#fan interpretations

[lediz-watches]

Hazbin Hotel Pilot (kinda)

Yeah, I'm either three years late or three months early, but I'm here now and I'm documenting this for the sake of posterity, because SOMETHING is going to come out in January and the internet deserves to laugh at it.

Finally watched the pilot about a month ago. Loved it. Love the songs. Love Alastor because of fucking course I do. Love Angel Dust despite myself. Want to watch Charlie's story. Love it all. Am addicted to the fan songs. (One hell of a team and Radio Play are currently on repeat in my soul.) Hate fandom already. Miraculous Ladybug eat your goddamn heart out. No matter what happens, some part of the audience is going to hate it.

This post is actually more about why, than the pilot itself.

Before I get into it, I have to admit something. It's pertinent, I promise.

When Twilight was a thing, I heard all the hatred for it and believed it, but my sister was into it and I believe in giving everything a shot, so I read it too, expecting to hate it. And spoiler alert, by the final book, I LOATHED it. I literally had to stop myself from throwing that stupid thing across the room at least twice. But before that final book, I was so foolishly impressed.

Not by the writing, especially, but by what I thought it was doing. Because I looked at the characters and what I thought they were, and I thought that was so cool and subversive. An eternal teenager who was made a vampire against his will by a loving father figure. An immortal stuck in the body and emotions and hormones of a seventeen year old. And he falls in love for the first time. Could you IMAGINE anything worse? And a girl who swans (hah. Unintentional) into a new town and a new life, who also falls in love, but grows out of being seventeen. And there were these parallels! Romeo and Juliet! The fourteen year old trying to escape a life she didn't want, swept up in first love with an older lover! The idiot nineteen year old who's so desperate to Live His Life that he kills himself over a summer fling! THE PARALLELS, MY FRIENDS.

Yeah, I... I misinterpreted that one a little.

But this is the thing that we so often do with TV shows (and book trilogies....). We are watching and consuming something that is not complete, and in doing so we make assumptions and cling to things that may not actually be there. Edward was not an eternal seventeen year old, and Bella was not a normal girl growing into a young woman. It was a terrible, trashy, vaguely Mormon-propaganda teen romance that probably started as a Labyrinth fanfic, don't @ me.

(I love Labyrinth by the way, please don't come for my head)

Now, with Hazbin Hotel, and especially with Alastor, fandom is doing that in several different ways. Some of the fandom want him to be Evil Incarnate, here to corrupt the innocent and pure-hearted Charlie. Some of the fandom want him to be Bugs Bunny With Teeth. Some of the fandom (ie, I) want him to be Creepy Good and/or Do Evil Unto Evil (because that's what Louisiana Voodoo actually is, and it's so cool and I want to see a show do deals-with-the-other-side-for-good well andandand). Some people want him to be weak, some people want him to be super powerful, I would find it super interesting if he's super powerful because he's sold his soul to some greater power that's just using him to manipulate Hell... (today I was thinking about What If Lilith Is The Mastermind????)(also, ask me about my idea for a plot where he's actually a pawn to Heaven's worst)

No matter what happens with Alastor, some part of the fandom is going to be FURIOUS.

Now, for me, yes he's my favourite character from the Pilot, but the most important thing he does is provide a foil to Charlie, who is 100% the main character, and SHE is what's going to make or break the show for me.

Because the way I'm reading HER is that she's a preppy little private school girl that wants to save the whales and feed the children in Africa. She's taking gap years, she's doing voluntourism, she's holding charity balls for the homeless, she's taking cheesy photos in front of Homes She Built For The Kids and then gushing on Instagram about how she was hashtag blessed and got to feed the elephants.

The story I've read in this pilot, and the story I'm interested in, is that private school girl getting absolutely slapped down, so she can build back up into an actual good leader; stronger and better than her parents never even tried to be.

For me, the story I'm interested in, is all of the characters learning that redemption and goodness isn't some goal to achieve. It's a path. And sometimes, you find it only in the people around you. You shouldn't be good to get into Heaven, you should be good because you want to be good. Because you want to be there for your friends. It's about choice, and who you want to be. You make your own Heaven.

And to that end, I don't want Alastor to be the Evil Saboteur. I just want him to be her foil. Her equal and opposite, in every way that matters.

I want him to be evil only to those who deserve it, but be incapable of seeing himself as anything but worse still, even while everyone around him knows he's actually on the right team. The inverse of Charlie's arrogant light and hope.

I want him to push her, to challenge her, to be constantly watching and mocking and I want it to be a constant struggle between which of them is right or wrong about the sinners. I want them to represent the two sides of western religious ethics - the carrot and the stick. Be good so you're rewarded, or be good because torment awaits those who aren't. I want them to end up a platonic but perfect team, leading Hell's sinners out of this eternal struggle to survive and into afterlives they actually want to live.

But I don't know if that's what we're going to get. There are so many ways to read the second half of the pilot. Alastor rolling his eyes when Charlie tells him no voodoo, only to immediately offer a deal? The fact that Charlie, who effortlessly warps reality with her song, can't fix up the hotel or feed anyone, while Alastor, a supposedly mere human sinner, completely transforms everything with a few clicks of his fingers. The way Alastor treats Husk and Niffty - the way they respond to him! Niffty barely acknowledges this guy who we all assume owns her soul, and there are whole essays that could be written about how Husk responds to Alastor in general.

And outside the two of them, these characters are all so good! Angel Dust. I am not invested in his story (we've seen it before), but I ADORE him. A character that's so comfortable in his masculinity, and still considers himself a man, even as he wears women's clothing and works in a feminine industry and suffers a traditionally feminine tragedy. And he's so deadpan and snarky and horrible and I LOVE HIM. I'm not invested in his story, but I WANT TO WATCH IT.

Sir Pentious. What the hell is up with him? I must know more. I must cringe and groan and see him fail and then get back up to fail again.

Vaggie. What is she doing in Hell? HOW DID SHE DIE? How did she hook up with the king's daughter? Why is she signed onto this endeavour that she clearly doesn't really believe in?

I NEED IT.

So yeah. I will probably be disappointed, but god damn am I looking forward to this thing.

[random-thought-depository]

Also regarding "maybe in a sense Paul didn’t deviate quite so far from the role the Bene Gesserit had planned for him after all":

I've thought a little bit about what might happen in an AU where the Bene Gesserit got the Kwisatz Haderach they wanted, and got an idea it might look fundamentally similar to canon but with the Bene Gesserit collectively playing the role Leto II did in canon.

My idea:

The Bene Gesserit wanted the Kwisatz Haderach as a means to the end of basically transhumanism through selective breeding: his intended purpose was to catalyze the creation of a political system that would give the Bene Gesserit enough control to apply their selective breeding techniques to the general human population, and once the Bene Gesserit had that level of control they'd use it to selectively breed humans for "humanity" (as they define it) and prescience and so on. Of course, as this breeding program worked the abilities of normal humans would converge toward the abilities of Bene Gesserit, so the Bene Gesserit would gradually lose their advantages and eventually be overthrown, triggering a Scattering-equivalent event (and leaving the Bene Gesserit damned in memory in approximately the same way Leto II was, as the worst tyrants in human history; the Bene Gesserit are creepy eugenicist elitists who consider you not human if you can't pass their edgy torture marshmallow test, so there'd probably be a lot of material to work with in creating an unfond historical memory of their rule). Like Leto II, the Bene Gesserit would see this end as a good thing and work toward it (maybe they'd try to breed some prescience-invisible humans to aid the revolution against them like Leto II).

I think the Bene Gesserit rule would last longer because they'd have goals besides the Scattering, and their rule would change humanity more, and their overthrow would take longer cause their empire wouldn't have a single point of failure like Leto II, but the ultimate arc of history in this AU might be fundamentally similar to canon.

[spaceoutcat-blog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

WOO, fanfic! OC stuff. I’m very tired, so IMa just copy paste stuff.

Generations, gone in minutes - men, women, children, all lost to the sands of time. He thought he would join them, be with his brothers and sisters among the stars, but Fate wasn't so kind.

[random-thought-depository]

Re: Blindsight vampire physical appearance: @brovitranduila has been awesome and made art of one of my vampire OCs based on my ideas about what Blindsight vampires look like!

Meet Heron, the alpha female of a vampire pack that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the early Holocene (illustration courtesy of Brovitranduila):

Notable features:

Heron's jaw is larger than a human's, and she has more powerful jaw muscles. If she showed her teeth, you would see that her front teeth are sharp and she has large canines like a baboon. Heron has a "chinless" jaw like Neanderthals; this is an ancestral trait that vampires kept and humans lost.

Heron's eyes have dark sclera, large orange/red-ish irises, and cat-like slit pupils. This is a mix of vampire weirdness and more ancestral features that vampires kept and humans lost. Vampire eyes are like Homo erectus eyes but with adaptations to night vision, which means vampire eyes look a lot like chimpanzee eyes but with more orange/red irises, slit pupils, and eyeshine in darkness (you can look up pictures of chimpanzee eyes for real-world reference). Humans got our distinctive eyes with white sclera after the human/vampire split. I like what Brovitranduila did with the eyes here, it nicely synthesizes my chimpanzee-like eyes idea with Watts's descriptions of vampire eyes (red-ish, intimidating stare).

Heron's earlobes are bigger than human earlobes. Heron "sees" with her ears much more than humans do, and her earlobes are like big deep dish antennae built to capture lots of sound and divert it toward her ears. Heron's earlobes are somewhat mobile; she can move them a little to point toward interesting sounds, flick them a little, etc.. Certain ear movements also served a communicative function in old vampire culture, and modern vampires make some of these ear motion gestures instinctively.

Brovitranduila also did a version of Heron with pointed ears:

At first I wanted to get away from the idea of vampires having pointed ears, I didn't see any obvious biomechanical reason for it and I wanted to do something different. But looking at this the concept grows on me. I like how they look like the ears of predatory animals like cats and foxes and give a sense of a being that "sees" with their ears more than humans do; they don't look like Spock/Elf ears (which is what I wanted to get away from), they really do give a nice touch of inhumanity and they feel functional instead of just like a random inhuman feature slapped on. And if this ear shape is common in mammalian predators it does suggest it has a biomechanical utility; when I look at it here I can intuitively see how a sound-capturing apparatus like this might be more structurally efficient than a more circular one. It gives a bit of a catgirl vibe, which I feel is actually pretty appropriate; I think it'd make a lot of scientific and aesthetic sense for vampires to be kind of cat-like (independent, self-willed, predatory, lazy).

The first picture is definitely more accurate for the nose and jaw though.

I also like how this made her look older and leaner, "alpha" in this context means something a lot like "mom," and vampires are supposed to look angular.

Thank you, Brovitranduila! You can see Brovitranduila's cool art on their Tumblr, they've got some neat Blindsight fan-art, check it out!

[random-thought-depository]

Back to Blindsight again, here's that prehistoric Blindsight vampire sociality/pack structure headcanons post I said I'd write a while back. Warning: this post contains a spoiler for Charles Stross's novel The Rhesus Chart.

Blindsight vampire headcanons: ancient vampire sociality/pack structure:

Ancient vampires got along a lot better with others of their own kind than modern vampires do, mostly cause they got to socialize with others of their own kind as children (see my interpretation of what Divide and Conquer is); ancient vampires organized into cooperative vampire groups/packs. Group size was pretty small though; the vampire pack my fanfic focuses on has eight members at the beginning of the fic and six members near its end, and it was pretty typical.

Ancient vampires were capable of genuinely affectionate relationships with other members of their group/pack, but even internal vampire pack politics often got pretty terrifying. Vampires were a much more egoistic and Machiavellian species than humans and good at killing stuff and predisposed to solving their problems that way, and even their relationships with people they liked were shaped by that. "Got killed by a member of your own pack for one reason or another" was a common ancient vampire cause of death.

The easiest way to create a strong bond between vampires was for them to be raised together or for one to raise the other. Mother/child bonds were relatively strong because of the reproductive investment of pregnancy. This meant ancient vampires leaned a lot on matrilineal kinship bonds for pack solidarity; a vampire pack was usually basically just a matrilineal family (grandma + mom + their partners + kids + sometimes siblings of the mom and grandma). The most common ancient vampire inbreeding-avoidance strategy was to exile/ostracize male offspring from the pack around the time they reached adulthood, with the understanding that they would seek to integrate into another pack as the alpha's mate. Female offspring usually stayed with their natal pack, and if they were lucky eventually it'd be time for them to become their pack's new alpha female and they'd accept an exiled male from another pack as their mate/partner.

Vampire packs had reproductive hierarchies. Mostly, only one female in the pack got to make babies; I'm calling this individual the alpha. The alpha female was usually but not always just the oldest fertile female (sometimes it was the most socially adept or dominant fertile female instead, and sometimes an older alpha would "retire" from child-bearing before actually hitting menopause). You should hear "alpha" in this sense as something between the stereotypical associations of that term and "an alpha wolf is just the mom/dad"; the consent of the pack was an important qualification for being the alpha, but so was the ability to defend her privileged position in the reproductive hierarchy through credible threats of ostracism/exile and physical violence.

More than anything else, a vampire pack existed so the alpha would be fed and protected and wouldn't have to hunt while she was heavily pregnant or nursing and so her children would be fed, protected, and educated/acculturated while they were still young and vulnerable. Protection from other vampires was an important secondary benefit, and cooperative hunting a nice bonus. As with eusocial species, the function of the reproductive hierarchy was to divert the reproductive interests and energies of childless individuals to the care of younger siblings and nieces/nephews. Ancient vampire culture was set up to keep their birth rate relatively low; given their ecological position, this was adaptive.

The alpha usually had authority but was not exactly in charge; vampires were too independent to easily submit to a well-defined chain of command or a well-defined leader; think in terms of respect rather than rank. Often post-reproductive individuals older than her would have as much or more respect because of their long experience (particularly important in a non-literate oral culture!). For most of my fic the closest thing Heron's pack has to leaders are Heron and Heron's mom, and that was a pretty common vampire pack situation.

Ancient vampires mostly did not get along well with vampires who were not part of their pack. It was a dynamic a little like PHANGS in Charles Stross's Laundry series novels but with the pack instead of the individual as the basic game theory unit; to a vampire pack another vampire pack was primarily competition for precious human protocadherins and a threat. Ancient vampires weren't exactly territorial, they were so thinly spread over the landscape that it wouldn't have been feasible for a vampire pack to try to police the borders of their hunting territories, but they would opportunistically kill vampires not of their pack if they could attack them from a position of strength. Mostly vampire packs just avoided each other. It wasn't completely inflexible hostility though, vampire packs sometimes formed temporary alliances and sometimes traded with each other (e.g. a pack with easy access to obsidian might exchange some of it for preserved foods, clothing, finished tools, etc.). They also had some social institutions for exchanging genes, a particularly pressing issue given ancient vampires had a problem with low genetic diversity. I can totally see the grandmas of two neighboring/rival vampire packs having meetings a lot like the ones Basil and Old George have in The Rhesus Chart, complete with calling each other "old enemy."

Matrilineal-centered pack structure + frosty to hostile relations between packs meant ancient vampires had kind of a matriarchal/female privilege society. Ancient vampires were probably solidly majority female because a lot of males got killed during the "lone bachelor" phase of their life, when they'd have been very vulnerable to being opportunistically killed by other vampire packs or other lone vampire males (who'd see them as competition for protocadherins and social/mating opportunities!) or getting a literally lethal rejection by a pack they tried to join. And even if they did manage to integrate into a pack they were often treated as expendable/on thin ice because bonds between vampires who met as adults were usually weaker than bonds between vampires who'd known each other since one or both of them was a small child. One factor that probably fed into this was that vampires have/had less sexual dimorphism than humans, size/strength differences between sexes are smaller in vampires than in humans (probably because ancient vampires didn't have as much of a gendered division of labor, both sexes were hunters).

[random-thought-depository]

I'm going to post some notes for my fanfic, miscellaneous filling in the gaps in canon stuff about Blindsight vampires. I think I'll do three installments: one about vampire childhood, one about prehistoric vampire sociality/pack dynamics, and one about vampire sexuality. I'll do the childhood one first:

Blindsight vampire headcanons: vampire childhood:

Vampires have shorter childhoods than humans. In this area vampires have evolved relatively conservatively; Neanderthals probably had shorter childhoods than humans too, it's the very long human childhood that's weird and extreme and really different from how Homo erectus worked. Being vulnerable and pre-reproductive for so long is a huge risk, one humans can afford because we're a very social species - vampires are less social and ancestrally had a more dangerous lifestyle, so vampires evolved to get big, strong, and smart (relatively) fast. This might be one of the selection pressures that led to vampire superhuman intelligence; humans increased their cultural capacity by lengthening their childhoods, vampires increased their cultural capacity by cramming more learning into relatively short childhoods, which meant more need to be fast learners.

This obviously means vampires go through most development milestones earlier than humans, but there is at least one major exception: language; human children develop language precociously by vampire standards.

Vampires reach full physical, sexual, and neurological maturity at 13-14 years old.

By the age of nine a vampire is most of the way to fully grown, is smarter than most adult humans, would be a serious physical threat to a fit adult human male, and in ancient vampire society would have been ready to join hunts (of deer and aurochs and so on; they'd get some years of practice with easier/safer prey before they started participating in hunting humans). Vampire childhood is not just human childhood but accelerated, things develop not just faster but in different order, and this would be really obvious if you met a nine year old vampire. They'd have the height and proportions of maybe a human 14-16 year old; they'd very possibly be taller than you. But they'd be obviously pre-pubescent. But if you talked to them, it'd feel like talking to an adult (albeit an asexual adult, but I think modern vampires are probably close to being asexual even as adults because they never get to be around their own kind - more on that in the vampire sexuality headcanons post).

That nine year old vampire has just recently developed the ability to speak. Vampires have a long non-speaking stage, from around the age of 3-4 to around the age of 7-8, during which they can understand spoken language and they can talk using sign language but they can't do oral speech. Even pre-speaking language acquisition might be somewhat delayed (or, rather, similar to Homo erectus language acquisition); IIRC a human child who didn't start talking until 3-4 would be considered a slow talker. Ancient vampire culture was built around this, so ancient vampires had a very extensive and sophisticated sign language, which was also useful to them for communicating without making sounds while hunting. When they first recreated the species in modern times they spent years wondering if the species was naturally mute or if they'd messed up somehow, until a seven year old vampire child spoke a complete sentence in perfect English.

Vampires don't really have much of a teenage-equivalent phase. Pretty much all their growth and brain development happens in the pre-pubescent phase; puberty is short (a couple of years, between 12-14 or so) and is a sort of "congratulations, you've developed to your full size, you've reached graduation day, time to get functional reproductive organs, secondary sex characteristics, a sexuality, and if you're male some extra muscle" sort of deal.

Ancient vampires nursed/breast-fed their children for a relatively long time, weaning them around the age of 4-5. This would have suppressed vampire fertility through lactational amenorrhea; feature, not bug, to a predator species dependent on a prey species that bred not all that much faster than them. I assume lactating vampires passed some of that protein they needed to get from eating people onto their offspring through their breast milk, so pre-weaning vampire children got it that way.

Young vampire children are actually kind of well-behaved in a way. Vampires are a less energetic species than humans, and young vampire children have an instinctive sense that the world is dangerous and will instinctively cling to their caregiver and try to remain in close proximity to them most of the time. Vampires don't have terrible twos. Heron once tricked a blind human into getting her pregnant (he didn't realize she wasn't human) to produce an offspring who was immune to the crucifix glitch, and one of her primary impressions of her half-human daughter is "she was an exhausting hyperactive hellion as a kid."

In a lot of ways vampire children seem a lot more human than vampire adults. They are much more curious, energetic, and playful. They spend more time awake. They will cry if upset and express pain if hurt (which adult vampires do not do). They are more expressive, less touch-averse, less avoidant-aggressive, and more interested in social interaction.

Watching vampire children play is a lot like watching a cat play: they love activities that vaguely simulate hunting like chasing and pouncing on wind-up toys, chasing a laser pointer dot, etc.. In ancient vampire society a 4-8 year old child would be following their mother around and helping her trap and hunt small animals. They really like hide and seek games too.

[random-thought-depository]

I’ve been watching some Dune lore fan videos on the internet. Thought I had: one thing a lot of visual depictions of sandworms miss on is the baleen whale parallel. Their primary food source is sand plankton and sandtrout (their own immature forms), right? That’d be logical, there isn’t much else on Arrakis for a creature that big to eat, and it’s what this video says. So they’d be filter-feeders, and filter-feeding whales are the closest Earth equivalent to them.

Visual adaptations make the sandworms look like predatory animals with big mouths full of sharp teeth, and that really doesn’t seem right. Their aggression is defensive-territorial-paranoid, not predatory; they’re like sand kaiju hippos, not sand kaiju sharks! They’re filter-feeders, and their dentition and general shape of their heads should reflect that! Those teeth the Fremen carve knives out of are probably more like baleen!

I guess they could have some sharp teeth too, hippos have tusks, and sharp teeth might be useful for digging through harder ground, but behind that there should be a baleen-like filtering apparatus. That baleen-like filtration apparatus is what you should see if they open wide the way they do in a lot of visual depictions. And they should be built to gulp down a lot of sand and then eject most of it while keeping the food, like filter-feeding whales do with water; maybe have some big vents on the side of the back of the head for ejecting sand after it’s been filtered.

Thinking about it, I think it would make a lot of sense for them to have beaks. When they move they’re ramming head-first through the ground, their heads probably take a lot of structural strain and sand abrasion, so it would make sense for their heads to be armored.

So, I’m thinking: a head that’s basically a just long, tapered, streamlined, armored beak, with two intersecting slits kind of like the Lynch movie design but they rarely or never open super-wide. When the worm isn’t feeding they’re kept closed and lock together pretty tightly for efficient movement, when the worm is feeding they open to reveal a baleen-like structure. Maybe there’d be some sort of catcher to slow down the sand somewhat before it hits the relatively delicate filtration structures while they’re feeding. Then behind the head there’d be two big vents that the filtered sand is ejected through during feeding; they’d look kind of like gill slits and give the worm a sort of fishy feel. The beak would be very thick and dense, and if you wanted to keep the mouth nice and scary looking there could be a single row of sharp teeth between the beak and the baleen-analog, but I kind of prefer the idea of just making the creature’s intimidation factor flow organically from its nature instead of adding extra “scary” bits.

I’m thinking with this interpretation, a sandworm’s primary mode of attack would be to simply use its armored head as a battering ram. Like, if a worm was attacking a spice harvester it probably wouldn’t bite it like in that scene in the Lynch movie, it’d use its closed beak like a trireme’s ram; it’d just “swim” full speed towards the harvester and drive that giant piece of meters-thick super-dense bone that is its break into the harvester at like fifty miles an hour. That feels more fitting for a giant highly aggressive but not predatory creature: it’s using its beak the way a bull uses its horns; it’s not messing around with trying to eat you, you’re poisonous to it, it just wants to obliterate you, and its tactics and natural equipment are set up to most efficiently leverage its size and power toward that end.

Something like the harvester scene done with my interpretation would emphasize the speed and violence of a sandworm attack. The harvester would be just peacefully sitting there and then WHAM, the harvester would just explode with dust and debris flying around as a creature the size of a skyscraper just rams it at fifty miles an hour and basically just obliterates it in less than a second! More of a Cloverfield monster throwing the head of the Statue of Liberty vibe. No opportunity for a slow dramatic shot of the worm, but I think this would effectively convey that sandworms are powerful creatures that you don’t want to mess with!

To me this interpretation makes a sandworm feel more like a real animal and less like an “awesomebro” movie monster, and that’s fitting given that one of the things Dune is famous for is the attention to ecology.

If sandworms are kind of like whales, might they have something like whale song? They might at least have warning calls, basically communicating “I’m here, I’m big, don’t mess with me!” to smaller worms. That’d be a neat touch. Imagine the deep desert on Arrakis occasionally booming with these alien yet eerily beautiful and music-like sounds; worm calls (maybe take inspiration from what dune booming sounds like for modelling them). One idea for when a writer or film-maker might want to emphasize the majestic side of worms instead of just the danger they represent. If so, it’d also be interesting to consider what Fremen culture would do with that; it’s the voice of Shai Hulud, so it would make sense for it to have a lot of cultural and religious significance to them (e.g. I could totally see them having a form of divination based on trying to interpret it).

A while back I noted having a very vague idea for a Dune fanfic but having no idea what it’d actually be about and, well, I still have no idea what it’d actually be about but I’m definitely getting some peripheral worldbuilding flavor concepts lol (I think next post I’ll talk about an interpretation of heighliners I came up with).