you. yes you 🫵. spare three fun facts about howie.
1. he really likes super dark chocolate (87%+) and after he quits drinking, he ends up eating a lot more dark chocolate instead as his kind of replacement. he doesn't really love chocolate baked into other things though, just the straight up chocolate bar experience for him
2. he can come off as kind of quiet and gruff but he'sreally just an awkward butch with muscle & a masculine voice so people think of him as dark and cranky instead of what he really is: a very shy and soft guy who should have been a philosophy major if he wasnt born in the early 1900s and evil-married during the great depression. he should not under any circumstances be at the club but more than anything he should have been at university. (his voice claim is hozier!)
3. with the other prophets (remi, skylark, wicker, and technically mimzy), howie had chance encounters with everyone before Zephyr tethered them as prophets to the narrative, except remi. he used to date wicker like 50-60 years ago, and he met skylark when she was a younger model like 15-20 years ago and then returned to work for her as she runs her syndicate, and he's seen mimzy in various places overlapping when she was very small, and after her parents were killed & she went missing, whoever did it was put on Mama's bounty board. remi just crawled out of the woodwork once everyone had been tied together and started throwing things at him though. i think this is why howie & remi tend to have the hardest time getting along in the group.
Okay, so to understand Popov you do need to also understand Rhys. And to understand Rhys, you must understand Iruiel. There's more beyond that, but that's the bare minimum to "get it" with what Popov's deal is.
The basics of it: Iruiel is something like the utter incarnation of destruction; not death, not war, destruction. Of himself, of everything, every person and every little thing. This is sort of what makes him such a dangerous antagonist, and why it is so, so dire to prevent him from fully resurrecting. Zephyr, an incarnation of creation, got Iruiel as close to death as something so divine can ever get. Over the next thousands and thousands of years, Iruiel slowly began to regrow his power, his conscience. But he's not like... fully... alive, again? He's currently just, like, a ghost at best. Make suggestions, influence folks, infect the area with a toxic magic that corrupts anything in its path. Even at arguably only 20% of his power, Iruiel is nearly world-ending already. Heartsplit revolves in part around Iruiel trying very, very hard to put his conscience into a vessel that can survive carrying him so that he has a physical form that can continue on his once-stalled plan for utter destruction.
But to find a vessel also required some physical form to collect followers, disciples that could be at Iruiel's disposal to further his plans while he waits and idles until he is powerful enough to be alive again...
That's where Popov and Rhys come in.
The pair of them were not really supposed to be a pair. Iruiel had just barely gotten past the threshold for him to have enough strength to kind of... sprout off two forms created from his will. Creating empty and unfillable hollows that could go out into the worlds and recruit, scout, destroy, build, etc. all for Iruiel's desire of destruction of everything. He really meant to only create one; a single and perfect capsule of his will. Belial, a figure in the story who is often involved in trips on both "sides" so to speak, intervened. Who knows why? Maybe there's a part of him that doesn't want Iruiel to destroy everything, so he wants to sabotage as much as possible without outright putting himself squarely opposed to any of the sides. A true centrist. Maybe he just felt bored. Either way, in the ritual where Iruiel worked for days to spawn that one perfect form, Belial ... didn't ruin it, didn't stop it, just sort of... split it... down the middle. Now, instead of that one perfect capsule, Iruiel was left with two half-perfect capsules.
Rhys, and Pyotr. Names they both took on for themselves after going out into the world; that's why Pyotr has a last name (Popov) and Rhys doesn't. The general idea is they've become sort of put into a head-versus-heart situation. They are, externally, identical twins - brothers.
However, due to the split, they are also the same person. Just two different halves. Each with their own body, personality, methods. But ultimately in lockstep with the other. Rhys is more the head of the pair - the logic. He's also, because of this, less inclined to work feverishly for utter destruction. Rhys is not a saboteur, he is absolutely the mastermind behind the cult (known as Sunless Daze) forming to help Iruiel. He is absolutely the one who killed Mimzy's parents and kidnapped her as a small toddler when he saw and found that she was uniquely going to be capable of becoming Iruiel's vessel due to her naturally high resistance-bordering-on-immunity to magic. He does the work. He just tries to savor his power more. He's a bit more bitter about the end. But not against it.
Popov, however, is the heart of the operation. Fully and maddeningly sold over into the purpose of their creation, he cannot understand why Rhys is not completely blissful and enraptured by the encroaching end of everything. Both Popov and Rhys assumed identities of evangelist, travelling priests (this was an excellently efficient guise for getting a quick route to a community's trust and thus, being able to recruit much easier). While Rhys could play the part, sometimes even more convincingly than Popov, he wasn't the most rapturous believer by any means. Popov was utterly taken with the divine; with his vague blurring of the G-d the townsfolk thought he meant and the picturing of Iruiel that Popov carried with him.
The other main difference is that Rhys tends to have a lot more... uh... stomach about the things the pair do to hasten Iruiel's arrival. To mean that he is a lot more grossed out about it. One of their main projects is extracting an essence of life force - the soul - enough to drain the person, killing them - in order to feed Iruiel and help him recover at an increasing rate. Rhys would lure the victims to the church Popov would keep home in in whatever town they stayed at, but he could not stick around to see the extraction. The needles and vials of blood and the gore - Rhys really can't stand it. It's all too filthy and earnest to him. He despises emotions and shows of pain. Popov, meanwhile, delights in it. Is completely obsessed with learning the perfect state of each victim, often pushing them to recount their feelings of pain, of decreasing blood pressure, or their heart palpitations, until they go incoherent and then expire. Together, they make an excellently lethal team, but they can fare separately just as well. Eventually, Popov settles down in a single church that serves as a headquarters of sorts, while Rhys strikes out to continue travelling. Popov continues to prey on the townsfolk, killing them methodically. Rhys devotes himself more to preying on the living.
Popov is a smiler. He's friendly. He's absolutely deranged and adores pain, adores causing death, primarily because he cannot understand it - he is a creature of emotion, not logic. He does what makes him happy. He completes his purpose. He does not think of anyone other than Rhys as sentient. And he regards Iruiel as the one and only divine end.
omg viki... what did you think of merrin & cal in survivor?
I hc'd Cal as gay and Merrin bi with a preference for women HOWEVER I knew they'd never let that happen lol this is Star Wars they're not gonna make a gay protag, so I expected the writers to make them a thing at some point but tbh I would've preferred if they kept it platonic. I don't hate it, I just prefer them as friends
this is more about comic fandom rather than comics themselves, but 1:1 comic adaptations are nigh impossible, because lbr some comic arcs suck absolute ass and shouldn't be adapted. certain fans throw a hissy fit whenever an adaptation takes liberties/makes changes, but some of those changes are good and enhance the source material. not saying it's always the case, but some changes are good.
I mean, look at The Boys, the show is much better than the edgelord torture porn comic, because Garth Ennis has a hate boner for superheroes (or had. idk he might've gotten over it, I can't see inside his head)
