#limbus offspring

[hongluboobs]

ok i was cooking up another hong lu analysis thing bc i noticed SEVERAL things in his base id art the other day and wanted to share with the class but they just dropped a new one in the canto V trailer and i have some stuff i wanna talk about that one:)

My Hong Lu knowledge and interpretation is very heavily influenced by reading Dream of the Red Chamber, which may not be the best because I don’t know how much Limbus will pull from the book because it’s Long as fuck but I think it’s given me a deeper knowledge of Hong Lu.

Keep in mind this ego is NOT out yet so i could be totally off base depending on what the full animation/corrosion/sin affinities are like and this is totally theorizing but I wanted to have a go at anyway!! And this got totally out of hand so reading is appreciated :)

One of the first things I noticed here is this Hong Lu seems VERY Bao-yu. We still don’t know for sure what Hong Lu is within the context of Red Chamber (i don’t think it’ll be straightforward considering how that book works) but it’s important to note!

He has this little hat on (this is the best pic i can get atm to show it’s not a fancy hair tie, unfortunately the footage we have rn is a little scuffed)

and Bao-yu is ALWAYS depicted with a hat like this.

This could just be because that’s the appropriate outfit for Chinese nobility (I unfortunately have little to no reference point here, feel free to correct me, but from some quick searches hats aren’t ubiquitous and ESPECIALLY not ones of this style.) I think it’s worth noting because it comes up in nearly all modern depictions of Bao-yu.

There’s also the pearl Hong Lu is wearing on his neck/chest area, which is where Bao-yu wears the magic jade he was born with. His jade is translated into Limbus as Hong Lu’s jade eye, but this plus his hat and the abno’s themes REALLY makes me think we are dealing with some Bao-Yu stuff here.

Speaking of the Abno’s themes, now i can actually go over them! All we have for Walking Pearl right now is the MD event (as well as general observation), but there’s a few things that are relevant.

Just based off design, the abnormality seems to be mostly about the precious (the pearl) and the filth (the muck) intermixing. which makes sense with the EGO being named “Effervescent Corrosion” and our holders being Hong Lu and Rodya.

There’s some symbolism around greed/wealth (the offspring filled muck desiring the pearl and fighting for which one will earn it? the muck tarnishing the pearl? ) and I think we should read into that because it’s Hong Lu and Rodya who have this one and they’re both very tied to their financial status. Those two sharing an ego makes me insane for a bunch of reasons but that’s probably for another analysis piece! But duality is REALLY important for those guys and that’s a theme they’re emphasizing here with both the pearl and muck within the clam.

There’s also some elements of shelter/protection/potentially entrapment with the clam’s shell which are HUGE for Hong Lu, especially with his egos so I think those may come up.

But mostly it’s about the mixing of the precious (likely “wealth” here) and the unsavory, which works very well with what we know of the Jia family. The design likely referencing Bao-yu and thematically dealing with the Jia family makes me think each of those individual readings are more likely because they’re deeply tied together!

And now onto the MD event! I did not write this in order so I may repeat stuff here but. I realized I had to cover the design first so here we are!

First thing that stuck out of me is this portion when you choose to sample some of the clam’s slime.

Sibling/family infighting is very Jia family. It reminds me a lot of this line base Hong Lu says.

You could take this a step further because the clam is something that would typically offer shelter from the rest of the world, and even though it protects, its offspring continue to kill and eat each other.

It seems fine, the offspring have this lovely shell for protection, and they have the precious pearl held within, but even as they are sheltered and wealthy. They are still getting killed and eaten by one another! Reminds me of someone I know:)

It reminds me of some bits in the later half of Red Chamber, where family members more obviously start acting behind each other’s backs or turning on each other, some even killing other family members.

Another part of the MD event that I got something out of was the beginning portion.

using specifically jade as the color for the seawater is a Hong Lu thing. I may be reaching with this bc it’s more than likely just flavor text BUT when taking this color with the fact that there’s nothing in the water it makes me think of an important scene in Red Chamber where Bao-Yu is described as an empty shell, so I wanted to mention it. We know Hong Lu has TONS of water motifs, especially when relating to his family (see his base ego)

The main reason I brought up this section of the MD event is because of the question brought up by the last portion.

If you take one thing from Dream Of The Red Chamber into your perception of Hong Lu as a character, it should be the themes of ambiguity, duality, and being between binaries. Because he sure as hell does that a lot!!! (and i’m not just talking about his gender) He is both genuinely curious and sheltered with an urge to learn as much as he can, but he also plays dumb frequently, backpedals and asks a lot of stupid questions on purpose to maintain others’ perceptions of him. He is CONSTANTLY walking the line between truth and illusion and it can be hard to tell which is which and precisely how much is fake or real, which is why I find him such an interesting character to think about.

Tangent about Hong Lu's characterization aside, it's really easy to read this line as about his family's perceptions of him.

Hong Lu (or rather, Bao-yu) can be read as being the source of the contamination in that he is the heir of the Jia family who is just an absolute fucking failure of everything you’d want in an heir for that time period.

The clam containing the filth can be read as Hong Lu’s lies (whether conscious lies or otherwise) to himself and others about the true “filth” of his family. Really good example of this is with another bit of window dialogue, but these lies and half truths come up quite a bit if you know where to look. (what happened to cohort of kin looking to stab each other in the back at every turn???)

We already have Hong Lu’s assorted water motifs (his feet make ripples on the water in his base id, land of illusion has so much water theming and shows the Jia mansion is surrounded by water) so I think this is a reasonable analysis to make :)

There’s some other sections to the MD event, but there’s nothing of note that triggered the Hong Lu sleeper agent in my brain & also this has gone on long enough that I wanna talk about predicting some stuff for the ego!

I am manifesting Gluttony/Gloom/Wrath for this ego!!

Gluttony and gloom are in the MD event’s skill check already and I think tie in nicely with the themes. Gluttony works with the offspring in the muck killing and eating each other and themes of greed with the pearl (plus the ego is primarily green and that’s a pretty good clue) and then gloom comes up a LOT with Hong Lu’s family (Liu Hong Lu, the only one that remarks on his jade eye, is also the only Hong Lu with gloom. land of illusion requires 5 gloom resources and also relates a lot to red chamber/his family) Gloom’s also generally a stand-in for water which exists here.

Wrath in Hong Lu generally manifests in him going “yeah, maybe my family was a little fucked up actually” internally, instead of manifesting as taking direct action about the fucked up things like it works for most other sinners, and acknowledging that his family was at least partially filth and killing and eating eachother (metaphorically. maybe literally) works for that

i am not an expert on sin analysis but i wanted to take a prediction bc it’s fun :)

I have a couple of predictions for corrosion and i’ll be real they are the main reason i wrote this thing because i LOVE when bad things happen to Hong Lu!!

Since this ego seems to be referencing Bao-yu so much i can pull stuff from Red Chamber too which makes it more fun :)

First one I came up with is Hong Lu taking the place of the pearl within the clam and getting locked in there! A bunch of his egos have to do with being controlled/trapped so i think it works and it also can work as a parallel for Bao-yu’s treatment by his family. Bao-yu’s name means precious jade, and he’s often treated more like his namesake than a person, heavily controlled and never allowed to leave the Jia mansion (or, in this case, the clam.) I just think it’d be fun!

My other concept has to do with more Red Chamber stuff, notably what happens when Bao-yu loses his jade. I’m not quite there yet in the text, but from what i’ve heard he becomes incredibly unstable and essentially loses his mind. This sets the Jia family’s downfall into even faster motion and from that point things get REALLY fucked up. Since the pearl here parallels Bao-yu’s jade, I think having a reference to that part of the book would be really fucking crazy for all 5 people who have read 1800+ pages of red chanber to get to chapter 94 where he loses that thing. Also i just want to see Hong Lu lose his mind i KNOW it would be terrifying and chilling. but they may be saving that for his distortion (manifesting)

In my skimming Red Chamber table of contents to find when Bao-yu loses his jade i just found a chapter where Bao-yu’s father admires a pearl but we will just ignore that for now bc this has taken long enough to type already and that is several chapters off. but there may be more analysis when this thing actually comes out!

Thank you for reading this far!! I hope you enjoyed me looking far too deep into an unreleased ego we know next to nothing about for fun! this took WAY longer than expected to type out but i’m glad I did because I loveee telling people about Hong Lu!

There is a very real chance very little of my analysis and prediction is reflected in canon BUT please remember that truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true and even if this doesn’t turn out to be correct now u know a little more about Hong Lu and the themes he plays with :)

[gootarts]

if you're reading canto v and wondered 'huh, ishmael and queequeg have pretty strong thing going on between them. i wonder if they played up gay subtext present in the original novel', you'd actually be wrong! limbus actually dumbs down the intimacy of their relationship a lot.

and by a lot, i mean a lot. these quotes are direct from moby dick.

Chapter 4, The Counterpane:

Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. [...] At length, by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,

Chapter 10, A Bosom Friend:

He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. [...] How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

Chapter 11, Nightgown:

Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his [Queequeg's] smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.

there's some really interesting analysis of their relationship by richard norton here:

In the opening pages of Melville's greatest novel, Moby Dick (1851), the narrator Ishmael and the cannibal Queequeg go to bed together, and symbolically marry and even give birth. The bed in which they sleep at the Spouter Inn is the landlord's marriage bed; Ishmael plays the role of the terrified coy maiden, waiting in bed while the bridegroom gets undressed: "This accomplished, however, he turned round – when, good heaven, what a sight!" Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk (!) and Ishmael "shrieks." There is some "kicking about" and Queequeg begins "feeling" Ishmael. Next morning Ishmael awakes with "Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." Melville emphasizes the point by referring again to "his bridegroom clasp" and "hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style." And they even bear offspring, rather more quickly than heterosexuals: "Throwing aside the quilt, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby."

sadly, queequeg (and his relationship with ishmael) gets sidelined in the novel once ahab makes his appearance, but he still serves an important symbolic role.

[limbushusbandry]

So I've got a bit of a dilemma here: my family and I live in a quite remote area and recently there'd been a growing population of feral limbis. I've been volunteering at a TNR program to help prevent further population growth, and we recently trapped a large, metamorphosed Kromer who I took in to get fixed and vaccinated before releasing her away from civilization, but during the vet visit we discovered that she's pregnant. My family has experience raising and caring for all kinds of animals from dogs to pigs, horses, and even non-domestic ones such as an orphaned raccoon so we're thinking of trying to raise and socialize the offspring. My main concern is that we don't know what breed the father was - as far as I know no males have been spotted recently with the kind of mating trauma you'd expect from a metamorphosed Kromer, and I've been told Kromers can be prone to mating cannibalism - so there's a good chance that she ate him and we won't know the father's breed until she gives birth. I think we're just going to have to hope it was a more docile type of limbus, and surrender the offspring to wildlife control if not. Do you have any advice for us regarding this venture?

you should just kill her

[ilovelaica]

My endless list of favourite horses: Limbothello B. [Ridden by Tobias Bachl.]

[yesods-a-purple-punk]

*me looking up diploptera punctata offspring and milk production just so i can write a fic where gregor from limbus gets fucking milked*

[limbushusbandry]

hi, just wondering if you could help me identify a limbus? I have a Liu Meursault and Gregor in my household and lately they seem to have been getting visits from another red creature of sorts. No fights or anything since I keep my limbi inside(fire risk and all) but they like staring at each other through my window and my limbi seem to respect the new creature(is that weird to say?). Is this new limbus going to set my garden on fire? What can I do?

my first thought about this new dynamic would be that your limbi probably see this new one as a threat, however since they're kept inside they cant do anything to ward it off. there is also a chance that they could be impressed at this new limbi's fire wielding capabilities, and see it as a potential mate seeing as it's traits would be best to defend/be inherited by offspring. if you're worried about this new limbi setting fire to anything, it's probably best to try and catch it yourself or call animal control on it to make sure it doesnt burn anything to the ground. i hope your garden stays safe anon!

[ilovelaica]

My endless list of favourite horses: Lissino. [Ridden by Patrick Stühlmeyer.]

[ilovelaica]

Holger Hetzel & Legioner.

Grand Prix of Spangenberg

CSI*** Spangenberg ‘18

(c) by me

[ilovelaica]

My endless list of favourite horses: Limboy von Worrenberg. [Ridden by ?? ]

[ilovelaica]

Tim Markus & Löwenherz.

CSI4* 2. Qualification for the Derby Final

Deutsches Spring- & Dressurderby Hamburg 2017

© by me.