Fanon Brothers Wittebane Week: Day 3

ANGST. It was far harder than it should have been.

Sorry for the different quality of art for day 3. I STRUGGLED too much the whole day before deleting my original idea and starting from scratch.

Some thoughts on Fanon Philips thinking.. "Human is mesurement of everything" would be his words I think. He thinks of himself too high, even if he DID accomplished a lot. Next step is to defeat death itself. Further than that is to become litteral God or something idk

Fanon Week started by @the-epileptic-toh-blog

"...you're fixing up my old tower..."

Aaaanyways, since I am finally done with finals and my contest entry for Webtoon, I decided to finally deal with my Owl House brainrot.

This drawing idea stems from the entire theory that Caleb married a Clawthorne and they had a kid he never got to see. And when I heard that line from Dell in "Elsewhere and Elsewhen" about Eda fixing up her dad's old tower (which later became part of the Owl House) a thought popped up into my head: "What if the tower had not only belonged to Dell and Eda, but also to their ancestors?" Hence a hypothetical design of the house during the Deadwardian era! :D

Caleb is dead but he gets to be there, too. He's a ghost.

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Shadow Puppets AU - Staying in Gravesfield

In this verse Caleb never meant to stay in Gravesfield, in fact he wouldn’t have even stopped there in any other circumstance, it gave him the creeps from the get-go. The only reason they stayed was because Philip had become deathly ill and they needed to stay somewhere if there was any chance he was going to survive. The Town Preacher, Father Josiah, took them in and helped nurse Philip back to health, and the boys stayed due to feeling indebted to him.

At least until Father Josiah showed his true colors, and the boys stayed because of his blackmail, manipulation and grooming. - I actually planned on drawing a wholesome scene from the actual RP, but I guess I just wasn’t done drawing Wittebro angst. Philip’s worst fear is being a burden for his brother, and with a simple question, he let’s Caleb know that he’d rather die than cause him any trouble.

Caleb didn't realize that taking care of his Grimwalkers in the afterlife meant he had to deal with sibling rivalries.

Context because I wanna: Dagger and Isaiah are both 1st Generation Golden Guards, which just means they're from very early on when Belos was still trying to figure out how he was gonna take over the Boiling Isles and mostly just going around making mayhem. Dagger died and went to the afterlife pretty early on, and Isaiah was the next to show up after him. Also, they kind of hate each other. No, they don't want to talk about it.

{au masterpost} {meet dagger} {meet isaiah}

one thing i find interesting about Dana’s words about Caleb and Evelyn from the livestream is how she seems to center events from Evelyn’s perspective (she refers specifically to the "Evelyn and Flapjack" lore when the question prompting the discussion also named Caleb, tho I don't think that's like. A calculated decision, it might just reflect who she views as the most significant characters in the grand scheme of things)

it’s about what Evelyn was doing in gravesfield, why Evelyn liked caleb, how she first presented herself to him. it’s about her family that he married into, the Clawthorne family, blood members like Eda, chosen/adopted members, like King and honorary members, like Luz. That’s who the story really centers around, so it makes sense that when approaching this nugget of lore, they'd tackle it from Evelyn's POV.

But i just find it interesting bc it’s so unlike 90% of the fan content centered around that era. Like most of the things ppl make related to Evelyn and the Wittebros is usually set from one of the brothers perspectives (with a couple of exceptions! @/moonmeg’s comics and @/litfeathers various drabbles and dubs all have a good balance of Evelyn and caleb/philip perspective!). Obviously this is mostly bc we got the Wittebros lore first (all the way back in yesterday's lie) and because we know (marginally) more about them, people have been playing around with them for longer and with more material.

But I'm honestly really interested in Dana's version of the story! Especially considering it seems like Evelyn had much more agency in the story than we give her credit for. She's the one who went to gravesfield, reached out to Caleb, presumably taking either the romantic or platonic initiative and thus setting things in motion. Why? we don't know! Dana says Caleb seemed more reasonable than the rest of the population in gravesfield, that they bonded over flapjack like dog owners over pets, which is all very interesting when we know he was a witch hunter, implies a lot of interesting things about why he was doing that career and what his status in the town social climate might've been like, but that's where fan interpretation comes into play, so I digress.

(also, this is a tangent but I'm a big fan of Dana implying that Evelyn took initiative? We only have huntlow to go off of but generally speaking the show likes to subvert overdone or overly stereotypical m/f romance tropes- while not being too pointed about it and still leaving room for nuance and characterization- and I like the idea that if they had the chance, they would've done that w/ Caleb and Evelyn, with her being the passionate Romeo and him being the more longing, pining-maiden type in the relationship hehehe)

Point to all this being, I think it's very funny how we all got wrapped up in the mystique and intrigue of (Belos' biased, carefully crafted and incomplete) narrative of ~the tragedy of the brothers Wittebane~ bc he was our main source that we failed to consider that Evelyn, who fits the character archetype TOH likes to use as a focal/viewpoint character much more cleanly that either Wittebane (what with being a young woman, a 'weirdo' estranged from her home, a Clawthorne, etc), might've actually been the perspective we should've been looking at things from. Dana's based for this actually

Now that TOH is over, I absolutely love reading through the fanon interpretations of the Wittebros + Evelyn. Poetic irony from a bygone era.

My favourite toh fandom feature is the way they always make up headcanons, opinions , theories or etc, distribute them to make everyone believe it's true and than go and hate everyone who desagrees. And how fast they change their view, when it turned out to be false.

We have so many examples of it:

1. Hcs about Hunter being bi, Willow being pan, Raine being lesbian, Alador being gay or Collector being non-binary. Noone ever confirmed it, but for some reason people are sure it's canon or implied.

2. Luz and Hunter being siblings. It was far before TTT even came out with their siblings. After HP it was the dynamic, "they act just like Blights/Clathornes" , after HM it was "parallels with Wittebros" and "Eda def is gonna adopt Hunter" and now, TTT it's "You're family now" and litteraly nothing has changed.

3. Willow being blasian. Sure, in theory it might be possible, that both Willow's parents are her natural parents since magic and stuff, but we don't know ho in their world it actually works and there is no official answer yet. Now we know only that Willow has features of only one of her fathers and has none of another one. So now we can surely say only that she is asian.

4. The theory of possessed Luz. I honestly never seen people insult others for not believing in it, but everyone tried to impose it and say "that's so obviously" and even tried to give proves. When now we know she wasn't possessed and isn't gonna be.

5. It was very long time ago, but I remember the time everyone was sure Eda and Camila are gonna be canon, cause both of them are Luz's mothers at some point. But now Eda lives Raine and that's most likely that Camila is straight, so it's defenetly not gonna be.

6. Even that era when everyone was hating on Lilith and wished she died. It was hard to find at least someone who wasn't Lilith anti at that time and if you liked her, everyone was gonna hate on you too. But now she is pretty popular and very loveble chatacter. That's ironic that I didn't hate het before, but dislike her now tho.

7. Basicly the way everyone used to hate on Huntlow untill the final of s2. It ship existed before s2b, but there were barely anyone who ships them and people hated those who do cause "it's a non-sence crack ship with a huge age gap". And guess what ship became litteraly the most popular in toh fandom now? I seen it more often then Lumity. Also these Goldric fans. Goldric used to be one of the most popular ships in toh. Their fans attacked Lunter and Hunter. But now it's just a stupid crack ship noone cares about and now Huntlow fans hate Goldric. When litteraly 2/3 of Huntlow fans used to either hate Huntlow and assume it as a proship, or ship Goldric.

8. The same as the last one, but with Willuz and Gaslow.

So what am I getting at? I just hate how hypocritical toh fandom is. They always wrong, but they never admit they were wrong. It's a perfect example of the crowd effect. When the one person spreads a thought and everyone starts believe in it with no reason and continue to spread it on everyone like it's canon. That's really so annoying.

Stupid small theory but here we go

If the Wittebro is actually Phillip/Belos honorary brother?

"HAHAHAHA wait what do you mean you stupid crazy lil guy" is that what you're saying, right? But is that what i think! And i'll show you why

Do you remember the episode "Yesterday's Lie" where Jacob tells the story about 2 brothers from Gravesfield? He recounts that "Gravesfield was a peaceful colony until tragedy struck. Two brothers were lured into an evil realm by a real witch and were never seen again." And obviously, he was talking about the Wittebane brothers whose story is being told in the pictures we saw in Hollow Mind! Take a look.

Gravesfield was founded in 1600, and precisely the same period as the Deadwardian era. In the story told in the paintings, it shows that Phillip and Wittebro were very close and liked to play witches vs witch hunters, and that they were probably influenced by the conflicts of the time. Possibly his village was witch hunters (which may have influenced the fact that Belos is also a witch hunter). BUT the Wittebro seems to have dabbled in magic and especially a witch, which notably displeased Phillip, who felt betrayed by his brother, as they both grew up with those witch hunter mannerisms and customs. I believe that the conflict that Gravesfield was something related about witches, as if I remember correctly, at the beginning of The Owl House Eda said that "a little bit of Bonesborough passes into the Human Realm", which can be deduced that the worlds have been connected before, but they lived in constant conflict.

"Okay, but what about Phillip and Wittebro not being blood brothers?"

And here we go! If I remember correctly, Jacob portrays Phillip and Wittebro as brothers (and they really are alike). But in Hollow Mind, you see they were VERY different. Hair color and structure, eye color, size (and possibly age)... Everything! But still, they were pretty close. It makes me think that initially, they were good friends, but that due to the closeness they ended up developing and sharing a common interest (Living to hunt witches), they decided to become brothers, honorably.

This would even explain why Belos, when Luz asks what a Grimwalker is, he replies that "It's a better version of an old friend of mine", as if he was disregarding the whole history of brotherhood they cultivated after that betrayal. And also by the pictures, you can see how much Wittebro LOVED Belos, even though he was a son of a bitch who eats palismans and even trying to kill him, Wittebro was hesitant, because the one in front of him wasn't just his friend with whom grew up together, but his brother.

Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm right but who knows! I'm obsessed with stories of brothers with sad endings and the idea of ​​them being friends, then brothers, and then enemies made my head spin.

For your gilded family au: where exactly in the time stream are they living? In the present day/Luz’s time or?

In chapter 1, Wittebro explained the time pools/timestream, and they're up at the present (I plan for Darius' mentor being there a couple months before Hollow Mind, so they're right around the beginning of the show at the moment) unable to go any further into the future because that's as far as time as unfolded somehow. What wasn't explained so well is that time passes between the pool's appearances. Say you're in the present, and you hop into a time pool. You spend a year in the past, trying to find another time pool, and when you DO find another time pool back to the present, it's been another year. That's how time passed between when Luz and Lilith jumped in and when they got back after spending a few hours in the Deadwardian era. Time, well, it passes for the time pools just as much as regular things.

Sorry, that was a long explanation for a simple question: Yeah, they're in Luz's time.

*shakes Owl House* give me the entire Philip-Wittebro backstory episode please I still have so many questions.

Namely, like, how the heck they got to the Boiling Isles in the first place and, even more so, how they (presumably) got separated.

Current theory is that it was easier to get between worlds back then - which is to say, not easy at all but at least something one could actually stumble into, as opposed to today where it is nearly impossible and unheard of. Probably something to do with more Titan’s Blood just being around during that era where now its dried up. 

So Philip and Wittebro - who I am just gonna call Caleb now - meet a witch who either intentionally or maybe out of a mistake of their own wound up in new england. Caleb is fascinated, Philip is Not, maybe they have an argument about it. Caleb decides to follow the witch without telling Philip, thinking he’ll be able to pop back into his world again after checking it out.

Except he gets somehow sidetracked - probably nearly gets killed because the Boiling Isles is terrifying - and by the time he goes back to the point of entry it’s gone and he thinks he’s stuck. He is appropriately stricken over the fact that he left his brother behind without warning or explanation, and decides to work on finding a different porta/creating a new portal. 

The witch he followed chooses to stick with him and help him; they grow closer; and as the months of work turn into years they fall in love. Caleb still intends to go home but, much like Luz, he’s found a family here now too. 

Except, way back when, Philip had in fact noticed his brother leaving with that witch and - in true Philip fashion - thought Caleb was being lured in for nefarious things and decides to follow them. However, he followed enough behind that he doesn’t actually know where Caleb went after crossing over and maybe thinks his brother was killed (comes across something of his that he lost, maybe torn and slightly bloody from earlier accidental near death) and is full of vengeful rage about it. 

So both brothers are in the Boiling Isles thinking they’re the only one there for one reason or another, until Philip catches sight of his brother one day. His brother, who is not only alive but appears to be happily settled in this awful place with a pregnant partner - and Philip is furious because not only is Caleb with a witch but it looks very much like Caleb willingly left Philp without a word to be with them. It’s like the worst possible version of Camilla and Luz’s conversation at the end of Yesterday’s Lie. 

(this also plays into my other theory that the Wittebane brothers are not biological siblings but orphans that were raised together. They only had each other as kids and Caleb left him.)

Fanon Brothers Wittebane Week: Day 6

"A Curse of Feathers and Mud, A Betrayal of Blood"

The history were destined to repeat itself fandom though. Lilith was not the first who though that cursing her sibling will be reasonable solution to a problem.

But WHY would William curse Phillip?

In the It could have been different" thread on Belos Simp Coven I got two ideas for the underlying motive for this. But I remember only one of them. So the second will stay a mystery for yall.

William saw his little brother slowly drifting away from him, finilaly finding the place to belong, WITHOUT the help of older brother. Before that, Phillip was somewhat dependent on William, being the only person Pip could talk to without shame and the one who could help Pip to "find a place in the society" (aka "helping Will in his job and that is it").

Before Boiling Isles, it was the mental problems that made Philip feel need for Will. But now, since Will is far from exiting about every magic and demon stuff.. there should be a PHYSICAL need.

He will be there. He will help. That how it always was and it is how it is going to be.

Textless version:

Fanon Week started by @the-epileptic-toh-blog

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Part of me misses calling Caleb the wittebro because we dont know his name era of toh

The 16 masks of the prior Grimwalkers are actually a disturbing low estimate of the numbers Philip's created over the years. The book that outlined Grimwalkers and the ingredients needed to create them noted one of them as a 'bone of ortet' - in botany terms, an ortet is the name of a parent plant that a liniage of cloned plants is descended from.

( on the subject of said book, it also listed some of the active ingredients as Galderstone for the heart - there are some empty slots in the looking glass ruins where stones used to be, palistrom wood for keratin - which Dell noted were being over-harvested, stonesleeper lungs- the same beast that once guarded the collector's disk in the skull, and selkidomus scales- the same sea monster hunter was hunting down out of blind obedience in 'Separate Tides', meaning even from the very moment we met him, the poor boy was being used to gather more ingredients for his 'replacement ' once he eventually grew disillusioned with belos, as he's implied to have come to take for granted, rather than considering if the problem lies with him)

Plants are grown in the ground and burst through the soil eventually, and at the back of the corridor filled with dying Grimwalkers, you can see a hand sticking out of the ground next to a tube aparatus that sticks down into the soil beneath it. A similar hand sticking from the ground can be seen in Philip's lair in 'elsewhere and elsewhen ', with a number tag attached to it saying 4. This implies that Grimwalkers are not created as children and grow to adulthood, but instead literally emerge as adults from their 'earthen womb' and have to dig their way out. The portrait at the back of the hallway is depicting the birth of a grimwalker, contrasting against all the deaths they suffered once Philip was done with their services. The example shown in the cave implied that it took Philip a while to realise they also need air, hence why that poor bastard suffocated in his metaphorical crib, and the breathing apparatus is needed to ensure they live long enough to dig their way out.

In the portrait depicting wittebro's body, you can see some of Philip's face reflected in his knife blade, showing his nose is unbroken, meaning it occurred before he met luz and lilith. This implies that Philip literally dug up his brother's body once his witch lover buried him, and used the corpse to make fully-grown adult clones of him that he would then spend the next 400 years or so systematically murdering over and over again, and has already started in the process by the time luz met his younger self.

Hunter stated that he was the youngest golden guard, meaning he was the youngest Grimwalker Philip had made to date, implied to be an experiment of his. After all, children are more likely to listen and obey their paternal figures, right? Perhaps a child version of Wittebro might not be so quick to turn on him, and be more susceptible to Philip's intent to mould him into something he's not.

This also means that if he was making and killing adults over and over since the deadwardian era, implied to still be within Philip's natural lifespan in the 1600s, then logically there must be a lot more bodies than are depicted in that memory corridor... Which is precisely why it has so few of them depicted. Killing people with a similar face over and over again, for hundreds of years, and they'll start to blur together.

For a bit of surplus information, in a livestream AMA, Dana said that Philip used to give the Grimwalkers individual names at first, before he got tired of it after the first few betrayals and, rather than go through the effort of making up a new name every time, went with calling them all the same one.

Hunter, as an inside joke to himself.

Hunter's name is not a name, it's a label, and the only name Philip ever intended to bestow upon him would not have been his, but wittebro's, once he'd 'earned' it. Killing similar-looking people with a uniform name over such a long period, and not even Philip could keep track of how many he'd actually killed, save a few noticeable ones here and there.

Darius: you son of a bitch! You killed Hunter!

Belos:... Do you have the slightest ideas how little that narrows it down?

And Belos gave the child a cruel name A name that means "killer" Hunter!

I already hate Belos, you don't have to keep giving me more reasons, you know.

Although I gotta say, there is something funny to me that Philip was somehow able to figure out how to create a goddamn clone of a whole human from wood and rocks....... yet it took him at least four tries to figure out they had to breathe.

(I suppose it's possible Philip found the grimwalker recipe from some other source... but that raises the question of why that didn't tell him the grimwalkers needed to breathe)

In the scene where we saw Philip don the Belos mask and preach the Titan's will, I noted that it couldn't take place too long after he met Luz & Lilith (due to the presence of a child that hadn't visibly aged). The fact that he can grow an adult grimwalker explains the presence of the first Golden Guard.

That does raise another question though. What exactly does the memory of a grimwalker look like when it first emerges? Can Belos plant memories within them?

That also raises the question of how old Hunter actually is and what his early memories are like if he wasn't made as an infant or really small child.

okay so i saw this picture at the end of an amazing post by @selenestarmoon (which you should totally go read, it’s about the parallels between the owl house and beserk)

and it got me thinking…what if Philip/Belos was “betrayed” by his brother? They got there and the longer they stayed and traveled from town to town, the more his brother (I’ve seen some people call him Wittebro so that’s what we’ll call him here lol) found beauty in the Isles.

It’s stated multiple times by Belos that wild magic killed his family, but what if him and Wittebro just disagreed (and Belos is a vengeful drama queen)? After Wittebro is the Golden Guard for a while, he sneaks off to be with a witch - after all, he’s happy here, and he knows what Philip is planning. He can’t avoid it, his two choices are to help Philip or to escape and be as happy as possible before either his death or the Day of Unity.

Here’s where it gets kind of bonkers, so stay with me. What if he married into the Clawthorne clan? Evidence to support:

We know that Wittebro ran off, and it is implied that he did so with a wild witch - to maintain a secret identity, it would have been best to change his name.

It is also HEAVILY implied that he came to the Boiling Isles with some sort of sidekick, who is, at least for representative sake, supposed to be Flapjack, who is a palisman. As evidenced by Hunter having Flapjack, “non-witches” can have Palismen.

There are many things on the Isles that a non-witch CAN’T do, the obvious one being using natural magic, but there are things that they can do, such as using rune magic and interacting with Palismen, regardless of their magical status.

Now, we don’t know how long ago people even used palismen - looking back at the episodes “Elsewhere and Elsewhen” and “Hollow Mind”, we can see that wild witches in the Deadwardian era actually didn’t carry staffs.

Finally, we know that Wittebro does not carry magic, but it is likely that he was able to replicate runes just like Luz and Philip.

Based on all of this, I conclude with this theory: Wittebro, without magic and without a brother by his side, married into a family of witches. He started Palisman matching trade not only to replicate his old sidekick (whom he either could not bring or had died sometime between traveling to the isles and when he left Philip’s life), but to help him with his lack of magic by allowing him to fly from place to place and protecting him from things which he had no defense.

Now, I’m not necessarily saying that Dell is Wittebro, but wouldn’t it make a lot of sense for some of the best Palismen carvers in the Isles to spawn from the very man who started the trade? Furthermore, it would make sense that the people that are “descended” from him - people down the line that have a non-magical lineage similar to him - would be able to interact with Palismen, because he made them to protect people like him who lacked magic in a place where it is almost necessary to survive.

i have a slightly working theory about the owl house so stick with me here

time moves differently, we saw in hollow mind that phillips presumed brother fell in love with a witch a witch who i think is a clawthorne and so wittebro changed his name and phillip hated that and confronted his brother then killed him while trying to get away he was cursed by the witch his brother fell in love with who was pregnant in a previous memory bada bing bada boom Dell Clawthorne. but now the time moves differently part i think the reason that stupid ass has been alive so long is because time moves differently on the boiling isles so he might have entered early deadwardian era but by the time he becomes the emperor it’s been 20-30 yrs not the most put together consensus but it’s a working theory that could be very possible

Do you think Phillip would have been considered evil even by 17th century standards? I'm aware that he grew up surrounded by witch-hunting colonizers, but still. Basically, what I'm asking is, was Phillip any more or less "evil" than the rest of his community?

Considering Philip was hated in the Deadwardian era for killing people and eating their palisman and that era was when the 17th century was happening to earth- the answer is a resounding "yes".

Philip has always been a sick puppy to some degree; the way Masha (I hope I'm getting her name right) describes Gravesfield's Witchhunting as a 'barbaric practices', and how real witch hunts were treated by both the colonies and the uk at the time- the witch hunters were seen as extremists even for their time. That's one of the reasons the salem witch trials were so infamous- it was an obviously paranoid tactic that people hoped would stay back in England and not out in the colonizers 'new world' which they'd found. Also, while the inquisition was in full swing those were murderous operations carried out by the governments- governments saw witch hunts and burnings as a sick because they were often a form of self government - yeah I think the Wittebros stances were extreme but the problem is they were children and never knew anything else.