#edwin appreciation

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

Welcome to the Dead Boy Detective Agency.

I am Edwin Payne, and this is my partner @biconcharlesrowland.

Some other people that are associated with us:

@crystal-isalive

@nikoisalsoalive

@reallycoolcatking

@montyisntacrow

@jennys-meat-cleaver

What brings you here?

This blog is unfortunately run by two other versions of me. I will have blue text and run the cases and regular interactions.

I'm a dark, "villainized" version of the Edwin you know. I'll use red text and run the more aggressive asks and discuss, darker themes.

And I'm a demon. I find it fun to mess with Edwin and get him to engage in more explicit acts. I'm using bold text and I'll occasionally take up cases and questions about Hell.

OOC: Hello again, Mae here from @mystic-mae. With, well, a third rp blog. Don't worry, this is my last one. I hope.

× ALL EDWIN TAGS ×

#magnifying glass - Looks like Edwin and Charles are on a case! Did you hire them for it?

#charles no - Edwin's just looking out for him.

#cat bracelet - Whenever the Cat King is mentioned or Edwin's just having a gay panic.

#soppingwetcat - Poor guy needs a break. Probably give him one?

#edwin appreciation - Edwin reblogging posts about what people say about him or when they draw art of him. 'Cause this community loves him and he needs to know that.

#dead boy detectives rp - General tag to get seen.

× REGULAR!EDWIN TAGS ×

#edwardian detective - Casual conversation with Edwin.

#hell's babydoll spider - Super angsty moments with Edwin. Possibly includes Hell.

#what's [blank]? - He's trying to learn all about the Internet and slang. Charles was the reason why he has a Tumblr in the first place.

#ball of sass - Edwin being a sassy, cunty Edwardian ghost.

#oh you love this don't you? - Well, it looks like Edwin's a little jealous...

× VILLAIN!EDWIN TAGS ×

#one little spell - Casual conversation with villain!Edwin.

#runes and curses - villain!Edwin causing some mischief. Maybe something bad happens, no one knows.

#colder to touch - Oops, you angered villain!Edwin. Try and survive... (the angst tag.)

× DEMON!EDWIN TAGS ×

#paradise or limbo - Casual conversation with demon!Edwin.

#spider's den - demon!Edwin's angst tag. He remembers a lot of what happened to the original Edwin, seeing as Hell altered him so much that he became a demon himself.

#infernal deeds - It's just demon!Edwin being a flirty little shit. Only ones affected are Charles, Cat King, Monty, and Simon. And probably any gay man in the area...

× RULES & REGULATION ×

FUCK NEIL GAIMAN HE SUCKSSS

NSFW is allowed! Just no heavily sexualized actions or super gorey stuff that the Edwins (or I, the mod) tell you is uncomfortable.

Heavy gore is to be directed towards villain!Edwin and demon!Edwin. However, regular!Edwin can and does experience gore from time to time. I, the mod, will tell you when to stop with the gore.

Failiure to comply results in being blocked, sorry.

No racist, transphobic, homophobic, or ableist shit here. I'm not gonna deal with your asses, and neither will any of the Edwins.

I suppose you can be rude to Edwin, but why would you do that?

Have fun!

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

@biconcharlesrowland

...Charles?

this one's for you, edwin paine

[hagstoned]

So much love for dbda fics that don’t make manga Niko’s entire personality. She is SO intelligent - fluent in a second language, smart enough to go to a boarding school in a foreign country to study in her second language, able to read, retain and recall vast amounts of complex new information in a relatively short amount of time. Let her shine!

[mostly-functional]

Headcanon that Edwin had a stutter when he was younger and that’s why he over-enunciates some words. Sometimes it comes back when he’s angry or tired, but he tries his best to never let that happen.

The first time Charles hears it is after a particularly had case. Maybe it involved a demon or sending someone to Hell (even if they did deserve it). Edwin is quiet when they get back to the office, and that’s fine because Charles understands that he needs silence sometimes.

But then Charles asks a question and Edwin all but chokes on the answer. Edwin braces himself because he expects Charles to make fun of him like all the other boys in school did. Instead, Charles stops what he’s doing and tries to help by guessing the answer and giving terrible advice he half-remembers from sitcoms. Eventually, Edwin manages to give the answer, and Charles smiles so widely as he thanks him.

Maybe that’s when Edwin first starts to realize that Charles is his friend. That he’s finally succeeding at socializing for once in his existence.

A few days later, Charles comes back from a walk with an Ouija board “cause we’re ghosts, yeah?”

Edwin pretends to be offended, but he agrees to use it when he’s having trouble with speech. It becomes the first of their little idiosyncrasies.

Maybe that’s also when he starts to fall in love with Charles. He won’t realize it for another 30 years, of course, but it’ll seem so obvious looking back

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

Hi! I'm from the 70 questions game.

15 (including the past, we all want to know what the infamous puppy debacle was)

57

And 62

(OOC: sorry for the late response!!)

15? Well, officially, the Dead Boy Detectives Agency has owned no pets. Charles tried to get a ghost dog back then, but, they're quite unruly at times.

As for 57, I myself have never focused on love, let alone true love. Port Townsend was the first time I was able to, figure that aspect of my life out. I do not have a concrete answer, but right now it's no.

62 is an interesting one to answer. I'd say taking up cases, helping other ghosts move on, Niko, and Charles.

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

I wasn't saying I wanted to get out of it-

Edwin: If I got send back to Hell, would you miss me?

Charles: It’s cute you think Hell can get you out of this friendship.

[ask-geralt]

I'm very sleepy but I've had another Edwin thought.

Before WWII, the unnecessary gendering of pink and blue was actually swapped; pink was associated with boys, and blue with girls. The reason it swapped after WWII is gay men sent to concentration camps were marked as such with pink triangles, and so the color became associated with femininity instead of masculinity. Tragic yet fascinating stuff, and absolutely worth knowing, as all things relating to concentration camps, especially in WWII, are. How to avoid history repeating itself, etc-

But why does that make me think of Edwin? Yes he's gay, but he predates WWII, and he's definitely not associated with the color pink?

It's because of all that, and he's associated with blue, of course!

Blue was the needlessly gendered girl color in Edwin's time, and he liked it even before he died, the blue cap Simon snatched off him, remember? I'm not 100% sure on if it's a one to one or if we've gone even harder on the needlessly gendering, but picturing every instance of blue related to Edwin as pink instead as a thought exercise for the fem vibes of his clothes is fun, to me at least.

[technically-human]

Hi i'm absolutely in love with the reverse au!!

I want to know, in this verse does edwin still confesses to charles? if so how is it different? i feel if he did he would end it by apologizing, you know, religious guilt and all

There’s a train that goes through Hell.

Its journey starts in Wrath, and it departs already full of souls. It took Charles far too many years to realize that there were separate, more spacious wagons that demons could board. Not that he could understand why anyone, hellborn or not, would want to get into the damned thing. He certainly hadn’t.

Actually, Charles couldn’t recall ever boarding the train. As far as he could tell, he just appeared there one day, and had spent the next tortuous decades trying to get out. It was part of the torture. Getting out was entirely possible. More than that, it was necessary.

The train had no regular schedule that he could discern (not at first, though he had always been good at finding patterns, and was eventually able to crack it) but it would make quite a few stops before finally returning to the Wrath ring. Souls inside the train were already angry and far too close to each other (close, so close not even air could squeeze in) but when they got really violent was when the train made a stop.

Getting out didn’t mean you were free, no matter where you managed it, be it Sloth or Gluttony, Pride or Lust. No, as soon as the train finished its journey, you would appear back inside, in Wrath where you belonged, suffocating once again, getting ready to claw your way out for the millionth time.

Because if you didn’t get out, The Conductor would get you.

If he thought about it calmly, Charles could probably say that he got out of the train more times than not. Still, being caught by The Conductor once was bad enough, as there was no coal in Hell, and something had to serve as combustible. Souls could not burn to death, and the whole journey always felt longer than eternity when he was caught. Once it was over, he would be inside again, and fight with more desperation than before, not caring who stayed inside so long as it wasn’t him.

He couldn’t understand why anyone, hellborn or not, would want to get into the damned thing. He certainly hadn’t. But as the souls pushed and bit and clawed and punched their way out, Edwin boarded the train. And that wasn’t even the most groundbreaking revelation Charles had that day.

ko-fi

[every-moment-a-different-sound]

Dead Boy Detectives

S1E7 | The Case of the Very Long Stairway

For Day 1 of Character Appreciation Week!

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

Why, do you guys not carry some spare cocaine for emergencies?

quick comic i needed out of my brain

[stark-lord]

Side A

[hannaloony]

What if?..

Day 7

SIMON APPRECIATION WEEK

@simonappreciation

[pandorem]

Genuinely find it fascinating from a writing perspective that Edwin’s propensity for playing trauma olympics is a well established trait of his that plays so interestingly into his relationships with Crystal and Charles and Simon especially, and how it works in his character arc and how it both plays into and CONTRASTS his incredible capacity for forgiveness. How it’s a flaw that makes so much sense with how much he’s suffered that it’s hard not to be sympathetic towards it or even agree with him sometimes, but that it IS a flaw and comes up at times that are less fair as well. Im not sure I have a real point to this yet, it’s just something I want to chew on for a while.

for one: Edwin’s tendency to put his trauma as worse than others’ (no matter how literally correct he might be) is set up directly to parallel Crystal’s own self centered tendencies and her character arc. They BOTH have a tendency to not consider other people’s feelings and pain until someone points out to them that they are being dismissive. They are mirrors of each other and I love them so much. I also wanted to push back a bit on some things I’ve seen about how Edwin’s reaction to her yelling at him in episode one was completely justified (“what she’s been through? I spent 70 years in hell!”) because of how their traumas interact and how she let David in the first time that feel too dismissive of Crystal’s trauma. Yes, their trauma’s with demons interact in ways that it makes PERFECT SENSE that Edwin reacted the way he did, and I even sympathize with him, but something being sympathetic does not mean it’s justified. Taking away the metaphor of the Demonic nature of it all, Crystal was just cornered and threatened by her abusive ex boyfriend who has succeeded in isolating her from her entire social circle/any safety net she might have had before the boys. And uh. We don’t say about people getting out of abusive relationships that it’s justified that people were mad at them for getting into the relationship willingly. So.

Also. While Edwin’s measuring of their traumas is more sympathetic in the first episode, the moment in a later episode where Edwin (nearly lightheartedly) dismisses Crystal’s nightmare about her abusive demon ex because “the living know nothing about true nightmares” is less so, and I think is there to confirm that this is a genuine, deliberately written character flaw that he needs to grow out of, just like Crystal needs to grow.

And that brings us to Simon. The character who Edwin is THE MOST justified to be angry at, to blame and to compare their punishments. When he rages that Simon damned him to decades of being ripped apart while Simon sits quietly crying in a room, getting paper cuts from tearing pages out of books, it’s honestly difficult not to agree with him, to not feel that same righteous indignation. But then despair lays it out for him: he was about to gloat over another’s torture. And even without yet knowing more about Simon, Edwin is horrified by the idea. I think it says so much about Edwin’s GOODNESS that the time this character flaw of his feels the most justified and right is also the time he works through and past it to empathize with the pain of the real person on the other side of that. It is after he comes back, needing Simon to know that he didn’t mean to gloat, that he is then able to see Simon as a real person, as someone he shares pain with, the pain of being closeted and terrified in the 1910s. Simon was a kid, same as Edwin, who was terrified of his own nature and let that fear and humiliation lead him to cruelty that ended in consequences that he never intended. And it says so, so much about Edwin’s goodness that once he is able to see past his own pain and empathize with someone else’s, he feels for and maybe even forgives the one person that he would be most justified in NOT forgiving. That connecting with him is literally what saved Simon’s soul in the end.

(It’s also worth noting- Simon thinks that Edwin is “another trick” when he first sees him. He says that “the headmaster will be angry”. In keeping with the theme that we shouldn’t compare traumas or decide that we know what other people are going through, it seems clear to me that what we saw- sitting alone and getting paper cuts- was NOT the entirety of Simon’s hell.)

And then there’s Charles. Now. Edwin has a lot of 1910s sensibilities that make him connecting the dots on what Charles went through a bit difficult for him. But Edwin never, ever suggests that his trauma is less or isn’t worth getting upset about. Because it’s Charles, and Charles deserves no amount of pain ever, in the world. I don’t think it would ever occur to Edwin if I’m honest. Of course it’s because he loves him and Charles is his favourite person in the universe, but also I wonder at the fact that their very first meeting, so soon after Edwin had escaped hell, was one of complete empathy and compassion. Maybe seeing the bullies made him see himself in Charles but it sort of circles the point I think I’m making- Edwin’s very real flaws contrast against and thus highlight his INCREDIBLE kindness and goodness.

[edwinpayne-deadboy]

@biconcharlesrowland

We haven't had a proper goodbye kiss after the Port Townsend events.

it's tradition crystal

[staticair]

[I Was Nervous]

Day 3 of Simon Appreciation Week! @simonappreciation

Simon and Edwin's story is so heartbreaking to me. They could've been the ones that understood each other the most. Every time I watch Simon's smile fade as Edwin rushes out is painful.

[fan-a-tink]

time to appreciate the hell out of George Rexstrew for Cast Appreciation Week through these gifs

Every single one of the gifs up there shows a tiny fraction of the genius of George's performance. In every scene, every movement, every small gesture and expression we can see how much George loves playing Edwin and that he gave everything to this role and more. George captured Edwin's curiosity and confidence, his strength and vulnerability, his sassiness and his insecurities, but most importantly his incredible kindness. I first fell in love with this show because I fell in love with Edwin. He felt incredibly real to me from the beginning, and I felt for him and with him through his entire journey. There's no one else, no one else who could have been our Edwin Payne.

I also want to give a shout out to gameo week, and what an absolute highlight that was for me within this fandom. George managed to raise over £10.000 for a cause close to his heart, and the fact that it was so successful makes me so incredibly happy! And just as a bonus we got to learn so much new stuff about the show, got the Edwin playlist, found out that ghosts can feel each other, and learned the backstories to all the agency's past cases! Every single video was such a joy and I appreciate George so much for taking everyone's requests and questions so seriously and giving so much of his time for this. My favourite thing about gameo week though was that George got to feel the love from the fans for a week and we got the chance to tell him how much we appreciate him and the show. He got to see both how unhinged we are and how deeply we care about this wonderful show.

George Rexstrew, wherever you are, I hope you know how much we all appreciate you. Please look after yourself and know that we will all be there to cheer you on for whatever you do next.