#idontwannabehereffs

[ourlordandsaviorgojira]

Seems like you've got a lot of thoughts on sacred bodies! Tbh I didn't entirely get it and moreso liked it for the art. Would love to hear your opinion :)

As the author says, Sacred Bodies is about "what different people/s see as taboo, and the socio-cultural lines that delineate propriety and deviancy." Which is a fascinating topic! They've created a really interesting world with a lot of really interesting character relationships and concepts but all of it fell JUST short of having real depth and punch. When I say I liked the idea of everything but found shortcomings to pick at with all of it, I mean it.

Barely organized ranting and a lot of it under the cut.

I should say right up front that I'm both a hopeless romantic and a conneseur of monster loving. However, the simple presence of either in a narrative isn't going to cut the cheese with me, it's gotta be Good. So here we go.

The World:

This relationship between humans and garaang as cooperative in the holy space above the clouds, viciously antagonistic below, is really interesting and I have a lot of questions about it. What made these apex predators choose to give up their perfectly successful biological niche and live mutually with their prey? What made humans decide to trust them enough to go along with it? The comic implies divine intervention, at least as far as the characters know, but that's a narrative cop-out, and I think there could be some interesting things done with that. Especially with the implication that this ostensibly utopian society is actually quite cult-ish. Garaang are expected to perform various levels of self mutilation to remain pure, its implied that mating with the matriarch leads to the males being cast out below the clouds, and a certain amount of abuse is definitely happening amongst humans. Nothing is what it seems here and there's a lot of potential in that.

Also humans are the ones who are raising garaang children, so what's up with that? Is having garaang chicks imprint on humans a key part of this coexistence, so that they instinctually see humans as "people" too and not automatically as prey? I'm also very curious about this thing where garaang have a hive-like biological/social structure. That's rare in anything more complex than insects and I'd think it'd have a lot of complications for a fully intelligent species. None of that really gets addressed though.

I'm also frustrated that what constitutes "sin" is more specific for the garaang (being predators) but not so much for humans. Obviously sex is meant to be strictly for procreation and there's an apparent aversion to meat(?) but does that mean humans here are vegetarian? Are the garaang allowed meat and humans aren't? Are there protocols to make meat acceptable vs unacceptable? Like it's generally implied that humans are more concerned with controlling sexual appetite and not what they can or can't eat, which is something in cultures that fascinates me personally (I'm a huge Dungeon Meshi fan btw). More on this when I talk about characters.

The Characters:

I love the idea of a neurodivergent/autistic character in general (hello, hi) but especially one who is used as an offering/sacrifice, something which probably did historically happen. Dualayim's abuse at the hands of her mother in some ways leading to her "promiscuity" is interesting but that's a whole can of worms that I don't feel the comic addresses honestly. I don't believe sex is inherently bad or evil but an autistic woman trying to cope with her abuse by having casual sex is... not a choice I'd make easily as a writer. Especially within the context of a society that, apparently very reasonably! associates promiscuity with death and suffering. Like, both garaang and humans have a very good reason to fear and abhor the feral urges that lead to the MASSIVE amounts of suffering that goes on below the clouds, it's not a theoretical. Dualayim's mother, abusive as she is, technically has a very good reason to fear and hate her daughter (some more). Somehow though, I doubt that justifying this prejudice in the narrative was Ver's intention.

Tolpan is... so fucking disappointing. I love me a good monster character but Tolpan is the quintessential monster husband archetype and it breaks my damn heart. He's big, outwardly scary but apparently harmless, he instantly respects Dualayim and asks nothing of her, he's deadly afraid of appearing threatening to her despite her having no reason to do so, he's attractive by the standards of his people and he has a respectable job. This is like a teratophile checklist, it's painful. He has basically no personality of his own. He barely even provides any interesting context for his culture aside from what's directly relevant to the story. He exists to be cutely awkward at over eight feet tall and fit the shape of Dualayim's needs and that's about it.

It's a stereotypical romance dynamic and it's boring boring boring. Tolpan and Dualayim never have any significant conflict aside from the very end when she misinterprets his bloodlust as sexual lust and it leads to the biggest flop of an ending I've read in a while. The whole story is about cultural propriety and deviancy and the two deviants don't even get to release their feeling of repression on each other? And yet this is a good thing because the story has established that he wants to fucking Eat Her, because he apparently doesnt have sexual desires. So while the theme is ostensibly "giving into natural desires" neither of them... actually does. And if the theme should instead be "outcasts finding interpersonal connection" then it still fails, because what they find is still only surface level because the characters have one pivotal moment of understanding and then... hug it out, DESPITE the narrative establishing their desires VERY EXPLICITLY. This could be a story about two people discovering a shared nature between them as animals that have multifaceted interconnected desires and needs, but instead it's satisfied with them just acknowledging that those distinctly separate desires exist. It makes no damn sense to me, and it shouldn't make sense to anyone who's been told to wait just a little longer for dinner or gotten interrupted while trying to get off.

Basically, Ver is a very good artist but they are not a very good writer and bit off WAY more than they could chew to try and cram into 60 pages. This is the kind of story that could be told by someone with a lot more experience in literal volumes of material and also the help of an editor who knows from more than AO3 fics. I want more. I want it to be good. It has SO FUCKING MUCH POTENTIAL it makes me want to tear at my hair! But every time I read it I keep asking questions that the narrative doesn't seem prepared to answer and I get more frustrated every time.