#emotional death by lore

[mrfoxdeer]

Just finished Doctor4t’s the 3 hours and 20 minutes Content SMP video. In other words, just got done getting run over by an emotional steamroller! That was insane. Incredible. Awe inducing. Soul crushing. I could go on. I laughed a lot and really enjoyed it, but the ending? I cried. And then I just stared at my screen after the video ended. Wow.

[numbuh424]

shoutout to whatever L and Light had going on in Time Speaks

[agentc0rn]

Lonely earth-bound monarch figures whose existences and legacies extend past the bounds of time and space.

[thepersonperson]

Since Sukuna still has that final finger. Maybe that’s where we’ll get an afterlife scene or even a backstory? Yuji basically confirmed Sukuna is only like this because of circumstances. So…I would like to be shown those circumstances.

I’m ok with Sukuna dying and all the students surviving. But the execution of that has been so poorly paced and unsatisfying. Can I please get a proper grieving scene? Megumi and Nobara being all smiles at the Gojo letters is...weird.

I think there’s something to say about a manga where overwork/exploitation kills people having its mangaka rush the ending because of overwork/exploitation.

[didderd]

lil doodle dump of Nimh, my sona as a dust. (the bottom two doodles are before and after he's allowed comfort.)

they have some lore. not just your typical dust. long lore ramble under cut. (tw: murder. death. manipulation. abuse.)

i figured Gooper would take a lot to become like dust sans, and so they needed a more fucked up backstory.

so normal Gooper. who is from a Fell au. lost their parents at a young age. their parents were taken by the au's Gaster. as shapeshifters, they have a unique set of abilities, and Gaster found interest in that. and as the mad scientist that he is, took them to conduct experiments, hoping to use them for something. but they didn't survive the experiments.

in this timeline/au, some time after, Gooper was found and taken too. they survived the initial experiments, and after Gaster figured he couldn't do what he wanted/he already got that, he decided to continue to make use of them and make them a weapon, making them a royal guard's person.

Gaster made him keep a skeleton form for his neutral form. his excuse being that it's easier to explain to others that he's a relative. but really he just wanted that control over his shifting, and for his 'work' to resemble him. and even now that Nimh's not controlled by him, he has a hard time trying to shift to a different neutral form, out of fear of punishment.

instead of being scattered to the void/code, this Gaster became a fell G!Sans. i'm not sure how, since i don't know the lore behind G!Sans.. but. yeah. things only got worse for Nimh after that. and it might'v even been when G decided to turn him into a weapon.

they still have the glowing crystal necklace that Gooper wears, which i decided was infused with their parents' magic. but. G broke it. and it lost the magic. it doesn't glow anymore, and they don't wear it. but they keep it close. they also have a scrap of paper with their parents' names on it. ripped carefully from paper records of their parents' experiments. in case they forget.

so when the human came around, Nimh was put on the task of dealing with them. their memory of each reset slowly got better, from deja vu, to remembering everything. and as they started to remember every failure at killing them, and every painful death by the hands of the homicidal child, they started to lose it... more than they already had. G would'v already been feeding him LV, handing him monsters he has to kill to get stronger, and they started taking more outside of that till they were killing everyone. including G. once they realized that's an option and how to do it. which they found great satisfaction in every time. for all the things he put them through.

eventually, like dust sans, the human gives up, and Nimh is left in an empty underground.

but dw. he is eventually picked up by a goopy demigod and allowed a chance to heal. :3

[cronxl]

them AGAIN. i hate them /aff. im gonna work on drawing gem after i wake up later :p

p e a r l e s c e n t s p i n

[mpekamitzii]

Girl you're not looking so well

[befuddled-calico-whump]

more characters who are technically from T$$ (lore under the cut)

So Lis/Lisbet (more commonly known as "Lu", her codename) was one of Vic's first victims when he started working on his own. At the time, Lu was a secretary at a law firm. Unbeknownst to her, her bosses owed money to a local mob boss, and Vic was hired to "apply pressure". By pure coincidence, Lu was the unlucky target. Her torture was recorded and sent to the firm, and it was roughly three weeks before the money was coughed up and she was released.

Her captivity resulted in the loss of her right hand and most of her left leg, and a pregnancy. With Lu not being in a healthy emotional or mental place, the baby was raised by Lu's sister and her husband. Meanwhile, Lu decided she was sick of feeling like a victim and began devoting her time to training, getting physically stronger, and hunting down Victor Shepard.

While her family was very supportive for the first few years of her recovery, most of them were horrified by her desire for revenge. Despite being raised in a close-knit Catholic family and being religious herself, Lu quickly became disgusted at her family's urging to forgive Vic and move on. The only relative who didn't shy away was her cousin Adrien (also known by his codename, "Uriel")

The two were close as children, and Adrien wanted revenge for Lu as much as she did. He not only listened to Lu's violent fantasies, but encouraged them, offering ideas of his own. As a former Marine, he had training to back him up, and helped Lu on her own journey, swiftly becoming her second in command and the most trusted person in her life.

Through the years, Lu tried to maintain routine visitation with her child, but the visits always felt strained, and gradually her goal took over and she came over less and less.

Years later, Lu's son (then going by Leo) sought her out. His aunt had warned him that Lu was going down a dark path, but he was desperate to form some kind of connection with her. He knew the basics of what had happened to his mother, but at her own request, he'd always been told that his father had passed away before his birth. Lu welcomed him aboard, finding it easier to foster a connection when he could be viewed as a soldier and not her son. When he came of age, she welcomed him into her group officially, granting him the codename Gabriel.

Though Vic is her target, Lu and her angels also chase after people like him, capturing and killing them in the name of avenging those who have been lost or had their lives destroyed.

In canon, Lu briefly captures Vic, but he escapes before she can do any real damage. However, in this AU, she manages to contain him, and gets the revenge she's sought for so long.

[triglycercule]

ok horror didn't go through all the different hundreds and thousands of resets that dust (and killer) went through sure but like. he went through something id consider pretty similar???? because through 7 years there HAD to have been a plethora of humans falling down into horrortale like we can see the countless amount of people that died there in toriel's home or in blue snow or in grillby's or even just that first human that aliza hides behind when she first enters snowdin!!!!!!!

and (i dont really know where this rant is going i will not lie 💀) horror (the prick he is) has to see all these humans he has to meet them and introduce him to all of them and at what point does it just turn into routine for him?? they all just blend into one skin colored bipedal figure and the only important part of them are their insides (which i could go on and on about how gross that probably is 🙁🙁) and how them eventually all fall to their deaths

everyone in horrortale is far too gone to particularly care anyways if aliza wasn't so smart and lucky (plot armor SMH) nobody except horror and paps would probably remember her name. and horror would only remember to add a name to the list of "spices" that are in papyrus's spaghetti and then forget it all again. it's all just an endless cycle of human falls down and eventually dies. nobody in horrortale cares enough (if the human doesnt make some sort of big event happen like how aliza stood up to undyne (i doubt snowdin monsters gaf about her b4 that aside from eating her)) and in the end theyll just turn into food again and then the cycle repeats. its kinda like a reverse dusttale (❓❓❓) where instead of the monsters dying over and over to the human's hands it's humans dying over and over to horror's hands

and now that i've established that 🤓👆 time to tie the trio into this! i mean technically dusttale is a loops of both those things happening with the human killing the underground over and over and then dust killing them in the end??? so i think both dust and horror could relate to that?????

a repeated cycle of a human entering the underground and eventually dying,,,, feeling everything go back to a fixed state (literally with dust's resets and a bit more metaphorically with snowdin not caring all that much in horrortale)

having to start off disgusted with killing and then eventually learning to find enjoyment in it (likely because satisfaction of death is the only reprise from the repetitive slog and boredom that is their aus),,,,

somehow feeling guilt for everyone in their world because of what you've doomed them to by your own hands but also being over it and having grown apathetic. theyre still alive. dust sees his underground alive all the time and so does horror his underground's still (mostly) alive. but dust's underground doesnt survive longer than a few minutes now when they see eithe him or the human (so does it even count as life or is it just a barely fufilled light snuffed out) and horror practically already considers them all dead men walking and theyll all probably die one day anyway with how things are in horrortale so whats the point in even trying and doing something fufilling when everything is so so so shit??? (on dust's end this next similarity is ambiguous :3)

& also what they did to their respective papyruses and how they feel??? ik horror probably feels like shit for tricking papyrus into eating humans but he did the right thing (in his eyes. his EYE). he made the right choice to trick him even if it was bad it was the only thing he could do to help snowdin (sure as hell better than undick's choice to try and use him as cannon fodder for the core) and dust i feeeeel would have a similar thought process. papyrus shouldnt die he doesnt deserve to die but its what needs to be done. he's giving papyrus the longer end of the stick by killing him because its better than being killed by the HUMAN. he doesnt like it but he does it anyway because its what "needs" to be done!!! more similarity,,,,,,, esuaghhhh mtt parallel,,,,,,,

how many more similarities can i milk out. i dont know but anyways i doubt they'd bother talking to eachother about their feelings on this because gawddamn these guys and vulnerability!!! horror wouldn't tell a soul (especially not some freak version of him that killed everyone with some cheap excuse that it was to save them from some freaky human that dust swears he should remember but doesnt. but for the sake of this rant just pretend they dont know about eachother's lore :3) about what he did and what happened in horrortale because THATS HIS BUSINESS!!! dont stick ur head into stuff that youre not involved in PRICK he never gave permission for dust to know that

and dust wouldn't tell either because (i think!!! this part is just me fanonizing dust's reason necessary for this part of my silly horrordust rant. also obligatory "this is all my fanon interpretation of them" because i ran out of space in tags) he doesn't think horror would relate nor would be care. he's gotten too used to not telling anybody what he's doing or why or explaining himself to those he knows and loves back in dusttale so why would he even tell any of that to some random stranger with his only connection to him being that they both used to be the same person b4??

he wouldn't horror wouldn't and they both live in not so blissful ignorance about eachother and just how similar they are. or maybe they only know surface level and make up assumptions and stereotypes because they dont care enough or simply just dont have any attachment invested into eachother to want to actually think things through

TRIGLYCERCULE THIS IS TOO LONG I DIDN'T READ!!!!!! ok 🤣🤣🤣 tldr horror has many parallels and similarities with dust that would only be realized by them if they got self aware enough (which like. when is that ever happening). maybe if they cared enough and liked eachother enough they'd probably bond over their shared similarities,,,,,,,, aka by hunting down horrortale frisk

[italictext]

Made a DN oc (Rae, it/its)!! Rae and L work together and here's a doodle of Rae styling L's hair! :3

( @nateriverswife @/ing you because you're kinda the reason I decided to draw them lol)

[ask-mortarion-the-death-lord]

Mortarion is actually the most powerful of all the primarchs, on account of having the most daddy issues. From Necare to Emps to mcfuckig NURGLE this man is like a rare collectible card for all the shitty father figures out in the world of warhammer 40k

okay but understand, a major portion of the reason i love morty so much is that he has the most raw wet dog kicked puppy angry cat energy of all the primarchs.

dude has a million and one complexes and no healthy coping mechanisms.

his immediate response to anyone and anything questioning his warped reasoning and logic on things and opinions is to either double down or deny he ever said or insinuated it.

dude has the most 'fathers' of the primarchs and they all suck and emotionally lead him on.

the moment mortarion tries anything cool or impressive the universe whips around with such violent velocity as to break the sound barrier before slapping him in the face.

in a modern setting he would spend all his time as part of the occult club trying to scientifically prove its all bullshit

dudes so easily motivated by spite he makes perturabo look overly forgiving

he has multiple instances of doing some stupid thing as part of an insane plan to get what he wants, and then crying about it like a wet dog

mortarion canonically made his daemon prince doom palace as an edgy recreation of the imperial palace but everythings bigger by 7 units ranging from micro meters to kilometres just because he could

i love this pathetic boy so much

[kaurwreck]

hi! i don't know how much of the lore you're familiar with but i really appreciate your verlaineposting so i wanted to ask : during the authur amnesia arc and chuuya the sheep arc... where was he? did he stick around in another basement somewhere until fifteen? he's not in the mafia and not in the ability department so how do you think he afforded food? maybe this was explained in canon but i can't remember...

It's explained in canon that he was an assassin. He earned himself the moniker the King of Assassins by having a distinct modus operandi: he shatters/pulverizes/blends his victims' insides without leaving any external signs of trauma and then leaves a white birch cross as his signature.

He wasn't in any basement; he was trying (and FAILING) to kill the Queen of England.

[specialshinytrinkets]

The funniest part about my OCs is that, out of all characters, Kee has the most normal parents (others I just didn't get much into-)

Like. There are three somewhat main characters: Derres, Lioo and Kee (like Sonic the Hedgehog). There's also Ies, but her deal is kind of Complicated™, since they're not quite. Someone to have parents. Cuz. She's a demon-

But anyways (warning for death mention):

Derres doesn't want to remember his parents much to not let the grief and trauma resurface, but he idolises them a lot. However, his speech about them is more often than not very... vague, prioritising the feeling of him missing their company than any specific memory. And I don't blame him, because, if you actually dig in, there aren't many niceties to remember! Being a witcher in a secluded place, from a dynasty of sorts, it was inevitable that a lot of responsibility would be put onto him, especially considering he is the youngest, most recent holder of the amplifiers. So, the pressure resulted in an odd dynamic where young Derres knew that he is loved (he must be loved), but would dismiss his own feelings to prioritise what is important, so that he would be given attention (the way to earn love). Of course, it does not mean the parents were cold to him all the time, but it was not an ideal dynamic. And sadly, one that could not be prevented or, at least, mended. Not now...

Lioo, on the other hand, despises her mom, namely because of how she handled her proposal to become Derres' apprentice. Now, obviously, she was 18 when she left home to do what she wanted, so you need to take this with a grain - or a cup - of salt. However, her decision had somewhat reasonable roots: she saw how much Derres provided for the community, stressing himself out every day, and wanted to easen up his job. Her mom did not take it well, though, shutting down the idea at every possibility. Think of "Blow My Brains Out" by Tikkle Me, specifically the chorus (lyrics):

Lucky is she who lives unaware Doesn't get bothered by those who don't care Lucky is she who lives unaware Who doesn't get bothered by all that's unfair Unlucky me who knows way too much Who fights to make changes and music and such Unlucky me, aware of the pain All 'cause I happen to have some brain

Mixing together teenager maximalism and seeing the indifferent response to trying to fix the issue is bound to create fire. And it wasn't put out, even after drowning. In fact... The rift deepened. Since, who else can be blamed for your daughter's death, but the man who "took her away with witchcraft"? Who else can be yelled at for ruining your child? For making a deal with a demon? Who else?

And then we have Kee, who has been fully supported by his parents throughout his entire life. Said parents tried their best to help him adjust to the prosthetics and reach out when their son suddenly isolated himself and left the city. He's gonna regret that, alright.

All in all, very funny how the guy you'd expect to have fucked up upbringing actually has it fine, he just got hurt much later in life than the rest, hence why his coping isn't very good. And well. We are witnessing it in real time, and not as a memory. Trauma is messy

[sodalitefully]

Duff & Slash vs. The World – a selection of quotes:

"One night Slash and I went out to the Rainbow, a restaurant next to the Roxy on Sunset that was famous as a rock-and-roll hangout. They gave us a booth. This was a new level of deference. A booth! At the Rainbow! As we proceeded to get blasted, a really big, drunk guy wandered over to our table. Though he looked like an overgrown hick, he was in fact the guitar player from a band considered quite big just then — much bigger than Guns. He addressed himself to Slash:

'N*****s shouldn’t wear tattoos,' he said.

What? Was this his idea of a joke or something?

He wasn’t laughing.

I stood up.

'What the fuck did you say to my friend?'

'You heard me. N*****s shouldn’t wear tattoos.'

I slugged the guy. Then I slugged him again. And again. He reminded me of the bullies back in Seattle, the meatheads who beat up punks in packs, who called everyone f*****s. I’m not sure how many times I hit him—I just completely lost it—but he went down. I found out later that three of his ribs had broken."

It's So Easy: And Other Lies, by Duff McKagan (2011)

"D: [Goes into a long incoherent rant about a fight he got into at a club on New Year’s Eve] … and the guy was bigger than I was, but I just went CAH-BOOOM! And… his eyes crossed, like you see in the cartoons, like that? And he went down. And then everybody dragged him back and dragged me back, but they were dragging him past me and I fucking biffed him three more times in the head! They said I broke his jaw…

S: Nasty [Suicide – former Hanoi Rocks guitarist] stuck his arm in through the crowd and got one in there too!

D: So we go through this shit all the time, people trying to fuck with us. I was telling you earlier, if anybody fucks with my homeboy here, Slash, – and it’s happened before, like if a big guy was gonna hit him – I’ve stepped right in front of him.

S: Sure, and I can hide in the crook of his knee…

D: I beat up a guy for him once. And he’d do that for me.

S: But not to sound stupid, because we’re starting to sound stupid…"

Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N' Roses, by Mick Wall (2016)

"Slash: [Sam Kinison and I] got into a really big fight. It was real violent, and Duff punched him out, the cops were involved, too, and it was a big deal.

Stern: Who won the fight though? Who could beat up who? I bet you could take Sam in two seconds.

Slash: Well, no. He actually – I don’t want to... Duff punched him out. He gave him a black eye. But, before that, he was sitting on me. And I had no way of getting out, because he had my elbows pinned down. I couldn’t get my arms up, you know?

Stern: How did he get you down on the floor?

Slash: He jumped me from the blue and just landed on my chest. I was gonna be dead. He was choking me. I was history. I was, like, sitting there going, 'I’m going out this way? I can't believe I’m gonna go out this way.'

He just showed up at my hotel room one night. I didn’t even – you know, a knock on the door and, like, it’s Sam, and I’m like, 'Okay.'

And so he got on my case about all this stuff, and he called me a dickhead. And I got pissed off and I jumped off the bed, and I didn’t expect him to react the way he did. And I turned my back – you know, I turned around for a second – and he just jumped on me.

He got me by the throat and my arms were underneath his knees. And I was like, 'Oh, this is it. I’m going out.'

Robin: And then Duff came to the rescue.

Slash: Then Duff woke up in the other room.

Stern: Hey, you owe Duff, man. I’ll tell you, that’s kind of funny, too. And leave it to Sam to jump Slash from behind. I mean, that is a low blow. That’s not right.

Slash: I was just this little guy with no clothes on. I mean, cuz I was in bed when he came."

The Howard Stern Show (April 30, 1992) (edited)

Additional details, related quotes, & discussion:

The first quote is from Duff's autobiography, obviously. The "big, drunk guy" in question was Chris Holmes of the band W.A.S.P. Slash's autobio (2007) recounts the incident somewhat differently:

"One time at the Rainbow I got into a fight with Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. Duff overheard Chris saying that n*****s shouldn’t play guitar. He didn’t say it to me, but it was obviously about me. As I remember, Duff told me about it later and the next time I saw Chris I went up to confront him and he took off running. Aside from insulting me, it’s one of the more ridiculous and untrue things a musician, of all people, could ever possibly say."

Aside from the obvious discrepancies in their versions of events (pretty much par the course for rocker autobios... Chris Holmes has shared his own take as well and rest assured it's very different), it's interesting to compare how they described their responses. Slash glosses over the fight entirely, he almost makes it sound like he was going to "confront" Holmes by giving him a lecture on the history of rock music – the last sentence is by far the most emotionally charged.

Duff's account is just shy of a brag, his sense of righteousness is evident.  Fighting is a significant theme in his book, Duff chronicles his journey from scrapping with school bullies, to drunkenly picking fights, to discovering martial arts in sobriety:

"Those beatings were also probably a factor in why later I would see red every time I perceived a wrong done to me or someone close to me and would fight at the drop of a dime. Justifiably or not, I saw myself as the protector, and the street-fighting skills I was forced to learn while getting my ass kicked as a teenager meant that I was not reluctant to perform that role with my fists."

"From then on, I wanted to kill anyone who crossed me at any club or concert. In my mind I was still fighting for righteous reasons—not just to hurt people but to protect, to make bullies stop doing bad things. But it’s pretty clear in retrospect that I was taking out aggression about the situation with the band. I would find offense in the stupidest little things and then I’d just flip and go street."

Slurs aren't a trivial offense, but we can see how Duff's protectiveness has been both a strength and weakness at times. In this scenario, Slash is "someone close," and Duff is eager to assume the role of his protector.

-

The second passage is in excerpt from an unaired interview (1990) transcribed in Mick Wall's biography of GNR, a secondary source. (That is, the more recent biography he wrote about GNR, not the one that supposedly earned him a scathing mention in UYI II's Get In The Ring.)

Anyway, Duff was a little less eloquent in 1990, but the pride he takes in standing up for himself and his friends is consistent.  He mentions a time he defended Slash against an aggressor, and I wonder if the incident with Chris Holmes is the one he's referring to.  Whether it was the same event or a different one, Duff's statements in this interview are certainly in line with the behavior he described in his book.

Slash's sarcastic comment made me laugh – I couldn't say for certain if he meant it in good (or self-deprecating) humor, or if he was getting a little miffed by the way Duff was characterizing him as someone who needs defending. I also included his last line because it seemed to me like he was trying to change the subject – while Duff could have happily gone on, perhaps Slash was conscious of playing into the dumb drunk rocker stereotype, something both of them have a history of struggling against. He’s also conspicuously not jumping at the chance to chime in and tell the world what he’ll do if anyone tries to mess with them.

-

The third excerpt might call for a little more context: Sam Kinison was a comedian and a friend of Slash's who passed away shortly before this interview. Earlier in the interview, Slash described how he was supposed to make a guest appearance in one of his shows, and Kinison didn't take it well when he had to cancel. 

This incident was never talked about much — as far as I know Duff never publicly shared his version of events — but another guest (comedian Andrew Dice Clay) on the Stern show recounted a phone call with Duff about the incident prior to Slash's interview:

"So, he's choking him to death, and the girl that Duff is with wakes Duff up, and she goes, 'I'm not sure, but I think somebody's killing Slash.'"

I wonder if the girl was the same one who was with him in Duff's chat with Howard Stern from around the same time. Slash said it happened in San Francisco, Clay said it happened at the Chateau Marmont in L.A., and Duff didn't specify, but I wouldn't put money on the accuracy of that detail in any of their accounts.

Anyway, this excerpt is a little different than the other two.  It has less to do with Duff's protector complex — instead we can examine the way that Slash talks about a fight, where in the previous examples he tended to dodge the subject.

I edited the excerpt for readability (and I made pretty significant cuts, so click the link above if you want the full picture), but this was an interesting conversation all around.  It's a bit awkward, because while Slash and Stern are ostensibly sharing memories of their mutual friend, Kinison is clearly the antagonist in Slash's story.  Slash didn't really react much to Howard Stern's enthusiastic assertions that Slash could take Kinison in a fair fight, and while he made a point of explaining that he was caught off guard, he seems pretty content to tell the story as it was: he got his ass kicked.

The way Slash talks about himself ("just a little guy with no clothes on"!) leads me to believe that his comment about "[hiding] in the crook of [Duff's] knee" in the Wall interview was meant as a self-deprecating joke.  He seems comfortable characterizing himself as harmless and nonaggressive, perhaps even uncomfortable with the idea of playing up his prowess.

Slash doesn't mention too many altercations in his book, but he does describe one friendly brawl with Nikki Sixx:

“[...] but I do remember doing what I always liked to do when I was drunk—wrestle some guy who was much bigger than me. In this case it was Nikki, whom I tackled, bar stool and all, out of nowhere. Nikki is pretty tall, and at that time he was pretty heavy, too, so he ended up turning it around: he slammed me on my back and sat on me.”

He goes on to explain how he passed out and woke up to find that he'd "dislocated four vertebrae in his back" and, to add insult to injury, he got teabagged by Tommy Lee.

Obviously we're working with a small sample size here, but like with Duff, we're starting to get a consistent picture.  Slash's tales of getting into fights are distinctly lacking a certain rock-n-roll bravado. His accounts aren't very serous, he comes across as terrible in a physical fight and he doesn't seem to care.

All of this isn't necessarily to say that Slash didn't get in fights – just because he doesn't like talking about it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.  But he's also made it pretty clear that he doesn't consider himself a violent person.

“I hate violence. At our shows, people hit each other and throw things, and I don’t know why. I love the energy of it, but everyone needs to be considerate of those around them, and that usually doesn’t happen.”

I don't have a source for that quote, so take it with a grain of salt if you choose.  Either way, you get the picture.  Slash is an image-conscious guy, yes, but he's not overly into fighting (or arguing, or yelling... but that's another set of quotes) and he doesn't try to pretend to be.  It's not an image he's actively trying to project (perhaps one he's trying to avoid?) — but in some ways it's one he was labeled with anyway, thanks to GNR's reputation.

-

Clearly I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm going to put a pin in it here because honestly, I think it would be pretty presumptuous to try to make too strong of a claim about the personalities of two real people that I don’t know based on just a handful of quotes (from questionably reliable narrators...). All I’m trying to do here is show a pattern, and to point out the contrast between the respective ways that Slash and Duff view/talk about physical conflict.

When Duff talks about fighting, it's important to him: he fought to deal with his emotions, he fought to protect the people he cares about, and he fought to get sober. When Slash talks about fighting, he laughs, makes a self-deprecating comment, and brushes it off. Duff wants to project that he’s more than capable of defending himself and others, Slash prefers to distance himself from the topic. It's interesting to see this juxtaposition in their relationship, and the way it translates into Duff acting protective of Slash.

-

Alright, thanks to those of you who stuck with me this far, lol. Feel free to let me know your thoughts, and of course keep in mind that this is just my take on the subject!

[kitsunabi]

I keep reading the lore and like I am absolutely doubling down on the idea that DF in the animation is 100% not the actual personality of DF. It contradicts like all the lore we’ve received of him.

It is 100% a representation of DH’s personal fears and viewpoints as shaped by his time in the Shackling Prison and skewed perspective from the ones who inundated him with the knowledge of the crimes of his predecessor

[idol--hands]