#just the fact that we as humans can connect so emotionally with creatures that don’t even care about how we look or why we do the things we

[nanstar200]

Guys..

“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you” …..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??

[ygreczed-3]

The Red Guard and the Snow Angel

Hank and Connor’s kiss

Hank and Connor fighting

Hank and Connor having good time with Sumo

Connor’s “I’m not going anywhere”

Gavin and Nines : interface

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6

They eventually find something in one of the books : Kamski is known to live in a castle, with 7 beautiful angels to serve him. No one knows how to get to Kamski's castle, since the pike is guarded by the darkness war spirit (actually Kamski being the powerful magician he is, sealed the war spirit to the castle, condemning it to the protection of the whole rock he lives on).

On their first attempt getting to the castle, Hank gets injured, and they're forced to retreat to Nestlepeek

Connor stays near Hank as he recovers, and can't help but touch him with noticeable loving attention. Nines sees him but just decides to say nothing, knowing he's too emotionally compromised with Gavin to give his brother a lesson. Gavin is totally oblivious to that, he's just very bad at hiding his concern for Hank (yes ! he is low-key worried for his human comrade).

X

Nines somehow gets to talk calmly with Nines, for the first time since the street fight.

Nines : I just don't understand. You've always been so ambitious, always training to be more powerful, why don't you use this aspiration to channel the power source and thus use it? It doesn't make sense. Gavin : It's… It's just too fucking much to process okay ? This war spirit is in me, I can feel its thirst for blood and violence all day long, and I know I can't control him because I…

Gavin just stops before he can say he's too confused with his own priorities now to have a defined goal he can use to canalize the spirit's energy. He used to know what he wanted to do with his power, but now, he feels a latent part of him wants to use it to protect his partners, Hank, and the two snowy idiots. He's still not ready to admit it outloud and thus, the spirit having no specific goal to unleash its violence, is in fact uncontrollable. 

Nines, who is a bit more honest with himself than our favorite rat, already knows he cares for Gavin more than he should in regard to his given mission, and just feels so useless when Gavin refuses to talk to him. At this point Nines only wants to help him. He looks quietly at Gavin's nape, where the seal of the war spirit is still noticeable and forms a delicate golden scar. The Golem feels a little contradictory about this scar, one part of him being satisfied and proud of the mark he was able to let on Gavin's body, and the other part of him feeling guilty for it.

Nines : I'm sorry for this. You didn't ask for it and now you have to deal with… a war spirit and unwanted killing desires. I sometimes forget you're only human, it's not in your nature to use magic. Gavin : … It's okay. Let's just… stop talking about the spirit, deal ?

Nines remains carefully silent when Gavin offers his hand in a casual manly shake. He knows humans culturally use handshakes to settle an arrangement, and decides to ignore the deep and intimate meaning of this specific gesture in his own culture. Their hands meet, as Nines' skin unwittingly turns white at the contact, but the golem doesn't pay much attention since a human can't interface anyway. Gavin's smug expression shows he's  about to say something but his grin fades away as Nines realizes their mistake : in a flash, he can feel Gavin's doubts about his unsaid desire to protect Nines despite his hatred for golems. Nines isn't sure what passed through the contact and doesn't have a clue on what impression Gavin had about his inner thoughts, or if he even felt or saw something. The human is the first to break the contact. He looks shocked, as he meets Nines' eyes and for a moment, none of them can speak. 

Gavin : The hell was that ?!

Nines is confused too : … I didn't know it would… interfaces only happen between magic creatures… Maybe… the spirit allows you to connect with me.

Gavin : What the… You read my thoughts ? Nines : It's not… mind reading. I caught a diffuse… "impression".  Gavin : … Shit.

Gavin looks suddenly so betrayed. He looks down and sideways, taking a few steps away, hands on his neck as if he was trying to hide his head between his arms. When Nines tries to get closer, he almost jumps away.

Gavin : Don't- Fuck it, don't… touch me. Nines : I'm sorry, I didn't mean to probe you. Gavin : What exactly did you… hear or whatever? Nines : … I think… I have an answer for why you can't use the spirit's violent spree. Gavin : Fuck you, that was private ! Did you search for it you fucking asshole ? Nines : Like I said, I didn't mean to interface with you ! You too must have seen something from me so stop being a child. Gavin : I didn't-

Nines waits patiently for the end of the sentence but it never comes, as some realization seems to dawn on the human warrior.

Gavin : That nice fluttering in the stomach, when we held hands, actually it was you ?

And for once, Nines is the one to remain silent, his face even but internally too embarrassed to answer the question. No wonder this sensation passed through the connection. For the few seconds their hands touched, Nines was, in a Golem way, experiencing a gesture akin to a kiss, of course he was kind of "emotionally impacted".

Nines : … As I said… let's not embarrass ourselves any further.

And at that exact moment, Gavin realizes that Nines likes him… more than a partner, more than a friend.

X

In their room, Connor is holding Hank's hand. 

Hank : So, what should we do ? Connor : I didn't think about it yet. I wanted to be here when you wake up. Hank : ...I still have three days of bed rest at the very least… Are you sure you want to lose all this time when we're so close to the goal ? I mean, we already went through the desert, you don't need me anymore. Connor : Of course I need you, Hank. Hank : Ahaha… It's nice to go easy on me like this but you don't have to- Connor : You have to trust me, when I say I need you. It's not because I think you can help me go faster or even because I think you can help me cross a specific territory. I just… need you because you mean something to me.

Hank stays quiet but tightens his hand around Connor's, looking down right at them, his large, calloused fingers embracing the golem's white and slender ones. A long and deep look into Connor's golden brown eyes tells him there is more into this already meaningful gesture than he might think.

Connor breaks the eye-contact, and Hank realizes how intense the moment was : Connor's eyes inexplicably make him feel comfortable, as if he was floating in a warm air bubble, and he instantly misses the feeling when Connor stops mirroring his gaze to look down at their hands.

Connor : You know… There is this ultimate quest upon us, something we have to achieve to save our people… And this goal governed us like it was the only thing that mattered… Maybe I'm being a selfish brat, but Hank you're so important to me, I don't want you to be injured or killed in all this. Hank : You're important to me too, Connor.  (And then Hank laughs, giving in to his stupid and unwanted feelings.) Actually, you probably couldn't even understand how much you mean to me.

When Connor meets his gaze with a puzzled expression on his face, Hank decides he has to tell him. If anything, Connor could still change his mind and keep going without him, and then Hank will be able to finally move on. He's too fucking old to pine for a pretty boy, and if it's gotta be painful then he wants it the sooner the better.

Hank : I… recently started to develop… indecent feelings… Connor, purposely obtuse: "Indecent" ? Hank : I mean... in a… hum… romantic way. Come on kid, don't make me say it. Connor : Why would "romantic" be "indecent" ? Hank : Dunno, I'm old and pathetic, you're young and cute, sounds indecent to me. Connor : Hank… I love you too. Hank : ...You, huh... Sorry what ? Connor : I mean every single word in this sentence, Hank, I really do. Hank : … Oh. 

Connor chuckles at Hank's blank expression, as his poor brain processes the information with unprecedented difficulty. And as Hank starts moving again, his brows frowning and his mouth forming an "o" like he was gonna say "why ?!", Connor just leans towards him and brushes his beard with his lips before meeting his mouth, softly.

And god, they love it. Hank leans forward to deepen the kiss, Connor catches his beard, his fingers following the edges of his chiseled jaw until they reach his neck and nestle around it.

And it's a weird sensation to Hank because he used to know what was hot passion and what was tenderness, and at this very moment, he could feel both in Connor's grip, burning fire and smooth touches at the same time. That's it, love, love everywhere.

They separate because the older man needs to breathe and hopefully, Connor remembered it because Hank was just gonna kiss him until he falls unconscious. 

Hank : Am I dead ? Connor : You're thankfully alive and safe, but you need rest. Stay calm. Hank : I can't  believe it… i'm… almost scared of falling asleep and realize you're gone when I wake up. Connor smiles smugly at this : he takes Hank's hand in his own, kisses the palm softly, his deep dark eyes locked on Hank's.  Connor : Sleep tight. I'm not going anywhere.

X

So, as soon as Hank can walk again, the party goes back to Kamski's peek.

Hank : I feel better but I admit that I don't think I'm able to fight anything right now. Maybe we can find another way ? Gavin : Humans and Golems can't beat a war spirit. But, huh… a war spirit could do. Nines : … Is that you you're talking about? Gavin : 'Know another war spirit around here ? Nines : But you… you can't control it… I mean, you're obviously facing a dilemma with your own motivations right now. I don't think you should endanger yourself in this state… Hank : What dilemma ? Gavin : Not your business. It's fine, I just need… I just need to meditate a little bit more. Connor : We don't need much more than a distraction just a moment until we reach the castle. There we'll activate the seal and it should stunt the spirit for some time. Nines : I'm not letting him go alone. Gavin : Still don't trust me, snow man ? Nines : I'm concerned for your well being. I wanna help. Hank : Well then we can do that. Nines and Gavin take care of the spirit and Connor, we get to the castle as fast as we can. You're good ? Connor : … Yeah, that sounds good. I just need to talk with Nines. In private.

Hank and Gavin just look at each other, surprised, but then they leave the brothers for their serious talk.

X

Connor : What was that ? "I'm concerned for you well being" ? Gavin is right, only a war spirit can compete with a war spirit… even if we wanted to, we couldn't help. Nines : Gavin can't control his spirit. I saw it when we interfaced, he truly can't, no matter how much he meditates, as long as he will have this dilemma, he can't make it. Connor : Wait what ?! Interfaced ? How ? Nines : Guess the spirit makes him sensible to magic connections. Connor : What's the deal ? Why can't he control it yet ? He's strong enough, and for what I know, ambitious enough, so it's only a matter of… Nines : He's confused. He grew fond of us, and he knows we're basically enemies. We're all being reckless, he's the only one to keep this truth in mind; if we can't reach Kamski, or if he refuses to help us, we'll have to go back to the war we left, go back to kill each other. He can't resign himself to accept his attachment to us if we're going to be his enemies again. Connor : … Do you think he can make it ? Against the darkness war spirit ? Nines : I don't. That's why he needs me there. If the thunder spirit takes control of his body, I'll be there to hit the seal in his neck. Connor : Oh Nines… You love him, don't  you? Nines : … We're selfish and weak, Con. This mission… our whole kind is waiting for us to succeed. And we're threatening this long awaited deliverance because we fell for humans…  Connor : ...That's why we can't fail. I understand you're worried but maybe… Maybe that's the reason why Gavin wants to try : he knows we can't fail now.

X

In the final act, Gavin and Nines get ready to fight with the war spirit, while Hank and Connor plan on reaching the castle as fast as they can, and find Kamski.

Gavin and Nines are hiding near the war spirit.

Nines : … Are you ready ? Gavin : I don't really have a choice there.

Gavin breathes deeply and steadily, to focus and calm down before entering the arena.

Nines : I'll be flying right behind you, okay ? It's factually stronger than me, so I have to maintain minimal distance with it, but I'll be ready to hit your seal when you need  me to, and help you run away if you're in a bad state.  Gavin scoffs : Thanks Snowman, I feel so confident right now, with you believing in me like this. Nines : … Sorry I just… worry. Gavin : Look, I was right, at that time, I couldn't do it and I was totally right. But today I… I'll do it. And I want to prove it to you. 

In front of Nines' incredulous stare, Gavin offers his hand : Nines narrows his eyes as he detects static electricity all around his fingers, as if his spirit was already eager to fight.

Nines : … Do you know what it means to us, Golems ? Interfacing with someone ? Gavin : Enlighten me, snow man. Nines : ...I'll tell you if we survive this fight. Gavin : Huh… fair enough. Now, take my hand, I'll show you.

Nines gulps nervously and reaches for Gavin's hand, his own fingers turning white as he gets closer to the human's warm skin.

And he can feel everything. It's a lot less blurry and chaotic than the first time, as somehow Nines' first sensation is Gavin's serenity about sharing his deep feelings. He catches a volatile thought that flies through the human mind, saying in a flippant tone "we might die, no need to get embarrassed", and smiles at it. Interfacing with Gavin is very special for some reason : Nines had interfaced with other Golems before but it was never so vibrant, so intense. "Maybe that's because we're about to die" he feels, and for a moment he wonders if that comes from him or from Gavin. Nines feels like Gavin is an extension of himself at that very moment. Suddenly, the realization he's gonna fight against a gigantic, ancient war spirit dawns on him. He feels scared, sure but somehow, confident as well. He can do it. He will do it now, because if he fails, he'd give up on his people in Detroit, his friends Hank and (surprisingly) Connor. He would give up on Nines and he's not ready to. He used to fear that he was making friends with an enemy… That they'd have to separate at some point, and go back to where they belonged, Detroit and Jericho. But if Gavin fails now, Detroit and Jericho are doomed. He used to fear that death was preying upon him… now he fears that his team could die. That Nines could…

If he fails now, Nines and he will be dead, and that is much more scary than befriending a Golem.

Nines frowns as he feels Gavin's hand twitching in his, as if he was about to draw it back. He wants to stay connected, he wants to melt into Gavin's mind, because he feels so scared right now.

All he can catch is a glimpse of something that sounds like "I have found some higher purpose in life than my own existence", before Gavin breaks the contact.

When Nines opens his eyes again, they're wet and his breath is short. Gavin too, seems a bit shaken up by the interface.

Nines wonders what exactly the human saw/felt/heard from him and feels very self conscious for a floating second. He wants to kiss the human, he can feel it in his vein, the fire of love rushing, burning his cold body. Gavin must have felt it through the interface… and somehow, Nines wonders if he knows. He doesn't seem shocked or… disgusted. 

Gavin : You okay ? Nines : Yeah… I'm ready to go.

Gavin exhales sharply : Alright, let's do this.

Nines : I've got your back. Everything will be alright.

So they get out of their hiding spot and as Nines takes off, Gavin summons the thunder spirit.

X

We then follow Hank and Connor, who are climbing up the rocky column at the top of which Kamski established his castle. Actually, Hank climbs it and Connor flies around to help him find the safe grips. 

They're constantly attacked by monsters with long members (parts of the war spirit), and can't fight them all back. They decide to run forward, and they finally reach a huge grid in a tunnel : Connor can pass between two bars, but Hank can't. Behind them, the monsters are getting closer.

Hank : Run before they catch us up ! Connor : Wait, there must be a way for you- Hank : I'm sure there must be, Connor, but we won't find the solution in the next few minutes we have. You have to keep going without me. Connor : What are you gonna do ? They're gonna outnumber you, and… and you're still healing from the last injury--- Hank : You have to find Kamski ! He must know how to stop those monsters, and the war spirit out there. He can help us ! Connor : … Yeah, right.

Connor puts his hands on the floor and ice columns grow up from the ground, keeping Hank in a safe space. When the man looks back at Connor with tenderness and gratitude, Connor kisses him through the bars.

Connor : The ice won't last long but it can buy you some time… Hank I… I love you. Don't let me down. Hank : I swear. Now, run, and don't look back.

Connor nods and starts running to the castle, as the monsters start to attack ferociously the ice cage Connor created. Hank knows it's not gonna last much longer, and that he'll have to fight. He prays to be able to see Connor again.

[yandere-dark-cupid]

Yandere alastor from hazbin hotel if that is ok?

It's okay, T.Angel.💜❤💜

Yandere Alastor:

Yandere type: Charming, Possessive, Violent, Manipulative, and Sadistic

How you guys met can end in many different scenarios. Maybe you're a citizen of hell that caught wind of Charlie's hotel; and decided to go there for the false humanity that's called "redemption", Maybe you're a desperate human that's facing the harsh, ugly hardships of life and made a foolish decision to summon the all powerful 'Radio Demon' since you heard he can make deals and can be of assistance for your rather tough life, or maybe you're some type of poor creature that was chosen ( by the man himself ) to be a certain Deer demon's prey. Whatever it is,...Babe..Honey..Sweetie, Darling, ANGEL....Please do understand..you are Totally, Royally FUCKED the moment he's noticed you.

Like I said, the moment Alastor has met you; it's all over. But you don't know that yet. He's already twisting gears in his mind to make you HIS. That being said; Alastor is going to put his Smooth, Charming persona on, to sway you to him. So at first instinct you're gonna fear him ( believe you're gonna, it's natural ), but to me I believe you're going to be drawn to him in away. And Alastor knows he has that affect on people ( he's also smug about it because it'll be easier on his part/ but harder on your part ). So he knows you're going to be his in no time. All he has to do is use his natural charm on you and it won't be long before you fall for him, but if you are hesitant or resist his charm he'll have to amp up his charm even more ( and possibly intimidate you even more ) to get you to comply to him.

Then after that, the outcome all depends on you. If you fell for him then, congratulations you just saved your self from a kidnapping ( but the kidnapping will be used later though ). If you didn't fall for him by now ( which is kind of weird since you should have, he made sure of it ) and you're still hesitant and is still too afraid to acknowledge only other feeling other than fear..well...all I just got to say is....I hope you like getting chased down and kidnapped by a psychotic, homicidal bambi. Just to get this straight T.Angels; even if you do fall in love with him and pledge yourself as a loyal partner, he's still going to kidnap you. It's just going to take longer ( but that's if you do fall for him ). Never forget Alastor is naturally a possessive creature, and as a yandere it only gets worse.

Once Alastor has kidnapped you, escaping is the equivalent of the impossible. A little reminder that Alastor is an Overlord from Hell, a powerful one at that. It shouldn't be to no surprise that he has connections, many of them. But if you do some how managed to escape his heavy secured manor ( I believe he owns a manor, it's my own little headcanon ), then ooooh booy I hope you like games; because ready or not here he comes, because Alastor has came out to play. It's like a sick game of hide n go seek with a murderous deer, Cat and mouse, Predator and prey. Yes he has connections, but he's one of the small handful of yanderes that won't use his connections(... Yet ). No, Alastor wants you to think you got away or has a chance of getting away. He thinks it's so cute on how you are holding to that little bit of hope, so he can rip it away and tease you after towards. Then after that the real "fun" will begin.

By "fun" I mean punishments. Takes great joy and pleasure in that you think you could escape him. But he takes even greater joy and pleasure into giving you the penalty afterwards for attempting to escape. At first he'll go easy on you ( this was your first escape attempt after all ), he'll chip away at your confidence and self-esteem. And it will hurt you mentally and maybe emotionally, and when pain ( from you or anyone, but mostly you ) comes pleasure to Alastor. We all know Alastor is a Sadist ( EVERYONE KNOWS ALASTOR IS A SADIST ), so while he's punishing he'll with most disturbing "happy" smile on his face ( No wait, he always has that smile on his face ). Now if you escape a second time, expect to be not only talked down but to be smacked around too. Now first escape attempt he went "easy" ( if being easy means having your confidence and self-esteem being cut down to nothing in a slow painful process, then yeah Alastor has been going easy on you ) on you, so on your second escape attempt he will get physical with you ( and not in away you want it ). If you're bold and try to escape the third time, you will be hit around radio/ microphone cane ( thing ???) and talked dow too. Now if you're still bold and still think that you have a chance of escaping.. Oh... Oh Angel, May the Lord above have you in his good graces and may he have mercy on you, because Alastor on the other hand; will NOT in 6 rings of hell will have mercy on you. You see on your fourth FAILED escape attempt, Alastor will get.... crafty. It'll be like your first failed escape attempt all over again, but instead of him just searching for you by himself; Alastor will use his Demonic powers too ( and at that moment... You.Are.Fucked Angel ). Now to those that know, Alastor powers revolves around shadows, portals, tendrils, and deals ( or as we know of right now ). So when When Alastor puts that out to play, it's basically the equivalent of one man hide n seek ( If you know what that is, give yourself a pat on the back ). But this time Alastor will give you a 1-2 hours head start. Once your time is up, he and his shadows will come looking for you. And It's hella scary. But like I said before Alastor likes to take his sweet time and make you think you got away or have a chance of getting away. And as time pass by agonizingly slow, you know Alastor is still out there looking for you and like to take his sweet time. And since you've been with Alastor for a while or at least for some time to know him, you know Alastor will take his time and get himself railed up. So basically the more time you spend away from Alastor from escape, the more eager Alastor is to punish you. So Once Alastor has found you and like I said he's getting crafty with with this punishment; Your mind will be broken down into nothing, you'll be tossed around by his tendrils, and thrown into a portal and Alastor will let his shadows handle you. Not only that but He ordered them to leave a few marks, as a reminder to never cross him and never leave him.....

So after all the failed escape attempts and being mind broken and having your spirit broken, the molding process will begin. It was fun; having you run away, hunt you down, and break you down to nothing. It was truly adrenaline filled and it kept Alastor's blood pumpin. But in the end every yandere would want a seemingly docile submissive darling. And surprisingly Alastor is no different. And now that you know that you are his and only his and your place is only by his side; Alastor is going to praise you. You're finally being the good little Darling your supposed to be. Not only that but Alastor is going to shower you with love and take you places. Ooooh he can't wait to take you to his radio station, or to go out dancing, or OR maybe he'll take you to the hotel to see his friends and colleagues. But beware, you may have this new found "freedom"; but Alastor has a sharp eye on you. And to be completely honest with you, part of the reason why Alastor has given you this "freedom" is to mock you and wave it in your face. So in hindsight, you're still trapped with him. And if you are not truly broken and take this new found "freedom" as an option to escape, the game will start up again and Alastor will happily break you for REAL this time. You are his after all, ain't ya?........

Bonus ✨✨✨:

Since Alastor is both Aromatic and Asexual, that won't stop you from being in a relationship. In fact, the both you will be in a queer platonic relationship. So you guys can still be together. Alastor will love to plant kisses on your hands, hug you ( though he'll have you in a possessive, and almost bruising grip ), and over all be close to you. ( Since I don't know where Alastor is on the Aromatic and Asexual spectrum, I'm playing it safe and trying to keep it as platonic as possible. )💜💚💜💚

Like I said before Alastor would to take you out dancing, and will love to do the swing with you. So if you're a darling that specializes in dancing or just like dancing, saying Alastor will be happy is an understatement. He'll be absolutely ecstatic! He'll just love to dance the night away with you ❤💃❤

Another thing I said, Alastor will take you to his Radio station. And with him being a Radio host he'll ask you opinions and sometimes questions. Alastor will like to have a talkative darling or a darling that likes to ramble on certain topics. To some it may come of as weird or annoying, but to Alastor he sees it as cute and charming ❤📻❤

We all know Alastor is a Overlord from hell, and one of of the most powerful out there. So if you think someone will help you, you are dead wrong. Once everyone knows your the property of the Radio Demon, no one will much even look at you. If anything they'll avoid you like the plague, So they know your off limits and knows what's good for them. So no one would dare or has the balls to go against Alastor, anyone with a brain would know what's coming to them if they do. But If someone was brave and kind enough to help you ( more like ignorant and naive ), they are the equivalent of a dead man/ woman/ person. If you watched the pilot episode, you saw what happened to Sir Pentions the same thing will happen to them; just far more worse. So you might as well kiss that help good bye Angel( that's if you get help that is ), because it won't last long. 💀💀💀

Sorry your ask took so long T.Angel. But I hope it's to your liking. Well until next time my Little Tainted Angels, see you soon ~💜❤💜

[spammreviews]

C-:

83. Ryokan-

The first half of the story sees a guy who goes crazy and tries to turn his house into an inn/ bathhouse, much to the chagrin of his wife and daughter.

The portrayal of a marriage in crisis is not unrealistic, but the cause of the drama is so absurd, it’s difficult to get emotionally invested in the drama.

The second half takes place ten years later and follows the daughter as she goes to the inn/ bathhouse that was once her house…well, that’s what I would say if this story was good. Instead, we follow a friend of the daughter who hears the story of the inn/bathhouse and decides to visit it. So, yeah, our new protagonist has no emotional connection to the story.

This new protagonist acts like no human being would ever act, acting very chill when he’s told he’s in a bath of blood.

However, this half does have some horrific looking creatures, even if it also feels the tonal opposite of the first half.

My biggest gripe with this story is that it has no real central conflict to it, mostly due to the sudden shift in perspective.

82. Unbearable Labyrinth

This is the creepy buddhism story.

Our main character is someone who stopped going to school after having a nervous breakdown. She has issues with worrying about how others perceive her. Our ending seems like a perfect opportunity to overcome this. However, it quickly ends before our character can do anything.

Also, the reveal is kind of underwhelming. There are mummies, just as the characters theorized there would be. It’s not even a twist.

This story is a bit odd stylistically, as the character designs are a bit different than Ito’s usual, looking a lot more classically manga. I actually don’t mind. There’s a bit of charm to the way they look.

81. Venus in The Blind Spot-

(Spoilers)

This is the story about the girl who becomes invisible when people see her from up close.

It’s not exactly scary so much as it is interesting. The plot twist about the girl’s father is a pretty well executed plot twist, as there is a lot of set up put towards it.

However, after it, I feel like Mr. Ito didn’t really know what else to do, so the story just wraps up really quickly.

Also, the ideas within this story, desire turning to obsession, have been explored by Ito a million times before in Remina, Tomie, and Lovesickness, and all three of those stories do it with a lot more intrigue and dimensions. 

I guess there’s something to the character of the father, who is messing with people’s bodies without their consent. However, the story never really goes anywhere with that.

80. Gathering (The Tomie Chapter)-

This is the chapter where there’s the one dude who doesn’t love Tomie.

The only compliment I can give this story is that it shows how there are men immune to Tomie’s charms, and that desire is something that can be resisted.

The problem with this story is that 80% of it is just Tomie trying to seduce a man who is grieving and doesn’t want to be seduced. I have zero interest in seeing that.

In fact, I’d argue that it is quite boring.

This story is better than previous Tomie stories because it doesn’t contradict the idea of Tomie as a character or be overly cruel. It also does offer a fairly new perspective on the Tomie situation. However, it’s a lot lower than many other Tomie stories because it lacks any interesting imagery, horrifying ideas, or creative use of the character. It really only uses half of the idea of Tomie, the getting killed by men half, and not the resurrection half.

79. Dead Man Calling- 

The set up for this story is a woman getting harassed by phone calls from a man on death row.

This story feels kind of pro-death penalty, as the man being killed is seen as a good thing.

It also seems like it’s trying to make a metaphor about grief, but it doesn’t comment on grief. Our main character starts out grieving and ends up in that same place.

The main character’s haunting problem isn’t solved because she has some grand realization. The dude is just executed, and the story ends. In fact, she doesn’t do anything to resolve her problem, which isn’t how stories are usually supposed to go.

Also, the guy who is being executed looks absolutely ridiculous.

I can’t take this seriously:

78. Red Turtleneck-

This is the story about the dude who cheats on his girlfriend with a fortune teller, and the fortune teller makes him have to hold his head to keep it from falling off.

I feel like this story kind of over-complicates itself. 

It seems to want to be a simple morality story where a man does a bad thing and then gets punished for it.

There’s a part in this story where it seems like that’s all it's going to be.

However, the girlfriend who got cheated on saves her cheating boyfriend. Now, sure, people don’t deserve to be killed for cheating, but it feels dumb in the context of the story. The main character didn’t do anything to redeem himself. We get no sign that he improves himself in some way. The girlfriend just saves him out of a sense of not wanting to see someone die.

Also, defeating a witch by stabbing her with scissors is really underwhelming.

Also, at the very end, the boy is saved because…well, we don’t know why. His head gets knocked off, and then it is revealed that the weird baby creatures that knocked it off actually didn’t exist. So, what was the point of having the weird baby creatures?

Basically, our main character, the cheating guy, basically just becomes a spectator in this plot after cheating.

Also, the drama between the dude and his girlfriend is never really resolved. I’m assuming they broke up, but it never says.

The end sees our main character still being punished, as the paranoia haunts him for the rest of his life. So, in the end, it does kind of circle back to just being a morality tale, but it adds so much that is not needed for the message.

However, the idea of having to hold your head so it doesn’t fall off is absolutely horrifying, and the design and character of the witch is very fun. 

77. A Deserter in the House-

This is the story about the deserter…in the house.

This deserter is a war deserter who is hiding in the family’s house.

Despite the character’s being the usual blocks of wood, they’re still likable (for the first part of the story) because what they’re doing is nice. The deserter is also likable because he’s such a  polite guy. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

However, it quickly becomes clear that this family actually sucks, and it’s at that point when the story starts to become rather interesting. I do like the way the reveal is done. The story doesn’t explicitly tell you at first, but instead slowly reveals it to you.

I appreciate that. This is a story that actually trusts its audience, and that’s nice.

The problem is, it is at this point when I’ve stopped caring about the characters. It’s also here where a very tedious love drama is added.

It’s hard to care about a love story when you don’t care about the characters being in love, and there’s also so many characters in this story, I’m not one hundred percent sure who is in love with who.

Also, the reason why the beginning of this story works is because the story doesn’t rely on exposition. Then, in the middle, the story begins to lay exposition on us.

It also doesn’t help that this story has one of the most confusing flashbacks I’ve ever seen. I had to re-read that part four or so times because I wasn’t sure what was happening or that it was a flashback.

However, the plot twist at the very end is fun in the way it kind of reverses what is happening to the family, I guess.

I suppose this is a story about the dangers of not moving on, with the family doing this whole revenge plot because they can’t get over a tragedy. 

I’m sure you can also apply that to some politics in Japan.

So, yeah, this isn’t exactly a good story, but the premise is interesting.

76. The Conversation Room-

This is the story about the women in the hospital with stuff growing out of their mouths. Wait, you’ve never read it? Oh. Well…

I have read this story, and it’s decent.

Firstly, Hospitals are always fun locations for horror, obviously.

Secondly, the story doesn’t do a half bad job at building suspense by slowly showing you stranger and stranger events, something Mr. Ito loves doing.

However, it does toe the line between “weird in an eerie surreal way” and “weird in a confusing way”. 

The problem is that everything about this situation is weird in a different way. The hospital staff are acting weird, and so are the four women, and the main character is also confused as to what caused the accident that got him into the hospital. A weird old man crawls through a hole in the wall at some point. He appears again, but he really doesn’t serve any purpose within the story. All throughout it, we get these scenes with very strange dialogue, even though that may just be a result of bad translations.

You can contrast this with the hospital chapters in Uzumaki, where the surreality is coming from either one or two places, and there are patterns to the weirdness.

With this story, there are no patterns. It feels like Ito was randomly throwing shit around.

Another weird thing about this story is the way it constantly switches perspective, going from a man, to one of the women, to the doctors. 

This story also has an odd way of revealing information. The first time we see the stuff coming out of the girl’s mouths, it’s in a flashback.

Another weird detail of this story is that, out of the five weird girls, there’s one we get to know more. What’s weird about her is that she goes from being on the side of the other girls to randomly being afraid of them to suddenly being on their side again without explanation. Also, the group of girls starts out numbering four, only to randomly change to five. That’s not a plot hole, as I’m sure there are other girls in the hospital,  but it just adds to how needlessly confusing this situation is.

Despite all of this, my biggest complaint with this story overall is that it doesn’t seem to know what it’s about. The central conflict of the first few pages is between the main character and one of the women. Then, it’s about the women being mistreated by the hospital staff, then it’s about one of the women not wanting to be with the other women, then it’s about the man running away from the women. The best Junji Ito stories have a consistent theme throughout whether that be spirals, lust, fear of others judgment, et cetera. 

This story has ideas, but none of them are explored. The end of this story has a reveal involving hive minds, but that is never elaborated upon, and none of this story previously had any ideas relating to hive minds like the division between 

Another thing about the best Junji Ito stories is that the supernatural is either born out of the character’s drama or internal conflict or somehow works alongside it: Remina doesn’t like being famous and now everyone hates her, a girl who doesn’t like her appearance turns into Tomie, a boy afraid of social connection has to deal with an apocalyptic force dedicated to sewing people together. Sometimes it’s as simple as a girl not liking slugs having her tongue turning into a slug.

However, with this story, the supernatural aspect has nothing to do with any of the human conflicts in this story. It’s a random interruption that seems to derail the story, rather than move it forward. It doesn’t help that, once the story is derailed, it does not go back on track. The conflicts about the hospital staff being skeptical of the woman’s illnesses and the man being mad about the accident just go away.

Despite my many complaints, this story does have some great imagery with the weird tendrils coming out of the girl’s mouths. 

73., 74., 75. The Tales of Oshikiri (Intruder, Further Tales of Oshikiri, and Further Tales of Oshikiri-Walls)-

(Spoilers)

There are a few Ito stories which span multiple chapters, and this tale of alternate dimensions may be the most obscure, and I think that’s for good reason.

Simply put, these three short stories make no sense. Now, that is par for the course with Junji Ito, but these make no sense in a new and intriguing way.

Let me start off by talking about the first story, Intruder.

This story follows three characters investigating parallel dimensions.

We are introduced to this kid who definitely seems to be a kid from a parallel universe.

He’s this weird and shy kid who is new in town, he gets really nervous when the group mentions other dimensions existing, and he lives without his parents in a big house that apparently has connections to other universes, according to one of our characters.

However, the twist is pretty crazy. He’s not from a parallel universe. 

However, there is a version of him from another universe that is out and about.

That is kind of weird.

Anywhoo, the beginning of the story is kind of  fun, as we’re anxiously waiting for our main characters to find out what we, the audience, think the truth is.

It is nice how we watch our main characters slowly move towards the truth as the evidence slowly builds up.

The problem is, there’s nothing about being from an alternate dimension that is inherently scary. Just because a kid is from another dimension doesn’t mean he’s evil or that he poses a serious threat.

However, the biggest problem with this story is the main characters, who are a new level of boring that I didn’t know was possible. It is impressive, because these are three people who are obsessed with the supernatural. However, they somehow manage to not just have no personality, but somehow have negative personalities. With some boring characters, you can at least make the excuse that there are some people in real life who are boring. However, these characters are kind of boring which is simply impossible for a person to be. Despite being friends, they don’t act like friends, or like people. These characters experience emotion, but they experience them in the way characters from a drug PSA from the 1950s experience emotion,  in a robotic way that people don’t act.

The exception to this is the one Weirdo Kid who is not from an alternate dimension, as he’s this shy little guy.

The boring characters act especially inhuman at the end, where they are witnessing a guy they know burying bodies and their reactions are to tell each other exposition that doesn’t even need to be said.

Imagine you were out with a friend and saw someone being murdered, so you turned to your friend and said “That man is being murdered with a bullet from a gun.”

Moving on,

The next short story, Further Tales of Oshikiri, picks up where the first story left off.

One of the members of the boring mystery gang, her name is Fujimio, runs through the halls of the weirdo kid’s mansion.

However, then the weirdo kid shows up. However, is it him or his evil doppelganger?

I do quiet like that trope, so that made me happy.

However, the member of the boring mystery gang then disappears, and our perspective has suddenly shifted to Weirdo Kid.

We then see weirdo kid, in class, wondering why she was in his house and why she disappeared.

Now, weirdo kid knew why she was in his house…because he took her there in the last issue.

Also, he sees Fujimio again in class, but she acts like nothing happened. So, the weirdo kid assumes that the version he saw was from an alternate dimension.

Then, we get a scene that lasts way too long with this dipshit bully kid picking on Weirdo Kid. Weirdo Kid snaps and beats the bully up, despite that kind of being out of care.

The bully shows up at Weirdo Kid’s house, but he’s a weird slime monster who melts.

The next day at school, Weirdo Kid has a conversation with Fujimio that serves no purpose. It’s exposition of stuff we already know that does not help.

Then, the weirdo kid is back at his house, and Fujimio shows up, only now she’s a weird gross flesh monster that also melts.

I actually really like the design of the flesh monster.

Then, if you thought this couldn’t make less sense, Weirdo Kid bumps into his evil doppelganger doing scientific experiments on Fujimio. He attacks his evil doppelganger and injects him with a serum that makes his evil doppelganger all messed up and turns him to slime.

I’ve read this story, like, eight times, and it still doesn’t make any sense. This might be the fault of the translation. It’s also because it’s mostly just a series of strange events occurring, with no real explanation. 

Now, I like when stories don’t make sense. However, what’s the point? The best stories which don’t make sense have some purpose.

On the other hand, the imagery ain’t half bad.

The story after this is Further Tales of Oshikiri-Walls, and at that point I had just straight up stopped caring. Weirdo Kid’s parents show up. There are people getting trapped in the walls. The second tale was so nonsensical, it makes the third story bland in comparison.

However, there is a definite charm to how bizarre the middle installment is. I like it when stories are bizarre, even if the story is just doing it for fun.

This story doesn’t seem to even understand its own reality, contradicting itself on even the simplest of facts. It’s legitimately impressive. There’s no sense of build-up either, as the second story feels so much more intense and over the top than the third.

This collection of stories isn’t good, but I definitely won’t forget them in a very long time.

One last final note. Alternate universes are a big thing now, and it is interesting to see a story from the 90s tackle this theme. I do like how little this story adds to the conversation. Its ideas about alternate universes don’t go much beyond “What if there were other universes just like this one?” In the first two stories, alternate universes are only used to tell a doppelganger story, something which doesn’t even require alternate universes

I think that’s kind of funny.

72. Rustling in the Grass-

This is the Mimi ghost story where Mimi and her boyfriend see a corpse hanging from a noose on a tree. Oh no! Then, the corpse rotates towards them and something falls from the corpse. Oh no! That’s it. It ends right there. This story does everything that a Halloween decoration can not also do.  Calling it a story is a bit of an overstatement. 

The Junji Ito Story Ranking, Worst to Best

Trigger warning:

Suicide, self harm, mentions of body horror, death, animal death, rape, marital abuse, transphobia, and sexism.

This will not include Junji Ito’s adaptations of others' works. There are also some works which couldn’t be put in this story because they simply aren’t available in English.

Also, there are two kinds of Junji Ito stories: one shots and longer stories.

One shots are stories such as Slug Girl and the Enigma of Amigara Fault.

Longer stories include Gyo and Remina.

There are some stories which are kind of on the fence between the two such as Tomie, Souchi, Uzumaki, and the Dissolving Classroom. These are collections of multiple different stories which can work together as one cohesive story. I ranked all of the Tomie chapters as separate stories as I felt like their quality varied, but Uzumaki, Souchi and Dissolving Classroom had more consistent quality (for better or for worse), so they were ranked as one whole work.

Penultimately, some of these stories have multiple titles. I have tried to show both titles when that happens, but there are most likely some times when I have made a mistake.

Lastly, some of my reviews will contain spoilers while others will not. Those with spoilers will contain a (Spoilers) tag.

Worst to best

F:

133. The Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings:

The Seance-

I hate every character in this story.

This story is about a family and they’re all spooky weirdos, like the Addams family if they were all annoying.

There’s the fat guy.

His design is obnoxious, and his entire existence is a never ending stream of stupid, overdone fat jokes. Wait, actually, that’s not fair, there is also a bunch of gross out humor.

There’s the little girl. She’s the “evil little girl” trope. She’s obnoxious and I hate her design.

There’s the little boy. He’s the “evil little boy” trope. He’s obnoxious and I hate his design.

There’s the eldest girl. She’s…she’s there.

There’s the eldest boy. He’s pretending to be mature and he speaks in a weird false-eloquent manner. He is not extremely obnoxious.

There’s Narumi. She’s “normal”, which means she’s boring.

The first half of the story sees us being introduced to our main characters. The eldest boy invites a girl to dinner. At the dinner, ee see the fat guy drooling and eating lots of food in a gross way. 

The family has a fight and I don’t know what emotion I should be feeling in that scene. Is it funny? If so, it fails, because there aren't any actual jokes. Is it supposed to be dramatic? If so, it fails because I don’t care about any of these characters. It’s clear that the family is grieving, but they’re all grieving in these extremely inhuman ways- so I can’t relate to them.

The family decides to have a seance for their dead parents, and that takes up the rest of the story. It’s filled with gross-out humor, inane banter, and extremely repetitive character beats. I think the little girl cries like ten or so times.

The family is also just arguing all of the time. Every page is another argument. I know that families argue with each other, but this is ridiculous. I don’t think this family likes each other.

All of this arguing means that the plot has the pacing of molasses, as none of this arguing moves the plot forward.

Also, family drama isn’t interesting when the family are just annoying caricatures of tired archetypes. 

This story sucks in every way. It’s not even nice to look at because the designs of the family make me want to vomit.

God, I hate this story so much.

132. All of the Souichi Stories-

The Souichi stories are too silly to be scary, too dark to be funny, too down-to-earth to be campy, and too annoying to be likable. 

Souichi is a child who never poses a threat to our main characters, so he’s never scary. 

However, his hijinks are also not fun to watch because they usually involve hurting people.

Fictional characters getting seriously hurt can be funny in a fucked up way, but only if something is added to make it funny. These stories just have someone getting their hand hit with a hammer. People getting hurt can also be fun if they are being injured in an extraordinarily cartoony manner, like in Evil Dead 2, but the injuries characters receive here are stuff like stepping on a nail, which is a very simple and realistic way to injure oneself, meaning that it’s not fun.

Despite being about a child who’s evil, these stories never have much fun with that premise or do anything creative. The only way Souichi being a child barely affects his career as an asshole is that he doesn’t face consequences.

Also, the others characters in this story are blacks of wood with no personalities and no dimensions. As such, the story is extraordinarily boring whenever Souichi isn’t on screen.

Watching a child be annoying to a bunch of boring people gets extremely old extremely quickly, especially with how repetitive these stories are. There are about fourteen of them, and they all have the same plot.

Lastly, Souichi is just annoying. He has all of the most annoying character traits of children: he always repeats things, he screams way too much, he eats really messily, he’s a gleeful asshole, and he never faces any consequences for his actions. 

This kind of character can work, like that prince kid from the Tintin comics, Abdullah or whatever. However, that kid appears in like fifteen pages over the course of two different books. 

However, Souchi is the main focus of these many stories.

Even when Souchi gets what is coming to him, it’s never cathartic because it’s always way too much, like him getting nails through his cheeks. That’s disturbing. 

Essentially, the problem with these stories is that they have no sense of tone. The mix of morbidity and wackiness leads to the stories just being really annoying.

They’re also really repetitive, both in the sense that almost all of these stories follow the same formula with the same beats, but this formula is one where the plot is one continuous cycle of Souchi being a little shit, getting away with it, and then getting angry for some reason. 

131. Fashion Model-

(Spoilers)

Haha it’s funny because the woman is ugly and aaah! it’s also scary because the woman is ugly and haha it’s funny because the ugly woman is going to rape the man as punishment for being slightly paranoid. 

This story is stupid. It’s cruel to every character involved, it’s not funny, the tone is all over the place, the pacing is extremely slow, and its attempts at suspense are laughably pathetic because they’re based on us being scared by a woman for no other reason than her being ugly.

It also has two really annoying tropes being taken to their extreme:

A woman pursuing a man who is clearly not interested in her and

Ugly people are evil/gross/funny.

When this story isn’t being absolutely awful, it’s just boring because every character ranges from bland to just kind of unlikable, like our main character. 

Despite him being kind of a jerk, seeing bad things happen to him isn’t gratifying because they are far worse than what he deserves. 

130. The Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings: 

Narumi’s Boyfriend-

(Spoilers)

This first two pages of this story see a teenage girl, Narumi Hikizuri, about to commit suicide, only to be saved by her boyfriend. You would assume that the rest of the story explores depression. You would not be wrong.

We then meet the other Hikizuri siblings, who, as I mentioned previously, suck, and there are five of them!

Then, we cut back to the teenage girl, Narumi obviously, and her boyfriend. Narumi is depressed and threatening to commit suicide again. Her boyfriend is kind of being an asshole about it, complaining about how hard it is to care for her. 

It’s pretty fucked up that there is really no good support network for Narumi.

Then, Narumi’s family finds her and kidnaps her, and it’s at this point where I can’t help but wonder if Narumi’s siblings are supposed to be scary or funny in this story. It wouldn’t make any sense for them to be scary, as their designs are weird and they talk weirdly, and they’re stupid and silly and wacky and dumb. However, them being funny makes no sense considering the fact that this is a story wich starts with a suicide attempt. Also, it’s hard to laugh because the siblings are so fucking stupid looking. They make me nauseous. Not only that, but the family members are being abusive to Narumi, and that’s not funny, even if their abuse is silly.

Anywhoo, the story randomly swerves in tone when Narumi says she’s going to kill herself, douses herself with gasoline, and flicks a cigarette lighter. You assume she’s on fire and is dying. You would be…uhh…wrong?

After that happens, the family gets Narumi’s boyfriend, takes him to their house, and tortures him by forcing him to lay in a bag with what appears to be the burnt body of Narumi.

It’s kind of disturbing, but it’s also very silly. So, what emotion am I supposed to be feeling?

Then, Narumi shows up, and the boyfriend dies of a heart attack.

As it turns out, the thing that burned was a mannequin, and the family were just messing with the boyfriend.

Narumi only seems a bit angry about her boyfriend dying, and the last panel sees her saying she “Had no intention of actually doing it” meaning she had no intention of setting herself on fire.

Now, I’m going to give the story the benefit of the doubt and say that Narumi was actually going to kill herself. I sure hope that when the family told Narumi she was just doing this for attention, they weren’t right. I sure hope that when Narumi threatened to kill herself in front of her boyfriend, she wasn’t manipulating him.

If that was true, this story would be awful.

I’m going to assume that Narumi is just lying. The story still sucks because we have a depressed character trapped with her abusive family and the story doesn’t seem to care. However, it sucks a little bit less because it’s not insinuating that depressed people are “looking for attention”.

In conclusion, this story is one of the most tonally bizarre things I’ve ever seen. It goes back and forth between silly hijinks and serious drama. 

It also doesn’t help that the silly hijinks aren’t funny, and I don’t even know much about Narumi and her boyfriend, so I don’t care about the drama of their story!

129. Groaning Pipes-

(Spoilers)

This is the story about the people getting stuck in pipes.

To truly understand this story, we need to go in deep.

The story starts off with black haired girl being stalked by, gasp!, a guy who is overweight and ugly. Now, I’d argue that the comic seems to want us to find him gross through the way the panels frame him.

So, we’re not off to a great start.

The pudgy kid asks black haired girl out and black haired girl rebukes him, something we are told has happened many times before. So, this guy sucks. 

However, black haired girl then insults this guy by calling him a “swollen and ugly".

Now, obviously, black haired girl has every right to insult someone who is being a creep. However, she is not insulting him on the grounds of being a creep, but instead focusing on his appearance, something he can’t control. In fact, all of the insults the black haired girl levels against the pudgy kid, and there are many, revolve around his appearance. The pudgy kid isn’t bad because he’s pudgy, he’s bad because he’s being a creep.

A result of this is that I kind of dislike both characters in this situation. Maybe that’s the point. If so, then I can congratulate this story on being rather complex in making the point that the girl had the right to not want to have sex with a guy she doesn’t like. Meanwhile, the guy, however much of a piece of shit he is, has the right to not be belittled for his appearance.

Of course, I’m assuming that’s the point. It’s probably not, because the rest of the story is very stupid. Also, the way both characters act is so extreme, it makes them seem like complete caricatures. The pudgy guy is a gross creepy incel and the black haired girl is a vapid valley girl.

Anywhoo, once that scene happens, black haired girl and her sister go to their house, where they bathe for way too long. At first, I was a bit unsure if these siblings were actually siblings because they look to be the same age and act less like siblings and more like casual work friends.

Then, we learn there is something wrong with the pipes in this house. We also see that the mom of this character is a total neat freak. The story feels the need to tell us this fifty or so times in these ten or so pages, and it quickly gets very annoying. There’s also an agonizingly pointless scene  where the mom yells at a plumber. 

It is also in this part where the two girls hatch a plan to let the pudgy guy go to their house so the neat freak mother can scare him off.

To finish our set up, we also meet the Dad of the family, who is divorced from the Mom and hasn’t seen his kids in a while. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have the time to explore what it’s like to be a child of divorce in any meaningful way. 

So, the story has just been set up. There isn’t even the suggestion of something scary.

The plan of the two sisters goes perfectly, and the mom throws eggs at the pudgy kid.

Anywhoo, then the plot actually kicks off when the mom accidentally kills the Dad because she thinks he’s the fat kid when he sneaks into the house at night. I guess the Dad just really wanted to see his kids again, and IDK, maybe he was drunk or something. None of the members of the family seem concerned about the death of this man.

The mom tells the cops that the husband had a knife, so her killing of him was in self defense. I suppose that makes sense. However, what doesn’t make sense is that the family is just allowed to stay in this house that has become a crime scene. I suppose I’m nitpicking. Whatever.

We then see the Mom obsessing over her husband’s blood being cleaned from the floor, and the harassment causes the maid to quit. Why does the maid even exist in the story? I don’t know.

After these excruciatingly long sequences of nothing, we finally get some suspense when mysterious sounds start coming from the pipes.

This, among many other things, causes the Mom to freaking lose it. This is not the only Junji Ito story where a stressed out mom with a dead husband goes crazy. Another one will be near the top. However, this one doesn’t work because the mom is an annoying caricature of a mom, and her neurosciences are so extreme she becomes unbelievable.

Anywhoo, it turns out that the pudgy kid is in the pipes, which is where the sound is coming from.

The black haired girl suddenly starts acting like an asshole for no reason, and the story ends with the sister getting pulled into the pipes- presumably by the pudgy kid. I should mention that she is wearing a towel, so there is an unsettling subtext to this.

That’s fucked up. What is this story saying? Fat people are rapists?

Also, the mom just disappears from the story.

One kind of wonders why the husband and his death was even included, as he’s absolutely inessential to the actual main plot, which is the incel in the pipes. The mom is also pretty pointless, with her only important action being throwing eggs at the pudgy kid.

This whole story is convoluted, contrived, and nonsensical. Every character in it is a caricature, whether it be of women or of fat people. It also seems uninterested in actually creating an atmosphere of dread and suspense.

Unfortunately, a common theme throughout Ito’s stories (specifically his earlier work) is unattractive people being cast as villains and women going through extremely traumatic events in a way which feels indulgent. This story has these two being taken to the extreme.

128. Nanakuse Kyokumi-

This is the transphobic story.

It follows a woman , Koroketsu, who is obsessed with a writer. She goes to see that writer, Nanakuse, only for Nanakuse to turn out to be evil…and also a trans woman. 

Anywhoo, the main character, Koroketsu, of this story is one of the more colorful main characters because she’s really weird.

This means that the beginning of this story is…interesting with how strange it is.

Then, we meet Nanakuse, the author. She is drawn with a very pronounced chin and nose, and our main character literally thinks “A male!” when she first sees her.

It’s at this point when I stopped wanting to read the story, but I had to because of this fucking list.

After this, the author throws the main character into a dungeon, our main character suffers some body horror, and then the story ends.

If it wasn’t for the transphobia, this story would probably be in C. It is very quickly paced. In fact, it’s too quickly paced, as there’s no time given to creating suspense and atmosphere. We don’t see the author seeming more and more off putting as we get more hints that she is evil. The second the main character shows up, the author acts like an absolute asshole. Then, we get a scene of the two of them drinking which does nothing to build suspense. At the end of that scene, the author randomly reveals themself as evil when they toss the main character in a dungeon. It’s kind of sudden. There’s no buildup with this story.

You know Dracula? That’s a story about a person visiting the house of someone mysterious (Dracula), and we get more and more red flags about Dracula throughout the beginning of the story. It’s fun and suspenseful. If Dracula hypnotized Renfield after one conversation, the story would be very boring.

Moving on, the quick pacing means that the stuff about people having “quirks” doesn’t have time to be fleshed out. It seems interesting, but we barely get to see any of it, or the consequences of it, or why all of these people are obsessed with it.

A bunch of exposition is given, but it's all surface level stuff that doesn’t even help us to genuinely understand what’s going on. We learn how the author bought the house and why she keeps people in the prison, but none of this explores the idea of having quirks. Obviously, horror stories thrive when the horror isn’t explained, but it’s helpful if we at least understand what the horrifying thing even is. Imagine Jaws, but we never learn that it’s a shark.

Not only that, the body horror is a little more silly than scary. It’s also very sudden, much like the rest of this story.

Overall, even without the extreme transphobia, this story is just half-baked, with a half-baked idea that never makes any sense or seems all that scary. 

Also, what was the deal with the old servant lady?

[novantinuum]

On the corrupted!Steven theory...

So, originally when I mused on this yesterday I was just playing around with random possibilities.

After combing the series for info about corruption, though, I’m mildly spooked at the increased potential for this to... perhaps be a thing? I’m not saying that this is what I for sure believe will happen- to be honest, I’m not even sure Crewniverse would go this direction at all- but just for funsies, let’s see what kind of “evidence” or “foreshadowing” exists that might support this potential story path in the context of canon.

(EDIT: 10/7/19 

I honestly no longer think this creature is a worm at all whatsoever, it’s either more akin to a horned caterpillar or potentially has limbs. Either way we can see so little right now that it’s hard to tell. I’m not editing the rest of this post because I want it to exist in its original form- but do keep this in mind reading the rest! XP)

1) The design of this worm creature.

Let’s start simple. Let’s start tangible. 

For future reference and simplicity, I will be henceforth be referring to this creature as... “Wormy Boi.”

So, let’s see what we’ve got here. I’m definitely not the first person to point out this fella’s pink nature, and the jarringly human-like nose they’ve got. (Compared to other corruptions, which have had distinctly non-humanoid features.) In the photo above, we also have Wormy Boi sporting glowing pink eyes, which then send out a flare of pink light/energy. So, seemingly a powerful entity.

If you watch the short segment before they sit upright, you’ll see that Wormy Boi is super, super big. They’re in the background, but BOY do they loom. The shadows cast upon them especially push that sense of size. They’ve also got a whole bunch of spikes on their back and framing their face.

So, then. What evidence could be made for this being a corrupted!Steven, as opposed to some other run-of-the-mill monster?

Steven Universe Future is a limited series, described as ‘tying up loose ends.” To me, as a viewer, it would make far more sense for the antagonists/conflicts to deal with big concepts that have already been established since there’s such a limited amount of time we have left with this world. Introducing a completely alien species in the last act of the show would feel offbeat from both a writing and a viewing perspective. Corruption- on the other hand- is something we don’t have full answers to yet.

We don’t see any gem, yes- but Steven’s gem is- of course- on his belly. If this theory were to be true, that would translate to the gem being on Wormy Boi’s underside, far out of our sight in this shot, due to how massive they are. As an addition to this, not showing the gem gives an air of mystery to this creature’s true nature- which makes it seem like there’s something surprising to discover here.

A corrupted diamond would surely be MASSIVE. Also, very powerful. The beam of pink light hints at Wormy Boi being quite a powerhouse.

The spikes on Wormy Boi’s back and around their face highly resemble rose thorns. We all know how much the Crewniverse loves their rose symbolism, and design wise, this aspect would make a lot of visual sense for a corrupted Steven. Running off of that:

The face/nose shape and the five horns on this creature’s head give off a very Steven-like silhouette. 

The nose, of course. The face has a very Steven-like shape to it, overall- although noticeably more angular and sharp. The mouth is reminiscent of the Watermelon Stevens’ mouths. And as for the horns, there’s five of them positioned equidistant around their face, just as Steven’s hair is always formed from five lil’ bumps at the same positions.

Okay, moving on.

(Read more under the cut!)

2) We do not yet understand the true nature of corruption.

“I guess it’ll take more than a kiss to heal damage from the Diamonds…” -Pearl, Monster Reunion

Corruption is still- bafflingly- a huge mystery. The Gems we’ve watched the CGs bubble since season one have been healed, yes, but there are still many gaps in our understanding of it. With Steven Universe Future’s promise to address some lingering story threads, it would make sense if corruption was on the plate for further discussion. So, what DO we know?

We know it’s something the Diamonds can do. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to require all four diamonds. Three of them together were able to cause all the damage to Earth. There’s also no statement made that more than one Diamond is required to cause effects like that. 

In Legs From Here to Homeworld, Blue and Yellow Diamond weren’t actually aware the corruption was something they were capable of producing. They seemed to assume they obliterated the Gems on Earth. Corruption is then, even a mystery to them. That’s... odd, isn’t it?

Pearl states that it’s “something nearly impossible to describe.” Garnet goes further to say... “It’s sorta like... if MC Bear-Bear didn’t tear the fabric of his arm, but the fabric of his mind.”

"A sound… A song?” There’s a lot of association between corruption and music.

It causes Gems to lose touch with their usual forms, instead warping into a more outwardly "monstrous” version of themselves that appear to be “just a bundle of fight-or-flight reflexes and survival instincts.” As seen by Centipeetle in Monster Buddy and Monster Reunion, it appears as if corrupted Gems try to regenerate with their original forms if unbubbled, but are simply not in a state where they can maintain that.

As seen with Jasper in Earthlings, extreme emotional distress very much seems to speed up corruption’s effects. This is less of a stated fact and more of my read on that episode, but I believe it to be an important tidbit, especially since Garnet states that corruption’s damage is mental rather than physical, at least at its core. This can also be seen in Monster Reunion with how Centipeetle’s partial healing backfires when she remembers the trauma of being corrupted and reacts strongly.

Now, when it comes to healing corruption, Steven tries to heal Centipeetle himself, and does make some nice progress... helping her regain a hold on herself as he treats her with love and compassion and understanding... but it’s ultimately not a healing that can occur in isolation, helping her on his own. She needs more support before she can heal from this corruption to a state where she can truly be herself again.

And that eventually comes in the form of the other Diamonds. So, all four diamonds can help relieve the corruption if they help these Gems all together. 

3) How could this theory potentially fit into the story anyways, you nutter?

Well, here’s the part of this post where I make some broad conjectures. I honestly am shooting fish into a barrel here because again- we know barely anything about how corruption actually happened initially, and my thoughts are very jumbled. Please forgive me.

"I don’t really know how the corruption works. It’s like they’re sick. They don’t remember who they used to be.” -Steven, Gem Hunt

So, corruption seems to be a mental ailment of Gemkind, turned manifest. It also seems to have a deep connection to a Gem’s emotions, with Centipeetle growing smaller and slightly calmer upon feeling more secure in Steven’s presence, and corruption speeding up as Jasper grew more and more emotionally overwrought and self-deriding about herself. 

When it comes to the Diamonds and how they perhaps caused it originally- without fully realizing- we know that at least Blue and White have abilities focused on causing others to act in certain ways. Blue has sway over one’s emotions, and White has a knack for forcing her thoughts and self upon others. (I’m not sure how Yellow’s ability would play in here.) Mayhaps, mixed with their grief and guilt and anger, their power simply pressed all of that hurt emotion onto all the Gems on Earth in one whole fail swoop...? Tearing their minds in the process of it all?

The question I still have, though- is whether a single diamond could produce effects like this. And whether a diamond could turn that ability on themself.

Could Steven accidentally corrupt himself? Why might that happen?

Well, let’s look at our boy here. 

He’s got a wide circle of support at this time in canon, but notably, he’s notorious for bottling up his emotion and not letting others in to help him- instead dropping everything to help them with their problems. Just to name a few examples (a few):

The Test. He feels betrayed and hurt at the Gems for a moment about the way they’re babying him with the rigged test, but instead of admitting the hurt he feels about the scenario, bottles that up to help them feel more like good guardians.

Joy Ride. He opens up to the Cool Kids about deep, incredibly troubling stuff that’s long been on his mind, but he’s never once talked about it with his family.

Mindful Education. The perils of bottling one’s emotions is literally the whole plot of the episode. The kid has a full out sobbing breakdown while he’s plunging to his death. Connie gets through to him a little here, but later episodes show that the resolution we see here is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Steven’s internal issues. 

Storm in the Room. Externally, Steven tries so hard to put on a guise of content and positivity, but once alone in Rose’s room feels safe enough to let the full brunt of his emotional trauma come out in an almost explosive manner. Geeze, get this kid some hugs. 

Gemcation. Steven actually fails bitterly on putting on his customary smile in this episode, simply because the weight of his problems have become such an impossible burden to him. When the other Gems are trying to help him open up, he isn’t immediately responsive to their efforts. 

What’s Your Problem? Amethyst spends the whole episode trying to cheer Steven up and find out how he’s doing, and instead Steven downplays his own feelings on the matter and ends up helping her sort out her own emotional issues.

So to sum: Many an Emotional Issue, a chronic tendency to avoid outwardly addressing said issues in favor of helping everyone else instead... and to avoid accepting other people’s help.

Even if he’s surrounded by all these people who love him, the fact of the matter is that Steven still feels as if he has to face his own inner demons alone.

Now, let’s look at the lil’ teasing synopsis that was given for Steven Universe Future:

“After saving the universe, Steven is still at it, tying up every loose end. But as he runs out of other people’s problems to solve, he’ll finally have to face his own.”

Blatantly sounds like we’re gonna finally get some addressing of Steven’s emotional state, now doesn’t it?

4) A concept on what could, theoretically happen

“Maybe… it IS a guy in a monster costume. I don’t mean literally, silly! What I mean is... there might be a conscious Gem still inside there, somewhere. What if the monster is turning back and forth into its original form? If it is, it might not be as corrupted as we think! There might still be a chance to save it!” -Steven, Gem Hunt

Suppose Steven- by some as-of-yet unknown means- ends up accidentally corrupting himself. His sorry emotional state only further amplifies the effects of this corruption, and makes it really hard to retain control. Wormy Boi as a form could be like... all his inner demons made manifest, a metaphoric mirror into his current mental state. But- as he is half-human- he’s not entirely unaware of what’s happening. Perhaps... as the quote above could be sneaky foreshadowing for... how he’s turning back and forth between this corrupted form and his normal form. 

He likely wouldn’t want everyone to see him like this, doesn’t want everyone to visibly know the sheer depth of how much he’s hurting. But just like the corrupted Gems were only able to be helped in community, with the support of the CGs and the Diamonds in preparing the fountain, Steven can’t fix this on his own. 

He can no longer face the dark alone.

At some point, everyone has to take a brave step. Reach out. Accept help. 

Steven’s helped so many people, and surely he deserves that same love and care in return, too.

And perhaps, when he’s eventually healed from this- and has gotten the opportunity to be open with his family and friends about the hurt he’s facing- he’ll be left with “corruption scars” as well. I think it’s an important thing to address, that no one goes through experiences like these without lingering effects. Stuff stays with you. Healing is not always linear. But life is a continuous journey, and with the support of people who love you surrounding, you too can make a change... can continue to live to the fullest at every moment possible.

I think the above would be a lovely moral for Steven Universe to tackle in its last run of episodes, no matter how they approach it- daft corruption theory or not.

Now, in the end- a reiteration. This is just a wild theory. I’m not trying to be any authoritative voice saying that this is for sure what will happen, because in reality I have no idea what Crewniverse is cooking. However, I do think it’s fun speculation, and I am kinda spooked at how well things fit. 

Whatever happens, I’m sure it will make me weep like a baby, though. Hoh boy. Grant me sanity in these coming months as we wait for answers.

[sk1fanfiction]

the many faces of tom riddle, part 5

 - more myth than man... or not? the mortality of tom riddle and the anatomy of a villain-

That leaves us with Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal of adult Tom Riddle/Lord Voldemort in movies 4-8.

I generally find adult Tom Riddle disappointing, even in the books, in terms of character depth. Instead of delving into his motivations and the inner psychology of a villain, we get... slight body horror? And in the movies, it’s even more egregious. 

If a story is as good as its villain, adult Tom Riddle is a bit of a let-down, especially on-screen.

“I was ripped from my body, I was less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost . . . but still, I was alive.”

Perhaps the very first time I watched it, I found this scary, but I must confess that nowadays, Voldemort’s resurrection is more funny to me than anything else. The forked tongue and the nose slits, yes, are supposed to allude to Tom Riddle’s loss of humanity, but I don’t think it...worked out that way in practice.

I know that’s how it is in the books, but ugly equals evil (and vice versa) is a tired trope. not only that, but under the CGI, Lord Voldemort is so difficult to relate to, so inhuman, that it’s hard to (1) see his true depravity (2) connect with him emotionally (3) at least for me, not laugh at him flapping around the graveyard in GOF like an oversized crow. 

Now, the reason I’m going on about this is not (just) me being petty. Lord Voldemort is the Boggart for most of the characters in the HP universe, meaning their greatest fear is Lord Voldemort. He represents Fear; as such, he should be utterly terrifying. Now, I don’t mean horrifying in that sense, but Voldemort’s grand entrance should at least feel somewhat unsettling, have some sort of a Gothic atmosphere...

"But then, through the mist in front of him, he saw, with an icy surge of terror, the dark outline of a man, tall and skeletally thin, rising slowly from inside the cauldron."

Visually, this looks great. But it’s not scary. And I’m not a purist by any means, but the words are scarier than the book. Darkness induces fear. 

“The lack of any kind of visual stimuli increases anxiety, uncertainty, and tension.”

So, having Voldemort’s pale body materialize isn’t as scary as it could be.

Furthermore, I think Fiennes’ overexaggerated expressions would actually come across as properly horrifying/threatening rather than funny if they just left his face alone. Yes, Fiennes does manage to emote the fear and the anger through the CGI, but it’s like he’s too alien to be scary, at least to me. The amount of memes with Voldemort suggest I’m not the only one this way inclined.

I think there’s probably a problem going on with the uncanny valley. (Images from the Mori essay linked).

[When things are still]

[Creepy things are creepier when moving]

Now, I assume Voldemort is meant to be zombie-creepy, or at least that how Harry describes him in the books.

"The thin man stepped out of the cauldron, staring at Harry...and Harry stared back into the face that had haunted his nightmares for three years. Whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes and a nose that was flat as a snake's but with slits for nostrils...."

Now, we can’t get Harry’s experience of being haunted by Voldemort in his dreams, because what I think makes Voldemort’s countenance so truly frightening to the other characters isn’t his snake-like nose or his red eyes, but the potential. Voldemort is, in essence, the Grim Reaper. You are at his mercy, and you’re probably going to be dead. 

“This time, I shall enter the fray myself, Harry Potter, and I shall find you, and I shall punish every last man, woman, and child who has tried to conceal you from me. One hour.“

And yes, Voldemort can be quite funny and witty, but..

“I will allow you to perform an essential task for me, one that many of my followers will give their right hands to perform.” (To Peter Pettigrew)

...it’s still incredibly dark, sadistic humour. Whereas the teenage Tom Riddle we’ve been discussing has just barely dipped his toes into evil, Voldemort is, well... swimming in it. At this point, he think he undeniably enjoys causing pain.

And much of what makes Voldemort scary is subtle. 

For example, what I personally consider haunting is the fact that he’s got a cave full of Inferi. A cave full of reanimated dead bodies. 

Either he dug them up, which is unlikely... or perhaps, a twenty-seven-or-so-year-old Tom Riddle would lie in wait like a bird of prey, very quietly and patiently, perhaps reading a book, waiting for an unsuspecting Muggle to wander past. Maybe killing is a game to him at this point, when it’s not so personal as killing Harry Potter. Maybe it’s a whispered Avada Kedavra, and then he carries the dead body away to his cave. Maybe he Imperiuses them to walk off the cliff. Maybe he tortures them first.

Shudder.

And I don’t think you can show that kind of horror through any CGI or make-up, so...

You know what is terrifying? Revolting? True crime; real-life people who do unspeakably horrible things. And I think a lot was missed out on, in stripping Tom Riddle physically of his humanity. Yes, Riddle is a monster...

But, as we’ve seen, he’s a human monster, not some eldritch horror from the seventh level of hell or something.

I just think it would be interesting to have this perfectly normal-looking human do all the horrific things Voldemort does. I want to see that sick joy in a human face and feel disgusted. I want to see fear make his bottom lip tremble, and feel a misplaced sense of empathy. (Think President Snow from the Hunger Games -- now, that’s a sick, twisted villain who we can relate to as a human being, but still love to hate -- or what about The Joker?).

And out of everything they chose to CGI, why on earth did they not make his eyes scarlet? That might have made him look at least somewhat menacing, rather than a failed lab experiment.

(Don’t even get me started on his and Bellatrix’s death scenes in the movies-)

Here’s President Snow. He’s got a cute little granddaughter, he sends kiddies to kill each other Battle Royale-style every year, and he poisons all his political opponents. He’s also a master manipulator and has a penchant for white roses. They cover up the smell of the sores in his mouth from eating the poison too, to conceal his treachery.

Heath Ledger as the Joker in Dark Knight (2008), who is, according to NYT (which I totally agree with), the best Joker. Now this is a villain done right, with many Voldemort-like traits. On a scale of one-to-ten, he’s absolutely terrifying. Why? He’s (unlike Voldemort in the movies) incredibly intelligent, shows young-Tom-Riddle-like skills for charm and manipulation, plays with humans like they’re his own personal psychology experiment (and to hell with the Institutional Review Board), and has one, single, very clear goal -- chaos. Like Voldemort, he wears an inhuman mask that’s not horrifying in its own right; but unlike Voldemort, the human is all there -- terrifying, real, and with a bottomless, obsessive desire to destroy. His disordered thinking is all out there for the audience to see. The Joker’s motivation is to enjoy himself; whereas Voldemort seems to lack drive. Why does he want to take over the world -- who knows, with Voldemort? The Joker wants to see it burn.

Let’s try to do the same with Lord Voldemort:

[SLIGHT FLASH WARNING]

I had to go with this because Voldemort isn’t legitimately terrifying in many scenes. And yes, this unrefined anger somewhat speaks to Tom’s immaturity

By this point, seventy-one year old Tom Riddle is a hollowed-out shell of a human being. After decades of building his power, he was defeated by a one-year-old, and ended up slumming it as a spirit for a decade, got defeated again, was a shrivelled-up baby for a year, then finally got his body back.

He’s angry, okay! And Fiennes does a great job of portraying the sheer, destructive, unbridled rage of this character.

The body language. again, since his face is inhuman, this is super important. and Fiennes’ body language is great. Voldemort/Riddle commits to his actions. He is very emotionally-driven.

But yet, he doesn’t feel capable, in the way that the Joker or President Snow do. Yeah, we know anecdotally that he’s incredibly evil, sadistic, and second only to Dumbledore in terms of power, but he loses to a baby, and then that same baby as a teenager. So, we really could have done with seeing Voldemort’s power, cruelty, and evil firsthand a lot more often.

Voldemort is not well-characterized. I don’t understand his motives, and the ones that I do understand are not compelling.

Not to die? Well, he’s already made several Horcruxes. Why not sit back and relax? Why start a war and risk himself?

JKR said that Voldemort’s great desire was to become all-powerful and eternal. But that’s... boring! It does little to tell us about Voldemort, other than that he’s a villain and a wannabe dictator. 

Furthermore, the charm, manipulation, and cunning that are hallmarks of younger Tom Riddle’s personality are gone.

Is Voldemort (to return to Jungian terms) all shadow? An empty creature of simple creation and destruction, perhaps? We’ll discuss this further down...

And this isn’t a problem of having a fantastical world with magic and the like. Grindelwald’s quiet, self-possessed, almost coy “So you think you can hold me?” was infinitely scarier than anything that has ever come out of Voldemort’s mouth. It was chilling. 

OOTP is my favorite book, and the Ministry sequence is one of my favourite in the films. 

This scene where he psyches out Harry, talking so quietly that he could just be a little voice inside his head (and again, during the possession scene)? Absolute perfection. 

Why? Because this showcases what’s truly scary about him. Voldemort can get into your head. He can make you do things. And perhaps, if we had seen that more often, we’d understand how scary he is.

I wish this had been his grand entrance, and not whatever that scene in GOF was. Somehow, him screeching “I WANT TO SEE THE LIGHT LEAVE YOUR EYES!” is not menacing. At all. 

But, I can’t help but think how much greater the emotional affect would be if he had more human features (think the burned-and-blurred, waxy features from Dumbledore’s memory). 

Just imagine these scenes if Voldemort looked human, and spoke as quietly as he did in this one.

Because of the reason that I have little to go on in terms of characterization that I haven’t already covered, we’ll discuss the myth and legend of Lord Voldemort.

I can’t decide if the statue in the films is supposed to be the Angel of Death or the Grim Reaper. He has a skeleton and carries a scythe, but he also has wings. There are so many different interpretations, attitudes towards, and personifications of Death across the world that I don’t want to draw any one conclusion. But I must wonder if Lord Voldemort, with his yew-and-phoenix wand (which carries heavy symbolism of immortality and rebirth) and almost deified figure is meant to be a personification of Death himself? His name, Lord Voldemort, is a shade close to Lord Death.

For years, it has stumped me that wizards and witches are afraid to utter Voldemort’s name, especially since we only see the Taboo in the middle of the last book. It didn’t make sense just based on fear; in the real world, we don’t circumvent Hitler’s name, for example.

Perhaps this may have been obvious to others, but it wasn’t to me.

Here’s a counterargument to myself; why Voldemort shouldn’t look human.

Voldemort, in the Wizarding World, is seen as a literal deity.

I promised to attempt to answer this question in Part 3: 

And so, I can’t help but wonder if the opposite is true… if Tom Riddle creates Horcruxes, would that grant him additional magic powers?

In Part 3, I likened Tom Riddle to a sorcerer in Russian folklore, Koschei the Deathless, also famous for sequestering his soul in objects. This source suggests that Koschei was considered not an ordinary magician, but a representative of the ‘other’ world, the world of death.

So, what if... creating Horcruxes makes you... more than human? Now, I could definitely see god-like status being appealing to sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle. Perhaps, even appealing enough to kill for. Now, his proclivity for Avada Kedavra makes sense. We know it’s an incredibly sinister spell, but at the same time, it’s a very humane way to kill. Why might it be so horrifying?

Here’s a weird theory.

To the best of my knowledge, no one but Voldemort is seen using the Killing Curse more than once or twice. 

Perhaps, ordinary mortals can only cast Avada Kedavra a few times, but Tom, having split his soul and having become in some way a non-human instrument of Death, can cast it however many times as he likes, and that is part of what serves to make him so terrifying.

This makes the idea of Voldemort tossing around Avada Kedavras actually incredibly terrifying, if you take into account what that might mean.

The collective cultural fear of speaking Voldemort’s name supports this theory.

Take the chthonic (underworld) deities of Greek mythology; most notably, Hades and Persephone, the king and queen of the underworld.

Hades, the god of the dead, was feared. 

So feared that the word ‘Hades’ (”the unseen one”) was so frightening, that people came up with all sorts of euphemisms to circumvent actually saying it and he was rarely even depicted in art. For example, they would refer to him as Pluto (”the rich one”), Clymenus ("notorious"), Polydegmon ("who receives many"), and perhaps Eubuleus ("good counsel" or "well-intentioned"), amongst many other names. 

However, he was not seen as evil; just stern, cruel, and fair. Like most Greek gods, he had an associated cult (the Death Eaters, anyone?)

Another interesting connection between Hades and Voldemort is that Hades was associated with snakes.

Persephone (suggested to have a pre-Greek origin and probably pre-dates Hades), who was also a vegetation/fertility/spring goddess, similarly, was referred to as Despoina (”the mistress”), Kore (”the maiden”), etc, because as the terrible Queen of the Dead, it was considered unsafe to speak her name aloud. In mythology and literature, she is sometimes referred to as ‘dread Persephone.’

--Just like how Lord Voldemort is referred to as The Dark Lord, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, You-Know-Who... (and if you’re Dumbledore, ‘Tom’.)

Her central myth served as the context for the secret rites of regeneration at Eleusis (which was basically a mystery cult devoted to her and her mother, Demeter), which promised immortality to initiates.

We don’t know for certain what exactly went on, because, mystery cult -- the members were sworn to secrecy -- but it revolved around immortality and rebirth and possibly psychoactive drugs. 

Perhaps ironically, in comparison to the Death Eaters, anyone could join, as long as they could speak Greek and had never committed murder.

And that concludes my assessment!

[barbecuebabybackribs]

Truly Damned (Male Angel-Demon Hybrid Reader x Jasper Hale)

Dating Jasper Hale was many things, the first thing that comes to mind is heavenly- although incredibly ironic- but one of the other thing I would say it was is difficult.

He’s a man who never has to ask what someones feeling, he just knows. So obviously when I walked in- not only his mate but the one person in his long life he’d ever met whom he couldn’t read? His interest was peaked to say the least.

Question after question, trying to find out why exactly I was immune to all vampiric powers, not only that but my scent was something he’d never smelt before, so heavenly but so easy to resist. With most humans he struggled to not bite down on there neck every  second he’s around them but not me, and he wants to know why.

Although that precise question is why I’m avoiding him now, trying to slowly make him realize he deserves so much better then a damned creature like me. I go against almost every religious text I’ve ever read- if they even bother to mention my kind at all.

A being born from the forbidden relations of a demon and an angel- it complicated my life to say the least.

Fortunately I was adopted at the mere age of three by a lovely older couple by the names Roxanne Seever and Delilah Seever, they didn’t know who I was or what I was but they loved me for me and that was enough.

However it didn’t last long, good things around me always seems to perish and Roxy was one of them- it all happened so quickly I could’ve done something but I just sat in shock as a semi headed right for our car, squeezed my eyes shut not wanting to witness what was about to happen and right when I heard the sounds of metal against metal and glass shattering- I felt nothing.

I opened my eyes and I was yards away from a picture that still to this day haunt’s me, I couldn’t see much but what I could killed me. The sight of the woman I called mom obviously launched from the wreck of a car mere feet behind her, laying on the ground breathing heavily, and blood surrounding her.

I could’ve done something, but I didn’t.

The ambulances came and carted us away but we all could see in her pale skin she was gone, and when I looked over and saw her cold lifeless face staring back at me that’s when I knew, I was the very thing I had nightmares of since I was a little boy.

I was left unscathed by my miraculous escape- as others called it. I just called it transmutation. I learned a lot since that day when I was a mere 12 years old, while my mother grieved yet never seemed to recover I became obsessed with finding out what I was, who I was, why I was created. It was years until I found out, but when they came to me, in my dreams. It all made sense.

They explained everything to me, how they and a demon had fallen in love however it wasn’t meant to be and they were torn from each other, but not before they fell pregnant- only possible due to the fact they were inhabiting a female body when the act took place.

It all made sense, all my years of searching and I finally got confirmation, I was a demon. A forbidden creature not even god could love, so I did what I thought was best and pushed everyone as far away from me as possible, and although it killed me to see my mother desperately trying to connect with me even through some of her darkest moments, I was doing what I thought was best.

My powers were completely out of control, the longer I lived the more powers showed up and the stronger they grew, transmutation, telekinesis, pyrokenisis, to many to name, and with each power came more struggle to keep my secret hidden, it was almost impossible to keep all of this bottled inside me,

And It was all going to plan, live my life never getting close to another person so they wouldn’t get hurt- that was of course until the new kid’s came to school- The Cullens- and among them was Jasper Hale, the man I would fall head over heels in love with and would completely change my life.

I tried my hardest to push him away but he wasn’t having any of it. He slowly chipped away at the walls I had so desperately built around myself, for months I slowly let him in, it was on the third month I officially befriended him, the fifth month I was fighting off a serious crush, and the six month was one I will forever cherish, the month he asked me out and I accepted so quickly embarrassment ate away at me. The eighth month he told me what he was and for just a moment I thought maybe he could understand, that we’d be safe with each other, and although I never told him what I was- I still felt as if he understood every part of me.

But that was crushed when a few days after our six month anniversary he was attacked by a group of nomad vampires, apparently my unusual scent still lingered on his brought them there- I was the reason they attacked him and he got hurt- although only slightly in vampire standard it still could have been much worse, he could’ve been killed.

I will never forget the image of him flashing in front of my, pure fear in his eyes as both his cold hands clamped around my shoulders, his voice faltered slightly as he asked if I was okay and if anything had happened. His blue shirt torn on his arms, new scars appeared under them, I  tried to ignore is but my head spun as he told me the events that had just taken place and I knew, I knew I was wrong. I knew he wasn’t safe with me.

And that’s why I’m pushing him away now, and this time I won’t let him tear down my walls in fear of him getting hurt because of me again- or even worse ending up like my mother.

But of course he wasn’t going to make that easy for me. It’s hard to explain to the man you love why you avoiding him when you can’t just casually say “Oh it’s because I’m a demon-angel hybrid and I don’t want you to die because everything good around me seems to die, my mother, my dog, happiness, kindness, all that good stuff. So I’ve decided to essentially shun you from my life. Okay bye have a nice day.”

So when I moved seats in class, didn’t sit with him at lunch, didn’t drive to school with him and hang out with him after school, didn’t even respond to his texts, he was slightly pissed, but mainly extremely concerned. What had happened? Was it something he did? Were you threatened by someone? Had you simply fallen out of love with him? Was he just not good enough?

He had to confront me, I knew it was coming but that didn’t make it any less heart wrenching. My chest ached as he confront me on my walk home, on the most secluded part of the route, his eyes were filled with pain as he asked a simple question, “Why?”

My throat went dry and I wrapped my arms around myself, the only source of comfort in this moment, I looked him dead in the eye and shook slightly as my entire facade dropped away in an instant, overwhelming guilt and despair washing over me, a single word caused my eyes to burn and water, my breath faltering despite my best efforts to keep it steady.

His golden eyes flooded with concern as he took in my pathetic state, “I can’t tell you.” I choked out, sucking in a jagged breath to try and calm myself but it only broke the damn in my eyes and tears streamed down my face- much to my dismay. In this moment as I looked at his confused and hurt eyes I envied his ability to not cry, it would make convincing him I don’t want to be with him much easier.

“Darling, what happened?” He said taking a step closer to me, “Why have you been so distant?”

I matched his step but backwards, wanting to keep distant because I couldn’t promise myself I wouldn’t fall into his arms if he got any closer.

“Nothing happened, Jasper. I just don’t think we are a good match.” I lied through my teeth, and I could see it on his face he knew it was a blatant lie.

“I don’t believe you, tell me what’s wrong Y/N. We can fix it, whatever it is we can work through it.” He promised, taking a quick step forward, this is so quick I couldn’t step away. I could only push him slightly by placing my hand on his chest, although he didn’t budge. He only held onto my hand while it was placed against his chest.

“Did I do something?” He asked, his brows furrowing as he stared at me, the pain in his eyes almost killed me and I couldn’t let him think he was the reason I didn’t want to be with him- he was the reason I wanted so badly to be with him, I was the reason I couldn’t.

“It’s nothing to do with you...” I mumbled trying to step back but his grip on my hand kept me in place, “Jasper please, let me go.” I said, referring to my hand although it had deeper meaning, I just needed him to let me go emotionally and physically.

“No, tell me what’s wrong,” He said cradling my hands gingerly although keeping a firm grip on them, “Whatever it is we can fix it-”

“No you can’t!” I shouted finally pulling my hands free, taking advantage of the fact that me raising my voice caused him to falter. I took a few steps back before running my now sweaty hands through my hair, I can’t do this... I can’t tell him.

“Please, Y/N. Whatever I did, I’ll make it better.” He practically begged, his usually steady voice quivering, irritation filled me and I finally burst, after all these years, my true self was finally revealed.

“No, Jasper! No you can’t, you can’t fix me! You’re not the problem I am, everything about me is damned- I’m quite literally a demon, I’m a monster in so many ways you will never understand, I can not be fixed like you said, you can’t fix this problem, I can never be fixed! Everything I love gets taken from me, my mothers, my friends, even my damn dog, I thought maybe you’d be safe, maybe you wouldn’t be affected by this damned curse, but no! You’ll just end up like everyone else!” I talked so fast my mind couldn’t keep up, I barely realize the burning sensation on my skin and the feeling of the wind hitting against my body but not in a sense I had ever felt before.

Looking over my shoulder I flinched at what I saw- there is not other way to say it other then the fact that I had sprouted wings, large and dark gray, filling the space behind me with large fuzzy feathers somewhat resembling a hawks feathers- but not only that small fires had lit themselves around my very being, causing the heat I had barely noticed before, this is it. He know’s I’m a monster, it only a matter of second before he leaves-

I was cut off by oh-so-familiar arms wrapping around me, pulling me into a tight hug, burying his face into my neck, I was so taken aback I could do nothing but stand almost limply in his arms, overwhelmed by a emotion I could not place but shocks of energy to each one of my nerves, but it sent a choked sob out of my throat and turned my stomach.

“It’s going to be okay, Y/N, Everything is going be alright.” his arms continued to embrace me, one of his hand resting on the back of my head and gently stroking my hair, although he was unable to soothe me via his powers, those simple words soothed me beyond imagine.

Finally letting a deep breath out the unimaginable weight I hadn’t realized was on my shoulders, I let myself fall into his arm, clutching at his freezing body like it was my only life line to this earth. Broken sobs leaving my lips as he supported my weight.

Once I had calmed down he finally let go of me, wiping the few stray tears from my cheek then ruffling my hair, without saying a single word he took my hand and started leading me away from where we had been, I looked over my shoulder- wings having dissipated at some point during the hug- and saw gray feathers blowing in the wind, scorch marks littering the ground around me.

“Jasper,” I said looking back over to him, “Where are we going?” I asked, He simply glanced at me, offering me a slight smile before stating simply “To the woods.”

“Jazzy that sounds like you’re going to kill me.” I mumbled but still followed him, knowing that was obviously not his intent.

Here only laughed at my statement, shaking his head slightly, if I could see his face I knew there would be a cheeky grin on his face and his gold locks would be perfectly framing his face- the thought made me want to make him look at me right now, however I continued to let him lead me deeper and deeper into the woods, before he let go of my hand- sighing in content.

“This will do.” He stated turning to me, leaning against a tree with his arms crossed.

“Will do for what exactly?” I questioned, he only smiled at me with that aggravatingly beautiful smile that just made me want to squeal like some twelve year old girl.

“For you to do some explaining.”

And with that he somehow convinced me to sit down and tell him all about my big secret- I had never even told him I witnessed my mother die in fear it would bring up to many questions, but now all my cards were out on the table and I spilled my soul to him. I told him about watching the life drain from my mothers body, how I spent months and years searching for answers, how my true “Mother” Visits me in my dream and explained everything, I told his I was technically a demon-angel hybrid, I told him how I pushed everyone away in fear my powers would become out of control as they so often did and cause someone to get hurt.

In the end it was nearly dark out, I had showed Jasper a small snippet of my power that I had showed him before, illuminating us with a small flame within my palm, he took my hand and pulled it closer,

“Hey, watch out Jasper it’s hot.” I said pulling away slightly so he wouldn’t hurt himself, although I quickly remembered he couldn’t feel the fire and it would simply wash over him, realizing my mistake I offered my hand again, a slight blush on my cheeks.

He remained motionless for a moment, before a grin spread across his face and he took my hand again, the hand that wasn’t gingerly caressing my hand floated above the flame, quickly dipping his fingers into the flame causing it to dance around him before pulling his hand away.

“Fascinating.” He almost gawked, looking me in my eyes, his eyes held a glint of fascination and an emotion I couldn’t place.

“What are you thinking about?” I quizzed, he let out a slight hum, letting go of my hand and standing from our position on the ground.

“You said you didn’t have full control of these powers?” He asked, however it sounded more like a statement.

“Yes..” I answered hesitantly.

“Well then,” He said before taking my hand and pulling me up so I was standing in front of him, “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

(I hope this was okay, I’m still suffering a tad from sick brain but I think it’s decent. @shamelessloverhairdopainter​ If this isn’t to your liking feel free to contact me and i’ll tweak it to your liking :) have a wonderful evening and stay safe everyone)

[andoqin]

Sisyphus: The Myth Ep 1- A Dissection

Okay, so I’ve had some time to process what I subjected myself to today, so I’ve decided to list everything in episode 1 that is just completely insane and an example of how Not To Do it. 

I’m not an expert on Film Theory, but i’ve watched a shitton of media, plus I watch a lot of Youtube Video essays, so clearly I’m half

The episode starts off okay enough even if we get a weird exposition dump and “tense” parting scene between a father and daughter. 

We start in what presumably is the time travel terminal where people stand around in pyjamas waiting to get through.

Okay, fairly interesting if unspectacular but I’m guessing that’s the point, this is now an industry. We zoom in and get this line that made me laugh, because well...

a) humans are living creatures and b) the amount of microbial organisms on human skin is estimated to be at hundreds of billions, or more. And this kind of time travel/teleportation is always hinky because well if you think about it, how does that even work without getting into The Fly territory. I’m willing to cut this drama some slack here and maybe it’s an awkward translation besides. 

This gets... exceedingly long, but if you want a (too) in-depth summary of what happens in ep 1 and why it doesn’t work (for me) read on :D.

But then the real trouble starts, because PSH’s dad (I’m not bothering to learn the character names) says he’s not going with her and this is apparently very sudden. He then makes her repeat some lines that are supposed to create tension? Be exposition? Idk.

“Don’t trust anyone.” 

“Don’t get involved with [CSW]’s character.”

PSH get’s teary eyed, because her dad is not coming with her, but the problem with scenes like these is: I don’t know either of them and do not have an emotional connection to their parting. Sure, it tells us something about PSH (she likes her dad and is worried about him) but I also don’t know how important her dad is going to be down the line. So when PSH asks about her mom and what if her mom dies and her dad just replies everyone dies at some point I’m a bit weirded out, but not to the point where I necessarily want to know more. 

We then smashcut to PSH waking up in a world that’s more similar to ours and she does what her dad told her to do. She grabs her (very inconvenient) suitcase and runs along the tracks she woke up next to. We see that she is somewhat surprised by the running trains and also hardy enough to track on despite bleeding feet. 

Alas, creepy people in gas-masks with guns and drones are waiting for her, so she runs even harder and after some near misses (they are able to track her by some sort of radiation meter) makes it to safety. 

On top of a train car that the TWO DOZEN PEOPLE WITH GUNS AND DRONES are too stupid to check apparently. Clearly if she’s not under the train car, the detecting devices must be mistaken. So she just chills on top of the train car, sitting on her suitcase and those goons trundle off after 5 minutes presumably like they’re Assassin’s Creed Enemy NPCs.

Now we get introduced to CSW in the most insane scene i’ve ever witnessed. Honestly. 

He is just ~chilling in 1st class in an airplane, filming a douche who is rude to the plane staff and epically owning him because he’s So Smart.

First of all, I don’t know what that has to do with soggy noodles(which the other asshole complained about), since by that measure the noodles should be *undercooked* (lower boiling point means longer cooking time after all) and secondly good lord I already hate this guy. He then proceeds to Epically Own (tm) with a convenient Forbes (sorry “Eorbes”) Magazine that he is on the cover of and flirts with the plane hostess. 

So right off the bat, our impressions of CSW are supposed to be: He’s Cool (look at his hoodie and general bearing), he’s Smart (debatable), he’s nice to The Help (I guess???) stands up to bullies, and most importantly he’s fucking rich. I guess we’re also supposed to get the impression that he’s arrogant, maybe a bit of an asshole, but still cool and everything. 

If this had been where the scene had stopped I would have rolled my eyes and then just continued on watching. But no, the writers thought: “Schooling some sexist rich asshole isn’t enough to show off how Cool and Smart and Cocky our main character is. Also he likes the ladies.” Look at him, he’s Tony Stark only from South Korea!!!

So shortly after he sits down, and we have the first moment with CSW where he connected with me emotionally (he sees the ghost of his dead brother and the way he says “because ... you’re dead.” and I thought OOOH this I can work with), the cockpit windshield is hit by what looks to be a suitcase (DUN DUN DUUUN) and something crashes into one of the engines, causing it to explode and catch fire. 

The pilot is knocked out and unconscious and even the co-pilot loses consciousness (after conveniently unlocking the cockpit lock). CSW is the only one who goes to check on the pilots, having grabbed a fanny pack from his onboard luggage and quickly assessing the situation he revives the copilot and welds the hole in the windshield shut with some ducttape out of his fannypack and a plastic notepad. IT’S VERY EFFECTIVE! They did it in WW2, or so CSW tells us so you know it’s true.

I’m not sure that ‘s how plane windshields and duct tape and plastic notepad thingies work, but well the plane is still in freefall we have more important things to worry about :).

The electrics are all on the fritz, the copilot cannot get control of the plane and so CSW takes a seat in the captains chair (having foisted the captain out of it, not even he is so crass to sit on some unconscious dude’s lap i guess) and quickly calculates that they have 3 min and 30 secs for CSW to restart the electronics before the plane crashes. So he hands the co-pilot HIS PHONE with a timer on it for 3.5 minutes so the co-pilot can tell him when 30 seconds have passed. Instead of idk, contacting Air Traffic Control or ANYONE he just sits there and lets his big boy brain work. 

After 30 seconds he has an idea, because he’s Tony Stark-ing it up like crazy now and can just figure out the electronics of a plane cockpit in 30 seconds, but guess what. HIS PHONE RINGS. AND HE ANSWERS IT, because he’s devil-may-care and “haha look at this, friend, i’m in the cockpit of a crashing plane we have 2 minutes before i’m dead.”

Said friend is calling him from the board meeting of CSWs company, bc of course the board is ~unhappy with CSWs antics (I gotta say I can’t blame them) and the friend doesn’t believe it at first, when he says he’s in a crashing plane, but checks on the news to see it’s true. 

I ... I don’t think news work like that, we’ve gone 5 minutes from the initial troubles till now, there won’t be news reports all over the media yet. THEY’RE NOT EVEN TALKING TO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL YET. Hell he even tells his friend to call 119 or the airport for help. I just... I’m very forgiving of a lot of things in a drama when it comes to writing. I’m willing to ignore obvious blindspots in a narrative, if I think the narrative is strong enough to support whatever it’s trying to say. At this point what could calling the police or the airport do, they have like 90 seconds left...

I don’t know what the writers are trying to tell me with this scene though? It’s so stupid, so unrealistic and CSW is so unpleasant and weird in it, because he tells his friend that he has to confess to taking out the friend’s college girlfriend on a date while they were still together. 

Well since the drama is longer than one ep, they do make it out alive, but the fact that the co-pilot managed to safely LAND the plane (which is insane to me) gets skipped over and we just get news snippets that herald CSW as a hero who singlehandedly saved the planes passengers. 

We then get to see him in his natural habitat “convalescing” in his giant apartment where he is being showered with gifts by worshippers basically. He continues to be an asshole, but his friend tells him, one more stunt and the board will kick him. 

The board will kick the guy who just saved a plane full of lives????? Yeah right, I’m sorry but that’s just fucking stupid from the writers. Why would anyone do that, even if the board hates him, kicking him now, when he’s literally a national hero would be the worst thing they could do for the stock prices. It’s only here so the writers can shoehorn in that CSW is close to OD-ing on pharmaceuticals and that the board wants to monitor his therapy and they have a way of “forcing” him to comply. 

Also he has what looks to be a dental x-ray machine next to his bed. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but lol what’s up with these set design choices. 

His friend tells him to go to fucking therapy or else and the next scene he is actually at a therapist. 

Who’s his ex-girlfriend (they have a whole tangent about that).

Who writes a report about his therapy to the board. 

But hey at least the therapy gets us a flashback of the last time he saw his brother. Big surprise he was an asshole to him as well, so no wonder he’s traumatised by that.

After therapy he *conveniently* runs into the co-pilot who’s incoherent and beaten up and hands CSW a usb-drive. It contains video of the cockpit on the day of the crash and it’s obvious what struck the plane was a suitcase and what crashed into the engine was a human being (DUN DUN DUUUUUUN maybe someone forgot to convert feet to meters when setting up the time travel thingamabob).

As he looks at the (very pixelated) figure of the person about to crash into the engine, he suddenly sees his brother’s face and honestly this scene just made me laugh? I know it’s supposed to be haunting and more evidence of CSW’s deep trauma, but I guess at this point my brain was just completely checked out. 

And that’s what we end our introductory phase of CSW. What the fuck was that plane thing even for. To show us he’s callous in the face of danger? He’s an asshole even when he’s about to die, so he’s got a long way to go? He’s haunted by the spectre of his dead brother and the guilt he feels for not being there when he died? I got a lot of that before we had the insane Plane Adventure!!! There are literally millions of ways they could have gotten this information to the viewers and not made an absurd spectacle of the plot that means that everything afterwards just feels lame, because you already had the insanity that was this plane ride, so it can only go down tension wise.

Now we’re back to PSH, but honestly her parts are kinda boring and bog-standard “UwU I’m unfamiliar with this way of life, I don’t even know how to eat a banana (that looks *nothing* like a banana btw), so I just eat it peel and root and all. Also I’m from the Future, that means I obviously know todays LOTTERY NUMBERS.”

I know kdramas like clichés and tropes, I like them too, that’s why I watch kdramas, but you gotta give me a bit more if you want me to at least invest in PSH, because I’m sure as hell not invested in CSW. 

She gets taken in by some guy, because we can’t have her homeless all the time, and she needs someone to explain this world to her and also how to eat bananas properly and she opens her suitcase. It’s got both future-tech-y looking stuff and a pink notepad that seems to hold specific information on what needs to happen on certain days. 

She also makes this expression and I don’t know if we’re supposed to laugh because she’s not threatening or if we’re supposed to laugh because she’s not threatening, but we know she’s gonna kick ass later, haha you just thought she was harmless. I gotta say it’s the former for me.

Rarrr fierce Elite Warrior PSH coming to get you.

She tries to get in touch with CSW, already breaking one of her dad’s three commandments. Oh, I guess staying with this guy breaks the other two. Welp, so much for that then. What even was the point of that first scene...

Anyway she tries to get in touch with CSW but ofc you cant just call the richest person ever (Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos would get very angry voicemails from me if that were the case), but she manages to get his voicemail. Or a voicemail he spoke for. But oh no, she is just Not Familiar with this world and keeps having a conversation with the voicemail as if it’s CSW himself. 

CSW who has scienced his way to finding the suitcase that crashed the plane and as she begs his voicemail not to open the suitcase, of course he opens it and gasp the combination for the suitcase lock is his birthday!!! Something his brother used to do!!! 

MAYBE THAT MAN WAS HIS BROTHER AFTER ALL!!!! OH NO!! 

But thank fuck the episode is over now.

VERDICT:

Just no. Don’t do this. The latter half of the show is more standard fare, but the first 25 minutes destroy any capability of this show making sense. I can see what the writers are trying to do, but it’s so hamfisted and badly written I’m just not willing to go along.

If you want a show that also has a fantasy action aspect (and this show is all fantasy no matter how much it tries to science it up), watch LUCA instead. That show at least knows how to set a tone, how to get us invested in the characters and does exposition in a way that doesn’t feel obtrusive. 

[anxiouslyfred]

Selling a Soulmate

Completely Inspired by this post from @writing-prompt-s and @chaos-by-all-means

Pattons sells Virgil’s soul to a demon, that demon and their soulmate are extremely angry when they don’t find Patton while following the soul connection. Virgil just got 2 new demonic soulmates of Deceit and Remus

/\/\/\/\/\

Patton thought it was all for the best, after all Virgil constantly made jokes about wanting to die, or just going to hell for more continuous torture as if that’s all he had in life. They’d been soulmates for years and he still couldn’t get Virgil to stop.

So he was selling a soul to a demon, for the chance to look after his family and friends, to actually be the perfect dad friend to them all and make them feel better, face the struggles of the world down and keep standing too. If that meant Virgil actually would be destined for hell now, well those jokes always did seem to serious to Patton.

Deceit and Remus had always known that soulmates had some ownership over each others souls, and could in fact bargain each others souls when making deals. No demon had ever heard of that actually happening.

Then they followed the soul link that came from Deceit’s deal with the human Patton to find someone neither had seen ever before.

“You’re definitely Patton.” Deceit was glaring between the strand of connection and the man, curled on his bed in a hoodie and clutching a letter.

“Apparently so, given his letter is only saying that all those jokes I make about going to hell can come true as I wished. Who the fuck actually wishes something like that and what the hell does he mean? If it’s a break up letter then that’s one hell of away to tell your fucking soulmate they’re dumped.” The man barely even looks up, tears brimming even as he glares at the page.

“Soulmates? I mean I do some twisted things with the souls I get from deals but that’s dark.” Remus comments quietly, knowing his pairing with Deceit is unusual since most demons ignore any compulsions to their soulmates and that he technically shouldn’t even be there.

Deceit just moves closer to the bed. “What’s your name, Patton’s soulmate?”

“If he didn’t tell you when he invited you in that’s even more stupid. I’m Virgil but whatever.” Virgil does glance up at the two people, barely taking any of their appearance in before turning to grab a robot plush toy. “Logan always used to warn that Patton only understood his brand of puns and would take my dark jokes too seriously after a while. Who are you?”

Deceit turns to share a heavy look with Remus, deciding if the words they want to say will be echoed but Remus is already moving to take the letter from Virgil’s hands.

“We’re your new soulmates, Remus and Deceit. Not sure what nonsense Patton’s been writing but it’s this weird rare quirk thing that can happen.” The explanation makes no sense, a lot of the things Remus starts without thinking through don’t really, but at least this time he’s on the same page as Deceit.

“In a manner of speaking at least, we are indeed your new soulmates. I was hoping to be able to take you out this evening, but if you need time to process what ever Patton wrote to you we understand.” Deceit’s words are smooth, offering but not demanding and they’re only hoping the rage that’s going through them isn’t showing in their eyes.

Virgil had looked to Deceit as Remus moved and while part of him wanted to believe them and relax, he could see fury waiting to burst out of Remus, especially as he read the letter, and there were small echoes of anger in the one called Deceit too. “You wouldn’t be angry if some weird quirk had given you a new soulmate. Why should I trust you when I can still only feel the connection to Patton?”

The mention of his anger is enough to set Remus off, unleashing a hundred attacks to the walls, windows and door to the room, form shifting as his fury is too much to remain consistently human now it’s being released. Deceit had made to intervene then, but all they could do was stay on the bed and keep Virgil there too.

Virgil is shying away from them both at the change, recognising Remus as so many creatures he’d read conspiracies about over the years, and wishing he’d never spoken. He doesn’t feel at threat, but he feels terrified.

Four hours ago he had woken up to Patton’s clothes emptied from the cupboards and a letter that left him feeling like the world was ending, like the anxiety Patton had insisted countless times wouldn’t change his love had driven his soulmate away finally. He’d felt confused and heartbroken.

Half an hour ago Patton had called him, laughing and making puns all around wishes coming true. Virgil hadn’t understood why or how someone could call his self-deprecating jokes wishes anymore then than he had while reading the letter, but knew Logan had said something about it before. The mention that Virgil should expect a guest had only confused him more.

Now there were two beings, basically strangers, trying to claim they were his new soulmates and destroying the room. Nothing felt safe and everything seemed likely to kill him or suck out his soul and leave his body just a husk. He wanted to fight and scream but couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could barely think as one stranger tried to shield him on the bed while the other raged.

A whimper breaking through Virgil’s lips finally calmed the storm. Remus flipping on a dime, from raging to comforting, but keeping his distance now. “Darling, if you’ll have us, we will be your new soulmates, far better than Patton ever was.”

“But you’re demons.” Virgil can only assume both of them are demons, despite Deceit still looking completely human. Why else would they be talking for each other?

Deceit just nods, wanting to twist words but knowing that blunt honesty would help them more in this moment. “And I had your soul sold to me. Technically, if I wanted I could easily make it truth when Remus says you’re now our soulmate, and given that I cannot believe even the most selfish person would do what Patton has done, I’m sorely tempted to.”

“That’s what he meant by my jokes about going to hell being wishes that come true?” More tears and pain hit Virgil then as he realises that not only had Patton broken up with him, he’d literally sold him, and whatever was brought couldn’t be equal to what Virgil had thought they had.

The creature, whatever he was now was leaning over to Virgil, a limb he didn’t want to identify wiping the tears away before they fell. “Let us court you Sweet thing. We’ll be your soulmates now.”

Virgil’s life and his room were suddenly in shambles where the day before he’d thought things could be improving. He’d been abandoned and learnt that abandonment included getting sold. He’d already spent the day crying but here were two beings, two demons who while they definitely had violent reactions showed no chance of them being directed at him. 

Nothing seemed real and everything seemed doomed and Virgil could almost hear Logan telling him not to make life changing decisions when emotionally compromised but his friend wasn’t there then. His friend had been unable to comfort him when Virgil had called up to ask for help after first reading the letter.

Looking at Deceit,still kneeling on the bed and looking at Remus, slowly regaining a more humanoid form, Virgil nodded. “Okay, yes, if - if that’s - if you actually mean it when you say you want me as a soulmate despite being such a fuck up even Patton couldn’t stay with me, you can do that, just let me keep Logan, let me keep whatever friends won’t expect me to be around someone who sold me.”

“Come here, Raindrop. I’ll make you ours now.” Deceit just nods, gathering Virgil into their arms while bringing their powers to the surface. Changing the binds of soulmates could be difficult, but Virgil’s was already weakened, first by Patton using it to sell a soul that wasn’t his and now by Virgil’s own honest agreement. Their eyes beaming golden yellow and the scales shining through their form were all the outward signs that anything changed, but Virgil gasping as the connection changed from one of a brought soul to a soulmate was warming.

Deceit has accepted a deal for ‘a soul’ precisely once, and he got a new soulmate from it. Ever since then Remus and they have been precise in wording every deal for the persons specific soul. If someone wants to sell their soulmate then they’ll have to find a different demon.

[theredhairedmonkey]

Why Callum chose to go home

While we’re all loving the “Through the Moon” leaks, I noticed that there’s a small minority of fans who seem to be a little fussy about the fact that both Rayla and Callum decided to travel back to Katolis rather than remain in Xadia. 

I think many people (myself included, for a time) presumed that the duo would stay on the Storm Spire so that Rayla could be a Dragonguard while Callum could learn magic from Ibis. I’ve already addressed here why Rayla going to live in Katolis is actually a very good thing for her; she’d be in a better place, emotionally speaking, a more nuturing environment with Callum and Ezran.

But the question as to why Callum chose to return to Katolis is a bit more complicated. It seems, at first glance at least, that Xadia is where he belongs. Being a prince was an awkward fit for him, but being a mage seemed to come much more naturally. One of the first TDP metas I ever read (by @raayllum​ no less) made a pretty compelling case for why Callum was going to choose to live in Xadia:

And as Callum’s interest and desire for magic only grew stronger throughout the season(s), it only strengthened the foundation this [boat] scene put down: these two, post war, living in Xadia together, and reminding each other of how incredible the life they’ve built together really is.

And shortly after S3, raayllum reaffirmed her theory that Callum will choose to remain in Xadia, both to learn Sky magic and to stay with Rayla.

This was, and is, a very convincing argument for me. Indeed, for the longest time, until Callum’s Spellbook was released (I’ll get to why that matters below), I took it for granted that Callum would stay in Xadia, focusing his efforts entirely on learning magic, and above all, to build a life with Rayla.

So, why didn’t he? 

To put it another way, why does Callum decide to return to Katolis and learn to be a prince as well as a mage?

The reason, I think, comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what Callum’s character arc truly is. A misunderstanding that I had, and one I suspect many fans do as well.

Here’s the typical interpretation of Callum’s arc: Callum doesn’t fit in as a prince. He’s terrible at everything he tries and doesn’t know how to interact with his stepfather. But then he discovers he’s a natural at magic, and so he’s now supposed to become a mage, rather than a prince.

And that’s not a bad interpretation. Indeed, in S1 that’s what it seemed like Callum’s arc was leading to.

All we see in those first three episodes is Callum struggling at just about everything...and then he tries magic and suddenly he discovers he has a talent for it.

He even spells this out himself:

Callum: Look...Rayla. Princes are supposed to be good at things. Sword-fighting, leadership, riding horses. But I’ve always been kind of bad at, well, everything. So when I tried that spell, I was sure I’d end up on fire or covered in spiders. But it worked. And then you called me a mage, and that felt...right.

So, again, in the context of S1, thinking that Callum is a terrible prince who learns he’s a great mage seems to make sense. Callum himself thinks this way too.

But that’s not where his story was headed. Which is why beginning in S2, Callum’s worldview begins to crumble. 

Upon learning that humans can’t do magic, Callum is determined to prove otherwise. But when he tries to give Lujanne the same speech he gave to Rayla, he hits a snag.

Callum: Growing up I was supposed to learn horseback riding, sword-fighting, achery, battle tactics, but I was so bad at everything.

Lujanne: But then, you didn’t give up? And you got good?

Callum: ...well, no, I gave those up.

Callum may brush this off for the moment, but the point Lujanne makes should be well-taken. It raises a logical inconsistency in Callum’s reasoning, questioning why he wasn’t this determined to pursue other skills. Why did Callum give up on being a prince, but persist at becoming a mage?

Because, according to him, it was because he was immediately good at magic. He thinks that, because magic seemed to come easily to him, that becoming a mage was something he was always supposed to do.

For this reason, he presses on. He will become a mage, come hell or high water.

Callum: [Lujanne] said that you had to connect to the Primal and that magical creatures or born with a connection. But I don’t see why I can’t make my own connection.

But 2x04 marks Callum’s  “the moment of grace.” The midpoint of the story, where he looks inside and sees the truth about himself.

The truth he realizes is that there is no magic inside him. That he has no special spark that will let him be immediately and readily talented at magic, and that if he is ever to become a mage, it will take patience and determination to do it.

He hits his lowest moment, which opens him up to accepting the real lesson he needed to learn all arc long:

Harrow: Callum, you are free. Free from both the past and the future. Nothing is set in stone. Fate is a lie. You are free!

And this was Callum’s real arc. He always believed he was terrible at all princely skills because he’s merely a “step-prince.” He wasn’t born royalty, and so he thinks he doesn’t have that innate talent that would let him be anything like his father or brother.

He discovers the same problem with magic; he wasn’t born with an Arcanum, and therefore can’t do magic like Lujanne can. Only this time, something clicks with Callum. The pieces come together and, inspired by his stepfather’s words, he realizes there isn’t anything he’s supposed to be. All there is, is who he chooses to be.

And once he connects to the Sky Arcanum, Callum writes this final lesson in his spellbook:

“My tip to anyone trying to learn something hard: Sometime there can be so much that it feels overwhelming, frustrating, and impossible. My advice is to try to be patient, and breathe, and trust that eventually you will get it!”

He takes his own lesson to heart. Once in Xadia, Callum’s new worldview is tested. He’s forced to scale an incredibly tall tree, ride a hard-to-tame Moonstrider, climb an Ambler, and help Zym’s defenders organize a battle plan.

Much of this happens to line up fairly closely to the so-called “princely” duties Callum was expected to learn in Katolis-- leadership, horseback riding, battle tactics. In fact, what he does in Xadia is probably harder than anything he would have been expected to learn back in Katolis.

And this is why it makes perfect sense that Callum goes home. Callum is not turning his back on his duties as a prince. Of course, just as with magic, he’ll probably learn how to be a prince on his own terms, combining all the subjects he’ll study with what he learns in Xadia, about magic or otherwise.

He realizes learning all of this would be hard. Perhaps overwhelmingly so.

But Callum is different now. He knows that, this time, as long as he keeps being patient and never gives up, he can do it.

Because destiny is a book you write yourself.

[de-cryptid]

Behind the curtain.

I’ll cut to the chase and simply state outright who I believe, and am almost certain, is behind the social media presence of Simon Alkenmayer.

Kristina Meister.

Kristina deleted her blog yesterday as of posting so I can’t link directly to it for the posts I am going to discuss and showcase here. I will be providing links that preserve their existence, however, so you don’t have to take me at my word alone.

For context: In Simon's world (which is how I will refer to the unreality that is his existence and supposed life), Kristina was his editor for The Creature's Cookbook and also the foot-in-the-door that is the publishing industry. She pitched the autobiography on his behalf, bringing it to Tapas media.

They maintained a friendship, both outside of the internet and here on tumblr. However, one day a fire was set in Kristina's driveway, leading her to what can reasonably be described as hysteria.

Here is an archived link to her reaction.

TL;dr is that she believes @simonalkenmayerisdead to be the only person in the world who could have possibly made a connection between her and Simon (despite the fact they actively engaged with each other on multiple social medias, that and there are far more people on tumblr that know of Simon than his critics) and threatened a multitude of legal action.

Here, The Fool explains the issue with the accusations levied against him and his followers.

Reading the exchanges between Simon, The Fool, and Kristina is what made it clear to me that Simon is Kristina. A lot of those posts are long gone due to Kristina's blog deletion, and are otherwise far too tedious to hunt down on Simon's blog, but they are quite similar to that which is linked above.

You can probably tell there's a level of irrationality (an understatement honestly) in Kristina's posts regarding the fire and her general demeanour.

As she and Simon have each other's personal contact information, which she herself showed a screenshot of, I think it's strange for Simon to respond publicly in the way he did. She's clearly not in a good mental state to be online, discussing a traumatic event, throwing accusations, cussing at and threatening her dissenters.

He's a long-lived observer of humans, in his world, and instead of recognizing this to be the behaviour of someone who isn't in the right frame of mind to be speaking about their circumstances to a substantial audience of presumably a few ill-intentioned people, he endorses everything she says and encourages her to continue on her rants.

Is it not obvious that this isn't accomplishing anything but potentially harming her more? She's shown the suspect that their tactic succeeded. She revealed her vulnerabilities in regards to her child and marriage. Simon, as a friend and the supposed cause for all this, should know better than to further feed into the anonymous attacks on his associate and instead handle it on a personal level.

But that isn't what happened.

The only way for someone to respond in the manner Simon did is for them to be as equally emotionally involved and irrational as Kristina herself is, which is clear from the notes where Simon's loyal audience reacts in a similarly distressed and irrational voice.

That's human behaviour, not that of a people-eating centuries-old non-mammalian monster who has watched famine ravage civilizations, killed countless individuals, and adapted despite it all.

But moving on, as I'm sure that in and of itself isn't enough for some people.

Let's turn our attention to The Creatures Cookbook itself. It's framed as a diary, meaning it was written in real-time and built upon over years, not as an autobiography. This is suspect for reasons I'll discuss further on.

I'd like to begin with the book's publishing history. It was first in print thanks to Fuse Literary, as can be seen in this post from their website, then moved onto the Tapas app (where it remains to this day).

Simon himself says that his book is "out of print", which is why it's not available as a physical copy outside of second-hand nowadays. This is not exactly true; fuse literary dropped the book. He isn't being represented by them anymore. Tapas, which is more of a pulp app where anyone can publish most anything, is not just the new medium he selected dutifully to act out the experiment more effectively; it was a last resort for a book people simply weren't interested in.

The Fool explains this quite well here.

I'd also like to reiterate something touched upon in that linked post; Simon lied about meeting his publisher, either in 2014 in that incredibly descriptive post about his agent and their experience with Tapas, or to that anonymous asker. Why is this? If the original post was incorrect, or no longer what Simon wanted readers to believe, wouldn't it make more sense to delete it? That or he, likely, forgot what was originally said about his publisher and simply made up a response for the asker. His memory spans centuries, and clearly that experience was a vivid one, given his description, but he couldn't keep consistent on his public social media. I find this suspect for many reasons.

Going back to Fuse Literary, we have articles that directly state Kristina is "writing as" Simon, which he has stated in the past was out of necessity to preserve his identity (which is somewhat contradictory, seeing as he claims that the government is aware of his species and him specifically, and also his aim is to convince people he does in fact exist).

Needless to say, a lot of little things just don't add up. Instead, they point to Kristina using Simon's character and presence as an outlet of sorts. He is an identity she assumes.

Here is another clue I stumbled upon, regarding Kristina's other writing endeavours.

Let's talk Cinderella Boy.

So Kristina is both a freelance editor (as Simon states she was for him) and a writer herself, with several published books. Easily her highest reviewed and most popular is called Cinderella Boy, a story about LGBTQ struggles from the perspective of a high school boy. I went through the reviews a while back and a lot were positive! But I noticed that many of those positive reviews were people who knew Kristina through Simon and already liked his character, his voice, his style.

And Cinderella Boy is very much the same.

I linked the Goodreads page above and recommend you go through reviews yourself to better understand what I mean, but below I will show one of the negative reviews that is... Very telling. (Click and swipe through, it's a long one)

And this wasn't the only person saying these sorts of things, either. Again, I recommend seeing for yourself. Here's another excerpt from a different review:

I want to focus in on the "70 year old philosophers" bit. The other review above said something similar about the overly deep and philosophical dialogue.

Sound familiar?

It appears Kristina's writing style happens to be that old-timey philosophically-bent verbose kind, highly reminiscent of Simon himself.

I found this rather funny. You'd think writing a modern YA would have a skilled writer attempting to make the character interactions more relatable and... Well, realistic.

It appears Kristina only has the one setting, however. And that happens to sound exactly the way Simon talks.

I will be going in-depth with the factual errors in Simon's historical assertions in the future, so I'll hold off on those for now, but a previous post of mine shows a clear miscalculation on the part of Simon's creator googling something and applying it to Simon's world, without realizing it was factually incorrect. You can see that here.

To conclude this very long post, I want to make it clear that I do not hate Kristina nor Simon, I am not posting this to harass either of them. I am only interested in making it clear that Simon is not an all-knowing cryptid and is not a reliable voice. Simon is a human creation and his readers should be aware of that. Seek real, professional help if you are looking for some advice. Do not think that an elaborate roleplay is an appropriate substitute.

[bronzewool]

After binge-watching the last season of Castlevania and sleeping on it for a bit, I feel like enough time has passed for me to reflect on my initial feelings about this season as a whole.

I love everything about Trevor this season and his entire performance as a whole. Trevor is easily written off as nothing more than a filthy, foul-mouth, drunk, when in fact he is the most insightful character out of our three main leads. He was raised to kill dark creatures from the moment he could lift a sword and is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to different types of dark creatures, weapons, magical objects, and dark symbols. He knows more about vampire lineage than Alucard does and is more worldly than Sypha. He is the smartest character in the rosta and doesn't seem to care none of his friends respect his wisdom.

And the best part is Trevor is just a man. He's not the son of the most powerful vampire in history, he's not a magician prodigy who controls the elements, he's just a guy with some enchanted weapons and combat training, and still capable of keeping up with them. Trevor is badass.

Although there are still parts of the overall story that do disappoint me, especially the interesting lineup of vampires and monsters we keep seeing in the background that never take centre stage before they're killed off in one fight scene. This show has some of the most unique and diverse vampires I've ever seen and we only spend time with a handful of them. Had this been 26 episodes per season we might have had time to see more of these enemies in a "Monster of the Week" style format with the rest of Dracula's council and the other territories, but alas, the quality of each episode would probably have dropped dramatically so I'll take what I'm given.

Speaking of missed plot opportunities, what was the point of Taka and Sumi? Their betrayal and attempted murder left Alucard emotionally and physically scarred, hinting at him venturing down a dangerous path and possibly repeating the same mistakes of his father, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Taka and Sumi’s plight doesn’t even come back so their entire subplot went nowhere, any negative feelings Alucard may have had towards Trevor and Sypha abandoning him are forgiven the moment they come to his aid. Heck, Alucard’s mistrust for humans is never brought into question once this season and no one seems to care he has a collection of bodies on pikes as lawn ornaments.

The moment Alucard receives Greta’s call to help he’s there in an instant and agrees to help her and her people with barely any resistance besides one short pep talk. You could have taken his entire subplot out of season 3 and he’d still be in the same situation we left him back in season 2.

Hector and Lenore’s relationship is also something I’m still trying to work out since we don’t know what they’ve been up to in the six weeks Hector has been made Lenore’s slave. I've listened to a lot of people discuss this very topic and whether it's abusive or just problematic. And I can't deny that if the genders had been swapped everyone on the internet would call out how cringe it is for a woman to fall in love with her captor.

But there is nuance in their interactions. The show seems to walk this tightrope of framing their relationships as genuinely affectionate while also giving off a lot of red flags. The two exchange friendly banter without Lenore forcing her power over Hector, Lenore feels she can run to Hector with all her problems and holds no resentments towards him for his part in killing Carmilla. But at the same time, her last words to him are something akin to a child or pet. She never once saw Hector as her equal so her actions make sense from her point of view. You don't feel guilty about domesticating a stray.

Hector's feelings however are more complex as he goes to great lengths to ensure Lenore's safety because he saw a lot of truth in what she was saying. Dracula did use Hector and lied to him about the plan, and Isaac is set on killing him in cold blood for his role in Dracula's demise. So I understand why he feels a connection with Lenore and holds no ill will towards her even though he was devising a future escape plan. I don't think he's in love with Lenore. Hector has never felt love. He had no love for his parents and the only thing he ever showed affection for was his pets, but he does feel something for Lenore that's he's never felt before, and that's enough for him to care.

I have a few thoughts on some other tidbits, like Zamfir and the underground council subplot that only seemed to exist to show how invaluable Sypha would be to build and run a village. Or St. Germain and his inclusion only making sense if you're familiar with Castlevania lore. His subplot seemed bigger than life and feels like it needed more set-up and exploration had this been an original story as opposed to an adaption. And maybe I'm starting to change my opinion about them bringing Dracula and Lisa back from the dead if they're just gonna have them retire on the east coast of England.

But I still love this season and Castlevania as a whole.

Now give me a sequel and/or spin-off. I demand more content!

Also, does anyone else find it funny the main trio never actually meets Isaac, Hector or Carmilla and they just had their own little war off-screen? Because I think that's fucking hilarious.

[dustyard]

Hi! If you're not busy could you touch on loose bonding vs close bonding terms? I'm a bit confused on what I am exactly and I really don't know how to tell. I searched your blog and couldnt find anything on this but if you already have explained it, I'm sorry to bother you. Thank you and have a good day!

Sure!

So the first thing that needs to be adressed is that humans are, fundamentally, social creatures. Barring a genuine psychological disorder, we crave companionship. We want to spend time with other people, and if we don't get a certain amount of human connection, we will get depressed and unhealthy. However, a lot of animals don't have the same types of social needs that we do! So when we're working on dæmon form sociability, it's important to keep in mind that while the sliding scale of sociability will almost always mean that you have to take social behaviors on sort of a readjusted scale.

When it comes to loose-bonding souls, most people, I think, take this to mean "a person who doesn't have friends". That's not what this means. Someone can be loose-bonding and have a lot of connections. The way we define loose-bonding is by the fact that a person who is loose-bonding won't have many (if any) really emotionally deep, meaningful relationships. They could have a lot of friends (think flock birds that don't always stay in the same flock, just kind of with whoever). A loose-bonding soul can be very sociable, they just don't tend to have close relationships. These types of people tend to be able to walk away from relationships more easily, and tend not to invest as much time and effort into any individual relationship. They also don't usually use other people as their emotional support. Think of it this way: loose-bonding people generally prefer friendly acquaintances, or they'll have work/school/hobby/whatever friends that they don't include in other aspects of their life. These are the kind of people who don't generally look for strong, close friendships/partnerships where you know everything about each other. Again, though, this doesn't mean that loose-bonding souls inherently dislike people (some of them do), they just don't put as much stock in having really close, emotional relationships with people.

Close-bonding souls are essentially the opposite. In the same way, sometimes people assume close-bonding souls are automatically very social people, but that isn't always the case! These types of people really crave emotionally deep, meaningful relationships, and tend to draw a lot of support from their connections with other people. The amount of people close-bonding souls will bond with can vary; some like to do it with a lot of different people, some only really want/need one or two really serious relationships. However, the relationships that close-bonding souls do take seriously, they take very seriously. It will hurt them a lot to end their relationships, and they frequently put a lot of time and effort into their relationship(s) so as to keep the people they care about happy. While not every relationship they have will necessarily be for life, they don't drop people without a good reason. Think animal forms that either live in groups (herds, packs, clans, troops, whatever), or animals that mate for life; they're usually good examples of close-bonding souls.

To put this into perspective, you can have a wide variety of amounts of close-bonding and loose-bonding when it comes to dæmon forms. Some people only loose-bond, and just have acquaintances that they might be friendly with. Some people only close-bond, and they have ride-or-dies and absolutely nobody else who matters to them. But most people fall sort of on a spectrum of some loose-bonding, some close-bonding, where they might be close to a few people but have a lot of acquaintances they're friendly with, or they might have a big group they're close to and only a few minor friendships they don't put a lot of effort into. That's pretty normal, because human behavior is not as binary as we make it out to be, so if you're not sure, just follow general trends.

[jeremys-blogs]

Belos: What Does He Want?

Disney has a long history of great and memorable baddies, and with the Owl House they've given us one more to add to that list in the form of Emperor Belos, the mysterious despot of the Boiling Isles. The supreme figure of the witches who rules over them and their society with an iron fist. Throughout the first season we're told of him and his "big plans", but it wasn't until the emotionally devastating Agony of a Witch, near the season's end, where we finally saw him. And that, coupled with the actual season finale, definitely set him up as a force to be reckoned with. This is no joke villain like Yzma or Captain Hook, this is a guy that it would be most unwise to take lightly, and since our heroes have already gotten on his bad side it's likely we'll be seeing a lot of him when Owl House returns to us. But I'm not here to discuss the character, but rather his so-called big plans. Because thus far we have no concrete answers as to what Belos' endgame is or what he's trying to achieve. So today, I'm going to try and piece together what we know about his schemes and try to guess what it could be leading to.

To start off, let's just lay out what we know about Belos so far. He's been ruling the Boiling Isles for a long time (about fifty years) and established the coven system to prevent witches from mixing different types of magic. Additionally, he believes only he and those directly working for him have the right to use more than one school of magic, and that anyone who breaks away from this control he has is to be deemed an enemy of the state. He is a revered, if secretive figure in witch society with many speaking of him in a way that suggests less a leader and more a deity-like being. According to him, he is able to communicate with the Titan, the ancient corpse that makes up the Isles themselves, and that everything he has ever done has been by that creature's wishes, adding more than a touch of zealotry to his personality. And on top of everything else, we know that his plans involve getting hold of Eda's portal to the human realm, which he is at least partly successful at by the time the first season is over. Aside from that, and his clear mastery over magic, we know very little about him, though this is likely to change once the second season comes along.

Admittedly, this quick rundown of him tells us very little other than the fact that he's an incredibly powerful control freak. And as such trying to figure out his plan is going to be difficult. The one concrete thing we've been able to find out so far is that he needs the portal to the human world for some reason. And this opens up a rather interesting thing to consider. You see, at the start of the series it was established that every bizarre thing humans have in their culture is a result of something from the Boiling Isles crossing over into their world, such as griffons. And even entire species, like giraffes, can be banished there wholesale. This tells us that, at least at one point, travelling to the human world was something that used to happen a lot more frequently for the denizens of the Isles. But this has clearly changed, and it seems that Eda's portal may be the only door to Earth that's left to the witches. Because it's not unreasonable to assume that, if there were other portals out there, Belos would simply try to find them instead, rather than going for the one owned by someone famous for escaping his clutches for who knows how many years.

When I first heard that Belos was after the portal, my first suspicion, as well as the first suspicion of many in the audience I'm sure, was that his plans involved invading or conquering Earth. After all, this is a tyrant who wants to get to another world. Nine times out of ten that scenario always involved wanting to take over said world. Yet Belos outright stated in the finale that ruling Earth is "not part of the Titan's plans", indicating that he doesn't want ownership of the human realm. Now, this seemed to undermine my initial prediction of his goals, until I remembered that Belos has already shown himself to be a massive liar to others. Remember, he deceived Lilith and got her to capture Eda so he could get that portal, going back on his promise to heal her curse. So it's established rights away that he'll say anything to get what he wants. Because of this, I maintain that he pulled a similar move with Luz. Telling her he's not going to conquer Earth as simply some means of convincing her to part with the portal, only to then go back on that assurance once he actually got it. So as of this posting, I'm harbouring the belief that conquest is still on the table for him, even if he hasn't admitted to it.

However, for the sake of argument, let's just assume that what Belos said to Luz was true. Yes, I know that ascribing honesty to a dark overlord in a fantasy story is a tall order, but let's attempt it all the same. So, if we take his assurance that he's not planning to invade Earth at face value, we have to ask what other interest that world would have for him. And there was one moment in the season finale that gave me an idea of what might be happening. In Luz's brief fight with Lilith, the two stumbled back through the portal and onto Earth, and Luz attempted to use her glyphs against Lilith, only to find that they don't work. But Lilith's magic, by contrast, was successful. So we learn that Luz's brand of magic doesn't work in her own world, and only works in the Boiling Isles. This is the first time this information comes to us, and I can't believe that it's coincidence that we learn this at the same time we learn about Belos' desire for the portal. There is a chance, however small, that his plan to get to Earth is somehow connected to the fact that witch magic is the only kind of magic that works there.

I think it's also important to consider that this is a modern Disney cartoon that we're talking about, and as such it's entirely possible that we're going to get one of their more recent staples, that being the surprise reveal that causes us to question what we thought we knew about a character. And Owl House has already done this a couple of times, with characters like Amity and Lilith. Behaviour and actions that were shown as negative being revealed to have some other motive behind them that, once shown to the audience, caused those actions to be seen in a new light. Amity cut off her friendship to Willow, but it was shown that she did so in order to ensure the girl had a chance of getting into school. Lilith served the Emperor and hunted Eda down, but it was then shown that this was all in order to fix her greatest mistake and heal her sister. As criticized and maligned as the "twist reveal" has been in recent stories, Disney has already primed us for seeing Owl House as a show that gives us more to its antagonists than meets the eye, and there is no doubt in my mind that they might try to pull the same trick with Belos.

As for what that reveal might be, I have my suspicions, mostly from the fact that everything we've seen of Belos thus far has been, for lack of a better word, off. He's unlike any other witch we've seen in the show, both in his mannerism and, more importantly, in how his magic works. Owl House has been very good in establishing very strict rules for how magic goes in this world, and the one consistent rule is that, aside from Luz, witches need circles to perform it. Belos, by contrast, uses no circles, and seems to have a brand of magic all his own. And the way it seems to work just comes off as disturbing and unnatural, even when compared to some of the more unnerving imagery we've seen in the show. Additionally, his staff is unlike any other witches artefact seen so far, having more of a technological bent, rather than the wood and palismans we see in the likes of Eda or Lilith. Belos is someone out-of-step with every other witch of the Isles, and that's interesting because there's one other person in the show for whom the established rules of the Isles don't seem to apply, and that person is none other than central character Luz herself, whose differences in magic have all stemmed from her being a human, rather than a native witch.

Now, I'm sure a lot of you can already see where I'm going with this, and yes, my prediction here is that Belos will eventually be revealed to be a human who, like Luz, came over from Earth. Remember, travel between the two worlds is apparently old enough for numerous myths about creatures of the Isles to take root in the human world, and given how old those myths are, it seems unlikely that no human besides Luz has ever made the jump to the Isles before now. Also, consider that when we're given the true history of the Isles, as told by King at the start of the season finale, it makes no mention of Belos prior to his establishing of the covens and his ascension to Emperor status. As far as the Isles are concerned, the guy just came out of nowhere one day and immediately started having an influence on the place, which sounds an awful lot like Luz's own arrival. What I'm guessing here is that Belos is someone who started out much like Luz, and who went on something of a similar journey, learning about the Isles and its magic, but unlike her went in a wholly different direction, winding up as some sort of dark reflection of her and as a form of cautionary tale of what she herself might be if she stays there too long.

Imagine, for a moment, a young kid, over fifty years ago, perhaps no older than Luz. A boy who obsesses over fantasy and adventure stories, and whose interests have isolated him and made him something of an outcast among his friends and family. Then, one day, he happens upon one of the entrances to the Boiling Isles, and with his over-eager thirst for discovery, goes through. Here, finally, he has his escapism, a whole new world to explore and a fantasy epic he always dreamed of, but a dangerous and often horrific place where magic is unlike anything he'd ever expected. Though bewildered and taken in by such strange new sights, he eventually comes to a conclusion. This place is all wrong, and so is the magic. This isn't what he dreamed of when he imagined other worlds in his childhood. No, this world needs to change, and he, as the "heroic youth" from the ordinary world, is clearly destined to be the one to change it. So, he sets to it, learning all he can about this world and, more importantly, its magic. The work is long and difficult, but in the end his efforts bear fruit, and he emerges onto the scene as a powerful magic-wielder. He finally makes his presence known and, eschewing the identity of his original world, takes on a new name for himself; Belos.

Thus, Belos begins his efforts to reshape the Isles into his perfect vision, his perfect fantasy. It takes years, but finally, he manages it, becoming the undisputed ruler of all witches. Then, both to ensure that he is the only one of Earth to come here, and to ensure he can never go back to his ordinary life, he seeks out and destroys every portal to the human realm, succeeding at eliminating all but one, which will one day wind up in Eda's possession. Content that he has fulfilled his self-appointed destiny, he enjoys his position of lording over everyone else, even going so far as to use his unique human-based magic to prolong his life to experience this reality forever, making him less and less human as a result. But as the months lead into years, and the years lead into decades, his love of this new life begins to fade. And eventually, he realizes that he's made a terrible mistake. He sees the Isles not as an escape, but a prison he's made for himself. And so he devotes himself to a new cause, finding a way home. And this new plot eventually leads him to discover the final portal, Eda's portal, which he pursues relentlessly, until he finally gets his hands on it with his battle with Luz. But once again, he's denied his way out, with the portal engulfed in Luz's flames, causing him to have to try some other means of using it.

So, there's the theory. Belos is a human who travelled to the Boiling Isles and wanted the exact same things Luz did. Adventure, wanting to feel special, all of those things. But while Luz has managed to grow out of that, Belos didn't, and as a result he was twisted into a selfish tyrant who now wants to go to Earth for the exact reason he left it in the first place. Escapism, plain and simple. And he knows that human magic, his magic, won't work back on Earth, so his hope is that, once there, he can undo whatever he did to himself to make him the way that he is. His feeding on palismans? A way not to extend his life, but to alleviate the pain he feels from having already extended it himself. His day of unity? Not an attempt to unify witches, but to unite himself with his old life, and maybe whatever family he left behind. After all, it wouldn't be the first time Disney would have revealed the construction of a mysterious portal to really be an effort to reunite with lost loved ones. Taking the portal instead of asking for it to get home? Merely a result of spending decades of getting what he wants by force. Belos will, I think, be revealed to Luz as someone she herself might become, or could have become, had she not gone down the more selfless path she had walked by the time the first season was over. That's my speculation, but hey, I could just be totally wrong about it all. That'd be fine too 😅

[distractionactivated]

HOW TO FIX AQUAMAN.

Abridged:

Care about the sea, its people and creatures and moods and true colours

Care about Tom’s Pacific Island heritage

Let Atlanna be more than a cariacature of A Mom

Honour her trauma, and Mera’s desperation; worldbuild Atlantis better

Keep all that deep charm and joy that somehow still was there.

LET THE SEA BE IN LOVE

I’m hinging this all off that key line, which I don’t remember the exact wording of, of Arthur saying he’d been taught to hide his feelings and deal with his problems by hitting them.

And that doesn’t make sense in the film as we’re given it – his dad’s clearly an emotionally intelligent, sensitive man, Willem Dafoe is never shown shutting Arthur down that way and in fact is shown nurturing his joy, they don’t show enough of his interactions with the general culture of toxic masculinity to blame that… But it could make sense. Have him be just a bit older when Atlanna leaves, and then make it be her.

So you’ve got this struggling, grieving father being like ‘hey kid, it’s okay to be sad,’ and Arthur staring at his scruffy shoes like, ‘mommy told me I had to be strong,’ and Dad’s gotta figure out how to say ‘mommy was wrong,’ to a lost, grieving kid.

Like overall, really scale it down. Pay the effects people more to do less. Focus on the central drama, and care about the sea.

Atlanna leaving put a void between Arthur and Tom (dad, but the writing was so bad I had to look it up), but they can connect on the shore, through birds and fish and seaweed. Tom is approached by Willem Dafoe saying ‘I want to teach Arthur’ and rebukes him the first time bc he’s afraid Dafoe will hammer more ice into him. He only allows it when he sees Dafoe will nurture his joy. Arthur is a child of both worlds and he needs both, and he comes alive with it.

DON’T open with the parents’ drama, though. Open with the sea. I don’t know what that means and I don’t see the point in wasting creative energy on figuring it out, but the sea is at the heart. OH maybe it means open with ‘Arthur Stops A Bad Thing’ only the bad thing is an operation that is simultaneously polluting the waters and abusing its workers. Manta – doesn’t he have a fucking NAME???! – is mostly in charge there and he and his dad have worked their ASSES off to not be members of the toiling class they rule, they’re scared of falling, they’re insecure. Let there be actual real-world race politics, my god. (Let Tom being a Pacific Islander be explicitly talked about! Arthur is biracial in both human and fantasy terms, let that. fucking. matter.)

(ON THAT NOTE remove the fantasy border patrol, my god, please, fucking hell. I KNOW a big theme is the boundaries of the two worlds, but a superhero film is never going to go far enough criticising the real human atrocity of borders. Just don’t. If you have to, uh, enforce that boundary, put some fucking thought into how that works rather than lazily cloning actual atrocities.)

So anyway. You’ve got tons of time to nail emotional beats, we’re cutting out most of the fights, I don’t remember them, they weren’t necessary. You’ve got time to hold Jesse up against Tom and Atlanna as a parent, to show him working and pushing and caring for his son in a fucked system; to show the fears of the parents reflected in the viciousness of the children, to have the encounter be a goddamn tragedy. When Arthur says whatever the line is, ‘ask the sea for mercy’ – he’s trying to live up to what he thought his mother was, to what her fears told him he needed to be.

Anyway back to how you’re interacting with the sea; don’t just use its creatures as set dressing. Don’t use their slaughters as a villainous gotcha that will never come up again. Have Arthur not be able to tell Orm at first, but in his heart know: not all humans. The seas are being killed by like a few people and corporations and they have addresses. Most people are just poor fuckers being fucked. He can’t say it (remember what Atlanna told him! Be the ice, be the bitter water!) but we can flash back to Tom telling him about his own people and their relationship with the sea.

Keep the sea creatures in their habitats, care about their habitats. Have Arthur’s communing be a lost art that the Atlanteans have buried to do their tech shit or something. Hell, maybe they’re polluting too. Maybe they’re hypocrites. If they’re imperialists, they should be.

Like, commit to the Atlantean stiff upper lip, to the cruelty and unnaturalness of a people cutting themselves off from their place in the world; blame human empires if you want, that’s valid, but like ‘I will conquer them all’ comes from a place of deep brokenness. Actually show what Atlantis is. Let Mera’s desperation matter.

I don’t know how to express how the sea should be conveyed – certainly not in so many technicolour lights, let it be in its own colours and eerie shades – but it should be a character. Fuck the trident, the trident doesn’t matter, it’s a symbol. The trident is forged of seawater. The sea has its moods, its feelings, its own thoughts on who the King is. The sea loves Arthur. The sea wants him in every way it can have him. OT3 Arthur/Mera/The Sea. I’m absolutely fucking serious about this. His communing can be a thing the sea is giving him, and he doesn’t even know it.

Anyway they’re all gonna have to grapple with Atlanna being cold and bitter like the winter sea in the end, but she’s had like twenty years to think and regret, and she never was what he thought she was either; she was a woman who could love and be loved by Tom. So she tries. And she’s awkward and uncertain and she falls back into bad habits, but she’s got that perspective and it helps Arthur realise that he’s twisted HIMSELF up into knots.

Honestly, honour her Atlantean trauma, and Mera’s.

There’s no big gribbly monster. There’s just the sea, and the scorn in the long-dead King’s voice, and the sea’s… mercy, I guess.

[littlemisssquiggles]

For the longest time I’ve been saying the wizard and the maidens share some sort of bond. Even before penny got the powers I wanted Oscar to talk to the old maiden, as like the wise old witch giving advise to the young warlock After v7 I made a theory that Oscar and penny would practice and learn to use there new-found powers together I mean, there’s gotta be some sort connection between them right? They share the same power, a power the original wizard literally gave the original maidens

Hello Mia. As far as I’m aware given the context of the canon, despite a Wizard originally creating a Maiden, there is no real connection between a Wizard and Maiden at least from a relationship standpoint.

Despite the Hermit sharing a friendship with the original Four Maidens, this dynamic doesn’t seem to have carried over to his successors. I understand that you would like for Penny and Oscar to have a connection but, according to the canon, they don’t. As I was telling an anon-ninja who brought up this subject, outside of their shared bonds with Ruby Rose, Penny and Oscar share no direct relationship with each other. They are not even friends. Allies in arms who fight on the same side (for now anyways), sure. But nothing more than that.

Penny wouldn’t even have the maiden magic if she hadn’t “pilfered” it from Fria the former Winter Maiden, according the Ace Ops. Penny was never even supposed to become the Winter Maiden yet she received the powers by circumstance. As interesting as it is that Penny---a sentient lifeform--- did become a Maiden, I’ll admit that I’m personally not a fan of how the showrunners chose to portray the Polendina girl’s rise to maidenhood. Penny becoming a Maiden feels almost forced since unlike Winter Schnee, she never shared any ties to the original Winter Maiden.

I remember that following the V7 finale, other RWBY theorists began speculating that Fria was meant to represent the Blue Fairy in Penny’s Pinocchio story and while I quite liked that interpretation, it doesn’t help rationalize what was done in the show. At least in the Pinocchio fairytale, Pinocchio had a relationship with the Blue Fairy who watched over him and even came to his aid at certain points to help steer him on the right path to “being a good boy”.

If Penny was meant to be chosen as Fria’s successor then where was this kind of bond? The rule of thumb for the succession of the maiden powers was that maidens chose themselves. The only exception is when the power was forcibly taken away like in the case of both Cinder Fall and Raven Branwen. Penny had no real bond with Fria yet…she was made to be her successor over Winter Schnee who was actually shown to spend time with Fria and even grow to care for her. While I understand that Winter’s time with Fria was only done as an act of grooming and the General’s attempt at manipulating how the cycle worked. Nonetheless, I wish the show had done a better job at building up Penny becoming a Maiden.

Imagine if…as a means of doubling his chances at ensuring that the Maiden powers went to one of his own operatives, Ironwood had assigned both Winter and Penny to establish a relationship with Fria. However this info was left unknown to both girls until Winter discovered that her and Penny were being pit against one another as rivals for the Maiden power and rather than take her disdain of this method out on the General, instead Winter absolves what little friendship she had developed with Penny during their time working together and accepted her role as her rival which hurt Penny who genuinely saw Winter as a friend.

Imagine if…we had actually gotten moments of Penny bonding with Fria and having a stronger connection to her than Winter? Or perhaps Fria, who never got the chance to have children of her own as a Maiden, grew to care for both girls as her surrogate daughters leading to her being upset by how their rivalry was affecting them emotionally.

Instead of the “out of the blue” way the show had Fria just hand over the Maiden powers to Penny---an absolute stranger she had never met until the moment she died…it would’ve been better for them to have had a bond with a Maiden actually passing on the power to a person they grew to care about as a opposed to the powers being “stolen”---again!

Because although Penny didn’t take the Maiden power from Fria by force…she did technically kind of steal it from Winter which is sad since it follows this weird trend that the showrunners have done with the succession from old Maiden to the next.

The powers keep getting hijacked. With the Fall Maiden, Cinder killed the original and stole her magic. With the Spring Maiden, Raven killed the original maiden and stole her magic. With the Winter Maiden, while Penny didn’t kill Fria---at least this maiden died naturally due to old age, Penny still technically stole the powers since as I’ll reiterate, she was never supposed to be the Winter Maiden. That role was meant to be Winter’s and Penny took that from her. So it’s kinda like the same trend. At least, in my opinion.

“.....After v7 I made a theory that Oscar and penny would practice and learn to use there new-found powers together I mean, there’s gotta be some sort connection between them right? They share the same power, a power the original wizard literally gave the original maidens...”

I mean… look at Oz. Oz was the Wizard before Oscar and as far as we’re made aware, he never had a relationship with Amber (the Maiden for his respective vault) either. As the canon shows, despite a Wizard creating a Maiden, their successors don’t share in this relationship. The Wizards will probably watch over the Maidens to ensure that they aren’t attacked but…other than that, the wizards and maidens are free to live their own lives never truly needing to be involved in each other’s respective lives.

As a matter of fact, at first, I was of the opinion that the reason why a wizard doesn’t have a direct relationship with a maiden is due to the possibility of the maiden magic returning to the wizard in the event of a maiden’s death. However this theory was more or less debunked in the show since Amber was killed in front of Ozpin and instead of the remaining half of her magic going to him, it sought out its other half and went straight to Cinder Fall. Still makes me curious as to what would happen in the event of a maiden at full power dying in front of wizard. Oh well.

Going back to Oscar and Penny---since you’re like the fourth person to bring this topic to me, I have to say that I don’t quite understand what the sudden fixation is with Penny and Oscar having a connection in the canon. I understand that some fans might like this pair for their own reasons and might want them to have an actual friendship (which is fine) but…that’s not the case in the show.

This fact isn’t really helped either by the notion that Penny was never meant to be a Maiden in the first place and essentially did what all  the other succeeding Maidens before her did---which was take the Maiden powers for herself when it was meant to go to someone else. I know it’s sad to say this about Pen-Pen since she is a hero (and a likeable character) but…she did take the Winter Maiden powers from Winter and while for the greater good, that detail still remains true.

Point is, you cannot sell me on the concept of their needing to be some sort of connection or bond between Penny and Oscar, not even with the point that he’s a wizard and she’s a maiden since…admittedly, these two freckly-frecks have no relationship in the canon and their doesn’t seem to be a push for one either . Despite Penny becoming a Maiden, her relationship with Oscar is still the same as it was. Respectful but not close.

And he’s not the only wizard with this dynamic with a maiden either. As I mentioned before, Oz wasn’t close to Amber and she was the Maiden for his vault. So why should Oscar have to share a bond with Penny just because she’s a maiden. It doesn’t change the established relationship they already have which is as acquaintances who fight for the same side (for now).

Penny may be a maiden now but she’s not the “magical girl” who Oscar is meant to have a deep meaningful bond that transcends magic with. That deep connection appears to be going to Ruby. Oscar’s true rose.

And undoubtedly, this connection is much stronger than anything the show could’ve done with Penny and Oscar as a maiden and a wizard. Oscar and Ruby share many similarities too. Not only do they both share in the burden of being placed with great power and responsibility despite their age as the two youngest members of their respective teams but unlike a maiden who is the byproduct of a wizard’s magic, a wizard and a silver eyed warrior are the byproducts of a God created to aid humanity.

A Maiden is a wizard’s creation. However it was the God of Light who first created a wizard to be the champion for humanity to unite the world while also creating the silver eyed warriors to be the living antithesis to the soulless Creatures of Grimm.

As a Wizard of Light and a Silver Eyed Warrior respectively---Oscar and Ruby share a divine power as well---they are connected by the same light from the God of Light.

According to the Lost Fable, magic was a gift from the Gods and it was through the God of Light’s power that a wizard is able to retain his immortality and keep reincarnating. As for a Silver Eyed Warrior, according to Maria and Ruby’s brief conversation from RWBY V6CH8, the Silver Eyes originated from the God of Light who shared in the same unique ability.

That being said, while Penny may share in the maiden magic which was created by one of Oscar’s predecessors, Oscar shares the God of Light’s power with Ruby and unlike Penny, he actually has a genuine wholesome relationship with Ruby as she is seen as his closest companion at the moment (more so than Oz since Oscar seems to actually like Ruby which is the least I can say regarding his feelings toward Oz).

I’m not quite sure what kind of answer you were hoping from me, fam but that’s as much as this squiggle meister can say on this particular subject matter. I can’t say that there should be a connection between Oscar and Penny since…there is nothing of the sort established in the canon.

Oscar and Penny have no real relationship outside of being teammates fighting for the same cause and even if you bring up the fact that they are wizard and maiden, that detail has neither affected nor actively changed the dynamic they already have in canon. Which is…nothing or rather not much? Again, they are colleagues at best but not really friends at worst.

It’s kind of difficult to sell me on a product that doesn’t really exist, mate. As I’ll say again, I know some folks really want Oscar and Penny to have a connection and nothing against that. That’s cool. However…canonically---in the show, as it is right now as of this volume and recent episode--- it’s not there. No other way I can say it.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2020)