i fear my puppy boy!soldier boy / catboy!homelander fixation has metastasized—quietly at first, like mold in the walls—into a full-blown bear-shaped billy butcher rabbit hole, and now i cannot tell where the metaphor ends and the hunger begins.
(and i realize, with the quiet dread of recognition, that the pipeline was inevitable. puppy to cat to bear. from need to narcissism to wrath. from “please touch me” to “watch me be adored” to “i will survive this even if i have to chew through it.” the ecosystem makes sense now. the dog circles. the cat watches. the bear endures. the bear devours.)
what seals the bear metaphor is this:
a bear can disappear into winter and not die. it seals itself in darkness and feeds on its own reserves—fat, muscle, marrow—slowly digesting the evidence of what it once was. it grows weaker in a way that looks like discipline from the outside. from a distance, it seems patient. strategic. in truth, it is quietly eating itself alive. that is butcher’s long war in miniature. he does not replenish. he does not heal. he endures by turning his own body into rations and calling that fortitude.
every plan is another winter. every scheme is a fresh cave dug into the earth, another season of intentional starvation. he survives not because he is strong, but because he is willing to lose more of himself than anyone else in the room. grief becomes protein. guilt becomes fuel. love—once warm, once human—spoils and is cured into something shelf-stable, something he can gnaw on when the nights get long. he feeds on memory the way a starving animal chews bark, knowing it will not nourish him properly, knowing it will hollow him out, but unable to stop because hunger has become his only proof of life.
and like a bear, he is not cruel by nature—he is dangerous by necessity. bears are not evil; they are provoked. they are animals that should have been left alone in the woods, allowed their silence, their distance, their rituals of survival. butcher was not left alone. he was hunted, cornered, prodded, taught that intimacy ends in blood and that mercy is a luxury reserved for the unscarred. so he adapted. he learned how to make himself unapproachable. he learned how to look like a warning sign nailed to a tree.
the most tragic thing about a bear is not its ferocity, but its solitude. bears do not travel in packs. they do not share the burden of winter. they go alone into the dark and come out altered, diminished, dangerous. when butcher emerges from each campaign, each victory, he is leaner in ways that have nothing to do with muscle. meaner, yes—but also emptier. there is blood on his mouth, but no feast. there is survival, but no nourishment. he lives, and lives, and lives, at the expense of the very thing he claims to be avenging.
billy is a grizzly with scripture burned into its bones and winter permanently lodged in its chest. a creature that learned too well how to endure. a creature that keeps mistaking survival for salvation. and like all animals pushed past their limits, he does not ask to be understood. he only makes his hunger everyone else’s problem.
Gods but Martin really went all out while writing A Storm of Swords didn't he? Killing so many important characters left and right without taking a pause😭😭
(I'm still not done, ain't ready to read Oberyn's death ngl😭)
As a toddler, I adored the Old Bear and Friends books by Jane Hissey, and this BAFTA-winning TV series adaptation which aired 30 years ago this month made me love them even more!
You can watch the first episode, as well as all the others on Jane Hissey's official YouTube channel! Visit her website too if you like!
