more people need to look into grooming (and rape) victim phainon. like the allegory is extremely obvious when you take even a cursory look at his character and the circumstances surrounding it: the duty of kephale to bear the world, to create its inhabitants contrasted against the birth of irontomb, a being with the expressed purpose to destroy & corrupt everything in its path are both wrapped up in things that are housed inside phainon— the coreflame and the ‘body’ of irontomb fueled by his hatred. but despite this contrast of The Good Fetus (a seed for the future Era where he holds up and creates the new world) and The Evil Fetus (the seed of destruction that eats away at phainon from the inside, using his determination & hatred for his world’s circumstances as fuel), both of these things are indeed bad for him. phainon suffers from the belief that he must and will become Kephale (and in actuality continue the eternal recurrences), only to a lesser extent than he suffers from the fact that he has to be the vessel for irontomb. either way, he suffers from the seed, regardless of whatever alignment it belongs to.
we also have genius society fragment zandar equal sigh kuwabara to carry half of this allegory (fuckkkkkkkk): his constant fixation over phainon’s youthfulness (and indeed, the malleability of his mind and personality that comes from that), referring to him as a ‘sapling’ that can be ‘properly nurtured,’ and literally pretending to be his fucking parents to further his own agenda. that’s genuinely insane imagery is it not??????? here’s phainon, being approached by an adult he can trust, a parent, but it’s not really his parent, they’re a monster masquerading as his parent using that position to manipulate him. and then from that manipulation fueled a seed inside him made of hatred that’ll literally kill him if it’s allowed to be birthed. hoyo you are audacious and heinous
