#spikewheelo

[silverskye13]

How did you come up with the hels story?

So there is a fic on AO3 Still Can't Shut The Closet Door by bananasofthorns and there is another fic that I thought was by betweenlands , but I just scrolled through their blog and couldn't find it - about Wels leaving season 8, while Hels sits in the shuttle with him, mocking the fact that he's running away. [I know theminecraftbee made a follow-up fic to it... Maybe they made the first one too sjdjfh I need to get better at bookmarking things].

I had Tumblr-osmosis'd enough about Hels to know he existed by the time I read those, but still knew next to nothing about him outside of "probably riding the post darkiplier/anticepticeye wave", so reading this really interesting take on a dark mirror character as something akin to intrusive thoughts, not entirely real but still incredibly physical, was really really cool to me. And then that sat in the back of my head for a couple months slow-burning.

Converging on this I've also been trying really hard to lower my personal standards on writing. Previously most ideas I had never made it to text, because if I couldn't polish it into a long fic or something I deemed high enough quality to throw on AO3 standalone, I'd just drop it. But I've been trying to change that, because that was more creativity stifling than anything else. So I've started just opening the Tumblr app and word-vomitting my quick ideas to see what happens.

That was the first Wels / Hels fic, with Wels in the cave talking to his double in the dark. I was really leaning on the idea of a double who's so tightly bound in whatever Wels is that they can feel each other's emotions. Very soulmate-ish. And it turns Hels into something less like intrusive thoughts and more like a personal thundercloud. He's weather in the fact that he kind of just happens, and he follows his own logic, and that logic is mostly "I have what I consider rational reasons for hating Wels." Because at the time I was also kicking around the fact that if current fanon likes the idea of Hels as intrusive thoughts, has anyone ever done anything with the fact that intrusive thoughts, for all their badness, always feel painfully rational when you have them. Even intrusive thoughts about self harm, logically you can think "I know what x neurological problem is, I know this is a symptom of that," and still think it makes total sense that you're doing whatever you're doing. It's not until you're no longer under that influence that you can look back and go, "Woah shit, that was kinda messed up, huh?"

So I took that concept and I shoved it in a quick fic. And I left the fic pretty open ended in case I wanted to kick it around some more. There's a lot of implied things [hels can go between dimensions. Hels and Wels can feel each others' emotions, sometimes so intensely it has a physical effect, Hels exists but only his effects are really witnessed by other people, etc]. And then when I posted it, and other people started talking about those things I'd hinted at but had no plans for, I kept thinking about those things, and I got more ideas about them. Now it's kinda snowballed. I get to chase threads where I find them. Maybe the hermits and helsmits are two halves of a whole, and at some point those halves have to rejoin? Maybe Helsknight hates Welsknight so much because he feels self righteous as a knight, and he thinks Wels is a mockery of knighthood? Maybe that feeling is mutual? Maybe only some hermits have helsmets, and maybe those hels don't manifest the same way every time. Maybe The Red King could be a hels, or human!Cleo. Maybe the hels don't think they're the hels at all. Maybe they're incredibly aware they are, and that their days are numbered. What does that do to someone, to live your entire life knowing you weren't supposed to exist, not in a creation vs evolution existential way, but in the sense that you were made of someone's issues, and when they rectify those issues and move past them you no longer have a personhood? Do you fight it and become your own person, or do you submit to what you believe is the natural course of the universe?

To be honest! I've just been having a lot of fun with how much it all evolves, and how informed it is by other people yelling in the tags about little ideas I threw in flippantly that could have really interesting implications if you followed the thread a little further. That's kinda just the fun thing about fandom in general, and something this little snippet-on-tumblr style has really facilitated? The idea that an idea can start as one thing and dramatically snowball into a dozen others because no idea exists in a vacuum and you're allowed to be inspired by everything. It's a lot of fun! It's like playing in a sandbox, or really, like playing in Minecraft. You don't know what you don't know until someone else does, and suddenly a while new world has opened up to you, like learning you can use stairs to build a roof for the first time.