Obviously Ilya is a chronic clothes thief, we see this at the cottage, but after they move in together he starts getting fuzzy on the details of what belongs to whom. One day he’s folding laundry, holds up a t-shirt, and genuinely has no idea whose it is. He just folds it and puts it in Shane’s drawer.
And then at some point it stops even being a question. There’s no “his” or “mine,” it’s all just theirs.
And one day Shane comes home and says, “I got us some new socks,” and Ilya tackles him to the floor.
after watching the most recent episode of the pitt i find mel and becca’s relationship to be very reminiscent of elphaba and nessarose’s (from wicked ik everyone prob knows that alr but just in case)
like the caregiver who has inadvertently been forced to structure their entire life around the one they care for, who has taken care of them for so many years that it becomes habit and instinct and who’s convinced they know what’s best for them because they’ve always had to
vs the cared for one who was never able to seek independence, who was always limited by a society that did not want to accommodate them. and when they finally find a way to express their desire for freedom they do it in a way that hurts their caregiver. not out of malice but because in a life lacking in personal autonomy they don’t know how to make their own choices without cutting that bond.
cause sure it was kind of a dick move for becca to make plans with her bf to see the fireworks and not even try to invite mel along but also she literally lives in a care facility. when does homegirl ever have a chance to go do anything without mel. and they’re twins ?? like oh come on.
it’s toxic in the way that any relationship becomes when you’re forced to be the primary caregiver of a family member and all these resentful feelings build up on both sides until you end up hurting each other because you’re so lost in how the dynamic is hurting you, you become blind to how you’re hurting the person you care about.
it's important to me that ilya remains captain of the centaurs after shane joins, but i have a specific picture in my mind of shane being assistant captain and being generally harmless and super chill , so the centaurs see him as like the chill parent (something to be said about shane being content in letting someone else, specifically His Someone, have the reins and enjoying not being in charge) but then ilya has to be out for a few weeks for like health or smth so shane goes into Captain Mode and the centaurs are scared shitless by how intense he gets all of a sudden. the most intense drills of all time. the hardest plays they've ever heard of. the strictest practices on earth. and they suddenly understand why shane led the metros/voyagers to victory so many times and why ilya treats him like the boss in their relationship. and then as soon as ilya comes back he turns it off and the centaurs are like Oh Thank Fuck Because What The Hell Was That
sometimes i wonder how much of Ilya and Shane's adult sexual behaviors are straight up because of each other.
for Ilya, obviously hes a pleasure top throughout their relationship, but would it have been different if he wasn't pleasuring The Shane Hollander, the object of his sexual affection and fiercest competitor, who checks him into the boards and then lets him put Shane face first into the mattress in the hotel room?
Ilya was surprised the first time he gave a command and Shane followed it without a word. Shane fell to his knees three seconds into that hotel room with nothing but a few blowjobs worth of experience and a dream.
Shane Hollander, the person who his father rips into him for losing to, his greatest rival and the source of the worlds dissatisfaction with him. Goody-two-shoes, golden-boy Shane Hollander. Perfect beautiful Shane Hollander wants to be taken apart and the only person who can give it to him is Ilya. and that thought crawls into Ilyas brain and makes a home there.
For a dude with as low self worth as Ilya, pleasure is the only thing he feels confident offering to someone else. if The Shane Hollander wants something from me, then i must be worth something.
and for Shane, a majority of his physical submission seems to be related to his performance of masculinity out in the "real world" vs the interior space of their relationship. hockey is obviously a big factor contributing to this necessary performance, but Ilya doesn't help!
Ilya is a hard shell to crack, and opening up to Ilya first is practically a requirement to finding anything out about him. if Shane wasn't so vulnerable, Ilya wouldn't have been able to open up to him, maybe ever. by leaning into his own submission, he gave Ilya the sense of control and autonomy that he needed to grow their relationship.
Shane also refuses pleasure constantly. he refuses food he likes, relationship with people, sex, all for the sake of his hockey performance. as a hedonistic guy himself, would Ilya be as fixated on pleasuring his partner if Shane was willing to take pleasure for himself?
neither of them knew how perfectly their burgeoning freaks were matched until they tripped into each other and then they made each other worse. thank god.
I'm pulling this rant from my drafts because I fear some of y'all let Sel off too easy.
Over time, I came to forgive Sel for trying to kill Bree 3 times a day. But, I tell you, it wasn't easy. He was just so loud and wrong, my god. Like dude, you're supposed to be the best kingmage in your generation!! Tighten up.
And yeah, he was right. Something was amiss, but still, idc that was crazy.
My bloodmarked thoughts:
The thing that pmo the most about his murder Bree crusade, the maliciousness. He was being so nasty to her and Nick that he was betraying himself. It was really annoying seeing him let his emotions cloud his reasoning like that.
Upon re-reading:
Sel said he was distracted by Bree because he couldn’t clock exactly what was going on with her, and he also didn’t know what she meant for both him and Nick and their relationships. Which is like okay I guess...
Truly, though upon reflection I don't know how he would’ve been able to figure out Evan was a gorchel or whatever. Unless he started going around and testing everyone??? Bree was sussing him out because she came out of nowhere and was entrancing Nick, and himself, apparently, so SEX DEMON, naturally. All I can take from that is she has supernatural beauty, so sweet of you Sel.
I saw a comment say how in OB Nick never mentioned to Bree after she lost her memory how Sel wanted to kill her the first few weeks they knew each other. He has NO bad feelings towards him and just wanted Bree to remember him as the kind, loyal person he is in BM. UGH I'm SO SICK of these guys 😭😭😭
sometimes i think about the fact that nick and alice have straight up never met. this is a modern travesty and i demand alice wake up bc 1) she’s amazing and deserves a long full happy life and also 2) her and nick would get along so well as some of the og bree supporters
Thinking about how Nick, who hates the Order and everything It represents, who resents his kingsmage bond with Sel so much, still was protective of the role and reassured Sel he still could be a Kingsmage because he knows the title is very tied to Sel's Sense of identity🥺
Erebus biggest opps being a group of like 20 teenagers
**oathbound**
It is so silly to me that Erebus Varelian, the Shadow King formerly know as Arawn of Annwfyn—shepherd of souls is beefing with teenagers on a PERSONAL level. He saw William, Greer, Felicity Sar and them and immediatley got pissed.
Erebus's pesky kids tier list:
5. Briana Matthews
He creepily is fond of Bree, even though he really shouldn't be. But since he has a bias towards once in a generation, or in Bree's case once in a millennia sorceresses, that checks out.
4. Selywn Kane
Calls him a prodigy but is also constantly demeaning him calling him a waste of talent and a failure. One time he said to Bree "What exactly were you thinking with him? Truly, you can do better ", talking about some "its to his torment that they were entangled". Soooooo unnecessary, just mean for no reason.
(He's still Natasia son so that is keeping him lower on the list, for now)
3. Zoelle and 2. Elijah
Wow bro is both nonchalant and a bully at the same time. He refuses to train them in good faith but also shits on them, x2 for Elijah. It's so malicious. (He hates his kids)
major analysis ahead (this post got long lolol fair warning)
so in bloodmarked sel tells bree that after he realized that he was wrong about her being a goruschel, and how cruel of him it was to abuse his oath with nick to make nick feel his murderous intent towards bree, was when started to see how good and brave she was, and that was when he began to worry about losing his humanity.
then in the extra sel perspective in the paperback version of legendborn we get his perspective on that scene in the woods which basically confirms it, he says:
and in that same bloodmarked scene, he mentioned that he started feeling the effects of not fulfilling his oath to nick within the two weeks it took the regents to arrive at the lodge. there are several points where people say that sel fulfilling his oath to the other legendborn would help keep him from fully succumbing, and it likely did, but it goes deeper than that.
when bree asks why she was the only person he mesmered, sel says that he was raised not to trust himself. and this is the core of it, honestly. his shame about being a demon, a monster, how that nature made him treat bree initially, kept him from being honest with her. and his distrust of himself is what made him mesmer only her, because he didn’t trust himself around her, leading to william doing things like not letting sel carry bree inside jonas’ cabin.
when they were in the crossroads bar, william describes merlin oaths as “belief and intention combined,” that intention being to protect others, a very human thing to do. but at the core of merlin oaths is the belief that one day they will become a demon, insatiably hungry for human misery.
then in oathbound, when we hear from natasia’s pov, she doesn’t believe descent is inevitable, and was able to reverse it in herself. even besides that, she talks about how she doesn’t believe that increased desires, impulses and hungers are inherently immoral, and that balanced cambions who embrace their demonic nature come to embody that balance (valec is a good example of this that we see).
so sel doesn’t really descend because he’s a merlin or because he wasn’t serving his oath to nick, but because he was raised to believe that every aspect of his own demon nature was monstrous and must be fought against.
even using the word descend is like framing things the way the order would. sel was slowly exhibiting more demonic traits, and then consuming bree’s root heavily accelerated the process. his main problems were that he hated himself for it and fought against it happening.
so then, why do the tonics that worked for natasia not work on sel? there are some key differences between them, namely being natasia’s own acceptance of her demonic nature. sel still holds a wild amount of self-loathing, and could easily interpret his mother’s attempts to “cure” him as more proof of his existing beliefs about demonic tendencies, especially when they don’t work. but also, both of natasia’s charges are dead. martin, and faye, who she didn’t even know she was meant to protect.
sel spent a month trying to kill his king, and in doing so inflicted intentional cruelty on his bonded charge. tbh i don’t think there’s enough herbal tonics in the world to help someone get over that, even if they did help his emotional stability somewhat.
compared to how he reacts to bree at the end of bloodmarked, merely picking up on her negative emotions of guilt and heartache, he reacts much differently to her when they meet at the end of oathbound. he doesn’t mention her negative emotions at all, only that he would enjoy just looking at her and his iconic “please never make it easy” when she warns him against trying to consume her root again.
on the otherrrr hand his reaction to nick is interesting. after nick and bree try and fail to convince him that who he is now is not a problem, he mentions fear and rage, and then begins to taunt nick. he taunts nick for his assumed status as the sweet golden boy, but nick doesn’t respond in the way sel expects, showing sel more grace and understanding. “just like she knows the sun lives within you.” so sel changes strategies, trying to make him jealous about the fact that him and bree kissed. this too, doesn’t work, since nick already knows and all he wants is for both of them to be happy. this is all an example of what we know as “typical” demon behavior, trying to draw negative emotions out of someone, but it’s not effective on nick here.
all of this to say that sel has the most growth left to do out of the three of them when it comes to breaking away from the order’s ideologies. while i’m sure bree, nick, and sel will all have their own journey throughout book 4, they’re more intertwined than ever. i get the sense that bree and nick will both be critical to sel’s arc, wherever it goes, as the two people who see him in full. and i’m excited to see it too, because for all we’ve been told about merlins i feel like we don’t really understand them at all. AND he’s now a freaking shadow prince so who knows how that’s gonna play into things.
tldr; fuck the order they designed the whole merlin system to make merlins powerful and then make them hate themselves so they would be easy to control love u sel
rereading bloodmarked is so delightful bc it puts so much into perspective, like the way alice and william are acting at jonas’ cabin towards sel makes so much more sense when you know that he’s started looking more demonic and bree just can’t see it 😭😭
like when alice starts talking abt how scary sel looks and bree gets indignant on his behalf like girl no he’s literally started looking more demonic lolllll and william not letting sel carry bree inside after the fight like wowowow i love hindsight
also another thing i realized is that bree’s birthday was so eventful 😭 sel took her to the waterfall clearing as her present and then they bloodwalked with nick and had that whole long convo, then sel and bree made out and had another whole convo, and five seconds later the attack on volition happened and bree got possessed like that wasn’t even over the course of the day that all happened within the span of like an hour, maybe two max 😭😭😭😭
rereading bloodmarked is so delightful bc it puts so much into perspective, like the way alice and william are acting at jonas’ cabin towards sel makes so much more sense when you know that he’s started looking more demonic and bree just can’t see it 😭😭
like when alice starts talking abt how scary sel looks and bree gets indignant on his behalf like girl no he’s literally started looking more demonic lolllll and william not letting sel carry bree inside after the fight like wowowow i love hindsight
i think we as a society do not hate on erebus as much as we should. he was literally using cult indoctrination tactics on bree, has killed countless people, abuses the children in his care (both zoe/elijah AND the mageguard).
bree's internal monologue about erebus during the first few chunks of the book was colored so Much by the fact the she was literally missing a chunk of her soul and thought he would make her stronger, because she thought she was FAILING everyone around her.
he positioned himself as a teacher and an authority figure, all the while he allowed the order to experiment on her, trained her Only so that he could eventually consume her, and refused to give her back her Soul because it was Fun. erebus doesn't care about his own son, he doesn't give a shit about bree. he and davis can shake hands in hell frankly.
spoilers for all three currently released legendborn books below
okay another thing i mentioned before but wanted to say again is that bree is so hard on herself throughout all the books. it makes sense cause she has all this external pressure from her bloodlines but also like if i became the king of an entire organization with next to no training and everyone else around me had been training for like ten years and there was only one or two people who resented me for this i would freak out too 😭 like wdym yall are being kind and understanding abt this anyways bree is so strong and iconic i love her.
also she’s actually a really good leader imo cause she summoned the shadow king to help her get stronger but she knew that after the end of bloodmarked she had to get sel to a safe place too bc if the order found him all demoned up they’d lock him in a shadowhold and it was hard enough to get him out the first time lol. so she did what she had to do and made his safety part of her deal. also correct me if i’m wrong but isn’t that what made their deal open bc it was an even trade, she’ll let him feed from her power when her strength peaks if she goes with him and he trains her up, but then she added on sel’s safety which made it unbalanced (i think) which is what made them have to pull the trick with the king’s crown at the end of oathbound.
anyways sel is such a tragic character to me because he’s literally been trained by the order/his mom since he was THREE !! (erebus mentions sel conjured his first aether construct at that age) so he got no childhood and furthermore was raised to believe he needed the order and their oaths to retain any scrap of his humanity and then it got worse in bloodmarked bc not only could he not protect nick it turns out nick wasn’t even the one he was supposed to be protecting 😭
honestly that one scene at the beginning of bloodmarked was funny to me and it probably shouldn’t have been 😭 the one where erebus sel bree and lark were walking back to the lodge and they were trying to pitch lark as bree’s kingsmage and in her head she’s just like “i already have one ????” girl no u don’t lollll it was so funny to me even though it was also tragic esp that part where bree and sel are alone outside her room and he tells her that he’s “not. yours.” like ughhhh sel become a bit more of a rebel already (ik he needed time but ykwim)
anyways looking back it made perfect sense that sel would go full demon bc he was the only one out of our main three messy icons who actually still subscribed to the order’s teachings, since bree never did and nick had cut that shit out by age twelve for the most part lolllll like he needed to see what he would actually be like outside of the oaths and what being in demonia would mean for him in order for him to grow. cause sure they could have just gone to find his mom but they had no clue where she was and erebus only took sel there bc bree sold him her soul lol, and even if they had gone before sel demoned out it wouldn’t have been the same as him going through it himself.
demonia sel was so iconic and it makes sense we didn’t get much of it bc mostly he was just sitting in his mom’s house lol but i’m rereading bloodmarked and he def changed but it’s more like he just became singularly focused on bree in a carnal sense which he lowkey was always like from the time he met her just for different reasons lollll like the part in oathbound where he said “briana is mine. my scion. my sovereign. my king.” like ohhhhh oh oh ohhhhhh he was crazy for that one. (side note i get why some ppl like sel more for bree, lots of ppl are into the crazy and possessive type in their book men while nick is more crazy and devoted but i’m a why choose truther bc i love them both)
okay now about my other faves (which is everyone) i love alice taking so much of everything in stride like at the beginning of bloodmarked she’s like how have you not been living in this archive ???? digging up all the secrets and tea lolll she’s so iconic. i’m glad her and bree were able to stay besties and bree being king didn’t pull them apart at all UNTIL THE COMA like oml free my girl alice, when mariah went in there and saw that she’s spent the last FOUR MONTHS reliving the moment where arthur possessed bree outside of volition like fuckkkkk i think alice is gonna join nick in the arthur haters club when (WHEN!) she wakes up lol.
this post is getting long again so i’m just gonna say let my guy william be happy and gay instead of tired and gay like plsssss
