Arrax here; I want Vox's full out demon form to be some horrifying eldritch being, like...I dunno maybe Vox's form is Vox's electricity--omly his, his Cyan electricity that the city uses.
Like, Vox gets shot with an angelic bullet and he falls. Everyone thinks he's dead, and yest Vox's employees are still fighting. The Vox's screen lights up, as does every single screen in the surrounding area, and you hear this draconic, viscous snarl and using all 8 screens that are around him, fully demonic Vox breaks out, and he terrifies everyone.
oh, thats a very interesting concept!!. my favourite ever FULL full demon form of vox comes from RHTVS, where he has (technically...) two full demon forms, one as a giant white electricity beast and another being like this giant kaiju mecha
i have seen gorgeous depictions of voxs demon form such as a giant mecha-shark hybrid, but i like imagining him close to the devils from csm. (actually, this kind of correlates with your hc too)
something like a cross between the gun devil and the falling devil, where he's still somewhere "close" to an approximation of a human body (bc for some reason, vox just strikes me as the type of person to cling onto what human parts of himself he still has. might just be me tho), but built up of a mixture of mechanical wires, electricity, and the souls under his contracts. id imagine like the gun devil, many many many fucking television screens would be incorporated onto his body.
also, in the situation youve posed, i cant help but imagine a scenario where vox never told anyone about this form before, and everyone (even the vees!) truly thought he might be dead for a moment, the power around hells pride ring slowly flickering and crashing as his opponents revel in having taken down one of prides top overlords- before they start screaming. limbs start to burn from an overwhelming amount of static electricity in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt bits wafting through the streets of the entertainment district as vox reaches forward with arms constructed of pure electricity and strings of wiring, pulling forward until he stands up, form flickering with static and power. every broadcast flicks on, and the unfortunate sinners too weak to resist the pulls of their screen are pulled in toward him until he consumes them too, fueling him with only more ammunition for the fires.
16 notes
·
View notes
do you have favourite Crocodile face?
the one he makes at the end of chapter 540, vol. 55 is seared straight into my soul. he almost went }:3 and I cannot deal with it like a normal human being. I love his facial expressions, those sad eyebrows are *chef's kiss* 💚🐊
Ah yes, this one, right?
It's a hilarious expression and definitely an underrated one kjshdfjgkghf Like we've seen him smiling plenty of times before this, with that classic evil grin we all know and love, so something about this panel is so funny to me, like if it wasn't for the hollow look in his eyes he'd look almost mischievous here and I love that. He's up to no good and he knows it dsjkfhgshdfghkdjf
IDK if I have a favorite expression from Crocodile, typically my favorites are just the really meme'able, funny expressions and this man does not have any of those to offer (which is fine really), and really every panel he appears in during Impel Down + Marineford are fantastic, Oda kept us so well-fed
I think I'll give a shout-out to this panel though, because while I think this man was already irreversibly changing my brain chemistry (while I was falling down the Crocodad Rabbithole and re-reading Marineford obsessively), I think this is the panel that finally kind of broke me
Like I think it was this panel (from chapter 577) that finally made me go "wait, am I losing it or is Crocodile kinda handsome" lmfao
21 notes
·
View notes
honestly like. the more i take it apart and examine it, while going into it entirely is going to be A Post or Three of Its Own and will probably get its own thread: i think one of the reasons nine in canon upsets me so much is that i genuinely related to the version of him that made sense to me, when i tried to apply some continuity to his character from before his imprisonment vs after. he's actually the muse i wrote for the most prose for in this fandom, even more than five--which is saying something!--and he came to me pretty easily.
[longpost and Decidedly Harsh toward canon's depiction of him, but less ARGFMSKDKDKFK HATE than usual so much as 'man the awful way these people handled him was a waste.' believe it or not i'm actually pretty attached to him, but as the secret Better Version that lives in my head lmao]
the arc of his character could have been such a good one about how men and boys and the people around them are harmed by toxic masculinity, and examining the ways in which that's held up by other cis men, every other configuration of gender and AGAB, and both. he came through loud and clear to me as an example of a poorly socialized, abused, isolated homeschooler with very little life experience, who is throwing bits and pieces at the wall that he's cobbled together from the outside without understanding the experiences behind that kind of thing, to see what sticks. all this while having suppressed and sublimated his emotions so much that he doesn't actually recognize what he's feeling, and goes 'well, i guess this trauma reaction to killing people means i like killing people. let's go then!'
like... in canon, you can kind of see how the seeds of his trauma, and baseline personality, from before his capture might have gone septic in the process the way it does in canon. if he was already the kind of person who would spit that result out on the other side. the writers used his Acute Trauma as an excuse to go 'anyway his cêpan was a sexist dickhead under the guise of ~respecting women,~ and he got captured by pursuing a normal teenage crush and blames himself for it, and then he went through solitary for a year. so now he's a gleeful sexual predator who harasses john and thinks women are meat!'
and this becomes even more glaringly obvious when you set it next to how the aftereffects of his trauma are (not) depicted. this kid spent a year in solitary confinement--broken up by the intermission of mercy-killing his adopted dad after watching his torture--while not being fed enough and hurting himself on the forcefield on the regular. he's not going to immediately come out of that Ripped and an Incredible Polished Fighter; he's not going to come out of that a ~charming edgy debonair lovable asshole.~ this kid knows what the fuckin hat man looks like, dude. that's shit you come out of an emotional, physical, and psychological wreck, and not in a 'haha look how rude and boundary-pushing and violent and sleazy i am uwu' way.
he is barely going to be able to walk out of there on his own two feet. he is going to be hallucinating and not remember how to tell faces apart. he is going to freak out at anything like an enclosed space. he is going to be food-insecure. he is going to be constantly finding ways to self-harm when he feels at all out of control, and once again not in a 'haha i'm so quirky and edgy' way. he is going to have obsessive rituals and get stuck on repetitive thought patterns because you run out of shit to think about after a year with nothing to do but pushups, even before you add in the shiny new PTSD events to obsess over. which tend to take up all of your brain space even when you aren't isolated with them for long periods. he is going to be doing weird fucking shit after he gets out, bizarre and frightening shit that's not just 'being violent and a dick,' and other people will probably notice.
and all of this is before you factor in his backstory! (which, by the way, is not conducive to him coming out of his imprisonment an Unstoppable Highly Trained Killing Machine. he was taught how to actually fight opponents for Three Whole Ass Weeks before he got captured, and none of that was training against human-shaped opponents. i don't care how many pushups he does over how long, he still has had zero practice fighting Other People and that's immediately going to fuck him over in a fight. it's one thing to have him be dangerous because he makes up for lack of skill with being completely fucking berserk with zero regard for his own safety or anyone else's, but he's not going to be an unstoppable whirlwind of death. and you're not going to build muscle while you're being starved.)
and like. i could go on for a long time about how they fucked up his character to the point where seeing him onscreen anywhere outside his novella makes me instantly want to flip a table. but i think so much of what it comes down to--and i don't say this casually, i mean after laying out and examining all his scenes in the first series--is that he doesn't actually have an arc. he doesn't grow. the entire point of his character's existence is to be an awful person and never be held accountable, self-examine, or allowed to face any kind of real consequences for it.
it's genuinely fascinating to examine all the different methods they use to do this (which is for a whole post of its own), but he's not an exploration of culpability or responsibility--for past, current, and future actions--the way five's arc is. he's just a parade of all the abuse tactics and rhetoric the authors could think of, both direct and via enablement by people around him, to pour into one guy. nine is literally The Missing Stair: The Character.
contrast this with five getting nailed to the fuckin wall for things that are often, arguably, much less horrific or unhinged than what nine does. he's treated like a ~broken, irreparably insane monster~ by characters and narrative both. he's punished brutally and endlessly over and over and over and over no matter how much he tries to grow, or make amends, or even lay down and take everything that might be done to him as punishment because he Deserves It for, [checks notes] repeatedly having been groomed and manipulated for years. If You Can't Tell I am a Little Bitter
and it's not just other characters who suffer for it. the creators are SO invested in nine never being accountable, by himself or anyone else, that he is PUNISHED FOR IT when he makes even the slightest effort to unpack. when he has a moment of vulnerability during a breakdown over fucking up, he is restrained in exactly the same way as when he had to watch eight die. this so that he can have his self-blame literally beaten out of him to make him 'stop moping.' the writers don't care about his trauma, or being compassionate or fair in their portrayal of it, or letting him heal. the only thing they care about here is getting to write a Missing Stair as a good thing, and trying to get you, the reader, in on it by forcing you to like him.
anyway just. man. they did nine so fuckin dirty and their version of him brings down every other narrative around it. i know i rant about nine a lot but justice for my boy
16 notes
·
View notes