say here, but I think the aspect of the Corruption that has to do with love is deeply underlooked.

Kevin might be uncanny just because of the body horror and our familiarity with Cecil, but the actual themes of his narrative are more important.

@bracketsoffear

[robyn-i-guess]

liking someone platonically is so embarrassing like. yeah i admire you. yeah i think about you all the time. yeah i look forward to every time i see you even if it's only for a minute. yeah it's all platonic and yeah i couldn't explain this because it'd sound romantic. fucking hell

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[bizarrebazaar13]

what if your doppelgänger wasn’t evil it was just a person. what if your doppelgänger wasn’t trying to replace you it was just trying to learn to be a person and you were the best model it had. what if your doppelgänger looked at you with your eyes and said with your voice that it just wanted to be loved. what then.

[mroddmod]

the queen of the disco or whatever

[theres-rue-for-you]

my brother works on a boat so when he rants about his job I can’t take it seriously because he keeps angrily referring to his boss as “captain”. like sorry ur having 19th century sailor problems my guy

[hamletthedane]

Thinking about him (the soldier in Poynter’s Faithful Until Death painting watching an apocalypse unfold around him with horror in his eyes as he tries to keep himself standing beneath a doorway, based on an actual 19th century archeological find of a man in full soldier’s garb under a doorway at Pompeii)

[riacte]

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[michameinmicha]

Stumbled upon this random ship (in a fandom im not active in myself) that has like 150 works on ao3 which are all from just two people gifting each other fics about this pairing back and forth and theyve been doing it for 3 years... i think thats true love probably

[catgirlstalin]

[scientia-rex]

Sometimes when people on the Internet are like "ADULTS CAN NEVER INTERACT WITH MINORS IT'S CREEPY" I remember how, at 12, back in 1997, I was on the Witchvox forums with people ranging from me to people in at least their 50s, and no one there was ever a creep to me, no one ever made me feel uncomfortable or asked for my personal info, and when I finally broke down after a particularly brutal day of bullying at school and posted about it they were the first adults I'd ever met in my entire life who told me the bullies were the problem and it was okay to be angry about it.

Kids need to interact with adults who will listen to them.

[blorbopolis]

im cooking

[kensatou]

MONKEY MAN (2024)

[sexygaywizard]

new yuri image for desperate lesbians just dropped

[skrunksthatwunk]

see 0 note flop posts aren't that bad when they're personal but 0 note fandom posts feel literally so bad. like if you don't wanna play toys with me anymore just say that. i'll pack up my super cool awesome things and go and i'll sit on the other side of the playground by myself and i won't even look at you. fuck

[kimabutch]

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.