little prince

Multiship, proship

[ogjujunwa]

Was so lost in the sauce that I forgot the owl house had an ACTUAL canon monster x human yuri pairing-

(Also please pretend I didn't fall off the face of the planet for the last 2 years, I was engaged in bloody battle with my college dean)

[sepublic]

Okay! So this explains a bit more; I guess TLLK was being worked on shortly after TOH finished airing, and before Dana left Disney. And in that time she wrapped up her work writing it alongside Mikki Crisostomo before leaving the company, as Daun Han continued to adapt everything into manga-inspired visual format?

I guess that tracks; I knew shortly prior to this that Owen Dennis finished work on the Among Us cartoon before being let go, and the cartoon is still being developed. Given that writing and animation are two different departments with writing being finalized first, I guess it tracks that you can finish your assignment and then leave while the rest follows and is being worked on.

This does bode less well for future graphic novels unless there are others already in the works, and/or Dana trusts other writers still with Disney to tell the stories she intended. While she, JBO, and Zach were the head writers and now handle Knights of Guinevere, there were definitely a lot of other writers who wrote individual episode scripts; Mikki has had her work on other King episodes so being assigned alongside Dana for this tracks! And maybe if the job treats her well Dana might be open to returning for another graphic novel or two but hoo knows?

[bleushark]

has this been done yet

the second episode was so fun! sold eclipse as my favorite but zira is a close second

[elektracomplecks]

i need them to interact more... raine would fix hunter

not a shippy thing bee tee dubs

[orangemik]

[makeliasoul]

[unooart]

[itslilacmoon]

mods are asleep, post forbidden myosotis hexsquad polycule

[numum]

it’s not our fault

[rattanwhip]

🧛❤🐺

[ddldyf]

Small purple magical beings who can make fantasy into reality with star & crown metaphor

boop

[batsandboba]

owl house was right.planet earth turns slowly and i do feel like an insomniac

[batsandboba]

not owl house. crap

[smol-ruby]

…owl city?

[batsandboba]

no obviuosly i meant owl house !!!!! leave me alone!!!!!!!

[batsandboba]

the owl economy is in shambles

[undeadsucker]

❗ (1) New Move added to the Wicked Uncle type: Betray Nephew

Wicked Uncle may now lie to and scheme against any Brother's Son type character

[cosmicrat3]

Do you think Belos is not as complex as his fans makes him out to be?

I don’t think it’s a case of more or less complex, it’s that a lot of Belos stans mischaracterize him to the point they make him a different character.

The “Belos” a lot of Belos stans present is the guise he wears to manipulate others and himself, hiding his actual character and nature beneath.

Belos is one of my favorite villains, because he manages to be a truly reprehensible villain with no redemption in sight, while also having a lot of layers to his psychology. He’s a villain whose thought process/general psychology I find fascinating to think about, as I think it’s quite well-written and reflective of people like him in real life.

With a lot of people, there’s this perception that in order to be interesting, a villain has to be sympathetic or redeemable in some capacity.

This is an attitude that comes from the backlash against cartoonishly evil villains who just are evil for the sake of it, in simplistic morality stories about the good guys defeating the bad guys, with no real nuance. People are either born good or evil, and they fight.

That is an easy narrative that isn’t reflective of real life, so a common solution to this is to give villains sympathetic motives or backstory, and even redeem them. That avoids the “I’m doing evil things because I’m evil” type.

And this type of villain can absolutely work, it’s just not necessary for every story, or for a good villain. You can have a complex, layered villain whose psychology is fascinating to think about, without them actually being sympathetic in any way.

Belos doesn’t think “I’m doing evil things because I’m evil.” He justifies himself with a twisted line of thought built around his own selfishness, insecurities, immaturity, and possessiveness, as well as the Puritan ideology he embraced.

A lot of Belos stans erase what makes Belos, Belos. A big part of his character is that he warps reality in his own mind to suit his needs. That’s why his mindscape is literally layered, with the beautiful, heroic paintings at the start hiding the more true, ugly memories. He isn’t just lying to other people; he’s lying to himself. He’s so caught up in his own delusions and persecution complex, he’s lost sight of reality and starts to be confused by his own lies.

The show makes it clear how his view of the world, that he is an oppressed victim, is delusion. It shows Caleb embracing his brother warmly in the Boiling Isles, despite the terrifying aggression he displays. It shows people were friendly and trusting during the time period he arrived, and only lashed out at him once he began to kill and oppress, like the demons avenging their trusting brother Blue Fang. His child disguise used to manipulate Luz is shed to reveal the true sinister man underneath.

His misery is of his own making. He killed Caleb, he refused to change. Even after four hundred years, he refuses to do anything but whine about what witches and demons took from him, despite the fact he was always the aggressor.

Belos’s story is the story of a man driven by an extreme selfishness, a desire for coddling and protection, to have everything revolve around him and his needs, at the same time as he claims to want to purge the sins of others for being selfish and evil. A man who is so caught up in his layers of lies and manipulation, he himself loses sight of what he believes, and eventually descends into a crawling, whining monster, still screaming about humanity, while he changed himself into anything but.

It’s a pathetic end that is his own fault. He caused the events that took place, even though he insists on shunting the blame to others. It’s a fascinating exploration of this type of person, how they think, and the horrific impact they have on other people.

But Belos stans want to ignore all that in favor of believing the simple narrative he presents at face value - that he was a mistreated kid whose brother abandoned him to cruelty and persecution on the Boiling Isles. They take the story to be a simple “tragic orphan was wronged and now he’s bitter” instead of an exploration of the psychology of this kind of truly reprehensible human being, who absolutely does exist.

The thing they portray is fine for a character story, but it’s not Belos. It’s so blatantly missing the entire point of his character, that they might as well just create an oc.

We have to shed this idea that a complex villain means a sympathetic one. You can have a rich, layered character who has basically always been a piece of shit, and remains so. Sometimes those are the best villains out there, depending on the themes of the story.

So no, Belos isn’t less complex than they make him out to be. He’s just a different character entirely.

[noxthesleepymoodyoverthinker]

Personally, I actually prefer the redeemed villain trope, especially if that villain is sympathetic or was a monster created by the society it was in.

What I love about the way Belos is portrayed, tho, is that it does do that on some level: He grew up and survived in a Puritan society. He absorbed all those extreme values and ideology, the violence with which any kind of outlier or difference or independence was handled. So his society did create this monster.

BUT! He also lived for centuries in The Boiling Isles, where people proved him wrong, where he had multiple human lifetimes to change his views, where he had multiple human lifetimes to see his ideology disproven. Heck, he even had his brother as a very direct and positive example of how someone entrenched in that ideology could change.

He even met Luz so many centuries later that proved him wrong in thinking that his brother was merely an exception to that rule.

So, very much unlike a lot of other sympathetic villains whose origins could be traced to their tragic backstory TM and traumatic past caused by their family / society / village / uncontrollable circumstances, Belos had both multiple opportunities and a lot of time to change or at least consider that he might have been wrong.

Instead, at every instance, he not only puts on an act to get people's sympathy before promptly betraying them, but at every point that he faces resistance or cannot win an argument or person, his reaction is to blatantly pretend that resistance or argument is not worth thinking about, because it doesn't serve his wants.

Anything that doesn't serve exactly what he wants is automatically not worth his notice and/or something to be destroyed. It started with his brother Caleb, likely when his views differed from him and he wanted a different life to what Philip decided he should live. Then he killed him. And then he manipulated an entire realm of people to gain power just so he could exterminate them all -- but, he would do so only once he was sure he could escape back into the human realm.

Then Luz showed up. A child. A human child from the realm he was apparently trying to protect -- And the moment she disagreed with him and resisted him, she was something to destroy as well. There was never even a flicker of doubt.

How irredeemable Belos is -- because he simply does not want to -- is obvious especially in how he created and treated his "Golden Guards". He made them in his brother's image, maybe because he missed him (but missing someone and wanting them to live and believe only what you want them to do is not love or guilt). And they were always, always, his subordinates, someone to control, to order around. Someone to throw into danger as he wished. Someone to do his bidding without question.

And the moment they questioned Belos too much? He destroyed them and made a new one.

Frankly, I don't know whether he kept making Golden Guards in his brother's form simply because he wanted to see his brother be subordinate to him, to be under his control... Or because he was looking for a way to create the "perfect" version of Caleb who never strayed from exactly what he, Philip, said -- to further confirm to his ego that it was Caleb who was wrong and Philip who was right. Because by the time we see proof of the Grimwalkers in "Hollow Mind", Belos's reaction to destroying his Golden Guards when they stray is very blase. (Almost like he'd started enjoying it even. The sheer power that remaking Caleb whenever he didn't like what he was saying and manipulating him and controlling him again gave him.)

Frankly, studying his behavior and motivations from a psychological point of view would be fascinating.

But yeah, he is an utterly reprehensible villain through and through. (And, I think, the only other time I found a villain of the same reprehensible caliber was "Lord Prime" in the 2017 version of Shera.)

[kyri45]

🛼Urban TOH print series by Kyri45🛼

This series was the craziest in terms of lineart, but it was fun!

[a-kai202]

golden

[zuhcat]

Ok hear me out w this rarepair