God give me courage to show you, you are not alone...
Killian Donnelly and Lucy St Louis as The Phantom and Christine
For @meilas
@lasagnatrades master
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“Four disappearances, all students from the same college... and the police found nothing. Perhaps we should go undercover...”
@onabikaa sent me a message asking for more stuff on my “cult in a boarding school” idea! I was considering making a full post for it and your ask finally pushed me over to do it.
Story details under the Read More! This is already a long post. There’s some pretty dark themes so please let me know if you wish me to tag anything, cw for mentions of death, religion and cults:
This is one of the first cases Chang helps out with since coming over to Belgium. Four students from the same Catholic boy’s college go missing and the police are seemingly reluctant to investigate. They enrol into the school under false names to go undercover. Haddock has a lot of fun mocking the weird upper class culture that looked down upon him before he became wealthy, posing as their aristocratic father.
Tintin initially finds it easy to blend in, as this school is very similar to the one he attended as a child. However, these similarities start bringing back some deep childhood and religious traumas, which he first tries to push aside to focus on the case.
Chang immediately stands out, being one of the only non white students. He is quickly targeted. Tintin stands up for him, quickly leading to the school separating them.
The school tries to drive a wedge between them. Despite the school’s efforts they manage to meet at night, exchanging new information and making plans. With Chang’s encouragement, Tintin starts to open up about his own school trauma and touches on his past.
Chang later discovers documents detailing sales of precious metals - he is caught and captured by some students, who are all secretly a part of a cult. The cult is headed by the school administration who are exploiting their labour to mine metals in the deposits that were discovered around the school grounds.
I had the idea that the cult is broken up through empathy and compassion, leading to the surviving boys working together to escape the underground mine and reporting the school administration. I wanted to explore stuff like power structures and how they are maintained - basically I was thinking this would be a situation Tintin can’t punch his way out of, and a way to showcase Chang’s strengths as a character.
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