Jun 2, 2021
Yu Han Sung
It's Back! Tower of god / Torre de dios
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Yu Han Sung
It's Back! Tower of god / Torre de dios
I couldn’t get that KhunBaam HanahakiAU out of my head so here are some highlights
- It’s called “Your Flowers On My Mind (My Flowers In Your Throat) because symbolism
- before his supposed death Khun always stood on Baam’s left side and after he’s gone it’s his vision on his left side that slowly gets dark as the flowers invade that eye because symbolism
-After be becomes blind in his left eye Khun is the only one Baam allows to stand close to him on his left
- When Khun first sees the flowers he thinks for exactly one (1) second that it might be about him, before he throws that aside and assumes it to be Rachel
- His next thought after is that he’ll no longer be able to kill her like he planned
- Baam doesn’t really understand the Hanahaki disease, love, especially romantic unrequited love, doesn’t really mean anything to him, he’s never had any experience with it. So when it’s described to him as a yearning for someone to consider you important to them he assumes it would be Rachel
- No one ever tells him that being terrified that the other person might no longer care for them because of how much they have changed, that being no longer worthy of their care or respect and so assuming they don’t, might actually be love, or at least enough like unrequited love to trigger the disease
- It’s Rachel that tells him it’s not her, she knows Baam, she knows that what he feels was never romantic, and that he’s selfish is enough not to care whether she wants to be beside him, just that she is
-Khun nearly kills her for that comment
i’m tagging @1-800-i-ship-it because this is their fault and they deserve to know what they’ve done, I have two in-progress ToG fics to write and an entire series in the BSD fandom to finish and I can’t get this out of my gd head
I was thinking about Rachel and Baam’s time before the tower and about how Rachel tells Baam he can’t come up “there” because he wasn’t chosen.
And at first I was thinking, is this proof that they were actually in the tower, as in, Rachel understands the concept of “being chosen” as “being able to climb up” because she lived in the tower and therefore already has associations between the two? But then I thought of something more interesting in that, whether or not they were in the tower before they entered, Rachel probably said that because she already knew he was chosen, and even back them she was trying to stop him in as kind a way as possible (for her).
It’s heavily implied that Rachel knew Baam was chosen as the “Hero” before they entered the tower so I’m operating on the assumption that she might have known since before she met Baam (I suspect by Arlene), and that she wanted to be the center of the story since then as well. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that, self-image and confidence issues like hers don’t just come from no where. They were likely building up since she was very young, and she was likely hiding her resentment long before she actually blew up at Khun about it.
What’s also important is that she has always tried to be as kind to Baam as she thought possible while also achieving her goals. Remember that she left him so that she wouldn’t have to fight him, that she got her team to protect him in the crown game, and that she doesn’t kill him in the test against Hoaquin. This doesn’t excuse that fact that she has done shitty things, but the point is that she is kind to him as she thinks she can be. (you see this most notably when she thinks she’s winning but that’s another conversation).
And this is all relevant because when you take a girl struggling with self-worth and have her interact with a boy who has (everything she wants) never met anyone else, who adores her because he has never met anyone else, she’s going to think that the moment he meets someone other than her is the moment she stops being special to him, it’s the moment she loses control of him. And not only is this important because his idolization of her is one of the few things that boosts (and fucks up) her self-esteem it’s important because if she controls him, the Hero, than she controls the narrative.
Think of it this way, she doesn’t want to kill him to take his place, she’s not nearly cruel enough yet for that to be an option, but she also doesn’t want him to become the Hero and ruin her chance at becoming the Heroine. And the best way to do that without grievous bodily harm or some real fucked up manipulations? Make sure he never realizes that he is the Hero. The longer it takes him to realize his powers the longer she has to catch up to him, or-
So long as he doesn’t “come up”, so long as he doesn’t chose to be the Hero, than she still has a shot of becoming one.
it’s 2 in the morning for me so that means sad headcanons
We know that Arlene and Jahad went to war over a thousand years ago (at LEAST), and it was the tail end of that war that Jahad killed Arlene’s child?
Baam barely looks 12 when he firsts sees Rachel, which is the furthest back we see him. But we already know that he was born over a thousand years ago, so what happened during that missing time.
Now, we could go with the headcannon that a thousand years ago Arlene took Baam’s body to the outside and either 1) it took a long time for the outside God to transform Baam into what he is now or 2) it was done quickly but his body was left in some sort of suspended animation until the time was right to wake him up
But why think that when we can think this
Baam has been awake in a lightless cave entirely on his own for almost a thousand years. And since we know Rachel taught him all the basics, things like speech and math and general knowledge, that meant he did it entirely without being able to articulate his own experiences.
It meant he would have been desperately lonely without knowing what loneliness was.
It meant that he would have spent almost a thousand years in total darkness without once knowing the concept of light
It meant he spent almost a thousand years yearning for companionship without knowing what that sensation even was, it would be just a dull ache in his body that he couldn’t fix no matter how much he ate or drank or slept, and there was nothing he could do about it because he doesn’t know what’s wrong, or that there is something to feel wrong about
A thousand years of trying to figure out what the signals his body was trying to send him meant and why some of them never went away
And the worst part of all of this is that he wouldn’t know, he wouldn’t know words like sad, or hungry, or frustrated, or alone. Everything would be a nameless dark pit inside himself that he couldn’t rationalize away.
And I think so few people realize how often we take our ability to articulate things, how we are able to understand a situation by talking about it, by having words for it, for granted. humans are born desperate to communicate with each other, to understand the world around us by the words we give things, there’s a reason language, a method of communication, is the first thing we learn.
We feel sad and identify the emotion as that, sad. And because we know what the word sad means we know what to do in response to it, and we know that “being sad” comes from somewhere, we know that something is causing it and we have words for those causes, and knowing those causes makes it something we can fix. But what if we had no words for any of that? If you could not only not articulate what was happening to others but not even to yourself? There’s nothing to rationalize because there is no words to rationalize with, there’s nothing to understand because there are no words to convey that understanding, not even to yourself.
Baam lived a thousand years living from sensation to dizzying, uncomprehending sensation. and while some of them had answers, things like sensations from stomach= eat something, so many of them wouldn’t
How many times did he hold himself without knowing why, how many times did his skin ache without him knowing it was because he craved touch, how many times could he only cry to response to things he didn’t have the tools to comprehend
the song Achilles come down by Gang of youth is Khun singing to Viole with the second voice a mix of Rachel and FUG and you literally can’t change my mind
Baam runs back from training, taking the dizzying turns of the cavern at a sprint as he races towards the cell block. His chest aches, hairline impact fractures on his ribs creaking as he pushes himself faster.
He skids to a stop in front of her door, breath sawing in and out of his lungs and blood pooling in his boots. His fist causes cracks to open in the door, alongside a dozen others.
“I’m here!”
The screaming from inside pauses, a second of sickening silence to pass before the door opens, the lock clicking open.
Two people exit, their emotionless faces causing something searing and tight to curl in his gut and throat. He ignores them as they leave, pushing through to throw himself to his knees in front of the woman chained to the ground.
He reaches for her hand and her shaking, broken fingers curl around his.
“Please, I’m sorry Baam I tried, but I can’t, I can’t anymore, just make it stop”
“I’m almost strong enough, please, just-”
“Stop! I can’t anymore, you’re being selfish Baam!”
They both flinch from her shout. Baam holding his shaking heart in his throat as she deflates, eyes guilty but too tired to take back her words.
“Please, Baam, it won’t be your fault.”
Seconds pass between them as his heart breaks.
“Ok, ok Serena-ssi, I will.”
She barely has the time to smile before his baang stops her heart. She doesn’t feel a thing, his master had made sure he knew how to do that, at least.
Baam understands, now, he will never ask FUG to spare someone's life again.
Remember in an earlier post where I was like ‘the fun thing about having characters leave and never really knowing what happened to them other than they failed means I can do whatever I want with them’, yeah this is that.
concept for chapter 2 of A Foreign God Gave WitnessAU
tower of god /kami no tou / torre de dios 13 anime
A possible opening to A Foreign God Gave Witness:
The problem with people is that they only have control of themselves.
What does this matter?
If he were just a puppet he could be... maybe not happy, but resigned, even content. He could follow the path laid out for him and act exactly as manipulated, without an ounce of guilt.
Than make him a puppet, I don’t need a s- a fallible human
Or, if he could control everything, then he could make his own happy ending, no one would be able to take anything from him, no one would be able to hurt him.
Why are you telling me this
Because you should know what you are making of him, he will be stuck, knowing that he can control himself, knowing that he can influence the story, but, also knowing that he will never control enough, never influence enough to change that story, not it’s grand end, not it’s most tragic roots, and it will drive him mad
I know this, I went through this
And what did it make of you?
________________________________________________________________
Somewhere in the middle of chapter 1:
If I become him will she look at me? If I bury this so deep I forget what I am, will I be human?
(Will she love me?)
No, little monster, what she wants is a weapon
Than why won’t she look at what she’s made?
... humans are beings capable of regret, she knows what has been forged cannot be undone
Maybe, but I’ll show her him, ,and then she will smile at me
If you wish, little monster, but when you come back it will be time to sleep, you will understand more after you wake.
________________________________________________________________
The probable ending of the first chapter:
The thing with being weak, is that you have so much freedom.
a girl looks into the face of the most beautiful woman she had ever met, and cannot help but hate her, just a little bit.
When you are weak, and plain, and ordinary, no one asks anything of you, no one expects anything of you, you are not wanted or needed or desired, you are just... free
Free to do nothing, free to waste away and be used and then forgotten
I suppose, if you were beautiful men would chase you down, they would follow in every footstep, they would murder for you
yes
If you were strong, people would follow you, they would beg at your feet to fix their every problem, and save them, and judge them, and to never, ever, be wrong
Yes
And if you were chosen, you would have a grand destiny, your friends would be provided for you, your choices, your endless trials, every thought and reward and possibility laid out on a shiny, silver path
Yes! That’s what I want, that’s all I ever want!
I know what you want, girl, I know what it will make of you
Probable end to the first chapter of my A Foreign God Gave WitnessAU because I like parallels