CTHONI BACKSTORY FIC [EDIT: second chapter w/ accessible formatting ver. added]
ITS DONE!!!!!!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
BODY ON THE GPS
--APPROACHING TUNNEL NOW.
You’ll live like you never knew light.
There’s tunnels under the Ground. There's a girl made out of nothing but space. Go forth deep where the air doesn’t reach; all The World a haunted thing.
Or: Cthoni Andor, in life.
My thoughts and decision-making process on writing the fic, jinki/anima theories, and character analysis rambling below! If you're coming from reading the endnotes, I've bolded and colored where the text continues from there. Thanks for reading!
So Cthoni is named after the underworld, her jinki is a manhole cover(which are attached to tunnels, are the entrance to tunnels below the ground), and her ability is to create portals that work better in the dark. This fic is a v literal interpretation, she grew up under the ground in old sewer and train tunnels, divorced from concepts of humanity and warmth and light, to the point that when she finally accesses real daylight it's a terrifying and unpleasant thing. And while she grows older, becomes acclimated, and (starts to reckon with) liking/preferring aspects of the Above world, having her development fundamentally rooted in a deathly, isolated, long darkness sort of linking her mentality to something that is already dead…
(Not cotard’s syndrome, it sounds similar, but cotard’s is specifically delusions of negation; denial over some part of one’s existence and dysfunctionality due to it. For Cthoni in this fic its a more allegorical death of her heart/loss of hope for real connection, which she never had words for before it was gone. And despite that, relating in her own way to people(Jabber/Momoa/Zodyl) through that feeling.)
I thought about how the significance of the physical aspects of Cthoni’s jinki would manifest, and she naturally has really pale eyes which are drawn without pupils, and her color scheme of yellow eyes/blue hair which are ⅔ of the main colors of her jinki…it ended up how it is in the text. I was drawing from charles bonnet syndrome(you get it easier the more fucked up your eyes already are), phosphenes, and stygian/forbidden colors(seemed very fitting esp with the greek roots of ‘cthonic’).
Her powers canonically function better in the dark, and when she knows the location herself…so her ability to explore a space is what allows her to know it. And to function ‘as intended’ best in the dark, that means…not just that she would live nocturnally the way others would diurnally, but that the dark has specific significance to her that she is /limited by the light/.
So for Cthoni in this fic, Manhole is her shield/savior/freedom/tether. It allows her to go where she needs and live successfully, and better, in her realm. It reminds her constantly of her origins, the dark she has built into her mental foundations that she cannot escape, that that is all there is in the start and the end. It physically represents the parts of her mind, the colors, that don’t actually exist; it is an extension of how she moved through and experienced her reality. //It is how she reaches out and interacts with the world//.
She doesn’t speak enough in canon for this to matter, it's technically canon compliant, but I hc she uses only people’s names and structures her speech in a way that she doesn’t use pronouns, bc she can’t tell who uses what consistently. Everyone is ‘she’ to her bc she likes that the most, unless they're a child, which she categorizes much like she does animals (them)(thats how Jabber and then Momoa are described in here). ‘It’ is for Manhole and locations(like The World)(for clarity’s sake I kept her pronouns consistent, but she would have considered herself ‘it’, like ‘the only one of a kind’, in the time before coming to value and then awakening Manhole. Before learning human language she considered them both ‘as one’. After adopting human pronouns Manhole is the half that carries the ‘It’)(she also describes Mishra-with-Zodyl as ‘it’, lowercase; she associates him with The World).
In this fic, how I approached characterization--Jinki are reflections of their people. That's their other half. A part of them. Givers put their hearts/souls into their jinki. The relationship between a giver and their jinki is definitely unique to each person but they have to Not Be Normal about them, like not even a little bit. It has to mean as much as yourself.
I do think it doesn’t have to be love. Caring for an instrument, improving its quality…you can maintain something obsessively and hate it. You can do that to yourself. You can resent what you rely on, you can immortalize something that represents your grief, you can carry an object that reminds you of betrayal. Maintaining and repairing something is the mark of its ‘quality’; the depth of the emotion is the key for me, that the giver is so reliant on it they can’t function properly without it, no matter the specific emotion.
Same with Momoa and Jabber, which (i am attributing to) why their abilities are so ‘powerful’. (Watchman series items are a different category). Jinki are reflections on their user, conduits for their intent, representations of the parts of themselves they think or care about affecting, the most about. Riyo has a jinki that is lethal by default, which she tempers every time she uses it.
She vowed to never bloody it again with human violence--she regulates the self that grew up killing, which she cannot refute but can control. Fu has a jinki that literally embodies his ability to make decisions; Hii is another person to him, and whether or not Hii is ‘actually a cursed doll’ doesn’t really matter, bc by being a jinki Hii /is/ in fact exactly what Fu thinks he is.
So on. So forth. Momoa’s jinki gives her entire lives’ worth of memories. Her sense of self, her capacity to process the world, all of it being filtered through the experiences of others, to the point where she’s numb to her own feelings.
Cthoni meets younger Jabber and Momoa a couple times each. Jabber is mostly not lucid/poisoned, while Cthoni only interacts w/ Momoa giving her painkillers after she’s incapacitated in her car(ik I write pretty ambiguously so it might not come through. the ‘hideout’ part, she watches Momoa hole up and cry, she doesn't interact. She’s not interested in getting Asyl used on her).
Also, she has some hand in the Raider organization management, along w/ Momoa, esp with locating/gathering supplies. Momoa does the deals and long haul(driving), Cthoni theft/direct transportation. She can knock someone out but usually refrains in favor of using Manhole.
Oh and my Anima theories. Anima is described as life force. Vital energy. Thats You thats Essence Of People. My theory, though I think this is likely already popularized somewhere I haven’t yet found, is that being able to manifest Anima baseline requires a level of passion (that sparks/fuels continuous obsession) that inherently motivates a giver more than a non-giver; the intensity of which determines the intensity of the Anima. The quality of the jinki determines how much of this Anima is absorbed and how much can be output, equalling the total perceived power of the giver/jinki/ability. The more Anima you have, the stronger you are physically, like. More vitality=more health/strength/stamina/etc. Again with Fu, in this theory since his Anima is pouring right into his body with only a little filtering from Hii, instead of being output from Hii’s body, he has wildly enhanced physical ability(watch us get info that Fu’s just Like That...)
Anyway, Anima is externalized people energy. People with strong/a lot of anima, who are in tune with their jinki(the item that facilitates their power, and their sense of what makes up their ‘self’) can manipulate it better. Anima that interacts with each other should be able to sense the essence of the other person, b/c its the same as physical contact confirming the state of the body. That's why when Cthoni is observing/interacting with givers their Anima is an active part of the world being observed, and why she and Manhole ‘reaches out’ to Momoa(in that scene Momoa is subconsciously projecting her anima out through Asyl; Cthoni’s text is meant to say that you gain control and become more purposeful abt your external Anima in time. Ofc it's much more distinct the stronger you are…Cthoni wouldn't make note of super weak givers.)
Back to Momoa and Jabber, they are ‘powerful givers’ because they understand and are in sync with the part of themselves they care the most about. They’re passionate about seeking more ‘fuel’, participate in the world through the use of their jinki, and clearly have put their lives into caring for their jinki. I wrote Cthoni relating to the two but also parallels between them, because I thought it would be really interesting.
Momoa frankly uses Asyl super casually when we are introduced to her power. She gets that would-be assaulter’s /literal entire life’s worth of memories/ so she can remove him. It's the immediate action she takes and she’s confident this is the method that works. It dovetailed pretty conveniently with how she stated she can 'focus on a single world' of someone’s memories, with the scheme I gave Cthoni about [[The World]]. She is stated to not have combat ability but requires physical contact for Asyl to work, and is unafraid(and/or finds the fear irrelevant) to put herself in that extremely close range to do so.
Jabber uses Mankira the same way in combat. Fighting someone is obviously through her. Medicating himself is obviously through her. If he wants to drop into a fugue state he’ll stab himself right through, with her. If he’s interested in someone they'll get acquainted with her. He achieves his pain-pleasure by using her. His entire scheme of toxins is taken in through him and expressed through her; it's extremely literal processing of the world through his jinki.
The two of them share a certain total trust in their jinki to meet the world for them (Fu is like this too, possibly the most extreme). As previously stated, Cthoni, while physically capable, would opt to use Manhole over fighting someone with her hands. Compare this to, say, Zanka. Stated to loathe both ‘geniuses’ and ‘average people who act like geniuses’; he hates his past self and his present state. And despite being obviously obsessed w Assistaff continues to call her ‘a plain stick’. He introduces her by saying ‘people think she’s plain’ and that people question or mock him for just having a stick. His internalized feelings of worthlessness are embodied by Assistaff and the way he treats her is an extension of the way he treats himself, encapsulating how he’s limiting his own potential.
Or using this theory for Enjin and Umbreaker--he’s a shield, he cares for the people under his wing, but an umbrella is intended as a temporary item for temporary conditions, and he similarly avoids being a hands-on mentor, and creates a bubble of space around himself.
Oh yeah also, smaller thing, the idea of attractiveness being explicitly linked to nature is something I tried to work in. I think perfumes would be both higher-status products like irl, and be focused on fresh/natural scents, that smelling like plants or herbs would be considered alluring; not just flowers or wood but like. /Fresh/ earth, clean water, cut grass, moss, etc. I think antiseptic or sanitized smells would be much less negatively viewed on the Ground too.
Damn, thanks for reading again :D