#before deciding that hes ready to leave belos. that he has a support system outside of the coven who wont treat him like this

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

ngl i kind of miss the era of fics after hunting palismen but before season 1b where hunter slowly befriends luz’s friends and family under the guise of studying wild magic/espionage/whatever they were setting up with hunter spying on luz in season 2a that they didn’t have time to pay off in the show. and he finds a loving mother figure in eda and gradually realizes that belos and the emperor’s coven are bad before bravely standing up to his abuser and permanently moving into the owl house to be luz and king’s grumpy older brother.

i know his arc in canon didn’t go like that and tbh despite having more episodes to interact with him than darius or camilla eda ended up being like. the least parental towards him out of the three. but i really like that fic concept? not very action-y so i get why they played his arc out this way in the show but hunter’s heel turn in the show didnt. really feel like it was in his control? he has doubts about helping belos in every episode he appears in bc he was growing to care about luz and her friends. and ofc he finds out that belos is evil in hollow mind and ends his redemption arc by choosing to help hexside fight off the scouts.

but he was forced into all the realizations about belos by outside factors. he leaves the emperor coven not because he made an informed decision about how it was bad but because he knows belos would kill him if he didn’t leave the coven. and then when he helped the students at hexside it was because the teachers were about to trade him for gus if he couldn’t prove that he was trustworthy. i guess in the human realm he does get to learn what counts as a normal childhood and loving family, but that ties more into his post-redemption arc about found family rather than this being what makes him realize that belos was evil.

(this is also why i like to compare hunter to peridot from steven universe rather than zuko. i know on a surface level hunter and zuko are both angsty boys with a scar and an abusive father figure. but zuko had a journey bonding with civilians and the gaang where he learned why exactly the fire nation was wrong. and his decision to leave the fire nation, after zuko got back all his privilege and his fathers favor, was meaningful because it showed he was willing to give all that up to do what was right. meanwhile hunter, like peridot, had nothing left to lose by the time they join the protagonists. they fought against the villains because they were trapped with the protagonists and would die if they didn’t. i’d say even peridot had more agency in her redemption arc than hunter because she was given a chance to go back to homeworld but instead chose to save earth anyway and tell off yellow diamond.)

every confrontation between hunter and the villains during and after hollow mind was forced on him. in his earlier episodes, hunter did some small betrayals towards the coven to help luz and willow. but during the final part of his redemption (hollow mind & labyrinth runners, where he fully does a heel turn towards the protagonists’ side), saving gus from getting his sigil was the only major action he chose to do. in every other instance, his options were either help the protagonists or be killed.

this isn’t a bad thing. i like hunter’s character arc. it’s definitely more about coming to terms with one’s trauma than about anything bad hunter actually did. so they kind of brush aside his redemption arc once it’s over and the major focus is on what comes after. which i think is how toh does most of its redemption arcs? like with lilith or to a lesser extent amity. hell even mattholomule. once the character realize they’re wrong they get on the protagonist’s side and there isn’t much lingering tension about the harm they did. because once they’ve dedicated themselves to helping the protagonists, there isn’t much more they can do to make up for the past harm and toh definitely isn’t trying to preach anything about punitive justice.

so for hunter he realizes belos is evil and going to kill him in hollow mind and decides to help luz’s friends stop him in labyrinth runners. and after that he permanently joins the gang and helps fight belos and the rest of his arc is about finding himself after his redemption. which with how they wrote his backstory and arc so far i am more interested in this than seeing him haggle with the moral quandaries of working with belos and slowly realizing that he wants to be a Good Boy.

but man. those season 2a fics are so good. they’re like an au where hunter’s redmption arc is more like zuko’s than peridots and they give him a LOT more agency. in those fics he might get forced to stay with the owl family at first out of plot contrivance, but by the end he chooses his new family. and he chooses luz and eda and the rest of their friends and family over every privilege he had in the emperor coven, and over belos. and even though it might be a bit cliche, i still think that idea is really powerful.