#paranormal-librarian

[candiedfright]

POE! PLEASE, I DONT THINK YOU'VE EVER DRAWN HIM!!!

OKAY FINE !!!! he smells like damp wood

[possessedpasm]

You're work reminds me of Paul Coker's in a way. Maybe it just bc of the 70s comic-esq artstyle, or the way you draw dogs.

I can't place why i think it but I do mean it as a compliment :)

You say this as my eyes well with tears of joy because Paul Coker Jr. was one of my earliest inspirations and now I feel like I can rest easy with this being on my epitaph thank you, I have been freed *floats away to Heaven but I get stuck on the ceiling like an old party balloon*

[commanderfreddy]

Thats perfectly fine! I get it, its hard to put thoughts into words some times.

I did really like your Hunter and Hank post though :) ive been on a Mama/Grandma Hunter fix lately. Do you have any headcannons for her?

I started writing a casual reply to this and then it got completely away from me because uh. TL;DR, yes. Yes I do. Final word count is 3,300 words.

I think Hunter Gathers was a child soldier and here's why:

I know it's kind of a big thing to pitch but the specter of it is there within the narrative, mainly in her treatment of Billy when he was dragged into the OSI in the 80s and especially the contrast between that and her rules for running SPHINX.

Throughout Invisible Hand of Fate Hunter is very much aware that Billy is a teenager

however she shows a level of frustration with him that is 1) excessive (counterpoint, that is just her personality, but, counter-counterpoint, at this point she's a colonel and has been 1 on 1 training new recruits for some time), but also, crucially, 2) centered on Billy's emotional distress at having to pretend to be a university student when it's all he wants to do for real, in a way where it seems like she doesn't understand that the lack of getting to do normal teenager things is just as upsetting to him as having to do espionage is

Billy was already denied a normal childhood by virtue of being a prodigy - he mentions at one point that he went to his high school prom at age 12 and took his mother as his date (and I don't doubt his disability impacted his social development too, we know from this episode that feeling like a "freak" and an outcast is a major part of his teenage psyche) - but Rose also raised him as a civilian (to the extent that he was completely ignorant of her past as a protagonist at all), so he had enough proximity to normal life to know what it looked like and that he wanted it.

Hunter is so goddamn bizarre that she strikes me as someone who doesn't even know what it is that she missed out on - or at least didn't until well into adulthood. She strikes me as someone who grew up "in the game" and, much like Hank and Dean, didn't really have the necessary context to understand how fucked up that is. Hank and Dean, however, are locked into the genre convention of Boy Adventurer (much like Rusty and Johnny, and we see how that can turn out!) as a site of specific peril and a very codified form of limited agency (you may end up saving the day through wacky hijinks, but it's not like you get your own gun), while Hunter strikes me more as someone who was forced into a more traditional rank-and-file military role. Though of course that could just be because we exclusively see her as someone who has been in the military for decades within the narrative of the show.

(wearing nonstandard uniform (shorts. not even getting into her gender presentation) and yet bitching about the lack of a uniform code strikes me as the kind of behaviour that develops from seeing the military as a safe and familiar structure due to its eternal presence in your life, regardless of how safe it actually is for you)

But I think you can see the effects of a militarised childhood throughout her character. Personality-wise, she's extremely paranoid,

quick to violence,

and is surprisingly withholding about personal information despite her loquaciousness (the only exceptions seem to be when her feelings about her gender are presented to the audience for laughs). We don't know anything about her life prior to the events of Invisible Hand where she's already a Colonel and probably around 40 years old. In a show where peoples' backstories come up all the time (why do we know that Dr. Z fucked Malcolm's dad? IDK but I'm glad we do) and in a character cohort that are obsessed with getting in each other's personal lives (O.S.I. Love You my, uh. beloved), it's not hard to read this lacuna as her keeping it deliberately secret.

Which brings me to my next part of this theory, which is that not only was she a child soldier, but that she was a child henchman.

This is where I kind of veer off into making shit up whole cloth but I'm making it up for a reason lol. I think Hunter grew up in a Guild family for a couple of reasons:

She has a vendetta against the Guild that persists even when the OSI change targets to SPHINX in the 80s, and reacts really strongly when Billy suggests that the Guild might be fictional, since he only knows it from The Rusty Venture Show

(look at her fucking sulk oh my god wait i just remembered hank also sulked in this room in the Destiny suit in O.S.I. Love You. these parallels go all the way to the top.)

And when she takes charge of the OSI in Season 5, she's the first OSI leader to seriously target the Council of 13, and then the Sovereign himself, rather than focusing the OSI's efforts on playing cat-and-also-cat with supervillain jobbers. Treister likes playing soldiers. Hunter wants these people to pay for crimes against humanity. It's not hard to imagine this comes from a place of intimate familiarity with those crimes, whether as a victim or as a forced perpetrator.

Adds even more texture to her rivalry with Phantom Limb, too. It's somewhat obliquely implied in Invisible Hand that she's working largely off a hunch

We don't know where this intel is coming from. Could well just be firsthand knowledge of her knowing Hamilton back when he was Fantomas' failgrandson. She and Hamilton are around the same age after all. Imagine being forced to hang out with your horrible dad's wretched coworkers' dogshit son at age 11 and then 50 years later he's forcing you to expose yourself in Central Park for bureaucracy reasons. Now THAT's Venture Bros.

Getting back to the broader topic of ways in which Hunter behaves like a former Guild child soldier: She lionises the concept of the civilian in a way that goes beyond simply making sense (like in the movie, her decision to shoot down VenTech tower before it crushes millions of civilians when it falls makes logical sense) and into the realm of the hagiographic. I'm thinking especially of her deployment of images of Americana in order to make her point. Like

we have zero reason to believe there has ever been anything like this in her actual life. It's a rhetorical technique she uses to explain her position. It's a symbol. It's some Thing worth fighting for, but it's completely divorced from her own reality.

The main idea I had was that she grew up as the scion of some Guild hotshot (not necessarily a Level 10 on the Council, but someone with clout and respect all the same) and defected to the OSI as a teenager in order to escape, with the horrible irony of it of course being that she simply gets trapped in another militaristic environment entangled in another web of self-destructive loyalty with an overbearing violent patriarch

(seriously their relationship is so goddamn weird. it compels me.)

In Fade Away and Radiate I explicitly had her backstory include shooting her evil Guild dad in the head which I still enjoy. Kind of a personal imperial boomerang there - teach your son to shoot to kill and expect to see your transgender daughter put a bullet between your eyes.

All of this comes back around to the decisions we see her make within the timeline of the show. After seeing her manage a child soldier (Billy) in Invisible Hand of Fate, with her operating specifically like he is a child and also like that is completely normal procedure, we see that completely blow up in her face with serious consequences for her.

(incredibly tangential tangent: Vatred's presence in this scene always makes me wonder about the OSI chain of command. Brock implies he expects a sergeant to start yelling at a colonel. I know that football helmet did nothing for him. It's all crayons up there now.)

We don't know much about her management style between the 80s and the start of New SPHINX (Old New SPHINX, as opposed to Season 5's New New SPHINX, which is mainly comprised of members of Old Old SPHINX. Keep up.), but literally one of the main things we know about SPHINX under Hunter's command is that all recruits need to be over 18 and have a high school diploma.

There's a direct parallel between Pomp and Circuitry and Invisible Hand of Fate, and it is literally about Hunter's treatment of child soldiers. Specifically it's the use of the term "junior g-man" to describe them - in Billy's case (see above) she says it to kind of gas him up and welcome him into the fold, whereas in Hank's case she says it to dismiss Hank.

The effect is a portrayal of someone who has learned that child soldiers are more trouble than they're worth and doesn't want to have to deal with that again. But… that implies someone who had to learn that lesson in the first place, necessitating a starting point of thinking child soldiers are a morally-neutral given in military operations. I don't want to get into fallacious territory by talking about "obvious" issues in ethics or whatever but. Come on. There aren't that many contexts where you can get that opinion from other than being one yourself.

But honestly what stands out the most about this rule of hers is the need for a high school diploma. To me this reads as more of her putting mundane civilian life on a pedestal, and - in a somewhat limited way - her attempting to reckon with her own lack of lived experience outside military life. Her subordinates are required to have something which she didn't have the opportunity to get herself, and I'm willing to bet this rule is in place to prevent herself from having to deal with anyone too similar to herself. Her agents are expected to have an incredibly diverse range of skills that they are capable of deploying under basically every situation ever. She already has to deal with fixing everyone's ripped pants. She doesn't want to have to deal with teaching anyone how to function in a grocery store without getting overstimulated and killing the guy giving out free cheese samples.

I wonder if she would also accept candidates with GEDs, or if she would have a kind of hypocritical artificial elitism about that. I can see her denying someone on that count just to make them do a bunch of crazy bullshit in order to prove themself to her. Then again, I can see her doing just about anything to goad someone into a show of strength and skill.

Her inability to grasp civilian life as something that is lived and valued in its experience rather than as a collection of abstract signifiers is also apparent in her use of the Washing Machine. (I just realised there isn't like a proper name for this thing. You know. The memory eraser. The Washing Machine.) I've mentioned this before (but I can't remember if it was in a post on tumblr or in a tweet or something I said Out Loud lmao) but Hunter uses that thing in such a palliative way. It's ingrained in her management style of SPHINX the same way that physiotherapy is ingrained in the running of a sports team. It's there to fix the inevitable injuries. Shoreleave is one of her favourites (to such an extent that Sky Pilot complains about it in P.R.O.M.) and yet she has no qualms about sending him into a situation that is directly, personally dangerous and emotionally upsetting for him

because she can put him in the washing machine and he's magically better. The fact that he had to experience the event in the first place - the fact that he's then missing a week of his life! - doesn't phase her. Perhaps most telling, she withholds a memory wipe from Pete because she thinks he doesn't deserve it!

It speaks to a view of the Washing Machine as something positive in Hunter's eyes. Something, potentially, that she wants to use on herself, but cannot due to the requirements of command. Someone has to be on top, managing things, and as we see with her gender (I talked about this in my tags here lol), Hunter sees sacrificing personal happiness as an inherent part of command. It shows loyalty and focus or whatever, and you could potentially use it to guilt trip underlings (I don't have a clear idea on if she's doing this or not. But I think she is aware of it as a potential tactic to keep in her back pocket if nothing else). I think that's something she's getting from Treister, the sacrifice thing. I don't think he's doing it during what we see of him on the show (he has a son! he's a normal guy! okay he definitely isn't but he has a life outside the hoverquarters!) but I do think he put that expectation in her head. He's very good at manipulating her.

(Hunter crash the hoverquarters and you will be reincarnated as a lotus flower)

The point is, the fact that she sees erasing memory as something positive, and events experienced during the course of duty as eraseable phenomena that cease to exist once the agent involved forgets them, speaks to a level of dissociative thinking that indicates Something. Being a military officer at all requires a certain extent of dissociation between cause and effect because of the. evil. but Hunter's so neurotic and particular about other things that this really stands out. Makes you wonder what it is she'd choose to forget. How far back she wants to go.

I don't think it's just Hunter though. Between how standard of a procedure Billy's press-ganging was, and how Hunter is emphasised as changing up the OSI once she becomes General in Season 5, it's also not too much of a stretch to assume that recruiting child soldiers - especially those with unique contributions like profile-fitting prodigy Billy and Guild-heir Hunter - was somewhat standard procedure for the OSI during Treister's tenure. I don't have this as a serious theory for anyone else, but it's something to think about.

(let's all read this line from Shoreleave slightly too literally together)

Beyond all of these things in the text that can be read as supporting the idea of Hunter as a child soldier, I feel like it works on a thematic level too. Venture Bros is very much a show about cycles, to an incredibly pervasive extent. Secondary and tertiary characters are not free from it. In addition to the main Venture family plot line we see this theme in things like the Monarch taking on his father's Blue Morpho mantle, Dr. Girlfriend being unable to get Phantom Limb out of her life, the Captain Sunshine lifecycle (WonderBoy -> Captain Sunshine -> Butler), etc. etc. As a counterpoint to the main emotional drive of the series (is there a way to break this cycle? will Hank and Dean turn out better than their dad? is Rusty's disdain for Jonas synthesising into anything tangibly helpful for his sons or is it just calcifying him into a worse and more bitter person?), these cycles are often presented as things that are impossible to break, at least without changing something inherent to the person escaping. I feel like you can see this best through Johnny and his addiction journey - by Season 7, he's in rehab and clearly working on himself, but one of the ways we see him take charge of his life is by setting boundaries with Dr. Z and refusing to move in with him. Which makes sense because Dr. Z literally tried to kill him all the time as a child, but at the same time Dr. Z is Johnny's entire support network! No one else is looking out for him! The game is so hard to break out of because it's these people's entire lives. It's their family, their work, their passion, their labour union, their enemy, their spouse, their friends, their gated community, their metric and assessor of achievement - it's everything. So I think having a major faction leader (who positions herself as a parental figure for her subordinates!) be a literal child soldier fits well with that.

All of the above are mainly just things in the text that support this as a concept. In terms of narrative progression, the ideas that I have can be broken down as such:

Hunter was born to a high-ranking Guild supervillain

Said supervillain used her as an active combatant (as a henchman or as some kind of mid-level hench-commander or whatever) from a young age

(yknow. Like This)

During the course of living as a villain, she forms a view of the OSI as a kind of idealised Other, inherently ideologically opposed to her current situation (and her dad, personally) and so comes to believe that everything that she does not currently have, everything that she wants, can be found with them

As a teenager she kills her dad, calls the OSI on his corpse, and defects to them when they move in to verify his death and dismantle his operations (I don't have an idea for any specific catalyst that brings her to this point. In a way the slowly building weight of the unbeatability of this kind of life is more appealing to me than any one instant of impetus)

Bad news baby girl its more of the exact same bullshit forever. Except you wear blue now. Yeah you don't even get to be a girl about it either. (now when did she figure that out? I'm not sure!)

In order to keep Hunter (a wellspring of insider Guild knowledge, and also an experienced soldier) in line and on side, Treister begins an insane paternalistic mentorship with her, defined by the bizarre combination of violence, affection, favouritism, responsibility, and secret-keeping that Hunter later replicates in turn with Brock.

At this point the timeline catches up with Fade Away and Radiate and I take everyone to yuri world. The. everything. is still there though. Underneath the yuri. Contributing to it.

I have more thoughts about what happens after that fic through to catching up with canon (i.e. the earliest point we see Hunter, in the 80s in Invisible Hand of Fate), but I want to write those as actual fanfic with like prose and dialogue and you know. flavour.

So I hope that answers your question.

Oh! One more thing! When she was first watching the show, my girlfriend pointed out Hunter's office in SPHINX Rising to say that the decor was incredibly white Alaskan. That cracked me up so bad that Alaskan Hunter has been my headcanon ever since. Yes this is coherent with the child soldier stuff. Do you have any idea how big Alaska is. You could hide so many supervillain bases up there. That's why she's always wearing shorts too. Doesn't get properly cold in the Lower 48. It all makes sense.

[555-yosi]

A while ago you mentioned in a post how Brock had to give up being Native to join the OSI. Which i agree with, but i would like to hear more of your take on that

I think you're referring to one of the points brought up in this post by @commanderfreddy about the parallel between Hunter having to give up her gender identity and Brock having to give up his Native identity as part of being the OSI?

I feel like there is fertile ground there, we see repeatedly that characters wishing to be properly part of the OSI have to give up what makes them them as individuals. You could go a step further and add Shoreleave to this list - he's deliberately contrasted against Brock and Hunter in The Invisible Hand of Fate as a member of the OSI who fails to mesh with our POV characters into the OSI (Brock and Hunter), while also being openly gay, and we know he was eventually dishonourably discharged for his sexuality. Interestingly, in that episode we also see a certain degree of insecurity from Hunter in the way she talks to Billy - her emphasis on the word "freak" when she yells at Billy in the car, coupled with what seems to be ongoing respect for him even into the present day, seems like a really interesting combination. Maybe something even like jealousy.

Which is to say, I think giving up personal sources of joy and strength in favour of the OSI being your one and only rock is a big theme for the most prominent OSI characters. Personally I think it's an interesting and pointed choice that Hunter specifically points out Brock's Winnebago heritage right before declaring that "the Brock Samson you knew and were is dead". In the art book (p. 46), Doc Hammer mentions that even in Season 1, after 20(?) years with the OSI, Brock's idealised fantasy version of himself is as a stereotypical Native boy. "Boy", too, not "man". And they point out his mullet specifically, which I'm embarrassed to say I hadn't even thought of before, but we know Brock had his head shaved down to a crew-cut when he first joined the OSI, and cutting Native men and boys' hair short is one of the most pervasive assimilation/humiliation tactics used by settler-colonialist projects (especially missionaries) in the expansion of the United States across stolen land with an aim to erode Native culture and sovereignty.

I'm not Native myself, so I don't want to speak on things that are beyond my purview, but I don't think it's much of a stretch to see the insidiousness of a guy having to turn away from his Native heritage in order to become a perfect killing machine for the US government. In fact it's so on the nose that it's kind of baffling that the show never confronted it directly.

Unfortunately, Brock's Winnebago heritage is rarely brought up in the show at all. In a way that's realistic, he left Nebraska as a young man and - as far as we know - is no longer in contact with anyone from that part of his family, or anyone from his youth at all. In the artbook (ibid), Doc and Jackson mention wanting to have done an episode where Brock goes back to the life he left behind and visit his mother in her trailer and his father figure on the reservation. I would really have enjoyed seeing that. [Remembers Princess Tinyfeet] But Maybe We Dodged A Bullet.

(I think this is the post you were referring to, if I forgot a post I made myself let me know - it wouldn't be the first time I said something and then completely blanked on it ever happening)

[cryptidmickle]

In your outfit post for the amnesia au you mentioned, Smilk will wear casual clothes around friends he eventually makes. Which cookies do you think he'd be friends with?

i think his first friend would be silverbell!

now i hear you. cryptid. mike. mickle. what the hell do you mean his first friend is silverbell- listen, silverbell is terribly optimistic, hopeful, and imo,, too trusting/gullible (like what do you Mean you immediately trust these 4 random cookies and a lizard when they say they knew white lily? i thought hed be more properly suspicious, but little guy just LET EM RIGHT IN?) hed absolutely be the first to approach smilk upon his reveal of being in the kingdom in semi-house arrest and try to talk to him. its a struggle of course, but i think silverbell would be a great first friend for smilk to make in the faerie kingdom. someone soft and trusting and easy to read, almost like a certain someone...

next friends would probably be the gingergang, as much as theyd be difficult for him to handle at first, theyre children. children kind of forgive easily, plus hes not scary anymore so? why not bother the jester that tried to kill them

after that i think hed get... friendly, with some of the faeries? everyones so kind, it gets on his nerves, but hes grateful to a select few

of the ancients, id say the first he manages to befriend is hollyberry

[commanderfreddy]

I have just discovered your blog. And I really love your vbros stuff (im the one that thought that Brock letting go of being native was 555 not you 😅)

So I wanted to hear more about your thoughts about the characters

oh thank you! i love thinking about the venture bros cast but im not great at putting my thoughts into words as like meta posts unless im seized by a wave of inspiration lol. most of the time i try to express my thoughts on the characters through my fanfic bc if im gonna put in the effort to write something i like to have fun with it and make it a narrative.

i feel bad bc i really appreciate your kind words but i have nothing off the cuff to offer you lol right now - i have been working on something featuring Mrs. Fitzcarraldo so ive been thinking a lot about her lately. i feel like its interesting that what little we see of her is pretty much exclusively through Don's eyes, so we just have to take his word/implication that she didn't know about his vigilante actions, or the nature of his relationship with Jonas. while i feel it's understandable that she might not know specifics, i feel like she definitely had to have some idea of what was going on, especially since we know that she and Don hung out with Jonas and Team Venture all the time - like i feel like if i was seeing in the news that there was a butterfly-themed vigilante out there, and my avid amateur lepidopterist husband whose best friend was basically a superhero kept sneaking out at night, i would have some suspicions.

and as for his relationship with Jonas... it's grim but i feel like something people regularly gloss over (understandably so, i dont like thinking about it much myself) is the implication that even though Jonas addressed the Fitzcarraldos' infertility problem by pawning a spare clone off onto them, there's still the implication that Jonas used Mrs. F's desperation to have a baby in order to solicit sex from her. considering how grim and frantic Don could become when thinking about Jonas sexually blackmailing him

i have to imagine that kind of tension had to bleed into his marriage, even as he fought to obscure its cause. like this went on for an entire decade - the tape was from 1967 and Don died in 1976 - and it tormented him the entire time. there's no way that his wife didn't pick up on something. but at the same time, considering everything about their situation - the time period, their class, their dependence on Jonas, Jonas' position as a fucking torment nexus inventor, the fact that he stole their friend Kano and forced him into service as a bodyguard - means that i can see her never ever bringing it up. lying awake next to him every night for what - unbeknownst to her - was the rest of their lives, wondering if what had happened to her had happened to her husband, too. knowing that even if it had, there was nothing she could do about it.

ok that was grim as fuck. but i cant not think about it. i feel like it's there, in the text.

[555-yosi]

I've just found your account today but I have to say I love all your analysis, especially of hunter. I see people talk about the circumstance around her destransiton but never really getting into it and I really feel like I understand her a bit better thanks to you. (Plus I love you talking abt her relationship with Brock AND Shoreleave, he doesnt get mentioned as much when talking about them but its clear they all care abt each other a bunch)

Thank you! I feel like it's important to remember that Hunter wasn't written with much care or foresight, especially initially and especially with her transition treated as a joke and her detransition as a way for the show to reset her to status quo in order to deploy her as a serious character when she became more of a series regular. I don't remember who said it but someone on here put it very succinctly in saying that on Venture Bros, comedic characters can be trans, but serious characters have to be cis. That's also why they went to a lot of effort around Season 2 to make it clear that Dr. Girlfriend was cis (although I like to disregard that, too. Not only because I like it when trans women exist but also it felt so meanspirited and direct that it didn't even feel like a natural part of the narrative, it just felt. Screed-like.)

But I do like taking characters in that position and taking them seriously because... hmm. On one hand, I enjoy the puzzle, trying to create meaning where none was intended. On the other hand, nothing happens to any of us with much care or foresight, really, and oftentimes we have to make up ourselves as we go along. There are plenty of things I've done and said in my own life that don't align with my current values (or even my values at the time!) and I still need to find a way to reconcile them with the person I am and the person I want to be. And I think examining fictional characters is a useful way to practice that kind of emotional and intellectual work.

That is to say, I don't think there was any intentionality in portraying Hunter as someone who had to detransition in order to conform to a very directly patriarchal seat of power because she feels it to be the only way she could pivot a lifetime of service to a structure she no longer truly believes in toward doing actual good in the world, who is replicating paternalistic patterns of control from her superior who successfully ingrained a genuine level of affection in her despite everything unto her own subordinates in order to secure their personal loyalty,¹ who personally regrets it and longs to return but believes that she is beholden to greater responsibilities that are inherently incompatible with her being authentically herself in a way that contributes to nothing but her own happiness.

But I think it's possible to read that as a narrative, and it's one that's deeply personally compelling to me.

¹I don't care if I'm the only person on planet earth who does so - I will take the joking uses of "mommy" and "daddy" deployed by both Hunter and Treister deadly seriously and if you look at where they show up throughout the show, it reveals a lot both about the OSI's use of patriarchal framework of family as a means of control, and how Hunter alters her gender presentation throughout the show in order to better deploy it.

[xerx]

OMG I was literally thinking earlier today abt how much I want the New Written in Blood chapter. I manifested this I swear ✨️✨️✨️

YAYYY OMG it makes me glad to hear that you were looking forward to it! you did manifest it indeed… this chapter is probably my favorite so far but i’m very excited to keep working on it.

updates to the fic will be fairly slow (i’m hoping i can upload a chapter a month, though it might be less frequent) bc i’ve never written a longfic & i’m balancing it with other projects. thank you so much!