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mothwingwritings · 6 months

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C and F for my boy Pickle

Eyyy sorry for the delay! (Yes I am still working on these!!!) Here is some Pickle goodness for you my dear.~<3

WARNINGS: Sex and violence and one love sick feral man.

Cruelty: How would they treat their darling once abducted? Would they mock them?

Pickle would honestly treat you as nicely as he is able too. His living environment has its limitations, but he does everything he can to make it comfortable and inviting for you, adamant about making it a home that is fitting of his mate.

Once you are safely stashed away in his secret abode he sets to work constructing you a nest of things so that you may find pinnacle contentment in your new home. He’s gathered an amalgamation of the softest blankets, clothes, linen, etc. that has been given to him or that he has scavenged, so that you may rest in peace and luxury while in his presence. He also brings you the best cuts of meat after his hunts, though he caught on quickly that you were apt to turn your nose at his bloody, raw offering (he couldn’t quite understand why, he was sure you would love it if you just gave it a chance). Once he picks up on your distaste, he instead begins to hoard ingredients and snacks he steals picks up out in the world, supplying you all manner of foodstuff till he pins down the ones you like.

While Pickle prefers you in your natural state, he understands your body needs protection from the elements. He doesn’t quite get modern fashion, but you seem sad wearing the same thing over and over again. While he’s out he procures a hodge-podge of varying clothing, presenting it to you by dumping it at your feet, a huge dopey grin on his face. He loves seeing you in the clothing he gifts you, you look so beautiful in each and every piece that he can’t help but stare, holding back the urge to rip it right back off and have his way with you.

Pickle won’t mock you and wouldn’t dream of disrespecting you in anyway. Any harm he causes you is either completely unintentional or for your own good. He loses control of himself sometimes, forgetting his own strength. You are just so small and he loves you so much, it’s hard to hold himself back. He hates using his strength against you to prove a point, but if you remain insistent on trying to escape him he will do what he must to protect you. You are HIS mate and HE’S the only one who can take care of you. All that’s waiting for you in this strange new world is danger, so if you won’t stay by his side willingly, he will force you there.

All that said, while you may be relatively safe from Pickle’s more violent tendencies, anyone else most certainly is NOT. If another person approaches you, threatens you, or tries to take you away from him they will be obliterated, decimated, ripped to shreds, torn apart until nothing is left. He’ll bask in the gruesome slaughter, their end another validation that he is the best one for you, the one who loves and can protect you above all others. Doesn’t matter if that person is a stranger or your own mother-he is all you need, anyone else butting in is an unnecessary threat.

Fight: How would they feel if their darling fought back?

He would find it incredibly charming if you tried to fight him. Pickle doesn’t see it as an act of aggression at all, but views it as you trying to mimic him as a sign of reverence. You think he is so impressive and strong that you strive to be like him, going so far as to challenge him to a fight. It’s adorable, and he can’t help but break out into a huge toothy grin when he sees you assume a fighting stance.

And it excites him- seeing you tense up, clenching your fists and bending your knees, preparing to strike at a moment’s notice. Seconds before the fray, you stare him down with such intensity, sizing him up and calculating what moves you should make against him, gears turning in your head as you focus wholly on him. The fixation on him sends a shiver of anticipation down his spine. He is the only one you are thinking of in that moment, and in turn you are all that is occupying his thoughts.

Your strikes never hurt him and he can tell how much that frustrates you. He’ll play along sometimes to make you happy, yowling like a mother lioness that is being batted by her cub. He’ll cringe at your punch, shy away from your kick. If he’s convincing enough, you sometimes award him with a small smile, a brief look of accomplishment. It warms his heart, knowing you are having as good of a time as he is.

He also relishes the closeness the two of you share when you initiate these little fights. Usually you try and hide away from him, distancing yourself as much as possible whenever he is in the vicinity. At first he thought it was another game you were trying to play with him, something coy, cute, and seductive to grab his attention. But when the chase became a regular thing he was disappointed, why did you put up such a fuss each time your mate tried to approach you? You didn’t even give him a prize when he finally caught you, just flailing and screaming and spitting. It hurt his feelings- this was supposed to be fun.

But the little brawls you had were fun, and they gave him a chance to have you near him without any to-do. He could feel your skin on his, smell your sweat as your body writhed and wriggled against his. Feeling your small hands grab at his hulking form, listening to your strained moans and heavy breathing as you threw your all into attacking him… Witnessing you in such a state, holding you close as your body rubbed his in just the right way, it doesn’t take long for him to completely lose control.

Before you can recognize what is going on, your body is sheathing his cock, previous grunts of exertion quickly turning into wails of pleasure.

He doesn’t understand why you cry so much afterwards, though. Were you not having as much fun as he was? You initiated the fight, why are you so upset at the outcome? It was a good tussle, and judging by the noises you were making, he was able to make you feel good. Even if you struggled a bit when he was trying to enter you, you always end up yielding to him. The fit is tight, and there have been several times he was afraid he would outright break you when he pushed deeper, pressing into your core. But the pleasure that courses through him as he bottoms out is indescribable. He loses himself in the feel of you surrounding him, completely consumed by the euphoria your body has supplied him.

You are his perfect mate, his brave little warrior, and his love for you is endless. So don’t cry, OK? Maybe next time he’ll let you really ‘win.’ :)

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kwillow · 3 months

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People are too nice to me and send me so many intriguing and prescient questions and scenarios about my imaginary friends. Some of these I would have a hard time responding to with drawings, so I've gotta just use my words (SO MANY WORDS) instead!

So, for all interested parties, in response to those questions, here come some LORE RAMBLES: THEO EDITION.

Asks and answers under the cut!

Thank you! “Strange but interesting” is what I aim for with him.

I don’t think I’ve talked about Theo’s voice before! To be honest, I often struggle to imagine precisely what my character’s voices are; the qualities of my mental performance for them varies from day to day. Still, I think with Theo I can formulate a description of some kind.

I imagine his voice to be on the higher end for a man, though not exaggeratedly so, along the tenor range. He can deepen his pitch purposefully to sound more imposing or masculine, but his voice tends to rise in pitch further and further when he’s tense, like a violin string on the verge of snapping. He speaks clearly and distinctly, sometimes to the point of almost biting off the ends of words rather than having them sloppily run into each other, and only rarely uses contractions. His voice has a slight nasal quality to it at times. When he’s angry, a bit of a rattling growl can edge the end of his words.

When he was young, he was a terrible stutterer. He made a concerted effort to train himself out of stuttering in his adolescent years, but he will still lapse into r-ruh-ruh-repeating his syllables if anxiousness gets the better of him and makes him forget to swallow those extra sounds.

He is an expressive speaker, far more so than he’d prefer. Like his pitch varies, so too does his volume, and he can swing from speaking so softly as to be almost inaudible to screaming with all the volume his lungs can muster in a moment. His cadence is full of exaggerated pauses for effect mixed with swift traipses through less important words said simply for the music of reciting them to himself; his conversational tone sounds more like a performer going through a soliloquy than casual speech. In large part, that’s because he’s had more pleasant experiences with theater than conversation.

As many have noticed, he has also a vocal tic. He makes nasally sounds and guttural grunts and growls involuntarily, more often when he’s nervous or upset about something. As he gets older and his body is less able to shrug off the effects of his little smoking habit, he wheezes and coughs in the middle of his sentences as well.

For most settings, I imagine him speaking in a highly affected Transatlantic accent, but in Amaranthine (which is what I assume people are asking about and what I’m defaulting to for these answers), his accent might be more typically British posh-y, like Received Pronunciation. Or maybe not, I mean, it’s a funny animal fantasy setting, so he could have any accent I like. :P

If you want auditory examples, I think something mixing the high-pitched, sibilant, nasally breathiness of Peter Lorre with the refined yet expressive voice of Vincent Price would get you pretty close to what I imagine. To break from the classic horror actor category, you can also throw in this animated series’ depiction of Doctor Octopus to add the all-important ingredient of “nerd factor” to his voice, haha.

He’s a bookworm, yes, but that means he likes to learn! In his case, he’s also someone who enjoys mastering (or at least getting competent at) new skills and is extremely likely to learn to do something well just because someone thinks he can’t. He also has the benefit of being kicked out of school and extremely unemployed, so for most of his life he had lots and lots of free time to take on all manner of niche hobbies if he so desired!

His drive to learn a new skill is motivated by a combination of practicality, gentlemanliness, a need to know how to handle his own business to have as little outside interference as possible or simple intellectual curiosity (which itself is often a cover for boyish whimsy about Cool Stuff). To give examples of practical skills he taught himself: most people probably wouldn’t expect him to be a good cook, but he learned to do that because his family lost their household staff, and someone had to figure out how to cook beef – and because he wanted to take better care of his mother after she fell ill. He’s a great seamster because he wanted to make alterations to his clothes to better fit his unusual proportions without suffering the indignity of being prodded and measured by some nosy tailor. Where he lives, engines are extremely uncommon, being used only for agriculture if at all, but if Theo did own his own automobile, he would learn how to fix the thing himself as best as he could because he wouldn’t want some stranger poking around in his precious baby. He does know how to repair basic clockwork mechanisms, though! (Even if he won’t fix his own pocket watch for weird sentimental reasons.) He taught himself to be ambidextrous purely because he worried about losing a hand in a freak accident one day. He never wants to be caught unprepared or feel like he can’t handle something on his own if he needs to.

For skills in the “oh but if I could do this it would be so cool – I MEAN GENTLEMANLY” camp… yeah, actually, he does like to fence. He might not be able to hold his own all that well against a trained opponent, partly just because of his own physical limitations, but he knows the footwork and he certainly enjoys fighting stationary enemies while role-playing in his head as a knight. (He would be exceedingly embarrassed if anyone knew that part.) He can dance – but only as half a pair – and play the piano – or at least the chords his fingers can reach. He makes model ships and is familiar with all their parts even though he’s never seen the ocean. He knows a fair bit about women’s fashion and could probably help a lady pick a flattering dress for a gala… if she didn’t mind dressing about decade out of style. He’s a fine marksman, though that does overlap with “practical skills” when you live in a world with monsters creeping around on the edges of towns. And that’s not even getting into his self-taught anatomy lessons! But maybe we shouldn’t get into that, for the sake of our stomachs.

I could keep rambling, but to summarize, Theo lacks worldly experience, but he is a curious little guy and has all kinds of weird skills rattling around in his skull. You never know what he’s gonna know! Except for anything involving successfully interacting with other people. He’s never going to know how to do that.

Theo is the sort of person who enjoys collecting things, in that he is often captivated by the history and sentimental value of objects that catch his eye, likes to have a little hoard he can lord over like a dragon, doesn’t see value in minimalism and is loath to get rid of anything he owns.

However, he’s a homebody who rarely traveled far from his hometown of Northcrest, a small and remote barony, and his family (and therefore he) did not have the kind of financial situation that allowed for many frivolous expenditures. Therefore, he cannot regularly obtain new items for his collections because he would quickly exhaust everything that caught his eye in his own town, and he would be wary of spending his family’s dwindling funds on something that only served to satisfy his own whims. If he were in different circumstances, able and willing to travel more broadly and possessing the kind of wealth that allowed him to fully indulge his fascinations, I’d imagine he’d have quite the collection of art, weapons, antique books, clothing, and other fineries. As it stands, he only rarely adds a new object to his own collections, and he instead contents his inner dragon by attempting to maintain and catalogue the acquisitions made by past Norths that have accrued in their manor over the generations. Still… a toy store in his town has made quite a profit off him by having new model trains in stock around his birthday and holidays.

I don’t think he’d be terribly enthused with an insect collection, regrettably. At least not a live one. Preserved, exotic kinds might at least hold the intrigue of far-off places, but something more mundane (and wrigglier) would repulse him more than fascinate him.

I’m going to say somewhere along the line between “absolutely not” and “it’s complicated.” Theo obviously gets fulfillment from looking after the people he cares about, and in Amaranthine, he’s been in a caregiver role for so long he takes a certain amount of comfort in it. Even so, if he somehow knew people thought that he “wants” the people he’s close with to fall ill, or have chronic poor health, he’d be horrified. Theo’s not exactly the most hale and hearty fellow himself (and he’s also made his health notably worse through the years via his own actions, good job on that bud), so he knows first-hand how miserable frequent illness is. He wouldn’t want someone to suffer through that. Also, witnessing his mother’s slow decline and death was harrowing for him, and part of why he flings himself into caring for Hyden is that he doesn’t want to see something like that again and is doing all he can to keep Hyden stable. It brings him comfort, but the stress of feeling responsible for someone’s health – and the stress of only being able to manage their symptoms and never fix the problem – takes a toll on him, too, even if he wouldn’t say so.

So, he wouldn’t blame a sickly partner for their condition, and he’d be willing to care for them and want to help them, but I don’t think he’d ever say he “wants” someone he cares about to be sick. Would he nonetheless be more likely to get close to someone sick versus someone well? Well, maybe. Theo has a bit of a dependent streak, not in that he needs someone to dote on him, but that he doesn’t feel like he has any worth in a relationship unless he can provide protection or assistance. But someone could easily satisfy his need to be needed in other ways, too. Like someone being clumsy and needing their clothes mended regularly, or having a deadbeat husband they need murdered, you know, stuff like that.

He doesn’t know much, and never cared to ask much either, like you imagine. He mostly just knows they’re not nobility, they do have some mage ancestry and ability, and beyond that aren’t important (according to Jocosa). Besides, as a history nerd, he has little interest in learning about his father’s side when his mother’s side has biographies, tapestries, records of badges and achievements and personal spellbooks in such great measure that he couldn’t hope to go through them all in his lifetime. Does Leonard’s side of the family have even one tapestry? No? How dull.

For his part, Leonard isn’t close to or fond of most of his family and isn’t very candid about his past life before becoming successful, so he was amenable to not talking much about his childhood or ancestry. He would prefer if Jocosa was similar restrained and didn’t extoll the virtues and history of her bloodline constantly, but alas, no. One of the consequences of marrying into snotty nobility, I suppose.

Oh, you’re on to something there! :)

Now, with someone like Theo, whose brain is a Gordian knot of congealing gray matter basting in a cerebral soup of self-deception, neuroticism, and concentrated hatred, it’s hard to point to one thing as the sole cause for any of his many issues. At the same time, I don’t want to just dump the entirety of Theo’s issues with his family and how they impact him psychologically because I worry that I could write a thousand words about it and still have five thousand more in me, and we all have other things to do with our time than read all that. That said, to briefly (ha) touch on what you’ve mentioned…

Many of Theo’s problems with intimacy, with needing to feel useful, with fearing connections with others, and so on do stem from his troubled family history. At least some of his self-loathing is borne from him, at a glance, looking more like the man he most despises instead of being the same long, slim, elegant creatures that form the roots and branches of his mother’s family tree. Although, the irony in that is that all the “bad” genetics that cause him grief and suffering come from his mother’s side – but he alternately blames the cruel gods and himself for being a freak, not his mother or grandpa or any of his weaselly ancestors for that.

It’s also true to say that Theo’s self-sacrificing and self-effacing acts of kindness towards his mother and to others he cares for are done in part to make up for the fact of his own existence. The fact that his beloved mother had to couple with a disgusting, loathsome, degrading, unfaithful cur of a man (have I mentioned Theo really hates his dad yet?) in order to bear him weighs heavily on his mind and warps his self-concept. As much as Theo knows his mother loves him, he also knows – and despises – that he if he’s his mother’s son, he’s also his father’s spawn.

Jocosa doesn’t talk at length about her problems to Theo, or anyone – she wouldn’t want to make Theo feel responsible for her woes and she isn’t the kind of woman to whine about her life’s tribulations besides – but Theo isn’t so ignorant that he can’t pick up on the tension in other’s conversations, read meaning into words left unsaid, or work backwards from what he is told to deduce the rotten truth behind what little he’s told. He knows that everything involving his conception was hard for her, even if she doesn’t say it, and he feels he needs to do everything in his power to make up for the suffering bringing him into existence put her through. ...And I could go on but I think that’s enough to get the picture for now. Have I mentioned I can write a lot of words about Theo??

I think Hyden would know better than to say something like that – out loud. Hyden does try to push Theo into a personal valet role. But Theo has his limits and Hyden is smart enough to not press them (too much, right away). Being referred to as a kind of servant is one of those limits that really pisses him off and would be a one-way ticket to not getting any more pillow fluffing. Also, for as much as he helps Hyden with daily tasks and provides whatever dotage he feels is required of him as an apprentice, caregiver or host, there are tasks a manservant would be responsible for that Theo categorically refuses to do (even though Hyden wishes he would).

I am greatly amused by the thought of someone trying to get a flower crown on Theo. I can’t imagine it’d ever go much better than people trying to put shirts on their cats. He just really doesn’t like situations wherein Stimulus I Have No Control Over Is Happening To Me.

He does tend to flip from fury to (relative) calm depending on the circumstance and the source of annoyance, so you’re spot-on with the variable reactions he could have to a floral intrusion. I would say he isn’t likely to use “witch” as an insult for the same reason as he wouldn’t use “harpy” or “ice queen” as an insult, which is that any kind of derogatory comment his mother was ever called might as well be a compliment in his books. “Harlot” is completely fair game, though.

Thanks a bunch for the kind words on my weird rat guy. So happy you like him!

(Also “dark fantasy rose type flower” made me laugh. God. He’s such an edgelord. Emphasis on the “lord”, with a title and arms and everything.)

Glad you like seeing him! I guess one of the benefits of me not getting particularly exotic with the colors or markings on my furry designs is that you can find associations to actual animals like this! I hope your pet rat had a better temperament than Theo does, though.

…Which sounds a little stupid considering quite a lot of these answers involved me talking at length about Theo being sad and self-sacrificing and crap like that. I swear to God he’s a nasty little bitchboy most of the time. I need to draw him biting someone on the face or insulting someone for being poor or eating someone’s eyeball or something again to balance the scales here.

Note to self.

#WHO WANTS TO READ 2800 WORDS ABOUT THEO?? WAIT COME BACK #i wrote this joke about anonymous letters but actually looking at these -#like half of them were actually sent by people non-anonymously #YOU ARE ALL SO BRAVE #also sorry to those of you who sent in asks months or years ago who either are in this or are worse AREN'T...#i do have plans for the asks I get but well #timeliness is not one of my skills #my draws #doodles #asks #theo #amaranthine

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madame-mongoose · 4 months

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whatever you want sugar 💖

#hi scrawny sorry for hijacking your guy again #i just #urugghh #actual footage of me when bitty sent me that clip months ago #i was like. oh i forgot you were like that hiiii #and was never the same again #self ship #my art #monnley

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front-facing-pokemon · 11 months

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#shedinja #now THIS is what i'm talkin' about! i love shedinja. i think it's a very unique pokémon and wonder guard is very *cool* if only it were ever #y'know. relevant. this thing is weak to way too many types for it to be relevant but like it's still cool in concept i think #you kinda can't tell what it is from this angle but that's why you have me here to tag it so you do know what it is #so. bit of a life update for you all. i accidentally deleted some semi-important files i needed for work. like two weeks ago #and i didn't realize i did‚ bc they were inside a folder that i deleted. but i didn't need the files at the time and i hadn't for months #i hadn't used those files since like last year. but now i need them again and i just realized that i deleted them two weeks ago #by accident? and now i need them again. to be able to do my work. so i'm actually queueing this guy and the next guy up #while i'm supposed to be working. as i've just sent an email to my boss being like Haha Hey. Do you Have a Backup of tHese Files……… PLease #and i'm hoping DESPERATELY that she does. if she doesn't i'll have to fucking reverse engineer them which i am not excited for #if it comes to fruition. so i'm just hoping she has a copy of them. feelin like shedinja against a fire-type rn fr i swear #i'll let you all know what she says when i get her response. if i get it before i'm done queuing up shedinja and whismur #spoilers. whismur is next but you could just look up the natdex numbers. and know that whismur is next #also don't tell me to look in the trash. on my computer. i know they're not there. for one i checked and for two they couldn't be there #because i rm -r'd the folder. i didn't just right-click delete that shit. i killed that shit. it's GONE #you might be asking me… why would you do that! and i would say? i did not know these files were in there #you didn't ask for all this information so i'm cutting it off here

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gideonisms · 4 months

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you know after one has not been a part of a religion for 10 years some might think "damn guess it wasn't for her! Oh well" and move on.

#whyyyy do you want me to get back together with my toxic ex i left 10 years ago #while we're complaining about xtianity kgjhnnj #an old family friend i went out to lunch with a couple of months ago recently sent a letter which is nice! she does that from time to time #but she was like 'i want you to have space to ask questions about religion to people who aren't family here's my number'#idk can we just be friends who catch up sometimes?#i've asked the questions how fortunate for me there were straightforward answers in my case #actually hang on. do you think i can deconvert her or would that be mean

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gendertrickster · 3 months

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i find very cool how you're dating the writer of the comic you were (still are) swooning over

it's literally so fucking funny. you guys cannot even comprehend all the reasons why this is the funniest shit ever

#mail #Anonymous #we only started actually talking to one another outside of tagging each other's posts #after i sent some example work in to the paradox space^2 server #and vicki was so excited to see me there and i was like. shocked #and then we were just insane about homestuck at each other for like 8 months #the whole time trying to avoid admitting how much we thought about each other like it was some fucking game to us #i blinked first when i subtweeted her by comparing sending a project file to gay sex in terms of raw intimacy involved #right after sending her a .fla so she could check to see how to optimize it better. which was maybe not my most tactical stroke yet #but apparently she found it extremely endearing of me. i did not sleep that entire night we were talking so long #i had a plane to catch in the morning and i did not give a shit. we were fucking living #a single barrier came down and that's all it took for us to realize. oh fuck. hey. we're both in love with each other huh #that was like over a month ago now. it is so truly special to me #you guys haven't even seen the most of it we could literally be making a spectacle of this shit were we not so merciful

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dailydegurechaff · 5 months

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You don't have to reply to this, but I am very happy to stumble across a non-problematic Youjo Senki fanpage. 💖

Thank you very much!! I'll continue to do my best!

#ask #anonymous #not a daily post #“ask sent 3 months ago” oops #sorry again ;;#im cleaning up inbox ok. or trying to #this is the last one tho i just. needed to express how much everyone being very kind means to me #confession: sometimes i kinda resent this blog for no good reason. its kinda tragic #suffice to say i regret taking on this project sometimes and i get in these downer ass moods #but like. i remember there are people who do actually like the silly time im having here #and it makes me feel better. so i need to express that. thank you. to the people who sent messages to me but also just like everyone lol #if these tags read as kinda corny im sorry but i just am in one of those sappy moods yknow and i need to share it #sorry i love u all. as if its my fault </3 /j #anyway see u all tmrw for dailydegu once more. itll be the last day of huevember!!#it uh. might be late bc im tired

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bleachbleachbleach · 1 year

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We're informes that young Byakuya was an ambitious, confident and such an energetic boy. What do you think the turning point responsible for the extreme change of his personality? I mean he went through a lot like losing his parent, had to disobey the law of the clan by marrying Hisana, then in the end he had to lost her too. Also being a noble clan head was silently such a pain. But what do you think is the most prominent cause? Or is it simply 'climbing into adulthood'?

I feel like if you were to ask Byakuya, he’d give you some well-rehearsed line about comportment befitting the 28th Head of the Kuchiki Clan and Captain of the 6th Division.

If you were Rukia and he caught you whispering something with Ukitake about Hisana, he probably wouldn’t disabuse you of whatever notion you and your captain had concocted.

if you were Byakuya, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to name some specific, discrete reason or set of reasons you are the way that you are.

But I’d resist naming a specific, discrete turning point—primarily to resist Byakuya’s inclinations, because what has he done to deserve those, but also because if Byakuya genuinely had his way then refusing gray areas and being hardline about how your life is going to go and what you should do to atone for your more whimsical decisions and what rules you must promise to uphold—that all would have worked out for him, in ways that it clearly didn’t. Because that’s not how life works.

Which isn’t to say that flashpoint moments don’t exist, or that there aren’t life occurrences that can have massive, traceable effects on the person you are, or become. Of course they can. But I don’t think Byakuya is the way that he is because of X, specifically, or even Y.

No matter what he says, or even personally believes.

I do think part of it is simply being older than we saw him in TBTP; but I’d hesitate to draw a complete picture of what Byakuya was like as a teenager from the one instance that we saw. He was in the yard, in the middle of a training session, and he was being terrorized by Yoruichi. He’s hyped up on endorphins and acting like a brat because he’s being treated like a brat by another adult brat. At that age, Byakuya was probably still spending a bunch of time shadowing clan meetings and doing calligraphy and writing dense, pedantic poetry about raccoons or shikai or whatever. He was probably also doing a lot of "traditionally Byakuya, as we know him" things, in the same way that Byauya, as we know him, still takes time out of his day to do completely insane things (more on that later. a numbered list, in fact).

How much of this is publicly available (or isn’t) does probably have a lot to do with being Clan Head. And sure, Clan Head is a role that he performs, but I think he believes in this whole clan head thing with every fiber of his being; like, he’s method. He’s the gonzo journalist of being clan head. he *is* this thing. And if there are parts of that role that are not desirable to him (I’m sure that there are) I don’t think he thinks about them as being a pain. They simply are. They are, and they are his, and he has never imagined a reality where they are not. We talk about shinigami being defined by their job but the man is the clan head, irreducibly and inextricably.

I think he’s discovered, between TBTP and now, that to be less knowable is to be powerful, in almost any situation he can imagine. Not that he doesn’t love a good opportunity to pontificate, but that’s like the reward at the end of a successful round of impassivity. Plus his pontifications are more allusive than genuinely educational, so it’s really just more of the same, in a different key. (When Urahara infodumps, he likes seeing the shape of your eyes change, and all the little microexpressions that are tied like puppet-strings to all the small epiphanies happening in your brain. When Hitsugaya infodumps, he wants you do have information and, ideally, have it correctly. But when Byakuya infodumps, he’s performing a philosophical treatise and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s parsable by you, the audience, or not.)

And of course I think he’s also been shaped by his time with Hisana and his time without her; with and without his father (and one assumes, his mother; with and without Rukia. But there’s no way to measure or organize these different influences and isolate the variables and during his designated moments allotted to introspection he’s probably not completely thrilled by that. So he suffers, as do we all. XD

I also think part of him is just naturally That Way; he’s a born, organic weirdo; a standoffish strangeman. That’s in addition to havng grown up and found out that it’s smarter, more strategic, and more effective in terms of getting what he wants to be a little more Enigma and a little less Boy Shouts at Cat.

On the other hand, we’ve definitely seen him be about 10000000000000000x more bananas in the current canon timeline than he ever could have dreamed in that one TBTP flashback:

1) He tried to imprison his own VC for losing to Ichigo, a proposal so insane every single other person was like, "well, that’s fucking stupid, so we’ll be ignoring that" even though technically he probably does have that power, since Captains can run their division however they want.

2) He almost killed his own VC in the middle of an active invasion, for reasons that only vaguely had anything to do with actually responding to said invasion.

I’ll give him a pass on fighting Ichigo, because technically that was his job? maybe? and sure, he did it in an ineffective way but that tracks with the overall Gotei strategic plan, so.

4) Immediately leapt to slashing his own tendons, deep in enemy territory, his only fallback plan being Hanatarou’s ability to survive and do anything about those tendons afterward.

5) Fought Zaraki deep in the middle of enemy territory, with Yammy still in play, in the middle of a war that YOU KNOW WHAT, THEY PROBABLY COULD’VE BEEN BACK FOR (not that it would’ve mattered, but) if they weren’t fucking around in the desert together

And that all happened in the same like, four months!

One of the scenes that I absolutely love from the Beast Swords Arc is someone commenting on how surprisingly baffling Senbonzakura’s personality was, in contrast to Byakuya’s. And Kyouraku and Ukitake don’t belabor the point, but they’re kinda like "weeee~ll hahaha" and I think that’s an incredibly accurate non-assessment of who Byauya both was and is.

I don’t think he secretly wants to be a drunk buffoon and his being Clan Head is the only thing holding him back from living his frat boy truth. I think he’s already living his truth because, from his POV, what else would he be doing? He’s Kuchiki Byakuya. Whatever he’s doing is whatever he intends to be doing.

However, I also believe that many people around him don’t actually see (have been trained not to? don’t know him well enough to? are politely pretending not to have seen?) part of the truth he’s living—the part that is that bananas streak in him, very much alive and well.

#i thought about adding pictures because tumblr likes pictures but then i thought 'what images would actually add value here?'#and then i thought about adding sub-headings for navigation and legibility but i thought 'well byakuya wouldn't'#so here is my love letter to byakuya with the biggest possible byakuya energy #21 completely uncut unbroken paragraphs of just byakuya #thank you for this ask you sent.... two months ago! SORRY IT IS SO LATE #rest assured i loved talking about byakuya and our lateness is not for lack of interest #asks #kuchiki byakuya #bleach headcanons #no brain just bleach

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