Come get your complete scans of the 2025 Marakuji collab PART 2! This Birdcage theme is a sequel to the first run, Tea Time. (Of course we've already got that one scanned!)
Thanks to my whining in the prev post about not being able to get a Touga, a kind fan reached out to help! Feste's scans were honestly superior to the ones I can do because of the weird way the plastic scans, SO YES I ASKED FOR MORE. Most of the scans for this set are thanks again to feste, with Utena, Anthy, and Saionji being the only ones I had to scan. There is, YET AGAIN, another set of these coming, which feste and I are already on top of. Which is great, because I'm tapped out of spending hundreds of dollars to get the blind swap acrylics second hand.
In the meantime, these new ones can all be found in the Chibis section of The Utena Gallery, where you can download the full size chibis and their matching acrylic cards. (If you really need to see those from within Tumblr, get under the cut!!)
I don't regret spending my entire evening doing this. Yall. Take it. Spam it. Go crazy. I also did this without the mud mask and cucumber, so if yall are good, I might drop that. Someone suggested I put a cucumber in place of his monocle.
On the subject of Alastor and friends, I do think he's fully capable of developing friendships with others.
However, I think he has a low empathy threshold, and his self-preservation instincts from having been a black man in the south in the 30s (while also working in a white dominated field), as well as the fact that he's been surviving in hell for close to a century at this point, are two factors that win out over any care he may feel for others.
That being said, I think it's interesting that Rosie, who has known him for that near century, felt comfortable enough to call him out on the idea that he would just leave the hotel residents to die. Namely because one of the silhouettes he uses against Rosie is Niffty's.
Alastor hasn't had any scenes to indicate that he genuinely cares for Charlie, Angel, or Vaggi beyond that he finds them entertaining and/or useful to an extent.
He has with Niffty, on multiple occasions.
And something that I think is important about his relationship with Niffty is that she actively makes it clear she cares about him in return.
She's the only one who's been shown going out of her way to help him with no (apparent) strings attached, and is openly affectionate.
With everyone else at the hotel? They've either largely ignored him or only come to him when they need something.
He had to make a deal with Vaggi just so he could be assured that he wouldn't have to participate in something he hates (TV) again after he helped her with the second commercial. They could have easily asked him to advertise on his Radio Show, but instead went out of their way to make him film a video commercial. Hell, they could have even just asked him for filming equipment and done the actual filming theirselves considering their only guest at the time was Angel Dust. Their schedules weren't exactly busy at that point in the narrative.
Charlie barely cared when he was captured, focusing more on her social media war with the Vees than on the fact that he was, as far as she was aware, kidnapped. Vaggi was even less concerned (although her reasoning for her lack of concern was understandable, and she was right that he was planning something).
When he and Emily get hurt, Charlie runs to Emily, the one she's known for maybe a few weeks in universe. Not Alastor, who she has been living with for over half a year and frequently relies on.
His seemingly genuine friendship with Rosie is marred by the fact that he was in servitude to her for nearly a century. Meanwhile, he is to Husk what Rosie was to him. Same issue, different font.
Sir Pentious was only interested in him because he wanted to prove himself to the overlords by beating him.
The only times Angel has spoken to him was to flirt (as far as I can remember). Cherri and Baxter meanwhile have had little to no interactions with him.
Mimzy, his only known friend from his living life, is a white woman who frequently uses his care for her to her advantage. Essentially treating him like her own personal attack dog. Mind you, this is a friendship that posed the risk of getting him killed simply by association due to the time they lived in, and it's implied she had him doing favors for her anyway, which would have increased that potential outcome significantly.
Vox, while he had genuine feelings for Alastor, still tried to team up with him to use his powers for his own benefit, and waited until Alastor was at least slightly inebriated to shoot his shot.
Alastor is somewhere around 130-150 years old, and the only times he's been shown genuine care (as far as the audience is aware atp) is from Niffty, Emily (who went out of her way to try to save him), Husk when attempting to warn him about Mimzy, and likely his own mother. ...That's a very small number of times for such a large time span.
Everyone else wants something from him, and they don't hide it at all.
None of this is to say that Alastor is justified in his more negative behaviors. Dude is in hell for a reason. But I can't really blame the guy for treating almost everyone else like pawns when they more or less do the same to him in the grand scheme of things.
Considering that "an eye for an eye" is a running theme in this show, I wouldn't be surprised if Alastor only begins experiencing "positive" character growth once someone begins treating a relationship with him (platonic or otherwise) as something other than transactional.
Presently, I can only see Lucifer and Emily being able to fulfill that need.
From what we've been shown thus far, Alastor doesn't have anything material that Lucifer objectively needs, aside from potentially being his executioner. (Which he could make a deal with literally any number of powerful sinners to do. Alastor isn't inherently special in this possibility).
Emily, meanwhile, isn't the kind of person who would develop a friendship with strings attached.
I think being met with genuine, no-strings-attached, companionship will confuse Alastor and drive him up the wall. It will be a nearly foreign experience to him. It'll take him out of his comfort zone, and make him more vulnerable than he's ever been in the show thus far. I'm very interested in seeing how he'll react.
What do you mean you've never had to rip your husband's head off in order to stop you from killing himself and everyone else in existence in order to impress his ex?
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