cogito ergo sum

"i think, therefore i am."

[mingos]

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　an indie portrayal of one piece’s resident heavenly demon, flamingo incarnate, flintlock enthusiast, and master of puppets, donquixote ‘joker’ doflamingo.

　　written by wilder（29/they/est)

a study in:

　delusions of grandeur, spider webs, heavenly retribution, cain & abel, a conqueror's will, addiction & alcoholism, "cluster b" mental disorders, disordered eating, living nightmares, marionettes, divine congregations, underground crime rings, & never taking ‘no’ for an answer again. 

　rules ・ verses ・ portrayal notes

blogroll: donquixote rosinante. x drake.

[mingos]

happy pride month from bisexual icon and the #1 supporter of gay wrongs, donquixote doflamingo.

[mingos]

okay okay okay i can't just keep sitting here thinking about doing stuff i actually have to do stuff.

[mingos]

He is everywhere for those with eyes to see

[mingos]

@sircrocodillian said: "Hold this." Crocodile grunted as he had the younger adjust the book so that it was readable for the elder. "Where did you leave off? Ah, the joints of the ankle and lower legs." He sniffed as he looked over the words. "The skeleton of the foot anatomically short bones, making up the tarsus...." he droned on as he began to read.

this was the life, really.

doflamingo was fully reclined in his favorite chair - beind read to by his favorite person, though admitting that aloud would likely cause problems - with his resting eyes hidden behind a delightfully cold compress that was already taking the edge off his headache after just a short half-hour. occasionally, a hand would cautiously reach out to his left and blindly probe a bowl of blueberries with his fingers, bringing a handful to back his lips and popping three or more into his mouth at a time. at an eventual pause in crocodile's rythmic pace - likely during a transition from one paragraph to the next or turning the page, it's not like doflamingo could see to tell which one - he finally spoke up:  

“i ask again: do you really have to sail back in two days? can’t we just” — he yawned, a testament to his comfort — “stay like this forever?”

[mingos]

Rev not wanting to ship dofu.wani but then meeting me and immediately getting flashbanged by the potential

[videog4mes]

TOMODACHI LIFE: SHENANIGANS EDITION. a collection of action based concepts inspired by the silly things those silly miis do. change verbiage and pronouns as needed. (send + reverse if desired.)

follow. sender is following receiver for some reason.

breakdance. receiver walks in on sender breakdancing and joins them.

ballet. receiver is trying to learn ballet with sender.

stare. receiver is watching sender closely.

hearteyes. while sender is excitedly talking about something, receiver suddenly has hearteyes for sender.

ready to risk it all. sender officially confesses how they feel about receiver.

street light. receiver discovers sender switching the street light on and off for some reason.

ants go marching. mid-chatting, receiver gets distracted by a trail of ants passing by them and sender.

unrequited. receiver responds to their feelings not being reciprocated by sender.

foam sword. receiver pulls a toy sword out on sender only to be met with the same response.

water sprinkler. sender and receiver spend time together splashing and running around under the water sprinkler.

show off. sender and receiver are preparing to show off their prized possessions and debate who has the best item.

gloomy days. someone put sender in a rather foul mood and receiver attempts to make things better.

shake it, shake. sender and receiver draw in a crowd playing maracas and putting on a show.

chase. receiver chases sender around the gardens.

date. sender and receiver are on a special date.

shooting star. sender and receiver are lying in a bed of grass watching the stars together.

renovate. receiver asks sender to help them decorating and/or renovating around their home.

jump scare. receiver reacts to sender's attempt to spook them.

blushing mess. sender and receiver clearly have a thing for one another but are being bashful.

new style. receiver models their new hairstyle/clothing style for sender.

roomies. receiver asks sender to move in with them.

[mingos]

i was diagnosed with autism and adhd during my year-and-a-half (?) away and it's kind of crazy because so much shit about how my motivation is so inconsistent all the time and why getting upset by things takes a lot more out of me than it should (especially not having a support system for the last 29 years because everyone just kept telling me i was 'normal' outside of the brain damage-induced balance issues I was born with and therefore all my shortcomings were just laziness/a refusual to apply myself) makes so much more sense.

still really pissed out it took 28 almost 29 years because I'm struggled all the way through school & college and could have really used that help because now i'm just burnt out and feeling really behind in life, but i'm glad i can actually read up about things about myself and how my brain works now.

[02decay]

frozen spiderwebs

[mingos]

DQ Pirates Verse Plotting Call

　attention!

is your muse a sweetie bean at heart? a nice little guy with morals, and integrity, who gets fulfillment from doing "good" deeds? a widdle angel baby who only hurts "bad" people? would you like them not to be those things?

is your muse mostly good but one traumatic incident in their past and a bad influence encouraging them to give into their worst impulses was all that stood between them and a jump off the metaphorical cliff of evil creature town?

have you ever wondered what your muse's life would be like if they went down a different path? mayhaps one where they were taken in by an eviler, more emotionally unstable, more hedonistic, less bald daddy warbucks with a weird relationship to food and drinking problem?

would your muse like to learn to commit... crimes?

how to commit tax evasion? forgery? how to gather blackmail? how to case a house? what a "drug mule" is and how to be one? how to harvest organs? how psychological torture works?

Well...

[mingos]

【 h.c. 】 ー doflamingo's crocodile fixation

　there have been exactly two characters in the entire series who have turned down an invitation to work with doflamingo and it's perhaps the most revealing detail about him as a characterーbecause he's thrown an absolute tantrum over it every single time. he despises it:

「 一番嫌いなことを覚えてるか？見下されることだ。」 "do you remember what i hate more than anything? to be looked down on."

　but, what does 'being looked down on' mean to a narcissistic psychopath? well, basically anything that doesn't involve doing exactly as they say and thinking they're the greatest person you've ever met. and you can't tell him 'no', especially if he's the one expressing interest in you/offering you something. both crocodile & law broke that rule, and he immediately tried to murder both of them. he hates them for it. 'if i can't have you, nobody can' and all that. psychotic child behavior.

but the thing that fascinates me the most in law's case is, despite his consistent refusal to take the heart seat & his actively trying to murder doflamingo for 100+ episodes straight, the entirety of the dressrosa arc can be summed up as "doflamingo is really, really, really obsessed with law". he cannot let go of the fact that law has turned him down and (even worse) decided to idolize his inferior brother instead of him. he wants to kill him, he's furious at him over his betrayal... but also but also tells law no less than five times how "disappointed" he is in himーincluding once where he doesn't think law is trying hard enough to kill him. but that's a post for another day because there are a lot of layers to his & law's relationship.

but basically, despite them having exactly two interactions in canon over ten years ago, doflamingo's obsessive fixation with law not being obsessively fixated on him gives me a generally good idea of how they would interact.

　doflamingo is a narcissist with an incredibly inflated view of himself. he doesn't need people to validate him emotionally (although, having sycophants around is nice) because his opinion of himself already can't be any higher. but when you don't feed into that, he ironically becomes both obsessed with your approval, and obsessed with ruining your life when you don't give him said approval.

doflamingo has a crocodile fixation.

[mingos]

【 h.c. 】 ー "food = survival" (food trauma)

　　　(cw: disordered eating, food talk.)

　been having back-and-forth with @belovedcorvid the last few days about the bird brothers™ and how their relationship with food was absolutely altered due to those formative childhood years being forced to eat garbage (as well as probably bugs, plants, or anything in the woods that looked vaguely edible) & steal to survive.

and we discovered that both birds, like everything else in their lives, had complete opposite trauma responses; rabbit's rocinante is more-or-less food avoidant because the act of eating is generally uncomfortable outside of specific tastes & textures, whereas i feel like doflamingo would be gluttonous when it came to food. basically, they can hardly stand to eat in the same room as each other because their eating habits are so opposite that it makes them either sick or irrationally angry.

-

it started with the realization that, although rosinante was only forced to survive by eating garbage & stealing for that two year period before being taken in by sengoku, doflamingo continued to eat garbage & steal. at least for another 3-5 years until his gang was established. because they were the ones looking to doflamingo to get them out of poverty, not the other way around, their first headquarters was is a garbage dump.

pair that with him being in a rough environment and his general desire to survive no matter what (ie. he can't survive if he dies of starvation), he'll eat almost anything without complaint. ate his entire devil fruit, stem & all, for sure.

almost anything. he has one specific food trigger (that he has tried to overcome for years for the sake of his "food = survival" mindset, but he just can't do it) which is barbecue or any slow-cooked meats. any meat with char on it, tooーreally, any meat that is drier than medium-rare is probably pushing it.

pretty sure it was just a dark joke made by oda about him almost being immolated as a child, but since i've already headcanoned that as the worst/most humiliating experience of his entire life, i'd say the memories being enough to make him repulsed by the thought is valid.

more about his other specific behaviors (food aggression, compulsive overeating, food waste anxiety) under the cut.

food aggression: i don't know if there's a human equivalent to this phrase because i've only ever seen it used when describing animal behavior when they become territorial over their foodーbut he has whatever that is. his food is his food; he doesn't share, he doesn't let people eat things off his plate, and if you try to take away 'finished' plates without his say so, or eat the last bite of any dish at his table (at least without asking permission first) he'll get irritated at best and furious at worst. really kind of just depends how hungry he is because, the hungrier he gets, the more his brain slips into the "survival mode" from when he was a child. same goes for pantry/snack foods he enjoys. even if he has no immediate plans to eat it, if you don't ask him first so he at least knows that food is not going to be there next time he seeks it outーthat's his food. he was saving it. how dare you eat it. so, i guess "food hoarding" can be tacked onto this point, too.

compulsive overeating: i generally see & write doflamingo as a hedonistic pleasure demon (he drinks, he parties, he's hypersexual, etc.) so him having a habit of overeating definitely tracksーbut it's not a hedonism thing. it's ironic considering his business partnership with cesar & kaido has indirectly contributed to the starvation of thousands of people, but he has an irrational fear of food scarcity. even when he's a rich as fuck crime lord & king with his own walk-in pantry and multiple fridges, it's never quite gone anyway. every meal may as well be his last meal so he's going to eat like a hibernating grizzly bear and stuff himself to the point of sicknessーeven past sickness sometimes, if he's in a particularly weird headspace or he's having his first meal really late in the day because he was too busy. big portions. double portions. triple portions, even. very rarely will he turn down food offered to himーusually only if he's sick, too busy to eat, or if it's his one food trigger. otherwise... yeah, just hibernating grizzly bear energy.

food waste anxiety: somehow, i keep finding ways to compare doflamingo & sanji, so me seeing him having a general hatred of wasting food tracks. they both had periods in their childhood where they were starving and had to covet what little food they could find, so it makes sense to me. though, dare i say, i think doflamingo would be a little more unhinged about it. because, when normal people talk about not wasting food, they usually just mean finish your plate, don't throw stuff on the floor, don't let food spoilーwhich doflamingo agrees with, don't get me wrong. he does. if you don't finish food in front of him (especially if it's food he offered you) he'll want to wring your neck. but... 'wasting food' to him also extends to not wasting edible food scraps. if it's edible, he will eat it (or at least have it turned into something else, like a broth). including, but not limited to: banana peels, orange peels, cheese rinds, apple cores, watermelon rinds, potato peels, and vegetable stalks, stems, or leaves. basically, there's this fanart of doflamingo smoking a cigarette with rosinante and, after he's done, he just... eats it. that's the vibe. that's what eating with doflamingo feels like. just... horror, and confusion, and you can tell something is mentally wrong with him just based on the way he eats

[mingos]

For the question about my character meme, how do you personally think Doffy felt about the situation when he was a child and St Homing decided to give up his status to live with the common folk. We saw how badly they were treated, but I'd like your opinion on how it personally affected Doffy, if you don't mind?

　oh, it psychologically fucked him up. no doubt. not even just the beatings & extreme poverty that would come later, i'm talking everything about that situation from start-to-finish. (before i start, just to be clear, this is not a 'uwu poor doffy uwu' analysis, this is a child psychology analysis.)

-

i know his shock & anger at the beginning before anything 'bad' happened was meant to illustrate "see, he's always been an evil little shit" but honestly, his base reaction is perfectly within the realms for a kid who has had his entire life & belief system essentially just upended. he wasn't an adult with a fully developed brain, he was a child with a child's brain. eight years old is actually around the time kids start thinking logically & understanding the world around them on a deeper level.

picture it: you're essentially one of the richest, most powerful children in the world, raised in an environment where you are deified & you can do no wrong, that everyone beneath you (humans) is less than dirt (whether that's right is not the point) and one day your dad is like... "hey, i want to be that". and you overhear your peers mocking your dad and essentially kicking you all out of your home and forcing you to move to an unfamiliar environment. like, moving schools as a child, but worse.

you've also been conditioned to think you are entitled to anything you want, and are allowed to be as nasty as you want to humans without consequence. but, suddenly, not only are they not serving you anymore... the moment you talk to these humans the way you have been conditioned by the adults in your life to talk to them when they 'disrespect' youーthey burn down your new house & start threatening to murder you. they are essentially in the position you used to be in now.

-

yeah sure "taste of your own medicine" and all thatーbut doflamingo is eight. he barely knows what that even means, at that age children are still learning basic concepts of morality & social norms, and at that point basically every social norm doflamingo has been conditioned into for those first eight years of his life were turned on their head & now all the sudden he was punished for believing them rather than praised. for the first time in his life, he's starving. for the first time in his life, he's been hit. he's poor. he's forced to wear rags. nothing he has been taught makes sense anymore.

also, at that age, your world tends to revolve around one thingーyour parents. they understand the roles of "child" and "adult" and understand that the adult's purpose is to give them guidance & protect them. homing, in doflamingo's eyes, did the opposite. he put them in harms’ way. another thing in his world that has been proven totally wrong.

-

child brains generally do not handle stress or trauma well; i forget the exact wording or study so don't quote me, but i've read articles over the years that make the argument that children who grow up in violent home environments (like witnessing/being subjected to domestic violence) or split home environments (like parents undergoing a messy divorce) essentially can have levels of ptsd equivalent to war veterans.

(on a personal note) as a very ill child who spent my first 12 years in & out of hospitals, i have medical ptsd; just hearing a heart rate monitor, seeing a needle, or smelling that very specific 'hospital' or 'anesthesia' smell is enough to give me a panic attack sometimes, even at 27.

that kind of trauma really does stick with youーeverything goes back to your childhood.

　taking his power back was, in part, to ensure that nothing close to that ever happens to him again.

[mingos]

　　　【 h.c. 】 ー love as a transaction, not reciprocation.

　been thinking a lot recently how this fandom discusses whether or not doflamingo can 'love' the people in his life he considers valuable (ie. his brother, his crime family, etc.) in a pretty black-and-white way. it usually comes down to "he does love" or "he doesn't love". but, honestly, it's both.

neither of those answers really take his quite obvious mental illnesses (narcissistic tendencies, antisocial personality tendencies, etc.) into account. neither of those answers really take into account that a person with those illnesses can love and even believe themselves capable to, just... they're missing pieces. something is off. really, really off. he does, but he doesn't. it's complicated.

　doflamingo doesn’t love like a normal person. he quite literally can’t; his base capacity for empathy is too low, and his sense of self-importance is too high. in his eyes, no one is his equal and very few people even come close (and you need to be of comparable value to him for him to take interest or you're a waste of his time) which means for the majority of his 'loved ones':

he attaches, but doesn't connect.

his love is transactional, not reciprocatory.

he can experience strong attachments to people he values, we even see it happen. law attacks trebol in ep. 799 and he stops his fight with luffy to intercept him. he gives that mini speech in ep. 683 after pica gets made fun of for his voice. he had a whole rule in place specifically so that no one would harm rosinante (you could argue that he did this because he needed him alive for the whole op op fruit thing and couldn't take any risksーbut i'll make another post eventually about how his attachment to rosinante was actually the strongest. the closest to real 'love', even.)

but he also... very conspicuously doesn't correct law in ep. 724 when he's trying to rile trebol up by saying doflamingo really doesn't give a shit about him at the end of the day. because law's right. he he doesn't. kind of.

　he cares, but only because he realized, when he does nice things for people, they praise him.

　he cares, but only because having people who love him around makes him feel good about himself.

　he cares, but only because he realizes if he doesn't do favors for you sometimes, or offer you things of value in exchange for your value, like protection or status, you'll leave.

his capacity for empathy is so low that, really, the only time he can empathize is if thing he's supposed to be empathizing with physically happened to him (but, even then, you could argue it's not really empathy, it's projection). hence, his closeness with the top executivesーbut, even then, his 'love' is more akin to love for an object than love for a person.

we all have favorite things that we get attached to that we are very possessive & protective over:

you store it in a safe place

you're gentle when you clean it

you look to take it out & just admire it sometimes

you might even brag about it or show it off to people

you don't lend it out to just anybody, if you lend it out at all

if it gets broken or damaged, you get upset.

you attach memories to it (ex. the day you got it, the person who gave it to you, an event you wore it to, etc.) that make it even more valuable to you.

but, at the end of the day, it's just an object; if you lose it one day or it breaks, you'll be sad for a while (depending on how much it cost, or the memories attached) but... you get over it. it's only a thing, what's got you so upset? just buy another one, or at least a close substitute. in a couple months, you won't think about it and cry like you might if an actual person you loved died. because it's an object.

　so, to answer the question: does he love? 　

　　yes, and no. it's complicated.

[mingos]

@sircrocodillian said: "And here I thought I already had enough of a headache."

❝ oh no, crocy - what happened? ❞ whether doflamingo was electing to ignore the snark, or was genuinely too arrogant to consider for even one milisecond that he was the problem was unclear.

he was using that tone again; the one where you could never really tell if he was mocking, teasing, or genuinely asking a question. his seemingly permanent grin and the fact he kept his eyes hidden twenty-four-seven behind thick, polarized sunglasses only confused his intentions further. that was doffy's biggest problem; he had perfected the art of masking how he truly felt in any given situation - filtering every emotion from genuine joy to boiling anger through the same, unfaltering smile and laugh - but he had a much harder time "turning it off", so to speak.

maybe the old wives' tale really was true: if you make the same face long enough, it'll get stuck that way. ❝ i told you - it's all the time in the desert! you're dehydrated, you need a vacation in a nice tropical climate. preferrably at a palace with a pool, owned by your oh-so-rich and handsome colleague.❞

[sircrocodillian]

There was an aura that hung around Doflamingo that made Crocodile sick to his stomach. He knew what it was. The man was more akin to a vulture than a flamingo, with the way he hunched over the corpses of the path he paved before him. It had always been this way. From the moment Crocodile had laid eyes on the fellow Warlord from across the table to every other damned encounter he had been cursed with enduring, the leering blonde came into his world and thoroughly wrecked his peace of mind, and he would insist, and insist, and insist again until the older man might seek to spin on him.

Hardly one to let the other know he was getting to him, though, Crocodile inhaled as he brushed his thumb up against his forehead to smooth out a brow.

"Reclining poolside, drinking little fruity drinks with the tiny umbrellas isn't really my style, birdy." He snarked back.

"Don't you have better things to do than harass me?"

[mingos]

“you call it harassment, i call it conversation.” he invaded crocodile’s precious personal space, flopping dramatically onto the meeting’s tabletop.

“oh! well, we can do other things! lots of other things…” he wiggled about his two greatest selling points on the matter: his inhumanly long tongue and his dexterous puppeter’s fingers. he left the veiled invitation there, though — likely to be figuratively crumpled, shredded, and the burned in a fire for good measure — and mercifully moved on from the subject. 

“the palace has a beautiful library - honestly my favorite room, if we’re being honest. I constantly have the shelves stocked with new and rare books. then there’s the colosseum - gladiator fights from dusk til dawn, every day! when i’m bored and have free time, i even participate in an exhibition match or two, so you could cheer me on. there’s beautiful greenery all year round, festivals every other month… me — am oi winning you over yet?”

he might have any easier time of doing so if he backed up a foot or two from crocodile’s vicinity. or ten. twenty, maybe.

[littlewanibites]

This is what happened at Marineford and you can't tell me otherwise

[mingos]

Doffy at Crocodile every two seconds, unaware he is the most annoying man alive to him