#askdario

[loominggaia]

Did anyone in the Dusk family play the organ by chance?

Well, we know Ivy played the violin, so it's very possible that Dusk Manor had a music room with other instruments in it. If anyone played the organ, it was probably Morgana (since she literally has "organ" in her name, hurrhurr)

Otherwise, I can imagine Dimitri randomly slapping away on the keys just to annoy the hell out of everyone lol

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[loominggaia]

We've reached the point where you guys can say some shit like "Diabetes Crust" and I still know exactly what character you're talking about lmao

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[loominggaia]

(Don't hate me) Ojio and Dario look similar. What if they were relatives?!

When I first read this message I was like "no way, no they don't". Then I pulled up two pics to compare and uh...

SHEEEEEEEEIT.

The eyes, mouth, ear shape, and chin are all spot-on. Even the noses are pretty close, Ojio's is just wider. They actually do look related AND WOW I HATE IT. :')

But if they are related, I think that relation is so loose and so far back in history that it's not even worth mentioning. I will say that the Boanningwad weren't the only elves to get caught up in Zareenite slavery, there were foreign elves in Evik at the time that got roped in too, and these different elves had offspring with the Boanningwad. The Marienna (Dario's people) were among them, and Ojio actually does look like he has Marienna-like features, so it's very possible that he just has some of that race in his ancestry and that's why they look similar.

(Many modern Damijan think they're descended purely from ancient Boanningwad elves, but this isn't always true. Many of them have some other elven races mixed into their bloodline, and this gives the Damijan the diverse range of skintones, face shapes, and hair textures they have today despite their closed-off society.)

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[loominggaia]

*stands on podium*

*clears throat*

*leans towards microphone*

"Dario Dusk"

Looming Gaia fandom:

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[loominggaia]

So how nasty is Dorzlaf, is he Dario levels of being a disgusting freak? What horrid things has he done outside of Abusing Zov & keeping Sirenes as pets?

Forzotti Dorzlaf doesn't keep sirenes as pets, I believe you're thinking of Bozzag Blackjaw (who is also a dworfen Evangelite and a massive piece of shit, so it's easy to get them mixed up!)

Bozzag owns the Kelvingyard Company, while Dorzlaf is a pit-fighting coach. Dorzlaf wishes he had Bozzag's money and clout, but he is a compulsive gambler who instantly pisses away any fortune he makes.

So, how does he keep the money flowing? In some of the most rotten ways you can imagine. Let's take a look...(The following text contains spoilers, so I will place it under a cut:)

Dorzlaf and Dario seem like total opposites on the surface. Dario puts on a refined gentleman act while Dorzlaf is openly rough around the edges. If the two met, they would hate each other. But when you get into their behaviors, they are actually very similar!

Both of them enslaved a young child and conditioned that child to see them as father-figures, gaining their trust only to abuse them. They both exploited these children for financial gain. They both completely fucked over everyone around them with no shame or regret. They both woefully mismanaged their cult/operation due to their own hubris. They both married women strictly to use them for power and then tossed them aside like trash.

Now here's some stuff that's unique to Dorzlaf. This guy...

-Wielded religion (Lindism) as a weapon to abuse Zov.

-Used Zov as a weapon to rape, kill, and terrorize slave women. Dario occasionally used Zeffer to do these things, but he directly harmed his victims as well. Dorzlaf had a creepy goblin fetish but was too chickenshit to touch his victims with his own hands (sexual contact with slaves is very illegal in Evangeline Kingdom), so he forced Zov to do it for him, and worse yet, he turned this into a business operation, profiting from sexual exploitation, violence, and misery.

-Found out that Zov had GSV (a deadly sexually-transmitted virus) and proceeded to keep breeding him with unwitting slaves and sending him into the fighting arena to spill his infected blood everywhere, starting a whole GSV epidemic in Evangeline Kingdom.

-Dario raped and beat Lily repeatedly throughout her life, but Dorzlaf never directly abused Zov this way. He actually never hit him or touched him inappropriately; instead, he got his overseers to hit him and play "bad guy", so that Zov would keep trusting him and stay loyal. He abused Zov sexually in an indirect way by forcing him to rape other slaves. Not to mention forcing Zov to "eat" the fighters he killed in the arena, which is disgusting and terrible for Zov's health.

-Cramming his fighters full of illicit drugs and forcing back-alley surgeries on them to make them better fighters, completely disregarding all the devastating effects on their minds and bodies. Also, blatantly cheating in fighting tournaments and bribing officials to look the other way.

-Dorzlaf owns a large piece of property in Queenswater, which he only has because he married into the family who owned it and then screwed them over. Basically this ancient dworfen couple had an aging disabled daughter, and they were afraid no one would take care of her after they died. Dorzlaf promised to be a good husband and take care of her, so they gave him their blessing to marry her. A few years later the old couple died, and being the man of the house, Dorzlaf automatically inherited the property. He immediately divorced the old disabled woman, which he could legally do on the grounds that she was barren. He kicked her out of her own home and onto the streets with no remorse, spent all the family's fortune on pit-fighting slaves, and started a shitty little business gambling on their victories and selling the sperm of the winners. Zov became his most profitable champion, but he was far from Dorzlaf's only victim.

-Dorzlaf promised his fighters, including Zov, that all the money they won was going into their personal accounts, which they could use to buy their freedom from him someday. Of course this was a lie...he spent all their earnings on hookers and blow, and they never saw a coin of it.

So, is Dorzlaf as bad as Dario? That's for you to decide.

But if you ask me, I'd say they're just two cheeks of the same stanky, sweaty ass. Neither of them is better or worse, they're just different flavors of shit.

Thankfully they both get what's coming to them in the end!

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[loominggaia]

kid-az: Three word….. three words only to describe him… JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!?!!! - aveture: Even if he does earn freedom I feel like he might never learn to truly function as a normal healthy adult. Just... jesus.

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That's the saddest part of Zov's whole story, imo...the fact that even if he does escape and somehow gets access to the best resources available, he will still have to fight a steep uphill battle for the rest of his life. :(

Realistically if he escaped, I think he would be imprisoned or permanently institutionalized in an asylum. But if we're being optimistic, I think he could climb his way up to an at least somewhat functional state. Here's my reasoning...

The fact that he shows interest in art and music is a good sign, it means he still has a soul in him somewhere. It's badly damaged for sure, but it's there. Having a soul means he has the potential to feel love--whether for a person or purpose. His interests are all non-violent in nature and could be helpful outlets for him to express himself.

I have a feeling Zov doesn't enjoy violence; it's just something he's used to and happens to be good at. It's a job to him. A chore. It's some bullshit he has to do to put food in his mouth. He is incredibly desensitized to it which is not good, but he doesn't really take pleasure in it either, which is good. That sets a solid foundation for him to move away from violence and pursue other things, like education and the arts, which he seems highly motivated to do (if only his master would let him...).

I think with intensive therapy, the right cocktail of medications, and a lot of soul-healing (perhaps with the Order of Love and Light?), Zov would come out relatively okay. He would definitely be haunted by some powerful demons, and he would struggle a lot in life, but he wouldn't be a total lost cause. I'm not optimistic he could ever have a functional romantic relationship or raise children, but he might be able to hold a friendship or two. He is able to respect his master and refuses to attack him, which shows that he's not totally out of control of his actions.

I don't personally see him as a "villain" or an evil character, because he takes no joy in the terrible things he does. He just doesn't know anything different. His future was doomed the moment those slavers got a hold of him, and they molded him into something monstrous; something far removed from what he could have been under better circumstances.

He's the type of character who makes you say "oh god there is no hope, just burn it with fire" at first, in a similar vein as characters like Dario or Goryx. However, there is a pretty big factor that separates those villains from Zov, and it's the fact that Zov doesn't want to be evil.

He is evil only out of ignorance, not greed or true malice. Dario and Goryx made themselves into monsters, but Zov was twisted into one by someone else. I don't think his soul is truly monstrous. If he was removed from his horrible environment, he would behave much differently.

Meanwhile you can put Dario or Goryx in any type of environment and they will still act like degenerate bastards, because their evil comes not from circumstance, but from within their rotten selves.

Anyway thank you for coming to my TED Talk

(This is of course just my personal opinion. I think there are actually many different ways to interpret this character and they are all valid!)

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[loominggaia]

How come the Dusk vampires didn't realize Evan was a werewolf?

That's a really good question! I think there are multiple explanations for this.

(Green) elves have a natural connection with beasts. They can sense when an animal is nearby even if they can't see it, and they can understand what an animal is thinking and feeling.

Werewolves are beasts, but lycanthropes are something else--something between man and beast. They are often described as "a beast wearing a man-suit". In a sense, lycanthropes are like intelligent beasts who can operate as people.

Theoretically, the elven Dusks should have been able to sense the beast in Evan. Why didn't they?

Let's talk about vampirism for a second. It changes elves by dulling their natural abilities and replacing them with new ones. This effect becomes stronger the longer they live with vampirism. For example, their naturally sharp vision dulls in daylight but becomes stronger at night. Their natural connection to animals becomes dulled, but their connection to the moon becomes stronger.

Knowing all this, here's some explanations for your question...

Explanation 1: All of the Dusks (except Lilian) have been vampires for a very long time. I think they all lost their connection to nature ages ago. Lilian still may have had this connection, but she was so sheltered and uneducated, I doubt she even knew what lycanthropy was, so she wasn't able to identify it in Evan.

Explanation 2: It's mentioned in "Ghoul Beneath the Guise" that the Dusks didn't prey on big, strong people. They specifically hunted smaller, weaker individuals for their own safety. Lycanthropy turns people into huge, muscle-bound tanks...in other words, not the type of people the Dusks would have close contact with, so they had very little--if any--experience with lycanthropes and kind of forgot they existed.

The Dusks didn't go out looking for Evan. They only imprisoned him because he came to them and practically threw himself onto their plates. The possibility of lycanthropy didn't cross their minds because as mentioned above, that disease had become out of sight, out of mind for them; probably for centuries.

Explanation 3: The Dusks already had their hands full when Evan showed up. They were trying to recruit Zeffer and prepare for his wedding with Lilian. Weddings are a huge deal to vampires because it's one of the few ways they can expand their clan size, and adding a new member to the clan is not something they take lightly.

This event was an especially big deal to Dario, considering how he felt about Lilian. Evan was the last thing on his mind; just another bloodbag to be thrown in the dungeon and forgotten about.

Explanation 4: Dimitri was a bad dungeon-tender. Dimitri was Dario's "nephew" and put in charge of keeping the Dusk's prisoners alive. As we saw in "Ghoul Beneath the Guise", the guy was a total sadist who enjoyed hurting and killing the prisoners, even though this got him in trouble with the clan. The more the prisoners suffered, the more Dimitri thrived.

Dimitri had a lot of responsibilities, and one of them was reporting sick, dead, or unsuitable prisoners to Dario. Dimitri should have noticed something was up with Evan's blood, and maybe he actually did...but in "Ghoul Beneath the Guise", we learn that Dimitri is terrified of Dario and tries to cover up problems whenever he can. Because whenever he reports a problem, even if it's not his fault, Dario gets angry and beats him.

It's possible that Dimitri did notice the tainted lycanthrope blood and either didn't report it, or just denied it to himself because psychologically he couldn't deal with it.

In conclusion, there was a perfect storm of factors that led to Evan's disease going undetected. And what's funny is that all of them were actually Dario's fault if you think about it...

Dario was the clan master, his job was to oversee the whole clan and its culture. He refused to educate Lilian, he chose who his clan preyed upon, he was too preoccupied with Lilian's wedding because of his own bad deeds against her, and he kept punishing Dimitri just for doing his job.

Evan's lycanthropy wasn't to blame for the Dusk's downfall. Ultimately Dario was to blame. The incompetent way he managed his clan finally came to a head and bit them all in the ass. Evan's disease was just a random spark that lit the fuse Dario left trailing behind them.

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[loominggaia]

You said Dario's family hated him for being cringe, now I must know what kind of cringey things did he do?

That post was mostly a joke, but there is some truth in it.

Dario was officially banished from his homeland of Barha for being a vampire (not only that, but contracting vampirism on purpose, which is considered extremely taboo.)

But truthfully, he was skating on thin ice well before that. I imagine he had behavior issues from a young age. Classic "future psychopath" stuff like killing animals for fun, hurting other kids, starting fires, crap like that. Dude seemed to have a screw loose from day 1.

HIs siblings were no angels themselves--they were wealthy young guys with fuck-you-money to throw around and bribe their way out of trouble. But Dario took this to a whole new level, engaging in some truly sick and depraved shit that even his brothers were shaking their heads at.

We're talking about things like serial rapes, kidnappings, arson, assault, major theft, and so on...Dario's family understood that accidents happen, and maybe his brothers accidentally killed a person or two during their drunken adventures, but it was nothing a little bribery couldn't sweep under the rug.

But with Dario...these incidents were clearly no accident. He just kept doing heinous, inexcusable shit over and over, never growing as a person. His brothers eventually learned some empathy and grew out of their wild phases, but Dario did not. All he ever learned was how to commit more crimes even more efficiently. He was drawing negative attention to the family and embarrassing all of his relatives, making his people question their leadership, etc etc...

Contracting vampirism was just the straw that broke the camel's back. Dario's oldest brother--the King of Barha--had the patience of a saint and was willing to keep digging him out of trouble up until then. It was that moment his brother realized Dario really didn't care, he had zero intention of being a better person, and trying to help him was utterly pointless.

So, he handed Dario a suitcase full of cash and told him, "If you want to act like a degenerate, do it somewhere else. We're all tired of your shit. I don't care where you go, but don't come back here. I'm only giving you this money to clear my conscience. Spend it wisely because it's the last favor you'll ever get from me."

Dario took that money up north to the lawless city of Taybiya, where he used it to build a cult around himself, and the rest is history. He finally learned how to keep his degenerate behavior on the downlow, but it was too little, too late. He would never return to Barha again.

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