#The shading got simpler as I went because I'm tired

[dynamic-dingo]

Prince

He was a request from Discord, I started him last week, but official translations of 242 came out and I had to color Ness.

I was going between pink and blue for the aura, but went with blue because I love it. However, his eye aura is hard to see, and was hard to see for pink too. Also, I gave him pink eyes because it seemed nice.

[aromanticannibal]

Basil is very mentally ill (SPOILERS)

I just came to this realization in the tags of another post but how deeply fucked up mentally must little twelve year old Basil must have been for his first idea to cover up Mari's death to be a suicide.

Mari has a knee injury that stops her from playing softball - so it must be a pretty bad knee injury. And you know what knee injuries do to you? They make you fucking fall. What are the odds of Mari accidentally falling off the stairs and dying from it after tripping because of her injury (and she was probably tired because of her training for the recital on top of that)? Pretty high me thinks. Even without the knee injury, these are some tall stairs man. Maybe I'm just clumsy but I know I'd fall from that.

So what happened is that Basil saw his best friend made his sister fall from the stairs and she died from it. And his first thought was to... Stage it as a suicide. And not any type of suicide, stage it as Mari having hanged herself. @a-rock-nothing-else in who's tags I screamed already pointed out that it's really weird for a twelve year old boy at a time where Internet isn't that easily accessible to know how to tie a noose.

So. Basil is undeniably fucked in the head from a stupidly young age, which makes sense given his parents are canonically "too busy" to take care of him, and he lives with his grandma + he seemingly didn't have any friends before Aubrey befriended him. So the child is probably somewhat depressed in the first place, and may have been suicidal in the past, explaining his knowledge of how to tie a noose (this is from @/a-rock-nothing-else's post).

But on top of that, even when he's seemingly really happy with his friends, his immediate reaction to Mari dying isn't to either freeze up like Sunny or call for help, it's to frame the "murder" and even then, to frame it as a fucked up suicide that's probably hard to put in place (need to know how to make a noose, need to bring the dead weight of a 16 years old girl down the stairs and then up a rope, all that alone because Sunny isn't responsive) instead of a simple "She fell down the stairs!". Even giving most of the truth would probably have been simpler ("Sunny and Mari were arguing and Mari was tired and tripped and fell down the stairs!").

I have a theory/headcanon : Basil probably was traumatized by something in the past (his parents' absence, his lack of friends or potential bullying, even just his depression) and got the good ol' "You're so mature for your age!" symptom. In this state of mind, he felt he had to help Sunny, because Sunny is helpless and doesn't know what to do, and he's his best friend, so Basil has to do something. He's the only one who can do something. (He doesn't think of calling for help.) Then, his first thought is to stage a suicide, perhaps because he's seeing things through his own eyes too much : when you're suicidal, you might view committing suicide as an escape from everything (good) and think that the people around you will forget everything about it in a few days, maybe (very good). Basil doesn't think in terms of "this is going to break everyone's hearts and might traumatize many of my friends" first because when you're twelve you don't think like that, and second because he's seeing himself in Mari supposed suicide.

Of course, he realizes after how terrible of an idea this is, but well. He can't do anything now, and he knows he did something wrong.

I suppose after all this, when the adrenaline went back down, he realizes that Mari didn't kill herself or die out of nowhere, someone pushed her. And when you're a kid you probably struggle to see shades of grey a bit, so he can't possibly believe his best friend is the one who pushed Mari down the stairs and killed her, no - it was something behind him.

Anyway. I'm not blaming Basil for anything, just trying to understand why his brain works so fucking weird and projecting a bit. I also might have missed some canon points but heh. These are just random thoughts, this is the reason why I labeled this as a theory/headcanon.