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coldmail750 · 1 year

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In the continuing saga of me rambling about Beastars - having rambled at length now about four carnivore character arcs, I'd like to talk a bit about an herbivore character arc, one that is one of my favorite arcs in the series, and one that gets done incredibly dirty by how the series ends:

Louis's.

I'll Never Forgive Chapter 194

or, the Ignominious Death of One of Beastars's Best Character Arcs

So at the end of part two of the carnivore parallels essay, I summarized my thoughts on the deeply dysfunctional societal dynamic in Beastars:

...this carnivore-herbivore societal arrangement, as it stands, works for nobody. Herbivores live their lives in constant fear and regularly face either infantilization or objectification, carnivores live with constant self-loathing either for being carnivores or for not being carnivore enough, and hybrids get all the downsides of both with the upsides of neither.

In the same way that Paru uses Legoshi, Bill, Riz, and Ibuki to explore what it's like to live in the society of Beastars as a carnivore, Paru uses Louis to explore what it's like to live in this society as an herbivore - but, given Louis's backstory, he's also got a lot going on that's specific to him (in comparison to characters like Haru and Sebun, from whom we get a picture of slightly more standard herbivore life).

For the purposes of this essay, we're going to be focusing more on that Louis-specific stuff, but we will come back to the broader societal dynamics, because that is still an integral part.

So what is Louis's arc, then?

Louis's character progression, simply put, is him growing more confident with 1) not following the course laid out for him and 2) doing things that society does not approve of.

See, there's a fundamental clash going on between Louis's personality and Louis's situation. On the one hand, Louis is a very strong-willed character. He knows what he wants, is absolutely determined to get it, and has very little patience for anyone who would stand in his way. Indeed, Louis's insistence on living his life on his own terms is a hill he is literally willing to die on, which is part of why Oguma adopts him:

But Louis has never actually been able to live his life on his own terms. As a young child, he lived his life on the terms of the black market, as a piece of meat to be sold and consumed for profit. Adoption by Oguma meant salvation from the black market, but it didn't free Louis from living his life on someone else's terms; it simply changed the "someone else" from the black market to Oguma.

Oguma adopted Louis for a very explicit reason - he needed a respectable heir, another deer that he could pass off as his son who would make a respectable name for himself in school, graduate from a prestigious university, marry someone of the same species and the opposite gender, and inherit the Horns Conglomerate. That is the course that was laid out for Louis the moment Oguma adopted him, the terms by which he has lived ever since.

We can add to that the general Beastars societal pressures - that they will marry within their species, for example - and the societal pressures upon herbivores - that herbivores will hate and fear carnivores, for example - that Louis no doubt was exposed to regularly throughout childhood simply by virtue of living in the world that he did. These societal pressures are largely in line with - or, at the minimum, not in opposition to - the course laid out for him by Oguma, so we can group them together.

So what happens, then, if what Louis wants clashes with the course laid out for him by Oguma and by society? The way the answer to that question changes is how Louis's arc progresses.

At the beginning of the story... okay, to talk about where Louis stands at the beginning of the story, we have to talk about Adler.

Watching how Louis plays the character of Adler tells us how Louis approaches a role. When early manga Louis is playing the role of Adler, he gets really into it; he is constantly practicing, he drags Odie to an illicit nighttime practice to make sure that Odie's performance doesn't drag him down, he memorizes the lines so thoroughly that he can recall them months later, and - crucially - he insists on attempting to play the role even at the expense of his own health, as we see when he attempts to play the role of Adler even on a broken leg, only stopping when he is literally no longer able to due to his injury.

Louis, as it happens, is constantly playing a role - the role of the dutiful, obedient son who does what is expected of him by society and his father - and, at the start of the story, he is invested in playing that role just as much as he is invested in playing the role of Adler the Grim Reaper.

But that dutiful, obedient son is just as much a fictional character as Adler, and even at the very beginning of Beastars, the role is beginning to slip a little when what Louis wants contradicts what's expected of him.

The proof of this is his relationship with Haru. Given the choice between the expectation of his arranged same-species marriage with Azuki and pursuing an interspecies relationship with a rabbit, Louis chooses the latter - but he obsessively tries to cover this up, keep it on the down-low, to give the impression that he's chosen the former. He wants to make it look like he's playing the dutiful son... but he's already kind of unsure about it.

This is symbolically alluded to by the fact that, when Haru and Louis first met, Louis had shed his antlers. Antlers are symbol of a male deer's virility, it's shameful to be seen without them (which is why Louis is trying to hide in the gardening club to begin with), and Louis acts embarrassed when he realizes he's about to kiss Haru while without antlers. But it also works as a way of symbolizing that Louis is clandestinely rejecting the course laid out for him by his father, the course that has him marrying Azuki and taking over the Horns Conglomerate; Louis is literally hiding the fact that he is without Horns.

The next time he's confronted with this choice between what's expected of him and what he wants is when Haru is kidnapped by the Shishigumi. He can either leave Haru to die, which will lead to the mayor erasing the records linking him to the black market, and continue with the plan that he will become Cherryton's beastar, marry Azuki, and succeed his father at Horns; or he can try to save her, at risk to his own life.

Louis tries to force himself to pick the first option. As he tried to play Adler until it broke him physically, he tries to play the obedient son until it breaks him mentally. He snaps, and - like the character Adler - decides that he'll prove his love through death; he charges into the Shishigumi's headquarters, murders their boss, and tells the underlings to kill him, giving Legoshi and Haru the chance to escape.

Of course, the Shishigumi does not kill Louis here, and this marks a turning point for his character development. Before Haru's kidnapping, Louis consistently attempts to pick "what's expected of me", and if he picks "what I want", he does so as furtively as possible.

After Haru's kidnapping, but before the final climax of his arc, Louis consistently picks "what I want" over "what's expected of me", and does so in front of more and more people... but still tries to not draw too much attention to it, justifying his actions only when necessary, and sometimes still telling himself and those around him "I'm definitely doing what's expected of me still, you must be mistaken".

So throughout the bulk of the manga - everything between the fight with the Shishigumi and the fight with Melon - that's Louis's modus operandi. When given a choice between the expectation that he will seek to return to normal society and his preordained course as soon as possible, or staying on as the head of the Shishigumi, he picks the latter; but the only person he tells about this is Oguma, as part of a failed effort to break his familial ties with his father, with Legoshi discovering it by chance and Juno deducing it herself.

When given a choice between sticking to this prejudice against carnivores which herbivores are expected to have, and abandoning it, realizing that he's come to deeply care about and even love the carnivores in his life, Louis picks the latter; he allows Legoshi to eat his leg, a transgression of this world's ultimate societal taboo, to help Legoshi defeat Riz. This stands as a total rejection of Louis's previous bigotry, the overcoming of his childhood trauma, and an expression of just how close he and Legoshi have become - but he keeps it and his reasons for doing it relatively quiet, and, in the same vein, usually hides the fact that he has a prosthesis afterwards.

When given a choice between accepting the title of Cherryton beastar, the sort of high school honor that would look great on the resume of a future Horns CEO, the accolade everyone has been expecting him to win, and refusing it because Legoshi deserves just as much credit but definitely won't get it, Louis picks the latter, and only explains why to Cherryton's headmaster.

The example of this change in habit that is the easiest for comparison, however, is his relationship with Juno.

While Louis's relationship with Legoshi is one based in their having been forged in the same flames, that knowledge that they can rely on each other when they need it, trust the other with their secrets and their lives unconditionally, Louis's relationship with Juno is wrapped up in an... almost envy? for her willingness to pursue his own wants - as is his relationship with Haru.

Haru and Juno are both open about their own wants, as opposed to what society expects of them, in a way that Louis feels he cannot be. Haru knows that being promiscuous is societally vilified, will result in her being shunned and bullied, but she does it anyways, because sex is the only time she's treated like a person, not an object, and she wants to be treated like a person. Juno knows that her entering a different-species relationship with a deer would be societally frowned upon, openly wrestles with this in front of Louis, and ultimately ends up angrily shouting that she loves a deer live on national television.

Louis wants to be able to openly wrestle against societal expectation and do what he wants, consequences be damned, like Haru and Juno do - and he does a little, letting Haru see him without his horns and letting Juno see his prosthesis - but he feels like he can't truly do it because of the expectations imposed on him by Oguma.

The specific contrast between Louis's relationship with Haru and Louis's relationship with Juno that I want to talk about, however, is how and where Louis conducts his relationship with each. Louis's relationship with Haru was something he conducted almost entirely beyond closed doors - a furtive thing that they shared only in places where they thought no one could see them, the quiet dark of the gardening club shed or a space hidden between tents at the Meteor Festival.

Louis's relationship with Juno is something he has in bubble tea cafes, at bus stops, in school hallways, on the metro - in public.

Of course, he insists to himself and to her that it's nothing, he's just indulging her. But no matter how much he tries to convince Juno and himself that nothing is going on here, Louis has once again chosen his personal feelings over the course his father laid out for him, and he's getting increasingly comfortable with doing so openly.

So that's where Louis stands for the bulk of the manga; he's increasingly comfortable with openly doing what he wants rather than what is expected of him, but still feels bound enough by what is expected of him that he avoids calling attention to this fact and still attempts to pretend, at times, that nothing is happening and he's going to precisely follow the course his father laid out for him.

Louis's relationship with Juno (and his relationships with Haru and Legoshi) all stand in contrast to his "relationship" with Azuki, his preordained fiancée.

While Haru and Juno demonstrate a willingness to wrestle against and ignore societal pressures that Louis secretly admires, and Legoshi is overcoming his own internalization of societal messaging in part through his relationship with Louis, Azuki embodies the outside pressures upon Louis. She is same-species, opposite-sex, also of the upper crust, the person who Oguma has arranged Louis to marry.

But there is no relationship, really, between Louis and Azuki. They have met each other a handful of times. Their interactions are stilted and awkward; neither much cares about the other beyond the fact that they are obliged to marry, because their marriage represents a corporate merger between Horns and Azuki's father's corporation. When Louis tries to force himself to become intimate with her, he cannot stop thinking about all the carnivores he actually cares about, and, ultimately, vomits.

The contrast is clear. While Louis's relationships with Haru, Legoshi, and Juno aren't exactly smooth sailing - they're all working through a lot, after all - it's clear that they are actual relationships with people Louis actually cares about, as opposed to his hollow, artificial construct of an outside obligation with Azuki.

There's one more event before the Melon fight that I'd like to talk about, though, and that's Oguma's death.

See, Oguma knows that Louis's "dutiful son" role is an act. Louis gets angry at Oguma over the fact that Oguma never attended any of Louis's plays not over the literal plays themselves but because he is constantly performing a role for someone who is never there to watch the performance; Oguma outright tells Louis that the reason he never went to one of his shows is because he wants Louis's wedding to Azuki to be the first time he sees Louis putting on his best performance.

It seems reasonable to assume that Oguma knows that this is an act because he has spent his entire life putting on the same act. That, once upon a time, Oguma's father laid the same path for him - make a respectable name for himself in school, graduate from a prestigious university, marry someone of the same species and the opposite gender, and inherit the Horns Conglomerate - and that Oguma devoted himself to it, played the part exactly as he was told to.

Since then, as Oguma tells us, he has devoted every aspect of his life to the Horns Conglomerate. He has treated every choice he's made as a business decision, evaluated every relationship he has ever made based on whether or not it was profitable for Horns - and was good at it, the company reaping the profits of his diligence and his devotion.

But now, on his deathbed, he's realized something.

There's one relationship he can't quantify.

Oguma was not a good father to Louis. He was near-totally absent from his son's life, interacting with him once a week; he imposed heavy expectations on Louis, expectations which Louis has spent the entirety of the manga suffering because of. The only halfway-decent father figure Louis had in his life was a lion in the yakuza.

But Oguma did love Louis - felt unable to express it, because of the expectations that he inherited from his father and passed on to his son, but did love him. And now, on his deathbed, Oguma realizes that this is his last chance to tell Louis that a real, loving relationship is more valuable than any business relationship, to the point of being beyond quantification, to tell his son that he loves him.

And as his final act upon the earth, Oguma says "let me do the most unprofitable thing", and hugs Louis.

When Oguma adopted Louis, he freed him from the black market, but he didn't free Louis from having to live his life on someone else's terms. On his deathbed, Oguma rights that wrong by telling Louis that love is more precious than profit - that what Louis wants is more important than that path ending at Horns.

With that, we can finally arrive at the climax of Louis's arc - the press conference during the Melon fight.

When Louis gets behind the podium at that press conference, he has to choose between giving a normal boilerplate speech about how business will continue at the Horns Conglomerate with him as CEO, sliding into the role he was raised for from the moment Oguma adopted him; or, he can bring up the black market, breach every societal taboo about meat-eating and carnivore-herbivore relations, and proclaim openly that he cares about deeply about a wolf and that that wolf is in danger.

As with Haru's kidnapping, this is a choice where his previous strategy for dealing with the conflict between what's expected of him and what he wants no longer works. Where Haru's kidnapping put him in a position where he could no longer pretend to pick the former while clandestinely picking the latter, causing him to shift to picking the latter but not drawing attention to it, he now finds himself in a position where, if he's going to do what he wants, he has to draw attention to it. He has to defy his preordained path, explicitly, live on national TV.

And that's exactly what he does.

Louis has seen the harm the expectations imposed by the society of Beastars can do. He has seen how they hurt Haru, Legoshi, Juno, Bill, Ibuki, Riz, his father, himself. He has watched people bend and break under them, felt the pressure to do so himself, struggled against it his entire life.

But now he has stared down those societal norms that cause or perpetuate so much of the suffering the characters of Beastars face, and won. He is no longer ashamed and fearful like the fawn in the cage, nor embittered and hateful like the young stag we met when the series began, but confident and optimistic. He has gone from feeling the need to bend or break under the expectations upon him, expectations that forced him to choose between what was "acceptable" and the people he cared most about, to using his power and his influence to help change what society expects.

This - Louis's total rejection of the path laid out for him in favor of carving a new path, a better path, alongside the people he cares about - is his great triumph, the culmination of one of the best character arcs I have ever read.

And then comes chapter 194.

Louis, having completed his arc, is given one final choice. He can follow the course laid out for him by his father, have his loveless but societally-approved arranged marriage with Azuki and wholly submit to being the next CEO of the Horns Conglomerate; or he can reject that, "do the most unprofitable thing", and continue his relationships with the people he actually loves.

The manga has very clearly set up Louis and Juno as romantic partners. It's clear that there's a lot going on between Legoshi and Louis, who are incredibly close and whose relationship is a fan favorite. If I'd been writing the manga I would've just made Legoshi, Haru, Louis, and Juno a polycule. If he suddenly declared his love for some random other character he'd never even interacted with before it... would be unsatisfying for a lot of other reasons, but it would still technically kind of fit with his progression as a character, because it would still be him choosing his desires over societal & familial expectations.

The only clearly wrong choice here, the choice which it makes no sense for Louis to make and which cannot be reconciled with his growth as a person, is for him - having been freed from his father's expectations by Oguma on his deathbed, having totally rejected the societal pressures upon him on national television at the culmination of the manga's final battle - to suddenly, inexplicably, for no good reason, throw all of his character development out of the window and cave to marrying Azuki.

siiiiiiiiigggggghhhhhhhhhh

The bleakness of this ending is amplified even more by a detail in the following chapter, where Haru tells Legoshi that she got a very short call from Louis, and it becomes clear that Louis hasn't just broken up with Juno to marry Azuki, he's stopped talking with Legoshi and is barely contacting Haru. Louis, whose entire arc has been about him learning to choose his own wants and the people he cares about over the path demanded of him by society, is now inexplicably cutting every person he cares about out of his life in the name of caving to societal pressure.

Look, I have a lot of respect for Paru Itagaki. She wrote the entirety of the character arc that I've spent the past god-knows-how-many paragraphs raving about, this wonderful narrative of a character who gets introduced as an asshole rich kid but becomes incredibly complex, compelling, and sympathetic, and did it all while working under a grueling schedule. But her decision to end Louis's arc like this is baffling and terrible all at once, and it still drives me up the wall two years later.

This is not to say she doesn't try to make it make sense. Louis says that he needs to marry Azuki because he needs to stay on as Horns CEO, and he needs to stay on as Horns CEO so that he can buy the Shishigumi a way out of prison and into his employ.

But that justification doesn't work because of a big piece of foreshadowing that, because of what happens to Louis's arc, ends up going nowhere: the whole "beastars" thing.

Paru Itagaki does a lot to foreshadow the idea that Louis and Legoshi are going to become co-beastars. After Louis refuses to become Cherryton beastar because Legoshi won't get any credit, headmaster Gon turns to Cherryton's deputy headmaster and tells him that it's a real shame that those two won't be a model for society to look to.

Shortly after that, we're introduced to Yahya, the sublime beastar, and to Gosha, Legoshi's grandfather. Yahya and Gosha just so happen to deeply resemble who Louis and Legoshi were at the start of their arcs - an herbivore who deeply hates carnivores because of an incident in their past, and a carnivore who allows himself to be feared and hated by those around him - and just so happen to have once dreamed of becoming co-beastars, before they went their separate ways.

Not long after that, we're told that Yahya is beginning to get too old to be sublime beastar, that his body is declining and he will soon no longer have the physical acuity or resistance to do the job he does, and that even Yahya is beginning to have to admit this to himself - in short, that soon someone will need to replace him.

We get an entire chapter about how Yahya once used his sublime beastar powers to get the 500 Cornered Rats - a gang of criminals who were captured by the police - released from prison so that he could take them on as his subordinates, which is important inasmuch as it establishes that Yahya can pardon Legoshi's conviction for predation and thereby allow him to marry Haru, but also clearly establishes that there is precedent for a sublime beastar pardoning and then hiring a criminal gang - something that would be really useful for Louis if, hypothetically speaking, the Shishigumi were captured and imprisoned.

Then, in chapter 158, Legoshi and Louis go to the black market, to the tower where Louis was once imprisoned, to the balcony where Oguma once told Louis he would change the world, and Legoshi proposes to Louis that the two of them should work together to change the world, that the two of them could be the beastars.

Louis even responds to this by making a big show of saying that Legoshi is being ridiculous, he can't just make up the title of the manga we're reading!

All of this foreshadowing is pointing so clearly in one direction. Everything that Paru has set up is absolutely screaming that Yahya will wipe Legoshi's conviction and then name Louis and Legoshi as his successors, the beastars; that Louis and Legoshi will build on the previous generation and succeed where they failed, with each other - and Haru and Juno - by their sides, standing as a new, healthier example of how carnivores and herbivores can live, work, and love truthfully, honestly, in solidarity alongside each other.

Louis, then, can use his sublime beastar powers to free and hire the Shishigumi, and break his betrothal to Azuki while giving her Horns - the only part of Louis she was actually interested in - since he's too busy to run it anyways.

It works as a culmination of the character progressions involved; it fulfills all of this brilliant foreshadowing Paru has set up; it makes the name of the manga work, because it establishes Beastars as having been the story of how Louis and Legoshi became the beastars. Everything ties together so neatly, so perfectly, so brilliantly.

Instead, all of this foreshadowing goes... nowhere. Legoshi gets an ending that's perfectly adequate but unexceptional, Louis's arc gets thrown in the trash, Yahya resigns from being sublime beastar but then keeps doing the work even though it was age interfering with his ability to work that was the issue anyways, all the stuff about "beastars" leads to nothing, and the manga just kind of fizzles out.

Again, Itagaki tries to offer some justification for this decision, putting the words into Louis's mouth:

I don't find this argument, this claim that Louis remaining close to the people he cares about most and becoming co-beastar with Legoshi would be too much like the plot of an overly saccharine movie, to be convincing.

Firstly, Louis and Legoshi becoming beastars with Haru and Juno at their side would not be a magic fix to all of the societal issues that Paru Itagaki demonstrated through her characters throughout the course of Beastars. Systemic change is slow, difficult progress, and it is never guaranteed that gains made will be kept. While Louis and Legoshi becoming beastars would represent the potential emergence of a new paradigm and the hope that change is possible, it wouldn't represent the issues they struggled to overcome being magically resolved overnight; but I don't think anyone unsatisfied with how Beastars ended is pretending that it would.

Secondly, even if Louis and Legoshi becoming beastars did magically fix all of the societal issues in Beastars going forward (which, again, it wouldn't and shouldn't, but just for the sake of argument), it wouldn't preclude the ending being bittersweet, because for a lot of characters, it's too late. It's too late entirely for Tem, for Ibuki, for Toki and Leano. Melon, psychologically, has been broken beyond repair; Riz will spend years in prison for what he did; Gosha and Yahya, once fast friends, spent thirty years not speaking to each other that they can't get back; Louis lost his childhood and Oguma lost the chance to have a proper relationship with his son.

Even if everything was magically fixed, the people who were hurt would still bear the scars - and I think that's plenty of bitter to balance out the sweet.

So there we have it. Paru Itagaki gave Louis one of the best damn character arcs I'd ever read, one that is incredibly layered and compelling, executed it masterfully from its inception to the final climax of the work, and then fumbled it in the final chapters, throwing out her own foreshadowing and leaving us with an ending that was a mixed bag on the whole and that, for Louis specifically, was outright terrible.

I guess that's why I'm still not over it, two years later, even though Beastars isn't even my most recent furry fixation anymore. It's agonizing to see something that was so enthralling and compelling get obliterated at the last possible moment, to think about what could have been, and to have the knowledge of what it ended up being looming over you every time you come back to the work.

I still love Beastars. But the way that Louis's arc ends, and the way the entire ending of the series got weakened to make his arc end that way... that's something I think I'll always be at least a little bit bitter about.

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a-little-ray-of-fantasy · 3 months

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Sir Pentious' stim: fixing his bowtie.

#This snek is full of tism and that's the truth!#Vivziepop #Hazbin Hotel #Sir Pentious #My Gifs #My Gif Set #Gif Set #Personal Rambles #Fave Character #Comfort Character #Autism #Stimming #Stim

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thesmollestsnek · 11 months

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Death echoes

So a while ago, i found this dp x dc post that had a really interesting lore headcanon for Danny’s ghostly wail. Idk if I’ll be able to find it again, I’ll link it here if I do, but essentially it posited that every ghost has something called a “death echo”, which is an ability unique to them based heavily on their deaths. These echoes are the most powerful move in a ghost’s moveset, but they’re also extremely volatile and draining, typically damaging the ghost in some way when used, with Danny’s being his Wail because he died screaming. The original post then went on to some really cool halfa!Jason ideas based on these death echoes, but for this lil snippet with an extremely long intro I’d like to focus on Danny a bit more.

Edit: Apparently I may have extrapolated a lot of the actual lore behind these death echos myself? The inspiration post was a lot longer in my memories. Or I might've mushed multiple posts into one mental box and then forgot lol. So a lot of the actual detail from this point on is seemingly mostly original material? I think? Idk man, sometimes my brain spits out information without giving me any clues as to where it got that information. Anyway, this post got kinda long and since I'm... decently sure this is where I shifted from summarizing @ailithnight's post to writing all my own thoughts I figured here would be a good place to throw the cut lol.

So! with all of the context-for-the-context out of the way, let’s move on to the actual context for what I’m writing cause I can’t be bothered with writing an intro XD

Essentially, this is an au where Danny is an established member of the Justice League, or maybe one of the teen hero teams? I’m a slut for eternal teenager Danny, but maybe he’s enough of a powerhouse to be on the main team despite him both looking and acting like the dumbass fourteen year old he died as. Either way, he’s on a League/League-sanctioned mission and things go bad. Like, everyone-almost-dies bad. And so as a final desperation attack, Danny uses his Wail, a power he’s never told anyone on the league he even has. And it works, and they make it out, but after the fact everyone has. Questions. And because in this au death echoes are deeply personal, Danny dodges those questions, but the league coughbatmancough isn’t satisfied with that. So they push for answers. Answers Danny’s not willing to give, because. In my mind death echoes aren’t just based on how a person died, but also their experience of that death. What their last thoughts were. When Danny died the only thing that he could process beyond just an all-encompassing painpainpainpainpain was the sound of someone screaming. His screaming. And so his death echo is the sound of a fourteen year old child screaming in deathly pain and terror weaponized, which definitely gave the league Even More Questions than they would’ve had already. Which finally brings us to the actual snippet, which is a conversation between John Constantine, who was brought in for his experience with the supernatural once it became clear Danny wasn’t going to talk, and Danny himself.

~~~~~~~

“So, kid. Batsy tells me you’ve been hiding some of your abilities, wanna tell me what's up with that? Call it an occultist's intuition, but somethin’ tells me you’re not just being stubborn for the hell of it.”

“It’s... complicated. And not anyone’s business, either!”

“Kid...”

“Why does it even matter?! It’s not something I want to or am even able to do on a regular basis! I saved the mission, can’t they just accept that and move on???”

Sighing, Constantine reached up to start massaging his brow. “Kid, you and I both know that ain’t gonna be enough. Now I know that some things are better left alone, but the rest of these idiots? They can’t accept that, Batsy especially. That man’s never left bloody well enough alone in his life”

He looked up just in time to see the otherworldly teen shrink into himself, looking every bit the child he was. “I know but... why? Why do they need to keep asking questions? And why do they only ask the ones that hurt to answer?”

A sharp glance. “The fuck kinda questions are they asking? Batman was speaking in more grunt than word, so I didn’t really catch all the details of what this power you’re supposedly hiding even is.”

Phantom shrinks even more into himself at that, and responds in a voice so small it’s more sigh than speech. “I... I can scream. And it breaks things and pushes people back. But it, it sounds. Bad. And it brings up bad memories and I don’t like to do it or listentoitoreventhinkaboutitandtheywon’tletmeforgetand-”

“Breathe kid. I know you don’t need to but just take a deep breath with me. Don’t you go getting lost in your own head on me now., Constantine reassured the kid automatically, the sheer hopelessness prompting action long before the words themselves could be understood. Then the rest of him caught up, and he had to pause. Looked up at the kid, saw just how distressed he was. A picture was starting to form in the back of his head, and Constantine didn’t like what he saw one bit. A last-resort power that the normally open Phantom was strangely reticent about. A scream so horrible sounding the rest of the league would not to stop asking questions about it. Terrible memories to match said scream. And one truly miserable child who couldn’t bear to even think about any of it.

“Phantom... is that your Echo? Screaming?”

A miserable nod is his only response, the tears that had been welling up in the kid’s eyes finally starting to fall. Cursing softly to himself, Constantine stood to leave, bracing himself for the Bat’s inevitable questioning. “Well then you just take all the time you need love, and leave the rest to me. I’ll make sure the rest of those idiots know not to ask you about this ever again.” And with that Constantine turned and strode towards the door, leaving the quietly sobbing child to collect himself in privacy.

~~~~~

I had a whole-ass lore dump conversation between Constantine and Batman planned here, explaining how death echoes are deeply personal, and asking about one is a taboo on par with, potentially even worse than, asking a ghost about their death outright. Because they are formed from an amalgamation of how a ghost died, their last thoughts, and their final emotions, in some ways asking a ghost about their Echo is like asking them to describe their death in painstaking detail. But uhhh... inspiration bug left. So yea. Side note, I’d like to apologize if my depiction of Constantine’s accent was Bad, I’m but a lowly USAmerican whose only exposure to British accents is through tv ^-^’

#did some minor edits to fix typos and make things flow better when i went back in to add the hyperlink #that being said dont expect too much i wrote this in a bit of an inspiration frenzy lol #and barely edited it after the fact #the snek rambles #the snek writes #snippit #dp x dc #danny phantom #john constantine #idk wtf else to tag this #dc x dp #dpxdc #dcxdp #crossover

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snickersnek · 3 months

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Kobold Shows

An inspiration particle hit my dumbass brain and generated this Idea™️ which means you have to read this.

They're like a dog show, but dragons (and adventurers) bring their kobold in. You can enter yourself if you want to, but it really helps to have a coach.

There's an Agility course, but also Combat and Trapmaking contests. A crowd favourite is the Hoarding event, where the kobold is let loose to complete a scavenger hunt under time pressure. There's shiny-looking but ultimately worthless decoy loot, cumbersome loot, hard-to-reach loot, so there's all kinds of strategies ranging from "Grab everything and win on quantity", "Appraise items quickly and make few, high-value looting trips," and even "Quickly construct a wheelbarrow to gather loot and a pogo stick to reach high-up loot".

Earplugs are recommended for the "Loudest Yip" event, but don't forget the "Softest Yip", very competitive scene there.

All kindsa kobolds enter the best-in-breed events, fluffbolds, floppabolds, dogbolds, candlebolds, seabolds, chromaticbolds, gembolds..

Dragons looking over and examining the kobolds for their qualities, rating tail length, crest hue, jaw strength.. and oh my word the dragon politics behind the scenes!

#kobold #snek rambling #the crowd goes wild as a fancy show-kobold goes FERAL in the combat events #and all the other events #it's rare for a ribbon to be awarded and the winner doesn't eat it

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lui-the-cute-snek · 10 months

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I have so many thoughts about Noah/Mirage, but most of them revolve around how generally on cybertron same sex couples are a normal thing, but the action on earth takes place in 1990's, where being gay wasn't that widely accepted and stuff so Noah wouldn't have been too like familiar with it, I think he never really gave it much thought, because he was too busy trying to find a job and earn money for his brother, but he knew like general opinion of the public which wasn't too positive, so he probably wouldn't pick up on like Mirage's flirting and stuff because he's not that familiar with the mlm or stuff idk I just think this would is an interesting dynamic, and I think when Noah would finally get it he would panic and need some time to like reevaluate his relationship with Mirage and to what conclusion he'll come up with I will leave to you

Sorry if this is very incoherent, like I said I have many thoughts, and none of them want to be compressed into logical sentences

#if anyone wants to add anything to ny ramblings i would love to hear that!#rotb spoilers #transformers rise of the beasts #rotb mirage #rotb noah #and if i got anything wrong with American queer history sorry but i dont live there #maccadam #transformers #random snek shit #Transformers rotb #rise of the beasts

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vixxelle · 2 months

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Susan the fabulous and her cute snake friend, Banny!

Back on my ‘drawing characters wearing Megan Thee Stallion inspired dresses’ this time with our girl, Susan!

I decided to use that one red ribbon dress Megan wore as inspiration and gave her a sparkly coat with heart glasses to give her a more fancy/fabulous look and added Banny as a snake because I thought it would be cute!

This took like… Three to Four days

Bonus Banny Doodle:

snek

#raye rambles #raye’s doodles #the walten files #susan woodings #susan twf #the walten files fanart #twf banny #banny the bunny #the walten files banny #snek #also if Caroline sees this somehow I’ll explode

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stuckinflightrisinghell · 10 months

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Happy Brightshine Jubilee! Just wanted to show these two off. Jura (Pearlcatcher) is actually a Wind dragon…but well…no one’s going to know if they can’t see her eyes!

Imp doesn’t have a name/character…yet.

#thinking of doing a Biolocke at some point #anyway…really loving the familiar this time round!#Snek!#and flowers!#the gene is…eh #not much of an ancient fan anyway #so probably won’t be buying any #flight rising #dragon share #Pearlcatcher #Imperial #sorry for the rambling in the tags!

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starlights-grasp · 5 months

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Ya know. Maybe there's a reason im making a good omens oc who is Crowley and Aziraphel's child (a present from god to her two favorite children). Definitely isnt to project and imagine being taken care by them. Definitely not

#ramblings of stardust #good omens agere #if anyone wanna see my art for my oc just ask !!#comment or reblog i dont care !#her name is Seraphine which is supposed to mean like heavenly snek or something

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arrowsperpetualcringe · 6 months

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Gonna update my sona to be a gorgon lol

#i wear twists more than i wear puffs or afros #and lil snek guys to rep thet is pretty cool ig #rambling #my art #sketch

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zipstick · 1 year

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why is the trope that snakes are cunning masterminds a thing. they're not they're all stupid. is it because they're ambush predators? is that it? that's a stupid reason

look at this man's face and then look me in the eyes and tell me that there's a single coherent thought bouncing around in that tiny empty skull. you can't. there's nothing

#reptiles #sneks #my ramblings

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isthedogawolfdog · 1 year

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I got the job :)

#I am now officially taking care of like #over a hundred reptiles ranging from snakes to tortoises to iguanas etc #I’m so excited #also baby sneks are too cute #rambles #not wolves #not wolfdogs

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coldmail750 · 1 year

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Back in 2020, when I started really getting into Beastars, I went on a couple long rambles poking at the characters and themes to Discord friends who were also watching the show & reading the manga. While I contemplated posting them here several times, I never really got around to it; at the time I only did things on Tumblr once every few months. Well, since I'm vaguely active on this site at the moment, I figure I might as well finally act on that urge and get at least some of them down here. So here goes, with the first half of the one that started it all:

Carnivore Parallels, part 1 - Legoshi & Bill

There's a particular image of what carnivores, especially large-breed carnivores, should be in the society of Beastars. Large-breed carnivores are expected to be tough, brash, swaggering. They're strong physically and emotionally, they're natural leaders, and they're hungry - in the metaphorical sense of ambition, in the metaphorical sense of sexual appetite, and in the literal sense for meat.

But, at the same time, they are given two very different messages about those expectations.

The first message is that it is natural and right and good for carnivores to be all those things, that they should be proud and embrace them because that's how carnivores are, that's what carnivores are supposed to be, and carnivores who aren't those things are failing somehow.

The second message is the exact opposite - that carnivores being those things makes them bad, dangerous, evil, a threat to those around them, that carnivores should be deeply ashamed of all these things that are supposedly their nature.

At the start of the narrative, Bill and Legoshi are both young adults trying to sort out who they are and what their place in the world is, trying to deal with the fact that they are carnivores and the contradictory messages around that.

Bill, at the start of Beastars, has gone all in on the former message; Legoshi, meanwhile, has gone all in on the latter. But neither course of action is really working out.

At the beginning of his arc, Bill deliberately tries to act with bravado; he plays tough, he's flippant and cocky, he doesn't look before he leaps, he sleeps around, he eats meat, he jumps at the chance to play the leading role in Adler after Louis breaks his leg, so on and so forth. All his life, no doubt, Bill has been told that those things are what define his worth as a carnivore - his strength, his machismo, his ambition - and he has pegged his own self-conception, and self-worth, to being those things.

However, in chapter 48, during the scene with Bill and Aoba (which is unfortunately reduced to a single shot of Bill and Aoba looking sad during the S1 credits in the anime), we get the image that this is not really who Bill is, at least not entirely; that if these actions are a part of him, it's a part he feels obligated to play up severely. He feels the need to act that way, because society tells him he needs to act that way, but he's not comfortable with it. He hates himself for it, even:

That conversation, at least to me, suggests that Bill acts the way he does in the first quarter of the manga because he's has been told his whole life that his worth as a carnivore is based on him being the strongest person in the room, the leader, the tough guy, but at the start of Beastars, Bill isn't any of those things.

Louis is.

So you've got this character who's been told his whole life that these things define his worth as a carnivore, and then he's outdone in a bunch of them by an herbivore, and - since this is early Louis - by this bigoted, domineering, egotistical jerk of an herbivore no less.

As a result, he feels a need to prove himself, both in the sense of "I need to prove myself to those around me" and "I need to prove that I have worth to myself", and he does a bunch of stupid shit without really thinking it through because he's been told that's what carnivores are supposed to do - they're supposed to be tough and strong and brash, right?

Els tells Legoshi that Bill is obviously nervous about playing Adler, but rather than seek help from her, or Aoba and Tao, or anyone else - which would require admitting uncertainty, and by extension weakness - he tries to play tough and dopes himself with rabbit blood. In the manga, he pulls the stunt of attempting to blackmail Louis with Louis’s tragic backstory - a desperate effort to tear asshole deer down a notch. He's obnoxious to Legoshi about Legoshi being a virgin who won't eat meat.

Deep down, Bill hates himself for doing those things, as he admits to Aoba. He feels the need to do those things, to project the image that society expects of him, and he fucking loathes himself for it - a self-loathing he was able to suppress so long as Louis was there to actively twist the knife by, y'know, being early manga Louis, but then Louis runs off to become the godfather, so that stops working.

Chapter 48 also illustrates how deep this sentiment has been burnt in - carnivores are supposed to be strong, and that goes for emotional strength too, and opening up to Aoba about his emotions means he's made himself emotionally vulnerable, so he follows up his admission by immediately trying to play it all off as "gotcha haha totally just joking lol".

As a result, the route that Bill's arc takes over the rest of the manga is him moving away from the idea that his worth as a carnivore, both in his own eyes and the eyes of others, depends on his swagger and his bravado and his appetite, and towards a middle point in between those two messages mentioned earlier; that it is okay for him to not live up to that expectation - that it maybe even makes him more, not less, to do that, that it's okay for him to be gentle, selfless, kind.

By paying for the drinks in chapter 48, Aoba discreetly signals that it's okay for Bill to open up emotionally to him. Els explicitly tells Bill, in chapter 78, that the best side of Bill is when he's looking out for the drama club, for his friends, for her.

We see Bill try to help Tao after the arm incident with Kibi, we see Bill take care of the shock chick, with help from Aoba and some reverse psychology from Pina, and do some legitimate, serious introspection during the process. We see Bill shine as drama club leader amidst the segregation fiasco, when he works to make sure that everyone in the drama club is doing well academically so that the club can stay open and together, and it's times like that when Bill shines the most.

It's slow-going, because it's difficult to overcome something burnt in so deep; Bill still calls himself a "trash cat" who is only good for eating meat in the shock chick chapter; but he does progress along that arc.

Bill's foil in this is Legoshi, who has internalized the exact opposite message - that carnivores are bad and evil for who they are, that they are dangerous, that they should be ashamed of their existence.

Whereas we get basically nothing on Bill's backstory, we get a really clear idea of why Legoshi latched on so hard to the second message - namely, the environment Legoshi was raised in. Gosha is obviously ashamed of the fact that he's venomous and allows himself to be regarded with hatred and suspicion; Leano internalized the message "you're really lucky that you're able to hide the fact that you're a hybrid" to the point where the moment she stopped being able to hide her hybridity she went into total seclusion for years and then committed suicide.

So Legoshi grew up in an environment where the two adult figures in his life were "I deserve to be feared and hated for being venomous" and "I deserve to be feared and hated for being a hybrid", which means it's really not surprising that he ended up ascribing to "I deserve to be feared and hated for being a carnivore" - his upbringing was a recipe for misery and self-loathing. Legoshi believes that he deserves to be hated by others for who he is. As he tells Els:

Or, to use the anime dub's slightly more eloquent phrasing, "feared and hated, that's the story of my life".

Having internalized "these make you a threat", then, Legoshi is deeply ashamed of and actively eschews all the things that Bill, having internalized "these define your worth", seeks out.

He slouches perpetually to hide his height and his strength. He trims his nails obsessively in the hopes of making them look less like claws. He tries to hide his fangs and claws - and freaks out when Louis points out that he's not doing a good job of that. He's on the stage crew, a role which puts him behind the scenes and will bring him no recognition, and actively resents being made to go on stage for the second Adler performance, literally trying to hide behind the whiteboard to avoid getting picked. He's aggressively virginal and he refuses to eat meat.

Legoshi's arc, then, involves him moving towards a more nuanced, middle-ground perspective - in the same general fashion that Bill's does, but in the opposite direction.

Fighting the Shishigumi, fighting Riz, training with Gouhin, working with Yahya, these things teach Legoshi that it is okay for him to fight, to be strong, that his strength is something that can be used for good. To quote Legoshi coming to this realization,

Eating Louis’s leg in order to beat Riz teaches him that it's okay for him to eat meat. His relationship with Haru, extremely slowly, teaches him that it's okay for him to have romantic and sexual desire. He also moves to cast off that "I will lie down and take being feared and hated" mindset - note how Legoshi insists that he and Gosha are going to sit in the front of the restaurant, and Legoshi decides he'd rather fight than take shit from the birds even as Gosha protests that they can just move to the back, in chapter 106.

This is part of why, when Bill and Legoshi meet again around chapter 152, they get along so much better than they did at the start of the story - they're more alike as characters than they were then because they're both moving towards that same middle point.

In summary, Bill and Legoshi are really good foils about the carnivore experience in the world of Beastars, giving depth to both each other and to the setting in which they live.

So that's part one of the carnivore parallels essay, finally out into the world after two years. Part two, which is a little shorter I think, will look at two characters who stand as tragic parallels to these two.

#not art #textpost #snek ramblings #beastars #legoshi beastars #legosi beastars #beastars legoshi #beastars legosi #legoshi #legosi #bill beastars #beastars bill

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