#but andrew being force-fed eddie's blood has a similar effect for me

[markiafc]

i know cannibalism / eating each other or yourself has gone stale, its become an easy shorthand for desire and obsessive love. but its still a really scary, gruesome notion to me.

i remember first watching that early arc in one piece when i was really young, where sanji is stranded on an island with his father figure as a boy. and his father figure gives him all the rations, lying about having food of his own. sanji survived those long months with food, while his father figure survived because he was eating his own leg. it was done out of love, but it felt horrific to me then and i still feel that way now. at the same time full of revulsion and dread, but incredibly moved by the sacrifice too.

its reminiscent of watching will throw up abigail's ear in the sink. that dawning realisation that he had ingested her in his madness. that she was inside him, or at least pieces of her were. and he couldn't get her out of his body. the idea makes him retch and i feel that deeply too. it feels frightening and also bewitching ofc. like trouble every day 2001, when the cannibals seduce their victims into having sex with them. it begins willingly, then it devolves into the cannibal forcing their brutal expressions of lust onto the victim. whom we see try to resist and get away but they're subjected to the grisly sexual violence anyway. the sequences terrify me. its also undeniably compelling.

it has entered the mainstream, but there really is a nightmarish edge to cannibalism that feels cathartic to me.