This is where I plan to reblog all of the content for my Hatchetfield Holywebs au! I usually post on my main and my art account about it, but for your sake and mine, I wanted a place to consolidate all of the information regarding this au into one place.
I will still post about and take asks for my au on my other blogs, but if you’d rather look at a blog rather than tag search for the au this is where you should come!
I’d also love take asks for my au here as well!
If you see anything reblogged and it’s not from one of my other blogs, it’s likely because someone said something I want to adopt into the au’s canon
🕸️What is this au?🕸️
The Holywebs AU is a Hatchetfield AU where Grace Chasity and Hannah Foster become successors to Miss Holloway after she dies at the hands of Wilbur Cross.
Over the course of the AU, Grace slowly becomes obsessed the power of the Black Book, while Hannah comes to terms with the burden of power.
The au also features characters of various prominence including Webby, Steph, Lex, Ethan Duke, Detective Shapiro, and any other Hatchetfield character I decide has relevance later!
Also if you don’t like Grace or Lautity/Holyphone this au may not be your cup of tea because I’m obsessed with them lol
💫About me💫
If you made it this far you can call me Wups or Ups (she/they/he)!
My main account is here and my art account is here!
Give us the Shapiro and Grace parallels, please! I need them so!
I’m going to say this before I’ve written anything, this is probably going to be the post where I go off on a bunch of tangents about Shapiro’s personality in general and maybe a bit of her backstory because while I feel like I’ve talked about many of the primary cast in depth, Shapiro is a character that I want to play a major thematic role, and thus she deserves a good bit of focus. Also we have a total of four scenes with her, so a lot of this is just my own ideas of Shapiro.
Future Wups here, I actually just talked a whole bunch about Shapiro as an individual character with light sprinklings of Grace thoughts but I hope you enjoy anyways
(ALSO also, I meant to talk more about Catholicism vs Protestantism in this ask but while I know a fair bit more than the average person about Catholicism, my knowledge is heavily in the protestant sphere, so I would like to do a bit more research and confirmation before I share those ideas. If I’m going to be dissecting religious themes critically, I want to do so in an informed manner. I know I just sound like I’m putting it on blast all the time but trust it’s because I have experience and I want to do my due diligence.)
I’ve talked about this before, but where Grace and Shapiro relate most is on the topic of morality. This applies to Grace being a framing device for Duke and Shapiro’s own morality showdown, Grace and Shapiro both having religiously based moral compasses, and them having similar philosophies in general.
I’ve mentioned Shapiro and Duke representing lawful good and neutral good respectively in a previous post. (While I think morality is more complicated than a DnD alignment chart it’s a very useful shorthand to describe what I’m going for). I do think I’d make a subtle asterisk about Shapiro being lawful good. She is very much someone who started her life as lawful neutral and with each passing day moves more into lawful good.
Shapiro started out with a very strict idea of what was right and wrong. This applies to the church and also the justice system, and both those things influenced her. To compare and contrast for a second, I think Shapiro’s religious upbringing had a higher focus on not only repentance, but putting things right afterwards, while Grace was raised with those values as well, but a heavier emphasis was placed on external judgment. They both believe the same things are right and wrong, but Grace is more willing to bend the rules for herself personally, so long as she can strictly enforce those rules on others. Shapiro believes in consistency. Everyone should be held to the same standard, that includes herself, and she’s resistant to bending the rules. Also, if she doesn’t see you putting the work in to change, she wont take your lip service.
I will say, in her final scene in npmd, we see her confiscate a flask from Jason, she tells him off and then eyes it because she’s fucking tired and a drink would probably take the edge off. While I could interpret this as her being lax, the way she reprimands both him, Pete and Steph feels less like a “I’m not so big on the rules” vibe, and more of a “I’ve had to deal with three murder cases, I got my head smashed into a windshield (she definitely got scars from that actually), saw a god damn corpse walk, and this paradoxical case somehow worked out despite all logic. I don’t want to deal with any more shit or litigation tonight so give me that flask let me take a shot.” Again, because we see so little of her, I feel justified in taking a few liberties with her character.
Back to what I was saying, a part of her always had an interest in working in the force or she considered being a lawyer. Ultimately, she landed on being a detective because she wanted to be boots on the ground, and I think a part of her likes the puzzle that is solving a case. Not to say she views it as a game, anything but, rather, the reward of cracking a case and catching the perp is satisfying to her. It’s justice. It’s right.
Something that interests me is why she moved from Chicago to Hatchetfield. Hatchetfield is very much so portrayed as a weird and kind of shitty town that the locals love and hate in equal measure. From the outside, I'm certain it’s viewed poorly, and as an island it developed a very insular and intense culture. This is part of why supernatural and scifi shenanigans go down and no one says anything. The powerful families and factions of Hatchetfield developed a culture that just accepts that people go missing every day.
Shapiro probably heard about this through the grape vine from Chicago, since the city isn’t situated all that far from Hatchetfield. Maybe something was going wrong with her job in Chicago. Maybe a case she was working on somehow traced its way back there, and she followed the lead. For whatever reason, she ends up in Hatchetfield and joins the HFPD. (I definitely want to develop a stronger case for why she is in Hatchetfield but I’ve already gone off the rails with this ask lol).
Compared to working in Chicago, Shapiro has a lot more freedom which she certainly likes. While police corruption isn’t a new or uncommon concept *at all* There is a certain level of negligence in the HFPD that is deeply concerning, but also means Shapiro can do cases the way she likes them. That is of course, until she starts poking around deeper. Sure, the average crime she investigates goes as usual, but there are some cases, odd ones, where facts don’t line up. Not just in an average police incompetence type of way, in a “This defies all known standards of logic.” Shapiro keeps trying to dig, and her usually negligent peers get increasingly more hostile, and she stirs higher ups who politely tell her (threaten her) that there are some things that We Don’t Look Into.
Shapiro thinks, “Fuck that” and keeps digging and this all leads to her getting entangled with Grace again in this timeline (maybe an Echo of the timelines is Grace and Shapiro going up against each other because I feel like in all the timelines we see Grace in, AC, WB and NPMD there is reasonable cause for a detective to get involved). All these weird cases are leading back to her somehow and if Shapiro can just figure out how…
But she’s kicked off the force before she can do anything about it.
I want Shapiro’s disillusionment with the justice system to be a parallel to the ways in which Grace becomes disconnected from her religion. I talked about Shapiro having a more consistent moral code than Grace, and while that’s how they appear at a glance, it’s actually untrue. Shapiro had to turn a blind eye to many things in the HFPD for a long, long while, just so she could keep doing what she does. Sure, she always felt she made the right judgement calls, but sometimes she’d just sit back and watch while her peers coughsamsweetlycough abused their power and status. Grace also experiences a similar crisis as well, when she finds out the Lords exist and the belief system she used to anchor her can no longer be considered secure.
The difference between Shapiro and Grace is that when Shapiro is forced to confront her reliance on a system to seek justice, she slowly begins to forge her own path and create a new moral compass. Grace on the other hand, keeps the same structures in place and just inserts a new higher power into this system. Shapiro takes a leap to decide what’s true and good, and Grace turns to someone else to tell her once again. This of course happens a lot later in the story. Shapiro slowly develops this belief over the course of the story whilst investigating and having long conversations with Duke.
Up until the later half of act 2, Shapiro still has some fragment of hope that she can still solve this case the old fashioned way. All of these strange occurrences can be pinned on Grace. If all this mess is just an individual perpetrator who can be taken down, she can return to the easy, rigid structure she had before.
The problem is the dissonance. Her own moral compass is pointing in a different direction from Duke, yes, but it's also not in alignment with the law either. The higher ups in Hatchetfield have been hiding all this magic and danger from its citizens for years, decades even. She can’t in good conscience act like Grace is the only issue here. This whole system is rotten to the core. Even if she turns Grace in to the police, something like this could still happen again.
I think Grace would agree with this. If what her morals are wrong according to Shapiro, then the whole system that let her happen is. Grace aligns herself with power (which she’s decided to be the lords), and if Shapiro runs back to the HFPD, she’ll be doing the same thing. She’ll just find the biggest bully on the playground, the cops, to enforce what they think is right over everything else. Shapiro is hiding behind power just like she says Grace is.
Now this is a lot and I feel like it’s very all over the place but I hope it satisfied some of your interest. I definitely want to dig in more to her being Catholic, as well as the implications of her being black and a cop specifically. I would especially like to talk about restorative justice between her and Grace as well. I don’t know exactly how I want the au to end yet since there are so many possibilities (and some of my options for telling this au actually allow for different endings to be properly explored), but I also feel strongly that just locking Grace up and carting her off is not the message I want to send. Its kind of hard to come up with an ending for the au because a) still working out how I want the plot to go and b) whatever I end with sort of decides the “thesis” of the story so to speak. Of course I could make an ending thats open ended but this post is about Shapiro not the struggles of writing a cohesive and complex story.
Yeah Grace is 18 and did a lot of heinous shit, but she’s still basically a kid, and Wilbur and the Lords had a major hand in getting her to this point.
I wrote this as a stream of consciousness and nothing here is absolutely set in stone for the au. I will say writing this is how I decided to remove bailey’s death from the au, at least as Shapiro’s motive. Bailey can still die to establish stakes and then we can ramp up the likeability of other characters who may or may not die. Death in the au is a whole other topic and its less of a thematic thing and more of a “Lets pull back the curtain and talk about the purpose of death thing”
I don't know how cohesive any of this is because I've been very busy the past three days and today was my last day of business so if this sounds like unhinged ravings uhhh no it doesn't. I will say now I've realized Shapiro has so much untapped potential in canon on the fact that she moved to hatchetfield alone. Also I just love how Bryce plays her. We always give credit to whoever's being the jokester in a scene, but the straight man is such a crucial role in comedy. I also appreciate her more purely serious scenes as well like in the beginning.
A few they say. I need to accept that me and brevity have no relationship lol.
I'm glad you like my character thoughts! Character motives, beliefs and quirks are my favorite thing to write about so I'm glad you enjoy them.
Also HELLOOOOOOoooo Zailey + Shapiro shenanagins very excited to hear abou tthat sometime.
I'm glad to see I hit the nail on the head with Shapiro's religious background. My knowledge is cobbled together from some classes I took, books I've read, me floating around deconstructionist spaces on the internet in general, and people I know irl. And it's good to know I've got another resource!
I know Shapiro being catholic was probably just a joke line (similar to the methodist one in tgwdlm) that isn't meant to be a major factor in her character, but also Hatchetfield has a habit of taking characters mentioned Once and then giving them a whole ass musical so who knows. Regardless, it feels like something that slots really nicely into the au and thus I want to dissect that.
After Hannah and Grace have their friendship breakup, I still want there to be an element of internal tension amongst the "good guys" so to say, so Duke and Shapiro's conflict is a good way to do that. I definitely should make a longer post about it at some point, and once Hannah joins the sleuth squad, or the sleuth squad joins Hannah, she'll definitely have input too.
I think of Hannah a lot in terms of comic book superheroes and shonen anime protagonists. She has this picture in her head of the perfect self-sacrificing hero who can change anyone's mind and talk them back to the side of light. If I were to add another theme to the au it would be escapism and it would center Hannah. Her relationship with Grace and her interest in stories and comics would both represent that. Idk but Hannah is a comic kid to me. She goes to toy zone and looks at Frank's vintage comic collection, and maybe holloway has some too. projecting my childhood obsession with 60s marvel comics onto hannah she loved the x-men and spiderman im sure. also those are the comics that holloway would have read when she was younger.
Also after I do the next character dynamic chart I will likely be doing that dnd alignment chart. Also after I do more of my art requests lol. One thing about me is that I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE a chart. I hear "Venn diagram" like a dog hears "treat."
Shapiro being from Chicago and thus an outsider is So Interesting To Me, especially because there's this running theme of people getting trapped in hatchetfield (emma, zoey, lex and holloway). It's like a one way door in, and unless you dismantle the whole system holding this town together you can't get out.
Also the HFPD is definitely in the pocket of the Lauter family, the church of the starry children and also CCRP in this au. They share custody <3. While this au is highly character based, it would be fun to dissect the power struggle between these three groups at some other time.
Some of my current theories for the Lauter family actually involve them being a protection system to keep hatchetfield citizens at large from knowing about the supernatural happenings in the town so they can use them to their advantage. If they monopolize any knowledge about the magic going on in the town, they can use it to their advantage.
The Lauters aren't as magically adept like the church of the starry children, and they don't have the scientific research of ccrp, but the Lauter family has *charisma* (Corey Dorris specifically has the charisma I love that man). They're also an old OLD family, so they have tenure. Hatchetfield is a town run on loyalty (fuck clivesdale and all that), so of course the Lauters have garnered so much of it over the years. CCRP and The Starry Children will shape the narrative a lot, but overall they step back and let the Lauters do their thing.
Part of what Steph uncovers (that Shapiro also finds) is this truth about the lauter family, how over the years they've quietly hidden and swept supernatural instances under the rug and given their own explanation for it. Sometimes it's been for the good of the town, other times its been for the good of the family.
I definitely think some of the powers that be CCRP and the Cult specifically, are interested in keeping Grace on the loose. They want to see what happens for their own personal reasons. I think Solomon may be apathetic at first, but once Grace starts to more openly threaten the town (which is *his* domain and *his* power), he may become more invested in stopping her.
This isn't set in stone but yknow something to Mull Over.
Very excited to think more about Duke and how his belief systems and morality shift over the course of the story. I think especially because his whole job is about trying to give kids second chances dealing with Grace is especially painful to him.
The kids of the sleuth squad drive shapiro Up The God Damn Walls at first. This is definitely based on her interactions with the main characters of npmd but also with officer bailey (who is a man child). I do think there are lots of interesting parallels between her and each of them, as they all go through their own kind of deconstruction. Steph especially since they both have a foot in the game of the Lauter corruption scandal.
Shapiro has definitely seen Lex and Ethan at the station before and has *not* forgotten about it. Over the course of the story though, she gains more empathy for why they did some of the things they did.
Holloway prooobably dies before her and Shapiro can meet, but also, I want them to interact So Bad, so maybe they worked on a case together somehow before the end of Act 1. I definitely think they've interacted before by nature of their professions. Maybe when Shapiro was digging she found a lead that brought her to Miss Holloway and they had a cryptic and confusing ass conversation that helped steer Shapiro on the right track (rewatching Killer Track helped me appreciate how holloway will just say scary cryptic bullshit and not elaborate I love her).
Also there are Definitely Shapiro and Holloway character traits to compare and contrast so maybe that will be another post.
I definitely thing in the window of time where Holloway was alive Hannah and Grace’s relationship was a good bit different.
With Holloway there as an older figure it called more attention to the similarities between Hannah and Grace due to their age in comparison to each other, making their own age gap less apparent.
It also meant that they had an older figure to go to for emotional support and thus they didn’t have to turn to each other in the same way.
Holloway added a healthy hit of balance to their dynamic that they sorely needed after her death.
You could say that period of their friendship with was the eye of the storm.
IF I were to make a holywebs role swap au, I would probably put Grace onto the sleuth squad and gives Steph the black book, and this is purely because I want Grace and Shapiro banter so badly.
Give us the Shapiro and Grace parallels, please! I need them so!
I’m going to say this before I’ve written anything, this is probably going to be the post where I go off on a bunch of tangents about Shapiro’s personality in general and maybe a bit of her backstory because while I feel like I’ve talked about many of the primary cast in depth, Shapiro is a character that I want to play a major thematic role, and thus she deserves a good bit of focus. Also we have a total of four scenes with her, so a lot of this is just my own ideas of Shapiro.
Future Wups here, I actually just talked a whole bunch about Shapiro as an individual character with light sprinklings of Grace thoughts but I hope you enjoy anyways
(ALSO also, I meant to talk more about Catholicism vs Protestantism in this ask but while I know a fair bit more than the average person about Catholicism, my knowledge is heavily in the protestant sphere, so I would like to do a bit more research and confirmation before I share those ideas. If I’m going to be dissecting religious themes critically, I want to do so in an informed manner. I know I just sound like I’m putting it on blast all the time but trust it’s because I have experience and I want to do my due diligence.)
I’ve talked about this before, but where Grace and Shapiro relate most is on the topic of morality. This applies to Grace being a framing device for Duke and Shapiro’s own morality showdown, Grace and Shapiro both having religiously based moral compasses, and them having similar philosophies in general.
I’ve mentioned Shapiro and Duke representing lawful good and neutral good respectively in a previous post. (While I think morality is more complicated than a DnD alignment chart it’s a very useful shorthand to describe what I’m going for). I do think I’d make a subtle asterisk about Shapiro being lawful good. She is very much someone who started her life as lawful neutral and with each passing day moves more into lawful good.
Shapiro started out with a very strict idea of what was right and wrong. This applies to the church and also the justice system, and both those things influenced her. To compare and contrast for a second, I think Shapiro’s religious upbringing had a higher focus on not only repentance, but putting things right afterwards, while Grace was raised with those values as well, but a heavier emphasis was placed on external judgment. They both believe the same things are right and wrong, but Grace is more willing to bend the rules for herself personally, so long as she can strictly enforce those rules on others. Shapiro believes in consistency. Everyone should be held to the same standard, that includes herself, and she’s resistant to bending the rules. Also, if she doesn’t see you putting the work in to change, she wont take your lip service.
I will say, in her final scene in npmd, we see her confiscate a flask from Jason, she tells him off and then eyes it because she’s fucking tired and a drink would probably take the edge off. While I could interpret this as her being lax, the way she reprimands both him, Pete and Steph feels less like a “I’m not so big on the rules” vibe, and more of a “I’ve had to deal with three murder cases, I got my head smashed into a windshield (she definitely got scars from that actually), saw a god damn corpse walk, and this paradoxical case somehow worked out despite all logic. I don’t want to deal with any more shit or litigation tonight so give me that flask let me take a shot.” Again, because we see so little of her, I feel justified in taking a few liberties with her character.
Back to what I was saying, a part of her always had an interest in working in the force or she considered being a lawyer. Ultimately, she landed on being a detective because she wanted to be boots on the ground, and I think a part of her likes the puzzle that is solving a case. Not to say she views it as a game, anything but, rather, the reward of cracking a case and catching the perp is satisfying to her. It’s justice. It’s right.
Something that interests me is why she moved from Chicago to Hatchetfield. Hatchetfield is very much so portrayed as a weird and kind of shitty town that the locals love and hate in equal measure. From the outside, I'm certain it’s viewed poorly, and as an island it developed a very insular and intense culture. This is part of why supernatural and scifi shenanigans go down and no one says anything. The powerful families and factions of Hatchetfield developed a culture that just accepts that people go missing every day.
Shapiro probably heard about this through the grape vine from Chicago, since the city isn’t situated all that far from Hatchetfield. Maybe something was going wrong with her job in Chicago. Maybe a case she was working on somehow traced its way back there, and she followed the lead. For whatever reason, she ends up in Hatchetfield and joins the HFPD. (I definitely want to develop a stronger case for why she is in Hatchetfield but I’ve already gone off the rails with this ask lol).
Compared to working in Chicago, Shapiro has a lot more freedom which she certainly likes. While police corruption isn’t a new or uncommon concept *at all* There is a certain level of negligence in the HFPD that is deeply concerning, but also means Shapiro can do cases the way she likes them. That is of course, until she starts poking around deeper. Sure, the average crime she investigates goes as usual, but there are some cases, odd ones, where facts don’t line up. Not just in an average police incompetence type of way, in a “This defies all known standards of logic.” Shapiro keeps trying to dig, and her usually negligent peers get increasingly more hostile, and she stirs higher ups who politely tell her (threaten her) that there are some things that We Don’t Look Into.
Shapiro thinks, “Fuck that” and keeps digging and this all leads to her getting entangled with Grace again in this timeline (maybe an Echo of the timelines is Grace and Shapiro going up against each other because I feel like in all the timelines we see Grace in, AC, WB and NPMD there is reasonable cause for a detective to get involved). All these weird cases are leading back to her somehow and if Shapiro can just figure out how…
But she’s kicked off the force before she can do anything about it.
I want Shapiro’s disillusionment with the justice system to be a parallel to the ways in which Grace becomes disconnected from her religion. I talked about Shapiro having a more consistent moral code than Grace, and while that’s how they appear at a glance, it’s actually untrue. Shapiro had to turn a blind eye to many things in the HFPD for a long, long while, just so she could keep doing what she does. Sure, she always felt she made the right judgement calls, but sometimes she’d just sit back and watch while her peers coughsamsweetlycough abused their power and status. Grace also experiences a similar crisis as well, when she finds out the Lords exist and the belief system she used to anchor her can no longer be considered secure.
The difference between Shapiro and Grace is that when Shapiro is forced to confront her reliance on a system to seek justice, she slowly begins to forge her own path and create a new moral compass. Grace on the other hand, keeps the same structures in place and just inserts a new higher power into this system. Shapiro takes a leap to decide what’s true and good, and Grace turns to someone else to tell her once again. This of course happens a lot later in the story. Shapiro slowly develops this belief over the course of the story whilst investigating and having long conversations with Duke.
Up until the later half of act 2, Shapiro still has some fragment of hope that she can still solve this case the old fashioned way. All of these strange occurrences can be pinned on Grace. If all this mess is just an individual perpetrator who can be taken down, she can return to the easy, rigid structure she had before.
The problem is the dissonance. Her own moral compass is pointing in a different direction from Duke, yes, but it's also not in alignment with the law either. The higher ups in Hatchetfield have been hiding all this magic and danger from its citizens for years, decades even. She can’t in good conscience act like Grace is the only issue here. This whole system is rotten to the core. Even if she turns Grace in to the police, something like this could still happen again.
I think Grace would agree with this. If what her morals are wrong according to Shapiro, then the whole system that let her happen is. Grace aligns herself with power (which she’s decided to be the lords), and if Shapiro runs back to the HFPD, she’ll be doing the same thing. She’ll just find the biggest bully on the playground, the cops, to enforce what they think is right over everything else. Shapiro is hiding behind power just like she says Grace is.
Now this is a lot and I feel like it’s very all over the place but I hope it satisfied some of your interest. I definitely want to dig in more to her being Catholic, as well as the implications of her being black and a cop specifically. I would especially like to talk about restorative justice between her and Grace as well. I don’t know exactly how I want the au to end yet since there are so many possibilities (and some of my options for telling this au actually allow for different endings to be properly explored), but I also feel strongly that just locking Grace up and carting her off is not the message I want to send. Its kind of hard to come up with an ending for the au because a) still working out how I want the plot to go and b) whatever I end with sort of decides the “thesis” of the story so to speak. Of course I could make an ending thats open ended but this post is about Shapiro not the struggles of writing a cohesive and complex story.
Yeah Grace is 18 and did a lot of heinous shit, but she’s still basically a kid, and Wilbur and the Lords had a major hand in getting her to this point.
I wrote this as a stream of consciousness and nothing here is absolutely set in stone for the au. I will say writing this is how I decided to remove bailey’s death from the au, at least as Shapiro’s motive. Bailey can still die to establish stakes and then we can ramp up the likeability of other characters who may or may not die. Death in the au is a whole other topic and its less of a thematic thing and more of a “Lets pull back the curtain and talk about the purpose of death thing”
I don't know how cohesive any of this is because I've been very busy the past three days and today was my last day of business so if this sounds like unhinged ravings uhhh no it doesn't. I will say now I've realized Shapiro has so much untapped potential in canon on the fact that she moved to hatchetfield alone. Also I just love how Bryce plays her. We always give credit to whoever's being the jokester in a scene, but the straight man is such a crucial role in comedy. I also appreciate her more purely serious scenes as well like in the beginning.
Okay so I'm definitely going to make another character dynamic chart at some point, but would people also be interested in a dnd alignment chart (ie lawful neutral chaotic/good neutral evil)? It's very rudimentary and doesn't cover the complete nuance of characters, but it can be helpful short hand. Just a thought.
I'm rewatching all of Shapiro's scenes in NPMD in prep for writing about her and Grace, and oh my god I just love her playing the straight man against Bailey and Grace. Also I'm pleased to be affirmed that her "kids these days" attitude is very much so on point.
BIG FAN OF GRACE CHASITY. TELL ME YOUR WILDEST HEADCANONS
This isn’t exactly a “wild head canon” but I do hope you find it interesting. In a lot of my art I draw grace with these two plushies, a lion and a lamb. From some cursory research "The Lion and the Lamb" may actually just be an extrapolation/misinterpretation of one particular verse, but culturally in christianity, the lion and the lamb represents the duality of jesus, and so I headcanon her with these plushies to represent that
the lion represents jesus power and his king status, while the lamb represents his sacrifice and suffering. Because I'm physically incapable of *not* giving grace jesus parallels I was like "let me incorporate this into her"
The two plushies represent similar things for Grace, the Lamb represents her sacrifice, her purity, her humility, and the lion represents her ambition and her her wrath. The lamb plushie is missing an eye because in canon (and other timelines), Grace either sacrifices her chastity and/or kills people, so the Lamb plushie looses an eye to represent that. The Lamb is a physical manifestation of how Grace views herself as broken/damaged after these events. She doesn't get rid of the Lamb though, it still matters to her.
The Lamb is all of her internalized emotions, while the lion is what she externalizes and pushes onto others. The Lamb is her shame and the Lion is her means of projecting that onto others. (The lion essentially represents ddmd)
The Lion remains unscathed. As the Lamb falls, the Lion rises to the challenge. Her power and her ambition become all the more clear as she can no longer lean on the Lamb's virtues. This is also represented by her having more of a preference to her Lion plushie over her Lamb one.
In two of these images, the lamb has falling/is falling of the bed, or its face is down, while the lion is face up . The purple image is paired with a poem about her sacrifice and lot of chastity in NPMD and the one in the top right is uhhh... listen transmasc Lautity like to have fun okay! Hence why the lamb is pushed to the side. It doesnt discriminate between those two encounters because they are both deemed sexual/impure.
The Lion doesn't gaf because it only cares about judging and ruling over others. (This is also why I sort of associate the lion plushy with Steph as well. Not that she has lion associations exactly like grace, but yk mayors, kings, lions, ambition, pride etc etc. I could elaborate more but this is already long).
I know this isn't exactly a headcanon in the traditional sense, but this ask got me thinking about her plushies again lol.
some little tidbits around them are
she used to take them everywhere as a kid
Karen made them for her so they're one of a kind
She used to take them with her to abstinence camp but after some other campers started messing around with them she would leave them at home and bring some of her less precious plushies
She turns them around when she thinks she's doing sinful because she doesn't want to be a bad influence on them
when steph comes over one time she asks grace if she ever made them kiss as a kid and she is horrified at even the suggestion
Grace never really thought about the plushie's genders, they were just The Lion and The Lamb and when people would ask her she would say they're just stuffed animals
totally not indicative of grace's feelings on her own gender
their color pallets are complementary, and *mildly* based on how grace wears blue and pink. (The lion is more of an orangish red but like close enough)
even though they're genderless in Grace's eyes, they do sort of represent a duality of gender
though the lamb does represent purity, it also is reflective of resilience in the face of adversity. This translates to how grace tries to shake off bullying
So Hannah’s character is very much so an allegory for neurodiversity/mental health/disability, and the concept of a nightmare time as explored in The Witch in the Web very much leans into that regarding both Holloway and Hannah’s nightmare times.
I think Willabella represents generational trauma and also because disabilities can be hereditary the specific trauma that comes with living with a disability in an ableist society
All of the people killed in the witchwood also play into this
The reason I bring this up was because I was thinking of Hannah playing the Ukulele, Miss Holloway’s inability to perform music anymore, and instruments and music as a coping mechanism
So fun fact about me I sort of play bass guitar. It was a gift from my brother a few years back and now I play casually on and off.
One thing that’s different about playing bass compared to all of my other artistic hobbies (writing, poetry, art) is that it almost never fails to calm me down. Playing bass requires just enough thought to be engaging and distracting, but gives just enough enjoyment to not be overly taxing. (Obviously this is in part because I play recreationally. My relationship to playing flute is different).
Back to hatchetfield, that’s what Hannah’s playing of ukulele makes me think of. Webby gives her this song to play to magically ward off Willabella and her Nightmare Time, but in general playing music can be a really helpful coping mechanism for stress and trauma.
Now looking at Holloway, she’s someone who’s spent a large portion of her life writing and playing music, but now she’s deprived of that. I’ve talked about this before in another post about Holloway, but I will reiterate, Holloway being deprived of her artistic expression is genuinely devastating.
Yes, she can play alone, but a large part of music and writing is the performance, it’s the communication and the connection that you gain from it.
Hannah’s song helped her remember and connect to Webby, and in contrast, Holloway is cursed to never be remembered and to never connect with others musically.
Music is such a good way to connect with people emotionally without letting them into the overly specific details of your life, but even Run Away With Me and its metaphorical and somewhat vague lyrics is too much for her to share.
Under the lense of a mental health metaphor, Holloway’s “curse” is her own emotional suppression. It’s her survivors guilt destroying the life and emotions she could share with others, but she’s so dedicated to atoning and becoming a savior that she’s become disconnected with her own emotions and craft.
This is why it was such a good choice to have Hannah play her ukulele in the witch in the web, the first episode that featured Miss Holloway. It calls attention to her themes and connection to music and mental health, even before we get more explicite details in Killer Track.
I will say in the witch in the web, she seems to be able to handle and navigate her nightmare time well, even without any seeming coping mechanisms, but there’s also something to be said about how sometimes you don’t have time to unravel your emotions and have a healthy relationship with them. Sometimes you just have to hold it all in for the time being and just survive.
Idk just a thought I had and I’m not sure if this is coherent but I wanted to share lol
Truly everyone suffers in the holywebs au, but Lex is in the unique position where everyone is genuinely trying to make things easier for her but actually just making everything fucking worse and she needs a break. I need to let Lex do something other than suffer in this au. Given the mentorship theme I would definitely love to pull in Tom and also Becky. I know she has more canonical interactions with tom but Becky and Lex have interesting parallels to me.
Heeyyyyyyy just wanna announce I’ll be taking hatchetfield drawing requests again!
As long as this is pinned I’ll be taking new requests, but if you sent a request after it’s not pinned don’t feel bad. I just do this to slow the influx is all.
I plan to get to every request at some point (yes even the backlogged ones from a while ago)
I just go where the wind takes me lol so my process isn’t very linear
I will say even if Hannah and Grace get toxic and co-dependent, Steph and Hannah model what that relationship dynamic could have been, and if there is some possibility of a return to normalcy at the end of the au, Steph and Hannah would have a very strong relationship.
