#particularly after Abyssinia is brought back by Cadaver

[beigetiger]

Kinda chewing on Omen and Crepuscular’s relationship right now…man they’re complicated and I wanna talk about them 😭

Even independent from Crepuscular, Omen is a pretty fascinating character to me. At first I didn’t like him because he felt like a bad stereotype, but character development saved him for me so much. He’s a really good representation of positive masculinity, even while he’s doing things that many of the more violent or problematically masculine characters do. He manages to do these things without having to be toxically masculine about any of it, and I’m proud of him for that. And a lot of his ability to do that came from Crepuscular.

Because while I definitely think that their relationship is toxic, Crepuscular was still hugely important for Omen being able to develop his own opinions and do what he wanted instead of being a shy kid who trips over his own two feet. Being with Valkyrie and Skulduggery and helping in their missions definitely started him out by giving him a taste of what the adventuring was like, but every single time he sort of…went back to his normal, boring life afterwards. He always felt like Skulduggery and Valkyrie needed to call on him before he could do anything useful.

Enter Crepuscular, who has so many emotional issues that he successfully manages to hide from Omen by actually being interested in what Omen has to say and encouraging him to do more risky and adventurous things. By this point, Omen has spent his entire life being an idiot who nobody takes seriously and who’s inferior to his brother, so he eats up what Crepuscular is feeding him and starts doing little rulebreaking things, like helping his brother get a knife he needs to kill the King of the Darklands. Small things, and stuff that Omen doesn’t have to get too involved in to help.

And then his brother kills the King of the Darklands a year early, freaks out about it, and suddenly stops helping out people around the school, even when that’s been what people depended on him for for years. There’s suddenly nobody to do it. There’s an empty niche in the school’s metaphorical ecosystem that Auger used to dominate but is now too traumatized to.

And then Omen is there with Crepuscular encouraging him and helping him grow and be more adventurous and be more independent. Since Omen understands what his brother must be going through right now and also understands that the people around them need help, he takes it upon himself to help them (while also pretending that it’s Auger who’s doing it). And Omen circa Resurrection would never have been brave or strong enough to do that, but by this point he’s been following around Crepuscular long enough that he’s actually brave enough and organized enough to figure out what needs to get done, sneak out and talk to Crepuscular, and then actually get up and do it.

And then Damocles Creed becomes Supreme Mage and suddenly they’re living in an incredibly fascist and restrictive state. Does this stop Omen? Hell no. The boy becomes a little punk who investigates suspicious activity around the school and talks to his friends (and sometimes other students) about how they’ll escape this situation.

And then he picks a fight with Valkyrie, who’s an evil god at this point, and tells both her and Skulduggery that they’re awful people (and rightly so). Again, Resurrection Omen would have passed out at the idea of disrespecting these two in their normal forms, but two years later he’s perfectly willing to yell at a god with a streak of breaking people’s wrists.

Crepuscular was a bad person who was produced by circumstances so bad even he knew they were fucked up and he was helping Omen for his own emotional gain, but that doesn’t prevent the fact that he gave Omen the same thing that Skulduggery gave Valkyrie all those years ago: a safe space to test himself out and spread his wings in a way that felt comfortable. And even if Crepuscular was simply doing it to compare himself to Skulduggery, it legitimately helped Omen so much and allowed him to become a more emotionally put-together person than Auger, who had always been considered the better one.

And even after Omen decides to break off his friendship with Crepuscular, that bravery still lingers. He leads a goddamn rebellion in his school and the other kids accept him as their leader and begin taking orders from him.

And after it’s all over? Omen decides to go to art school with a girl he met while on a mission with Crepuscular. Crepuscular was such a bad person but he helped Omen so much and I honestly wouldn’t change much about how their relationship went.

And I honestly think that Crepuscular didn’t hate him either. Aside from Omen giving him what he wanted, Crepuscular chose to go back and ask for Omen’s forgiveness even after he claims to have proved himself better than Skulduggery, and Omen chose to go on one last mission with him because Omen is a sweet person who is easily peer pressured and Crepuscular knew that.

In short, their relationship is toxic but developmentally important for Omen and this post mostly turned into me ranting about Omen’s character development, which I’m not mad about.

[beigetiger]

As a slightly more lighthearted part of Battlescape of the Gods, I wanna talk about Omen, Abyssinia, and Nye being roommates. Because I find it funny. Found familying the most bizarre trio ever but it fits in my head.

So BASICALLY what happened was Abyssinia spent her life kind of wandering around and not doing much after she got brought back by Cadaver, because really, what was she going to do? And her misadventures eventually got her teleported to America, where she continued doing nothing with her life. The USA also so happened to be the place Omen was currently living in, although in slightly different places.

But then the Faceless Ones get out, and things start going down. It’s not as apocalyptic as UtE, but the damage that a bunch of scared people will do to each other is incredible. Omen ended up wandering around and trying to stay alive whilst Abyssinia had gained access to a gun and was making full use of it. They met pretty randomly because Abyssinia attacked some guys who so happened to be attacking Omen, and then Omen basically started following her around because she was bigger, scarier, and didn’t pay mind to Omen following her.

So the two of them wandered around for a bit, and eventually stumbled across the entrance to Professor Nye’s lab. It wasn’t particularly happy to see other people, but it did acknowledge the use of having someone who can absorb power to make herself stronger and a Signum Linguist on its team, and so agreed to let them stay so long as they didn’t interfere with its experiments.

And that is what they’ve been doing ever since. They aren’t allowed to leave the lab super often because it’s dangerous, but Abyssinia goes out to gather supplies and pick fights with random people while Omen sometimes goes out to draw art on walls, usually art that encourages people to keep going with life. It’s very much enrichment for them, because there isn’t really a whole lot to do in the lab. Nye has gotten slightly more comfortable with them over the years, but there are still parts of the lab that they’re banned from entering and…really, it’s a lab. People were not made to live there.

In the meantime, they’ve been trying to find ways to entertain themselves. Abyssinia sometimes finds art supplies to give to Omen and Omen has been trying his best to catch Abyssinia up with everything that’s been going on since her death (because she never really got an update. She’s just been chilling with no idea what’s going on around her). He once found a board game and tried to teach her to play it, and it turns out that she’s very competitive. And Nye absolutely refused to play because it thought that the activity was childish.

There’s more stuff as well, but this is basically what they’ve been up to these past few years. Pretty relaxed vibe going on there. I am DEBATING giving Nye a kid (Crenga reproduce asexually Because I Said So™️) but who knows if I’ll actually go through with it.