Doll's Eye Reflex

Daily posts about  Grand Guignol Orchestra, a manga written by Kaori Yuki about a handful of disaster-prone musicians.  *   This blog will be no more gory than the original manga.  *  Always happy to talk about GGO, feel free to message/ask/reblog  *   Feel free to use images for fanworks.    The series is also known as Royal Doll Orchestra /Ningyou Kyuutei Gakudan / Guingol Kyuutei Gakudan / 人形宮廷楽団.   *  Side-blog: I follow back from @thetinny  *

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #30

The orchestra spend more time than you’d think practicing their instruments, as well as generally ensuring their upkeep. They may not be fastidious about their clothes, and they have few other possessions that they pay any heed at all, but when it comes to their instruments, there can be not a blemish on them. Gwin’s cello is always polished to a mirrored perfection, so clear you can see your face in it. And Kohaku, who literally looks like he’s never given a damn about the appearance of anything, ensures that the white violin is spotless.   It’s one reason they usually carry their instruments in their their protective cases.  In all honesty, if they got injured, Gwin or Kohaku probably wouldn’t rush to seek a doctor, but they would, without hesitation, pay richly if they thought that anything was out of place with their instrument. For that reason, the group may not know where to find the local doctor in most towns, but you can bet they know the location of almost every violin maker and piano tuner in the land.  They maintain a small supply of things like strings (just in case); but you can imagine that their first-aid kit for humans is not so well stocked!

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #29

The orchestra go through clothes quite a lot. Lucille has tried to adapt them a little to their… rambunctious lifestyle, but Gwin and Kohaku still end up tearing or splitting or bloodstaining their clothes beyond repair quite frequently. This is why the orchestra’s uniforms appear to change every once in a while in the manga; they just don’t hold up to the wear and tear the orchestra put them through.  Lucille: “Gwin, you flexed your third shirt to ribbons in as many months, what were you doing?!” Gwin: “We were dealing with Guignols hand-to-hand at the last village, Lucille. I’m sorry, I may have gotten carried away.  Lucille: “And Kohaku, did you shoot through your own coat?! AGAIN?!?” Kohaku: “Who cares if I did, it’s just a few holes. It’s not like we’re the goddamned official orchestra.”  Lucille: “I’m not having my orchestra turn up everywhere in rags! I’ll look like I’m dragging a bunch of hobos around!” Gwin and Kohaku: ... Lucille, rubbing his temples: “Don’t say it. Look, just... try not to destroy any more clothes for a while if you want your bails paid at all.”  You can’t really blame them, since their job is as much to destroy guignols as it is to play music, however Lucille does usually wish that it didn’t take quite so much from their budget. Ironically, Eles didn’t take many clothes with her, and pretty much kept her clothes spotless and tear free, for the most part, even though she didn’t have an orchestral uniform.  As entreating his colleagues to calm down and stop being so boisterous with their outfits does little but start arguments; “Well whose idea was it to dress us up as stuffy old butlers, anyway, Lucille!”, he’s learned to accept it.  

Gwin knows all the secrets of how to launder clothes to be spotless, and he’s been the group mom so far. If it was up to Kohaku, none of their clothes would ever need to be ironed again, after all, “what’s the use when they just get wrinkled, anyway?” Lucille despairs. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #28

The orchestra have a running gag about how often Lucille gets mistaken for a woman, and keep tally whenever they can. Lucille doesn’t mind, most of the time, and sees it all as part of the fun, unless things go in a creepy direction.  He has been mistaken for a lady of the night before, much to the orchestra’s amusement. Despite that, they are generally quick to defend him if they feel that Lucille is in any danger from sleazebags. For all their protests, the orchestra do care for each other, in their own way.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #27

Lucille warms up his voice by singing annoying and occasionally rude tongue twisters about the group. Gwindel mostly ignores them, but Lucille has to be well out of range of Kohaku before he starts. When Eles comes along, he makes the tunes a bit less… rude but no less annoying.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #26

They get Gwin to move their equipment whenever they have to set up for another concert; his incredible strength means that he needs minimal help from the others, so they’ve learned it’s more dangerous to get involved than it is to leave him to it. 

 Gwin likes the diversion of moving heavy objects, as he feels that it pushes his strength a little, even if most of the time it’s not a real challenge.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #25

The orchestra don’t date, and haven’t really tried to carve out love lives; their lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to getting close to people or staying too long in one place. Perhaps they were afraid of infecting others, and perhaps they just had too many secrets to hide? 

Lucille is happy to flirt casually with whoever will take an interest but rarely wanted anything more than that, though he’d often have to make excuses with men and women alike who were enraptured by his beauty. In all honesty, whilst he enjoys attention, he tires of the lengths people go to in order to  seek out the pleasures of the flesh; he’s the first person to bemoan why nobody takes no for an answer, any more.  Gwindel is usually polite but doesn’t make any effort with anyone who tries to engage him romantically,  feeling a sense of guilt over his lost family, and feeling that he has no right to seek happiness by drawing others into his existence. Kohaku is really bad at reading cues, gets flustered easily and often ends up putting his foot in his mouth, whether he intended to flirt or not. He’ll tell you he wasn’t interested, anyway dumbass, but deep down inside, it’s probably the case that genuinely opening up is a little bit terrifying for him.  Berthie had probably been the most successful out of all of them, because he combined good looks with an ability to get what he wanted out of people. But his tastes were sometimes… unorthodox to say the least. 

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We’re blessed with another GGO MMV; this one is Berthie/Lucille Kohaku, and carries a language warning, be warned XD Song: Second To None

As always with MMVs, they may contain spoilers, so watch at your own risk ;)

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day#23

Gwin can feel with those guignol arms; they had been numb at first when they were transplanted, but slowly he’d started to get sensation in them after the transplant had taken old. It doesn’t feel quite like his old hands had felt, but it’s better than feeling nothing. 

They are hard and slightly unyielding, though, so it took him a while to pick things up without shattering or crushing them. For a while, Lucille couldn’t trust him with anything remotely fragile, and Berthie used to have great fun asking Gwin to pick things up knowing full well that Gwin would shatter them within moments. 

 He took to playing the cello much faster than he took to doing almost everything else with his new arms; that’s partly why Lucille agreed to take him in the orchestra. By now, he’s learned to do everything with his new arms just as well as he did with his old ones; everything, except make art. He knows that would never be the same, but he also knows that to start down that path again would be to lose what remains of his sanity.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #22

Before Berthie’s ‘death’,  Berthie used to love antagonising Kohaku for kicks, moreso than Lucille. Berthie always loves getting a reaction out of people, and Kohaku was just easier than most to get a response out of. 

Now that he’s gone, Lucille found himself taking over that role, partly because he missed Berthie and his tricks, and partly because Kohaku is easy and oh so fun to antagonise, and partly because Lucille is well aware that if Kohaku’s not engaged in some kind of bickering, he tends to get grumpy or withdrawn. 

And in Lucille’s estimation,  a bickering Kohaku is definitely better than a withdrawn, moody one who feels sorry for himself.

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We’re blessed with another GGO MMV; this time IIt’s Lucille/Eles? As always with MMVs, they may contain spoilers, so watch at your own risk ;) Song: Untouched Artist: The Veronicas

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day#24

Lucille warms up his voice by singing annoying and occasionally rude tongue twisters about the group. Gwindel mostly ignores them, but Lucille has to be well out of range of Kohaku before he starts. When Eles comes along, he makes the tunes a bit less… rude but no less annoying.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #21

Gwin got married and had his daughter young, so he’s not actually as old as he appears. His hair was always light, so it’s not even that he’s gone entirely grey, though there’s probably a fair few gray hairs in there (who could tell?!)  That doesn’t stop Lucille from teasing him about his silvery hair, or Kohaku calling him ‘grandpa’ when he thinks he can get away with it… but Eles is the only member of the orchestra who actually just straight up asks Gwin how old he is… the other two didn’t have the guts to ask. They just assumed he was older than them, and went with it. In terms of actual age, the next youngest after Eles is Kohaku, and Lucille is probably older than Gwin, however looks younger.

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Another GGO MMV!  It’s gorier than some of the other AMVs, but no gorier than the manga, obviously.  As always with MMVs, they may contain spoilers, so watch at your own risk ;) Song: Rivolta Silenziosa Artist: Humanwine

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day # 20

Kohaku’s headaches vary in severity depending on how many guignols there are, and how close. W when there are many nearby, his headaches are severe, one-sided (on the right),  centred on his eye, and can last from minutes to hours. He can get them multiple times in a day, or go for quite a while without any. However, given they meet guignols frequently, he never really goes very long without headaches at all.  Even if they do try treatments, nothing seems to help, so he gave up. It’s one of the reasons he’s short tempered. Sure, he’s always been a bit-hot headed, but combine that with frequent head-splitting headaches and insomnia due to the aforementioned, and things just get far more sour.

Medically speaking, the closest kind of headache they might match in real life are cluster headaches, also known known as ‘suicide headaches’ because they are ‘one of the most painful conditions known to humanity’. Like Kohaku’s headaches, they happen on one side, and the pain is felt in the eye, however it is associated with the eye tearing up and the nose running, redness or swelling of the eye and a droopy eyelid as well as sweating of the face. In real life, these kinds of headaches can occur in bouts (or clusters) and be severely debilitating. In real life, they are thought to be set off by alcohol, seasons, volatile smells, sleep and particular temperatures.  Ordinary painkillers have no effect, though there are now some treatments. From what we see in the manga, I imagined his headaches to be similar. When you read stories about how people with this condition ‘feel like my eye is going to explode’ or deliberately don’t own guns in case they were tempted to use them; and many people with these headaches consider suicide. Another account also describes that apart from the severe pain, it is associated with terror; actual people describe pulling out their teeth, banging on their heads or beating their heads against the wall to try to make it stop. I’m absolutely not saying that Kaori-sensei necessarily had this in mind, or even knew about this condition, but I knew about these before I read the manga, and ever since I read it, that’s what I can relate it to. And if his headaches are anything like this, then it starts to make sense why Kohaku did what he did with his eye towards the end of the series.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day#19

Gwin’s favourite colour is green, he finds it soothing, but pale yellow comes a close second, because it reminds him of his daughter. Kohaku’s colours are orange and red; he doesn’t wear them, but if he had to pick anything that wasn’t black... Lucille insists that his favourite colour is white, though he’s very fond of gold accents.  His colleagues tell him that’s not a real colour. Celes’ favourite colour is pale blue. Spinel is secretly fond of magenta, but she would never tell anyone. If anyone asks her answer would be dark blue, like her hair. An unobtrusive colour.

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Headcanon Mondays:  Grand Guignol Orchestra headcanon of the Day #18

Kohaku uses guns partly because he can’t stand to get too close to guignols for too long, because they set off his headaches. After his time in the resistance, he is pretty adept at melee combat but reserves this for dealing with humans. Lucille and Berthie were pretty impressed when they first saw him in action.  He does, however, take particular relish in blowing guignols to smithereens; perhaps that’s his revenge for the head-splitting headaches they make him suffer.

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Yet another GGO MMV; this one is Lucille / Kohaku.  As always with MMVs, they may contain spoilers, so watch at your own risk ; Song: Your Love is a Song Artist: Switchfoot