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lucalicatteart · 7 years

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do people ever try to absorb the souls of recently dead loved ones (presumably with their prior consent), like in some morbid attempt to be with them forever? or could someone deliberately absorb a soul and then sacrifice themself, allowing the second soul to take over? seems like something a hopeless romantic might try, or the potential beginnings of a cult!

ohgg, thmank you for the question… always interesting to consider other things I didn’t think about before lol! hmmm… Both of these things are definitely possible, but like with most nonsense in realm of magic, there would be a lot of potential downsides and ways it also wouldn’t work well lol. ((tw for vague mention of death and occasional mention of suicide in the context of self sacrifice)) [also i think this ask is in reference to this post about soul magics here (link), so there’s the context]

It could be done, though they would have to keep in mind that, there can really only be one main soul in a body at once (with the exception of a few very temporary things like possession or certain soul magics where people enter the dreams of others or etc.).

Absorbing the soul would inevitably mean the other person would just fade away into the Main Soul, so though perhaps you could communicate with them inside of you for a while, they would eventually fade and just become an indistinguishable part of you. Which I guess could have symbolic meaning to a person, but it wouldn’t be as if you could keep them alive within you and have regular conversations with them forever or anything.

But I guess would be interesting, or moreso creepy, to know like, the past 10 loved ones that have died you just absorbed into yourself, you could get more powerful while also possibly justifying that you now ‘’carry a part of them everywhere you go’’ or something… though I’d still see the decision to absorb them rather than find a better solution for dealing with the souls as somewhat suspicious (like even if it was consensual I’d wonder if the people absorbed were tricked by a possessive partner into thinking that was the only option, or were otherwise not well informed, since the field of soul magic would have plenty other ways to keep people alive longer if that was the goal, thus them choosing to absorb the souls would indicate in some way that their goal isn’t to keep them alive/spend more time with them, but merely to absorb for the sake of getting some emotional satisfaction out of knowing they’ve consumed their dead loved one into themselves, which again,, Suspicious lol… )

Though the idea does present some interesting dynamics, especially with secrets and stuff, like if you absorbed a loved one and went through that process where you can experience bits and pieces of their consciousness for the first few days and were to find out something through their secondhand memories or traumas that they had never even told you about while they were alive, and now it’s too late to address since they’ll be fading away soon, or etc. And other similar possible ~~dramatic~~ issues which could occur lol

(rest of info under a read more since this got long bhbh)

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This would probably just be pretty pointlessly masochistic (not in a sex way lol but like, general concept of ‘knowingly putting yourself in pain’ ) for the person doing it though, since as mentioned, soul absorption is incredibly painful physically, as well as I’d imagine it’d be kind of difficult to be bombarded with a mild first hand experience of your loved one’s internal state and fears and memories and probably even have some degree of a dialogue with them while they’re fading away.. I don’t know anything about this stuff since I never have relationships or anything, but I could imagine that if you have a loved one who has died and is currently trapped within you and fading further, temporarily adopting elements of their internal experience would be like.. worse?? Like you can’t even step away from the fact that it’s happening and your consciousnesses are now briefly merged to a degree, you basically are dying with them in spirit as they pass away a second time from your soul entirely consuming theirs, hearing their last thoughts as they pass away, feeling the emotions they feel as they die and become absorbed into your own soul (all whilst you’re probably having severe physical health issues from the magic and etc.).. just seems.. Bad…

But I guess I could see someone impulsively deciding to do this out of weird desperation despite it basically being pointless suffering for a few days only to have the consciousness and personality and etc. of the loved one as they know it STILL be entirely lost after all the effort anyway. I accidentally tend to ignore the emotional side of things and the fact that people don’t always act rationally (the biggest area where I think my own personality and mental illness based emotional deficits kind of limit me when worldbuilding, I always forget to think about stuff like romance or attachments to others or feelings about people making you act in not entirely logical ways and how that could affect magic/the world/etc, since that’s so entirely removed from anything I could ever personally experience lmao) , so given that, it’s definitely possible someone somewhere has done this in the millions of years that conscious living beings have been in Nanyevimi. Not all people would use soul magic reasonably or be calm and aware of all possible ways to magically solve a problem, especially after a loved one has just died or something.

However, since someone has to be high level in soul magics to do any absorbing to begin with, I still think it would be likely they would find a better solution. There ARE many cases of loved ones dying and people using soul magic to trap their soul into an inanimate object temporarily until they can find another host for the soul, then like, going out and murdering someone to use their body to put the soul of their loved one in so they can live on or etc. etc. But this is still limited by the fact that, high level soul magics like this are very inaccessible to a majority of the population, and you’d also be taking a huge risk, you could easily fracture or damage your loved one’s soul during this process, leading to a lot of situations like the super common trope of “i did some weird magic shit to bring someone I love back to life and they’re not totally the same any more/I wish i hadn’t have done it due to the consequences/They don’t remember me anymore/They’re a monster/They’re in so much pain i hate seeing them this way it isn’t worth it/etc” .

It can definitely work fine, it would just be highly uncommon to face no complications lol. This is something people do with themselves a lot too, though likely if you’re able to do soul magics you’d also be advanced enough to find an efficient way to keep your own body immortal, some people do practice regularly jumping from body to body when their old one dies, constantly taking on different identities and etc (especially people who have lived thousands of years and maybe just want to , ~~spice things up~~ by living in various bodies, though the same thing could be more easily achieved through just keeping one immortal body and regularly using heavy shape-shifting, I could still see someone deciding to exclusively take various living unaltered bodies for The Authenticity or something lol ). I would say body jumping or finding new forms for your soul/the soul of a loved one to inhabit would be a more common tactic of soul/life preservation than like, trying to just merge their soul with your own.

I guess a way the soul merging with a loved one COULD work is if you timed it exactly right , like how I mentioned that if you die before fully absorbing the souls you’re attempting to absorb, it can lead to being alive yet permanently trapped in a strange partially combined state?? So I guess that would be possible, to like make your physical body die somewhere halfway into the process and hope you get the desired result and then jump that soul into a new body in your new combined form… However there’s still so much that could go wrong, it would be impossibly rare to actually time correctly and get the intended result of your souls now existing as one bigger soul split evenly between the both of you with 100% of each soul still fairly in tact (as opposed to the more likely options, loosing parts of yourself or parts of them, destroying both of your souls entirely, etc. Especially if you’re the only one in the pair that can use soul magics, if something goes horribly wrong during the process with YOUR soul, you could easily trap them in a situation they don’t have the skill to get out of, so now they’re like traumatized that you destroyed yourself trying to save them and on top of that, stuck in some shitty half fractured soul void state and unable to do anything to help themselves since you’re the only one that can do that type of magic and now you’re gone or so faint/broken that you can’t perform the task anymore, etc.) .

Additionally idk how like, good that would be in the first place, most situations where two separate souls live in one body are cases where things have gone badly, situations that nobody would actively choose, since there becomes a lot of control issues in terms of being able to effectively pilot the body with two sets of impulses and moods and experiences happening at once, being able to use magic while technically two people of different levels are existing, even stuff like being able to think with two consciousnesses occurring simultaneously, etc. Two souls combined into one don’t take turns in a body, especially if partially merged, they’re effectively in a weird state of counting as one singular Main soul yet maintaining separate aspects, so it’s basically just a constant “one arm wants to do this and the other wants to do this” type situation, it’s not like one person can take charge and control it or you guys switch out, it’s more of a constant, everything at once always all at the same time.. which predictably, people are not very fond of.

Even if they’re like, the love of your life or something, it would be incredibly difficult to co-pilot a body together. For the few freak cases where this has actually happened to people, usually even simple things are hard, like just feeding yourself or walking or doing anything really. I guess theoretically you could train yourselves to be so incredibly in sync that your impulses and thoughts and etc. are no longer as conflicting and you can operate mostly okay (maybe like how some conjoined twins are that share a body or etc.), but it would take a very very long time to get used to since you weren’t born that way and had previously existed separately, and additionally would likely still be dealing with the leftover health effects or consequences of that type of magic so.. idk?? It’s an option, but I’m not sure how satisfying it would be… especially if you ever fell out of love or started to dislike the person and then it’s just like.. lol well.. now you’re trapped in the same body?? so, whoops

Additionally, over time there is a natural tendency to merge anyway, even in the case of a big ‘’Soul Magic Gone Wrong horribly fractured 5 people trapped together at once into one big Main Soul most all of them being in an incomplete state’’ sort of thing, it would still gradually lean towards everyone else fading into whichever the strongest or most present soul is. Like if they’re all broken partial souls but one person has retained 75% of their soul and there are no big power level disparities that would tilt the balance otherwise,, that may be the main soul others integrate into. So even if you could manage piloting one body for a while, you’d still gradually merge into one another, inevitably loosing the unique consciousness of one of you (or in the rare case you’re fairly equal then perhaps you’d just combine into something like a new unique person that is a strong combination of both), it would just be over the course of years, as opposed to all at once in a matter of a few days like in actual soul absorption. Maybe if you were really really skilled at soul magics and handling souls you could do things to delay this or etc., but any case where multiple presences are in one body at once will always lean towards complete absorption of some sort, it seems to just be a natural law of this sort of magic for whatever reason.

And probably by a few years you would have long decided that two people living in the same body, despite loving each other or whatever, is extremely difficult and you’ve got to find someone with the skill to separate the both of you back into unique souls again,,, Which again would just lead back to ‘why did you even initiate absorbing them in the first place if you could have kept their soul separate and found another way to keep it alive, which would have saved you the trouble of merging and separating first’ .

But again, I could see it maybe being done impulsively, or in the rare case that someone somehow has high skill in soul magic yet is ignorant of all the effects or things you can do with it (perhaps someone using borrowed powers, or who is pretty reckless and doesn’t read up on their craft as well as they should since they think they can skate by with raw skill alone, etc. etc.), so when their loved one dies they panic and capture the soul and think “oh, I don’t have a safe place to store them until I find them a new body, I guess I can just put them in my own for now!!”,, totally unaware that the second they do this they’re going to begin to irreversibly eat away the essence of their loved one.. that would probably add a whole extra layer of trauma to the usual awfulness of the soul absorption process lol.. Well I Was Trying To Just Do One Simple Thing I Foolishly Thought Would Quickly Save Someone But Now I’m Crouched On The Floor In Pain Throwing Up Blood And Slowly Consuming Their Entire Soul Into Myself,, So Yes, My Day Is Just Fabulous Thanks For Asking.

Like imagine seeing your loved one die, rushing into the situation to extract their soul to save them before they fade from their body, thinking you’ll just store them inside of you for safe keeping until you’re out of a dangerous situation, only to a few minutes later collapse in extreme physical pain and start hearing them speaking from inside your own mind about how they feel weak and like they’re fading away, eventually after a few hours your just laying there hiding in a bush you dragged yourself to or something in so much pain you can’t move, and you can’t even hear their consciousness anymore, you know you did something wrong but your not sure what, but you think you killed them, or something like that.. but hey! you feel a little bit stronger! Almost like you’ve absorbed energy from an outside source or something! Hmm! That would be A Lot Of Bullshit to go through in a just a day or twolol.. this is why you read up extensively on magic before using it, especially not knowing what you’re doing when it comes to such extreme magics like soul magic is just, very very dangerous and potentially tragic.

Though if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may be more likely to die than actually absorb the soul, since like I think is mentioned in the broader magic post, you can’t really perform an action you don’t have the energy to do, and soul absorption is a sustained channel of energy over the course of usually a days - weeks.. I would assume if someone did that accidentally, they may not have planned to exert that much magic ahead of time, so instead of involuntarily absorbing the loved one fully they could always just, both die during the process due to the one entirely depleting their magical energy and then some.. which if the idea is that the person doing it is inexperienced already, I think would be the most likely way for it to end up lol.

People accidentally kill themselves ALL THE TIME due to not having the experience to predict when a feat of magic would be too much for them to try, or using it incorrectly , or etc. etc. There are too many non-magic species for it to be like, the number one cause of death in the realm but, definitely among the magic capable portion of the population, various complications involving self-inflicted/accidental/unforeseen consequence related/etc. magical injuries would be the number one reason people die lol. Out of the population of magic capable species all together as a whole, probably around a good 50% die by magical means, mostly through accidents. If you don’t even know enough about soul magic to know that when you try to put a soul inside yourself you’ll likely start to absorb it (unless it’s done in a special way like in the case of temporary possessions or etc.), then you probably don’t know enough to pull it off in general, and rather than the despair of accidentally killing someone you thought you saved, it’d be more likely you’d just like, drop dead from not being equipped to handle the spell you just unknowingly set in motion.

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As for sacrifice, you couldn’t always sacrifice yourself necessarily, since it’s essentially ‘the strongest soul is the one that merges with the Main Soul’ (which is usually hard to calculate due to how vague of a concept all this ‘soul’ stuff is anyway, but can be decently estimated.. sometimes). So if you’re like, a jhevona (humanoid demon) skilled in soul magics and they’re a fairly unskilled average elf or something. They die, and you decide you’re going to sacrifice yourself, by putting their soul in your body so they can have it instead, no matter what you WANTED to happen (their soul piloting your body instead of you), you would inevitably just absorb them into your own soul because your life force is the stronger one. However, if your soul is the weaker one then you probably could, since even if you initiated the soul absorption process it’s likely (even if they didn’t want this to happen), your weaker soul would end up being the one absorbed. Though I would wonder a lot about the trauma of putting them through that lol, they died and came back to life just to know that they only have a few days of dialogue with you before you fade away and merge with their main soul permanently, and then they resume life living literally in YOUR BODY, piloting theform of their dead loved one that they’ve just consumed into themselves, unable to escape reminders of the fact that you’re gone, unless they shape shift or find another body, which if they’re not skilled in soul magic and would be unable to do that, then you’ve kind of trapped them.

They’d probably at the least be annoyed with you after the fact that you initiated the soul absorption process on them, knowing that they’re going to be the one ending up absorbing you, in the two or so days that you’d still exist enough to chat with them you’d probably get a lot of lectures after their initial shock and acceptance of what’s inevitably going to happen. If they were skilled in soul magics they could probably reverse what you did in the first few minutes before it could take effect (maybe you could fight back and forth for a while lmao, one initiating the soul absorption process and the other immediately stopping it, which would be Comedy TV Show Funney Hee Hee Ha Ha until one of your souls breaks into pieces or one of you just drops dead), however if they couldn’t do soul magic they’d just kind of have to.. chill.. nothing to do but wait around until they absorb you into themselves kind of against their will.

You could possibly give your body to someone to use in a much easier way if there was a third person involved, though it wouldn’t really utilize soul absorption. You could kill yourself right after your loved one dies and have the third person take the soul of your loved one and put them in your body, so they would have a living form (since after you die you wouldn’t be able to transfer them yourself). Though this would really only make sense if, in this case, there are no applicable bodies/forms around anywhere close enough to get to, and your loved one’s body has been entirely destroyed by whatever killed them, thus in the group of the three of you, there are three accessible souls, yet only two currently utilizable bodies, yours and this third person. So you let your soul fade away, and then your loved one’s soul gets to keep your body. But again I feel like it’d be very situational..

The biggest barrier for people not being able to do stuff like this is just, the fact that soul magics on this level are very rare and extremely difficult and risky to pull off, but it’s kind of like, once you’re someone who’s already high level in soul magics, your possible solutions to the situation would expand to the point that you wouldn’t need to do stuff like this? Unless it was a deliberate choice or mistake on your part. But kind of like, with the above, you wouldn’t HAVE to kill yourself to give them your body, if you had the skill you could maintain them trapped in an animal or even an inanimate object or something until you find them another body. And if their body is still fine, you could just use healing magic to heal their body, then place them back into their own body. Though I guess maybe if you were fairly low skill, and their body had been entirely destroyed beyond repair, but you would still need a third person to do the transfer after your body has died, so either that person would probably be skilled enough to help you find another solution, or like… not to be morbid but uh,, you could kill them and put your loved one in their body lol,, instead of just having them help you kill yourself and etc… If I was the third person in the above situation (especially if I was just some random dude that wasn’t really important to the other two people) and the High Level Soul Mage started to look at me right after their loved one just died I would probably… run away as fast as possible or get prepared in a fighting stance…. you know they’re about to kill you and take your body as a vessel to save the other person lmao

But! maybe in the case where YOU don’t know soul magics but your loved one does, and their body is completely destroyed, if they were still existing outside of a body temporarily but there weren’t any possible options around for them to hop into, knowing that if they’re out of an acceptable vessel for too long they’d entirely fade away, you could offer to expel your soul from your own body so they can then take your form and live on. But also I guess if they know soul magics they’d probably try to find a way to save you after the fact, either decline the gift of your body entirely or accept it and take your form but then capture your soul as it leaves and like.. seal it into a rock or something to carry it around with them while they desperately run around trying to find some living thing to murder so they can place you into a more applicable form before they’re no longer able to sustain you within the rock lol. If they found you a body maybe they could eventually switch you both back (instead of them just piloting your body from now on and you having to be some random graveyard body). That’s probably the most plausible situation for sacrifice, where the person doing the sacrificing is the one who DOESN’T have the soul magic skill and is merely offering themselves as a vessel for someone who does, etc etc etc, but there are endless hypothetical scenarios, all of which are complicated and dangerous lol

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As for the cult thing, yeah there are already a decent handful of cults that are basically just schemes for people to gather souls, idk if you read much about the Avirre’thel species (basically vampires) when I post about them, but that’s why people are always suspicious when things like the situation with the Avan and their ‘’god’’ happen (basically one of the groups of the Avirre’thel like, secluded themselves in caves and devotes all their time to the worship of a certain ancient demon named Yvteii). Since even in vampiric culture, where it’s extremely acceptable to make deals with jhevona (demons) and is one of the few cultures in Nanyevimi that doesn’t view them as some frightening other and actually adapts them fully into their society, even they are still suspicious when it comes to ancient demons, especially ancient demons having relationships with or followings among other less all powerful living beings..

People who have the ability to do so and the moral compass to allow it will do anything to get souls, since it’s such an easy way to access more power and grow your strength, and with how scattered and isolated the supernatural realm can be sometimes, it’s uncomfortably simple for someone, especially who’s an advanced magic user, to like, show up in a random group of isolated people living in a forest and help them and perform a few ‘’miracles’’ (just regular high level magic, but maybe a type these people haven’t seen before, are too isolated to know of, etc.) for them, convince them to basically take you on as kind of a cultish religion leader and regularly reap souls from them. There have been many religious figures and etc. in the past that were just high level mages or ancient demons putting on a few fancy shows of magic for an otherwise magically ignorant group of isolated people, so they can basically just trick the people into believing in them and then make up some excuse for the people to give them soul pieces, or sacrifice whole souls, etc.

Kind of like in those weird like, resource management type games where you can upgrade certain resources to gradually accumulate in the background whilst you do other stuff, some ancient jhevona or other beings will have like, 10 or 20 various cults lined up scattered in different places all across the realm who are regularly sacrificing to them or making deals with them and etc., giving them a steady income of power growth, new souls coming in monthly or weekly or whatever. Though, this usually gets old pretty quick since really the only groups you can trick into stuff like this are non-magical groups (since anyone in a culture that regularly practices magic would at the very least know to not give part of your soul to people or etc. and would be suspicious of any outside being coming and asking for sacrifices, even if they tried to be tricky and didn’t outright say “give me some of your soul”, and would also not be able to be wooed by Fancy Magic Tricks and Seeming Miracles, since they’d just be like “uhhh, that’s just normal magic” lol), and non magic groups typically have much weaker souls and shorter lifespans, which means inevitably your cult would die out and you’d have to go start a new one every few hundred years or so probably, and even then, it’s a lot of work for mostly weak souls that don’t amount to much gain when you’re already an immortal nearly all-powerful being lol.

Soul harvesting cults are usually seen as like, a Baby Beginner Ancient Powerful Being sort of activity, since once you’ve been alive for like 15,000+ years you’re going to get tired of keeping up with all of them. It’s similar to how many ancient demons in their earlier years when they were just starting to get super powerful would do stuff like, shapeshift and become world leaders or etc. (the whole ‘all of these important historical figures are actually the same person!’ conspiracy except like.. actually true and done with magic lol), but then eventually you just get funcking tired of changing your entire identity every few hundred years and going through the same boring political exchanges to become royalty or lead an army or something when people seemingly never change and you’re just pulling the same nonsense but with a different face, etc. The cults and recognition that most powerful beings have are usually not ones they want or recognize, since once you’ve been that way for so long you usually just seclude yourself in a mountain somewhere.*(1) Because you’re basically the closest thing to an all powerful god being, no matter how much you try to hide, people will always attempt to find you and hunt you down and summon you to ask you for favors or powers or etc, and may even start a cult around you or consider you a god or etc, but usually at that point you want nothing to do with it. Voluntary cults are usually something powerful beings like ancient jhevona and etc. will grow out of pretty fast lol.

So yeah, cults usually get old after a while, since if you have the power to start stuff like that in the first place, you probably have much better things to be doing than tricking random small villages into thinking you’re a god just so you can get a soul every few weeks or so. Many powerful beings would rather go for fewer more powerful souls, than larger amount of weaker ones (killing a few high level mages and absorbing their souls could be equivalent to a years worth of soul sacrifices from a tiny human farming village), have another better way of growing power, or are at the point where they don’t even feel they need to grow power anymore at all since it makes little difference.

BUT ANYWAY..

In a way more similar to what is mentioned above, yeah I could also see it being a thing where you maybe use your ‘’close’’ (in “” since if one side isn’t being authentic then is it really ‘’close’’??) relationships with people to trick them into willingly letting you have their soul after death, then secretly setting up situations that will kill them, and ‘’’consensually’’’ attaining their soul. You could probably garner some sort of cult following using love and affection to manipulate people into giving souls to you, which I guess to me seems like too much effort like.. just be a plain ass serial killer then, what is the point in emotionally manipulating people ahead of time if you’re going to murder them anyway lol, but I guess some (incredibly shitty) personality types could get an extra kick out of that, or maybe the small strings of morality they have left in them require them to get ‘’consent’’ of some form first, even if under the context it’s not true consent and doesn’t matter, it could still help them rationalize their actions to themselves or something.

But yeah.. soul cult stuff is rare simply due to the inaccessibility and rarity of soul magic in the first place, but as you can imagine, cults and other gimmicks to attain souls can be pretty trendy among the tiny group of people who can actually gather them for absorption (at least for a while, until they get over that phase in their life lol). I could see a recently dead ‘’loved one’’ culty soul scheme being a thing.

Hmm, but yeah lol, good questions! There are a lot of different ways things like that can go, and you always have time limits and ability limitations and amount of magic you can expend and the general risk and instability of magic (especially higher level magics) working hard against you, so I feel like many people would not try things like this in the first place, either due to their knowledge of a better solution, or just due to the risk (like maybe they’d rather their loved one just rest in peace rather than taking the huge risk of damaging the persons soul or condemning them to extra suffering and trauma or etc. due to unpredictable magic), but there are certainly scenarios where it may be applicable, or done as a matter of personal choice (especially in unhealthily dependent and abusive relationships, choosing to absorb the other person despite there being other ways to manage their soul after death may be plausible, definitely if you’ve just ‘’accidentally’’ killed them and can delude yourself into thinking it’s somehow noble or meaningful to keep them as a part of yourself or something gross shitty like that,, or just two well meaning but confused people who don’t know enough to understand there’s better options both agreeing to let one absorb the other since they think there’s not a better way, or perhaps misunderstand what actually happens (maybe they falsely believe you can keep someone around forever by absorbing them,etc)) , or out of desperation/lack of knowledge/lack of skill/emotional impulse/etc. Same with the sacrifice thing, though there may be better ways to go about it, if the person has the skill and is willing to take the risks, there are definitely situations where things could play out that way for whatever reason. Both are plausible applications of magic which I hadn’t considered until now!!

[ side note 1: I put this down here since it wasn’t really as related to the rest of the text and didn’t fit in between those paragraphs lol

The typical (very broadly generalized/simplified ) life cycle for an ancient demon (which is basically just a term for an extremely world alteringly powerful being, they don’t actually have to be demons/jhevona, it’s more of just a title at this point than a true descriptor) is usually like:

start off as totally regular person who trains extensively and studies magic

>>>

either work your way up normally with an enchanting business or do shady shit like killing people and absorbing their souls in order to grow your power and exceed your natural magical limitations (though you’ve got to have a very driven or otherwise power hungry personality to be motivated to do this in the first place, to go literally like 10,000+ years gaining your power without ever stopping or changing your goals (or dying in magical accidents).. like it usually takes 10,000 - 15,000 years to get powerful enough to even be close to being considered an “ancient demon” so like.. you’ve got to really be a purpose driven person)

>>>

wow now you’re strong enough to start cults and tamper in world affairs and etc! lose your moral compass for about 100 - 500 years while you go through your baby power trip phase and abuse your abilities

>>>

become disillusioned with life because you feel like you’ve seen everything before and done everything and have no challenges left to conquer and kill yourself with magic OR turn away from the world and focus on a new challenge (you’re also probably at the point now where, whether you welcome this or not, people are trying to hunt you down to ask for favors and power, and some see you as a god (or a threat), so you have to hide from them now)

>>>

find a hiding spot to just bunker down in , create your own realm or something, and live your your days entirely detached from reality and the rest of humanity focusing on whatever your new goal or interest is (you’re also probably powerful enough at this point to need to abandon your physical form, or constantly shapeshift, so you don’t have to keep up healing magic from your body destroying itself from the inside out daily because your energy is too powerful to be kept in an organic form)

>> >

idk just do this until you get bored, either find something else to do or just die by your own magic whenever you feel you’ve accomplished enough

This is usually why the exact personality profile of pretty much every ancient demon alive right now is like, “weird isolated nerd hiding in an ancient cave somewhere wholly and completely focused on some obscure task like unraveling the true nature of magic” or etc. Most any other type of person burns out after a while and just chooses to die (people who were only in it for power or glory with no higher motivation, people who were fools and died using their powers irresponsibly, people who got too involved with the world and it ended up being their demise,people who found it too hard and quit growing their power, etc.), it’s really just the very focused scientist types who have the motivation and reason to keep going, since you never run out of new material to study and things to be interested in if you’re the type of person who really wants to understand the nature of the entire world and is easily interested in everything etc.

Of course this doesn’t mean many of them aren’t also like, completely weird as hell, or extreme power hungry narcissistic freaks who revel in their power over others and etc lmao.. You don’t live like..25,000+ years without developing a bit of an… “interesting” personalty. All of the 40 or so ancient jhevona currently known to exist are like.. absolutely ridiculous people in some way or another lol (at least in the few interactions they’ve had with the outside world, some are way more hidden than others, but none of them show themselves very often enough for anyone to know what their personality is truly like, but even based on one or two occurrences, it’s enough for people to be like “What the hell is like.. wrong with this person.. have they been living alone in a cave for 8,000 years or something?” (Yes, Actually.. They Have)). But just that at their CORE, regardless of what other traits they have, pretty much all of them have some element of 'extremely curious and highly motivated hermit scientist’ type in their personality. You don’t live 28,000+ years driven by a very shallow or single purpose, it usually tends to be people who have a lot of questions they want to answer or a lot of things they want to do (usually creating or discovering something, things that can be ongoing rather than one time goals), since that can be something you keep up for many many lifetimes without loosing motivation or becoming bored/disinterested.

The act of being an ancient jhevona tends to favor the curious problem-solving scholar types, as even after thousands of years they can still find new issues to tackle, new interests to explore, new theories and challenges to unravel, etc. Even if their other traits vary wildly and many of them are legit like… downright insufferable on a level that only an ancient nearly all-powerful immortal being could be, they AT LEAST usually all have that trait in common.

But anyway, so yeah like.. usually after a while they just dedicate themselves to some problem or area of study or something and hole away in a cave or other isolated place to experiment and think about things in peace, far away from the rest of the outside world. Though starting cults can be initially promising for them, pretty much any ancient jehvona who’s been around more than 16,000 years has passed that point in their life and is already in the 'Okay I’ll Just Be A Nerd Hermit Then I Guess’ phase where they become increasingly more obscure and detached enough that they couldn’t be bothered to maintain a cult presence or etc. ]

BUT entirely off topic rambling about demons aside, thanks for the question!!

#replies #death mention #worldbuilding

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courtanie · 8 years

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What do you think about consensual Kyman? It feels a little weird to me bcuz Cartman is an jerk to Kyle, but the last few eps got me thinking. Can you explain why this is a good/bad idea? I need to know I'm not the only one who thinks this is weird.

I have answered this multiple times in the past, so I’m just gonna copy and paste one of my other answers because I don’t have the energy for another full-fledged rant pfff. Question isn’t exactly the same but it hits the same points I would hit here. And yes this puts me in the tag and makes me into an ~anti~ but whatever this perpetuates a REAL LIFE problem where casual racism is a-okay. Please keep in mind I do not go after people who ship this, and I do not flood their tag with this kind of thing unless I am specifically asked to do so. Last time I posted this that seemed to be a consensus even tho no one could point out where I did such a thing sooooooo there ya go. Anyway.

Anonymous asked: Why are you okay with writing nonconsensual scenes and horrible violence but you're so against consensual kyman? Mind you I'm asking as a huge fan of both works and that cheesy crap between them. This isn't an insult to you it's just a legitimate question.

Because I don’t perpetuate the idea that the situations that take place in my fics are okay. When I write my violent stuff, it’s portrayed as traumatic and something that needs recovery, no matter how small.

Kyman fans, however, completely ignore the ramifications of what the two of them being together would be. It’s abuse, pure and simple. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until I hit the ground dead: Trapping a Jew with a Nazi is not quirky.

And that’s exactly what Kyle would be in that situation, he would be trapped. But no no, I’m told, “it’s okay Cartman considers him his Jew but still makes racist remarks because well gotta keep it in-character”. That is a disgusting mindset.

People who write this do not understand Kyle’s character at all. I was beaten down in my earlier days because I made their friendship too ooc with Cartman occasionally lending a hand to help him. So, their canon selves aren’t cool but completely destroying Kyle’s proud character and making Cartman a ‘doting cuddly and ‘only casually racist’’ boyfriend is a-okay so long as there’s some smut, right?

Listen, their relationship is nothing but a power struggle. They are frienemies for a reason, they are not meant to get along on any level outside of using one another to gain the upper hand in a situation. They’ll constantly beat each other down and then drag them back up when they realize they can use the other to their advantage. And that is called abuse. Both of them are guilty of this. “But I made them go through inner turmoil and wonder how they could love someone so mean to them!!!” And there it is. Kyman fans know how detrimental their relationship is. They constantly address it. But yet that all goes away because boners. The consequences are never discussed, the inevitable misery is never addressed. The realism is stripped away from the damning effects of such a relationship taking place.

Honestly I think your question is one of my biggest problem with Kyman fans (not you in particular, babe, I mean the general consensus I’ve found). Do I write graphic, awful things? Yes. Yes I do. And they are portrayed as graphic, awful things. I emphasize, especially nowadays, the recovery. I take it apart from all angles to reinforce ‘THIS WAS A BAD THING THAT HAPPENED’. But the guaranteed mental/emotional abuse from Kyman is just… glossed over. They put a pretty bow on it and call Cartman’s antisemetic ways ‘cute’ and claim Kyle would ‘have a fondness for it’.

Also, lol. Let’s talk about the fucking fat-shaming hypocrisy for just a moment because it’s one of my biggest grievances. Most consensual kyman fics, and yes, I have read many because I have a lot of readers who suggest shit to me insisting the fic they found makes it work and I’m a naturally curious person, have a scene where Cartman is calling himself disgusting because of his weight and being teased about it for so long. Okay you know what, I can get behind that idea. That is an absolute possibility it’d grind against him for years and lead to some inner issues. And Kyle comes over and comforts him and reassures him he still finds him attractive or some other shit. Okay. Fine. Not my thing but whatever. But then they will turn around and it’s RIGHT BACK TO THE CASUAL RACISM. And Kyle will just laugh it off because “well, at least Cartman felt like himself again”. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

The fact that people are more concerned about Cartman’s appearance being put into question than Kyle’s identity is fucking repulsive. It’s bad to call him fat but insulting Kyle’s religion is a-okay? And then you have the “well Kyle still calls him Fatass but it’s an endearing term”. Holy fucking shit no???? That makes it so much worse??? I mean, to take a scene specifically for Cartman to say “I have a serious problem with my weight being what defines me” but continuing to use it and he’s totes chill with Kyle reminding him of what made him so upset in the first place? Do kyman writers not understand how being insulted works?

There’s a difference between let’s say Ken and Ky together calling each other assholes and Cartman and Ky just tearing each other down in every way possible but finding it ‘loving’. That’s not how it works. But it’s completely ignored, once again, because boners. It skeeves me out. I feel really awkward writing a scene with the two of them interacting and having Cartman shovel out very in-character insults. And you’re supposed to feel bad over it because they are awful things to say. But no. No kyman writers are totally cool with doing so and ‘putting a spin on it’ to make it what they consider a ‘healthy’ relationship.

So yeah, I have a serious problem that I can understand horrible consequences of people’s actions and address them thusly, but I’m called a fucking disgusting monster for it. Meanwhile these people are treating Nazi like it’s as casual of a bad personality trait as like, a Dudebro. You know what a realistic ‘romantic relationship’ is between them? Dubious on every level. Kyle deep in the midst of a depression, desperate for some sort of human contact, and Cartman completely takes advantage of it and Kyle is fucking trapped because that’s how abusive relationships goddamn work.

That’s their dynamic. It has ALWAYS been their dynamic. They are terrible people to one another, even my goddamn major bias towards Kyle isn’t going to make me say he’s a decent person to Cartman because he’s not. And treating their relationship as though it could be nothing but flowers and butterfly kisses and casual racism is insulting to both the characters and to anyone who’s ever dealt with mental and emotional abuse. Like what you like, whatever I’m not your brain I can’t tell you how to feel, but people need to understand just what it is they’re perpetuating.

Adding to this for your question in particular:

Last season showed us that Cartman is still Cartman. He is still manipulative, he is still working to cover up lies of his, and we all saw that regret and anger and disgust on his face towards Heidi in the finale.

There’s a post going around that equates his personality change in seasons 19 & 20 to ‘Casa Bonita’, where he goes to Kyle’s house in a sweater thinking it’ll win Kyle over for his ‘change’. And Kyle tells him ‘That’s not being nice, it’s just putting on a nice sweater’. And OP of this post I’m referring to was correct, last season was just Cartman putting on a nice sweater. He’ll go back to his awful ways and all the points that I made here will still be firmly in place, I guarantee it.

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