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hanzajesthanza · 10 months

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watching the new season of what we do in the shadows (which also likes to play with tropes) and thinking about how fond i am of the fact that vampires in the witcher are so much less… structured

certainly, they have some tradition, ritual, even some “absolutely unacceptable things, the kind of things no vampire does” — but even these offhanded mentions are presented in the context of being humorous, like:

“i flew under the influence” being a darkly humorous play on “to drive under the influence.” or “my multimembered name is authentic. and in keeping with vampire tradition” … it makes you smirk and raise an eyebrow, like… and what tradition would that be?! and may i also mention that we know nothing of vampire language except for the untranslatable pun of regis’ mule draakul, as a throwaway dracula joke.

meanwhile, the rules and procedures present in what we do in the shadows are what typically drives the drama and conflict in the plot, as opposed to the comedy…. the comedy comes from the characters defying all expectations of their society, not the idea of the society itself.

and i think the things what we do in the shadows plays with are generally accepted as vampire tropes. they have a kind of undead, reverse-society: a strict heirarchy determined by councils, bloodlines, tracking honor and shame and who-bit-who and all of these intensely complex games.

vampires in the witcher, though?

“During my youth I enjoyed… er… the pleasures of good company (…) With humans, however, there exists a system of rules and restrictions: parental authority, guardians, superiors and elders–morals, ultimately. We have nothing like that. Youngsters have complete freedom and exploit it. They create their own patterns of behaviour. Stupid ones, you understand (…)”

they compose an entirely lawless, authorityless society—you could not even call it a society—an asociety. no organization, no heirarchy, no councils, bureaucracy, not even patterns of behavior to follow. no one to look up to, and no one to look down upon.

social approval, rather, comes in the form of peer pressure and the kind of stupid nonsense that can only come from friend groups:

“I didn’t want to spoil the party, and the thought of losing social approval terrified me. So I partied.”

social activities are parties, but not vampire parties as they’re commonly understood. they do not throw lavish balls full of sensual masquerades, garish horror, blood spills from fountains and fills goblets in a parody of aristocracy…

no, the vampires in the witcher? their parties are merely a few guys (and girls) getting wasted in some peasant village:

“Revelries and frolics, shindigs and booze-ups; every full moon we’d fly to a village and drink from anyone we found. The foulest, the worst class of… er… fluid. It made no difference to us whose it was, as long as there was… er… haemoglobin… It can’t be a party without blood, after all! And I was terribly shy with vampire girls, too, until I’d had a drop.”

organize a ball? they couldn’t organize a bingo night!

yes, they are indeed social, but society: the working together to help each other, or even the darker side of one controlling and commanding another, is an entirely alien concept to them. like the men of the golden age, they seem to live carelessly, like the cyclopes, they seem to live lawlessly.

councils, rules, codeces, instruction manuals… what is this? not part of their culture. they have no need for food, they are affected not by cold or heat, and they can fly with every full moon. they have no fight for survival, only petty squabbles and drama. no old, no young. no father, no son. no superiors, no inferiors.

ageless libation, celebration, socializing to no end. an ever-tipsy nothingness.

in short… life in a dream.

#the witcher books #emiel regis #c: regis #analysis #its important to me because looking at it it makes exact perfect sense for regis’ character #his backstory makes everything he does in the present so meaningful #and i dont mean just the fact that he is a healer now #but that he has joined a society and speaks a human language and indulges his philosophizing and overanalysis…

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 6 months

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megumi 🤝🏽 yuuji

dying even if it’s only for a good minute only to be brought back to life bc fate realizes if they died for real then they would need to find someone else to fuck over. those two are like fates favorite barbie dolls.

apologies if this post is going to seem all over the place, just bear with me. i don’t even know if you’re going to see this BUT it’s okay bc i need to get this out my system 😭.

starting off — god, imagine the chaos that will ensue when megumi tells nobara & yuuji about his very tragic history with the zenins. but like he wouldn’t even tell them straight up, he’ll just make a little deadpan joke (my sarcastic, sassy son) & the others would look at him like : ??? wtf do you mean by that sea urchin head???

like imagine itafushikugi going shopping for like traditional japanese clothes for a little festival or some shit (megumi was dragged by his spikes to come along) & nobara is having the time of her life finding outfits for her & the boys. like it got to the point where she’s dressing them herself & she shows megumi an outfit that looked similar to the robe he was forced to wear bc of the zenin (it’s obviously not the same) & megumi just refuses to wear a robe with similar color patterns to the zenin robe.

megumi: that looks like the outfit the zenin forced me to wear. i wonder what happened to it, cause the last thing i know, i got blood all over it. so as the second member of the zenin hate club, im not wearing that….

megumi: wait that blue one looks decent. i’m going to try it on.

nobara:

yuuji:

nobara: …did he really leave without giving us the “ getting blood on a zenin’s robe” story?

imagine maki complaining about naoya in front of the first years, & maki just brings up naoya’s onesided beef with megumi & her stories of how naoya was so petty back in his childhood made him remember who tf naoya is (megs have selective memory, it’s okay)

megumi: ugh, he was so annoying. i remember when he came to my middle school back when gojo was busy dealing with the aftermath of his evil ex boyfriend evil plan & he basically kidnapped me. i was stuck in a car with that man for 40 minutes..you would hate him nobara.

maki: yeah you would hate him nobara.

yuuji: i’m sorry he kidnapped you??? why did you say that so casually?

nobara: fuck that. megumi is a disney princess, we know this already. BUT we’re just gonna gloss over gojo had an evil boyfriend?

& imagine when megumi finally tells his friends about the zenin clan was when yuuji just came back from the dead & they were asking how tf that’s possible. & somewhere in that conversation megumi just let it slip that his heart stopped beating once & itakugi looks at him in silence:

megumi: yeah the zenin clan basically forced me to exorcise some curses & complete a ritual to get a snake — that snake fucking bit me. it was my least favorite. but yeah i basically died. then yuuta brought me back. then i was blind for a good minute.

nobara, yuuji, & even sukuna:

megumi: it was a terrible time for me. gojo was even more clingier & protective. it got to a point where he started treating me like i was 6 again… reading me bedtime stories, singing me lullabies & describing the pictures in the stories since i was…yknow blind.

cue itakugi & even sukuna wanting to burn down the zenin but ofc they can’t do that…so they settle for pulling pranks on the members & traumatizing them ofc.

IM ALSO imagining how funny it would be for yuuji to be jealous of yuuta. like bro is basically living yuuji’s fantasy world. i’m giggling at the idea of yuuji fighting for his life to be either megumi favorite or nanami’s favorite.

you also opened my eye to the potential of maki & tsumiki… like i also like to imagine that in a happier world, they would understand each other on such a deep level. but they would also find parts of the other that they wished they had. but on a happier note i like to imagine that megumi would suffer whenever it was brought up that his aunt is basically dating his step sister. like maki would be a menace to megumi. every little thing he do? maki is texting tsumiki in a corner.

maki watching itafushi cook together in the kitchen: i can’t believe megumi has a boyfriend. it’s so cute that he thinks that he can hide this from me. lemme go snitch to tsumiki.

maki listening to megumi describe his fight with sukuna, a cursed spirit who apparently has a stripping problem: oh my god. megumi is truly yuuta’s boy. they both got cursed spirits obsessed with them…i need to tell tsumiki.

maki to megumi after witnessing his suicidal tendencies: don’t make me tell tsumiki.

i honestly love your story. the way you added so much more to megumi childhood is beautiful. it just make soooo much sense. but also your characterization of gojo is so precious to me. i’m waiting for gojo to go apeshit on the zenin. i’m also giggling in anticipation at gojo finding out about yuuta attachment to megumi. i like to imagine him to be kind of worried about it actually, bc that’s not fucking healthy. but i imagine him getting used to it since megumi will have a protector in the form of yuuta & his power of love.

i’m also curious to see mai’s role in this story since.

*sighs in disappointment at gege writing choices*

since she had a crush on megumi…yeah. but imma just interpret that as she wants to be his family. it keeps me sane

i also wanted to ask if there’s a chance that you would write a megumi POV of what happened in the zenin clan? ofc i would understand if you wouldn’t since it leaves a much more ominous feeling to the events. plus yuuta running commentary is a good mix of angst & humor so ofc i understand.

Yuuji: man fushiguro almost checks the boxes for a Disney princess. except he was never kidnapped or enslaved

Megumi, sold to the Zenin clan, who later kidnapped him: *sweating*

Nobara and Yuuji would be the co-vice presidents of the "fuck the Zenin clan" club if they knew what happened. They would be the presidents but yuuta and maki are already in a death match for the position and they're trying to avoid the bloodshed. they are not allowed to be treasurer because neither of them know how money works.

megumi is unaware that a formal club has been formed.

Megumi is suffering SO HARD in any world where maki and tsumiki are together. they won't stop ganging up on him when it comes to his love life and general wellbeing and holding hands where he has to see it. maki lectures him about his suicidal tendencies in the field, holds up one finger, calls tsumiki, and lets her pick up where she left off. maki tries to talk to him about relationships one (1) time and he tries to drown himself.

see i'm pretty open to writing a megumi POV but it, like most of my stories, falls in this nebulous category of "if i have the time." like, i've thought about writing megumi's pov before, there's a lot of stuff that happened that exists as like, background knowledge for me that will never make it through yuuta's pov because it doesn't make sense for yuuta to find out about it. It would be very tonally different, but if i did write it, it would be a different work entirely and i'd be making sea glass gardens into a series.

i'm eternally tempted by the siren call of making my works into a series. If i did it with sea glass gardens, i would want to add a one shot of Megumi's pov during the time leading up to sea glass gardens and a short multi-chapter of the gojo, nanami, shoko teen parenting trio. If I have the time, it will exist; if i don't, it won't.

#ironically the one thing that WOULD endear yuuta to yuuji is finding out about all of this #yuuji would instantly love him for all he did for Their Boy. it's the only way i see megumi actually fessing up to what happened #i think megumi's just someone who's really private and uncomfortable with people knowing a lot about him and he would try to hide this from #itakugi for as long as he could. it probably eats at him that the second years all saw him like this. i think he just hates feeling vulnera #megumi gives him the /extremely/ abridged version of events to get yuuji and nobara to chill about yuuta and how he acts (yuuji is convince #that there's no one who could be that perfect nobara keeps looking for homosexual explanations) and they instantly veer hard into finding #out everything there is to know about the zenin and how to hurt them and also yuuta's like. beloved in their eyes. megumi is their boy.#they love their boy. yuuta saved their boy. ergo they love yuuta now. it's simple math.#tonal shift is a huge sort of struggle with me as a writer just because i change my styles with every narrator #which is why it's kind of hard to flip between works if the tone is too different. i was trying to juggle sea glass gardens and toy rosarie #and i was just internally screaming b/c yuuta and jack could NOT be more different with narration styles and i was like 'fuckkkkkkkkk'#with yuuta i structure sentences with a lot of 'space' in them. i don't have a better word for it i'm not actually trained in writing so #it's all just whatever shit i made up along the way i have no officially terms. anyway. Yuuta's sentences are structured to have this sort #of detached distance between the actual message and the start of the sentence. So we end up with a lot of sentences that start w/ structure #like “yuuta thinks” and Yuuta feels“ b/c I think of yuuta as a very detached person because of how he lived. it's a survival mechanism.#a lot of the meat of what he feels has to come in almost absentmindedly. So you end up with Yuuta's suicide scene and losing the knife and #him having a line like “He swears he never meant any of the bad things he did” and the fact that he thinks his own survival is a bad thing #/he's/ to blame for is almost backdoor'd in as a given premise. it's assumed. it's not even the point of the sentence. he's been living wit #jack murdock meanwhile is an intensively retrospective character that's meant to make you almost feel claustrophobic from how “close” his #narration style is. a lot of the actual message is conveyed through imagined scenarios and emotional recollection. he's a character steeped #in regret who has been torturing himself with it for years. yuuta's survival mechanism is isolation but jacks been yearning to get back wha #he lost for so long and dreaming of it that he's steeped in really vivid internal imaginings.#with jack you have multipage lamentations remembering his son buying cereal with him but yuuta drops the fact that his parents stopped #loving him at some point and it's not even the most important thing in the sentence. it's included as a qualifier because yuuta has accepte #so much of the bad things that happened to him when he shouldn't have whereas jack hasn't accepted ANYTHING that happened.#Yuuta uses a lot of very clean cut grammatically correct narration and jacks is riddled with a bunch of “ain't's” and grammatical errors.#he has an accent for lack of a better term. so you end up w/ two characters who convey information in different ways prioritize different #info in their sentences use different sentence structures etc. so megumi would have a /very different/ style and tone from yuutas that woul #sort of shape any fic that came through him because all of my fics are primarily shaped through the narrator's voice. it's also why I set #kind of hard lines about whether a fic can have any narrator or just specific narrators b/c it determines the whole tone.

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