#im first and foremost a lana del rey girlie ive seen this shit before and i can PROMISE you the intention of this genre of media isnt

[hella1975]

as someone who is extremely queasy and the thought of blood and gore makes me want to power wash my brain, can I ask genuinely what it is about cannibalism that is so intriguing? I swear that I’m not judging I’m just curious bc personally it’s one of those things that I absolutely refuse to let my brain think about

omg yes i can actually 100% so basically it shows a lot in my writing but im a fan of the extremes of human feeling like it's insanely compelling to me to consider the things we do when pushed into the darkest corner of a single emotion, be it love or hate or fear or anger or grief etc etc. we are a deranged species and we do deranged things when we feel too much of any one thing and it's the concept of extrapolating on that until you reach a point of it being too far, too much, too extreme, and the implications of that. we have cannibalism as one of the ultimate taboos, something that is rightfully so abhorred in society that many respond with horror at even the thought of it, and i actually like that about it. i like that we all - like you said - feel a certain repulsion to the initial thought. it's a biological knee-jerk because your brain fundamentally does not want to look directly at it. for the greeks, cannibalism was one of the greatest sins, greater than even murder, because kronos ate his children and zeus himself had no power over such a crime. to talk about the house of atreus again, the crime was so great that for atreus to subject his brother to it meant they were BOTH damned as a result, despite atreus himself not eating anyone. that's how extreme it is. you are inherently blurring the lines between people. there's supposed to be a victim and an aggressor, but when the horror is so unthinkable, what are you left with? most crimes are ingrained into us with strict responses and punishments, but with a crime this great, even after centuries of it featuring in our literature, we still can't look directly at it. that is ridiculously compelling to me.

so that's the bad, more literal side, but then we have love as consumption. again, this is considering the human reaction to a level of obsession and love so intense and unsustainable that it leads you to consuming each other. it's mutual destruction. it's being so tied to another person, so reliant on them, so adoring of them that the only way you can tolerate it is to put them behind your ribs and keep them, like a house keeps its occupants. the act itself - tasting, swallowing, savouring - is erotic. arousal exists in the heights of violence. the opposite of love isn't hate, but indifference, because love and hate are actually more similar than they are different. rather than opponents on a battlefield, they're dancers seperated by a single, fine line, never becoming one another but fingertips brushing, sharing air. loving someone so much you feel crazy, you feel restless in your own skin like it's trying to crawl off of you; hating someone so much that you can't stop thinking about them; sex and violence as intimate acts shared with another person - love as consumption tackles these dangerous crossovers, because the love becomes so intense that it slips into traditionally hateful actions, violent actions. cannibalism; the great taboo. yet done by someone who genuinely sees it as an act of love, received by someone who views it that way. both so entangled and deranged by this single shared emotion. again, insanely compelling to me. and that's not even considering the implication of one person seeing every part of the other. back to your point and what i said about cannibalism being something we cant even look at, you're getting the most disgusting, unseen parts of someone and instead of being repulsed, instead of looking away, you're taking them in your bare hands and putting them to your lips. it's reverent it's religious it's- *my laptop is forcibly taken from me*

sucks that i have to say this bc i like to think people have critical thinking skills but i KNOW some mf is gonna anon me like 'STOP ENCOURAGING ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS >:(' so disclaimer; this is all just fun stuff to discuss and consider, and personally i talk about it almost solely from a writing pov anyway. if you're listening to ethel cain and unironically wanting to emulate that kind of dynamic then maybe you are too young and/or impressionable to be listening to ethel cain.