#repetition compulsion

[slowandsweet]

Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it—to look deeply into its true nature.

[edwordsmyth]

Sigmund Freud

[simpletricksandnonsense]

🔪 Why Is Horror Funny? 🤔💀 🎥 The Monkey (2025) - Fatalism, Freud, & Trauma Explained 🎥

Horror isn’t always just scary—it can be hilarious. But why do we laugh at horror? 😱😂

Oz Perkins’ The Monkey (2025) is a wild blend of fatalism, trauma, and dark comedy, making us question: what happens when horror stops being terrifying and starts being absurd?

In this breakdown, I explore:

🧠 Fatalism & Learned Helplessness – Do these characters ever really have a choice? 🎭 Freud’s Theory of Humor – Why do we joke about death and fear? 🎬 Incongruity & Benign Violation Theory – What makes horror deaths funny instead of terrifying? 🌀 Trauma & Repetition Compulsion – How does Bill’s childhood shape his obsession?

👁‍🗨 Do you find horror scarier or funnier when it gets ridiculous? Drop your thoughts in the tags or comments!

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Thanatos

Thanatos (Greek: Θάνατος) is the personification of death in Greek mythology, and in philosophical and psychoanalytic contexts, it refers to the death drive—the urge toward destruction, dissolution, and non-being. As a counterpart to Eros (life, love, and creation), Thanatos embodies the tension between our longing to live and our deep, often unconscious, pull toward stillness, silence, and finality.

Mythological Origins

In Greek myth, Thanatos is a minor deity, the twin of Hypnos (Sleep), often depicted as a winged youth. While not malevolent, Thanatos is inevitable and impartial. The ancient Greeks saw death as both a release and a boundary—the line between being and non-being.

Philosophers like Epicurus and Seneca argued that we should not fear death, as “death is nothing to us”—when we are alive, it is not present, and when it arrives, we are no longer there.

Freud's Thanatos: The Death Drive

In psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud introduced Thanatos in contrast to Eros. He believed the psyche is governed by two fundamental drives:

Eros – the life drive: creation, survival, pleasure, sex, unity

Thanatos – the death drive: aggression, repetition, entropy, return to inanimacy

Freud observed that humans often repeat painful experiences, sabotage joy, or turn violence inward. He theorized that we have a deep-seated compulsion toward returning to a pre-conscious, inanimate state. This manifests as:

Self-destructive behavior

War and aggression

Risk-taking and nihilism

Fascination with death and mortality

Heidegger and Being-Toward-Death

In existential philosophy, Thanatos is not a drive but a condition. Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, introduces the concept of Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death):

Death is not merely an event but the possibility that gives life meaning.

Authentic existence requires confronting death and living in its awareness.

Denial of death leads to inauthenticity, conformity, and evasion.

Modern Readings

Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) argued that much of human culture—religion, art, war—is a response to death anxiety.

Lacanian psychoanalysis views the death drive as tied to the symbolic order, where desire is always unfulfilled and looping.

Thanatos in Art and Culture

Thanatos appears in:

Tragic literature – as the pull toward fate and ruin

Gothic and Romantic art – as beauty in death and decay

Pop culture – as the allure of nihilism or apocalypse

Religion and mysticism – as transcendence through death

In Summary:

Thanatos symbolizes the existential boundary of human life—our awareness of death, our attraction to oblivion, and our destructive impulses. Philosophically, it challenges us to reflect on mortality, the limits of desire, and the shadow side of the human condition.

[indigovigilance]

Why Crowley Rescues Aziraphale

Okay, yes: it's flirtatious, it's cute, it's Anthony J. "Acts of Service" Crowley showing love in the only way he knows how because God forbid he use his words.

But what if there's more to it than that? What if there is a much darker explanation that portends major events in S3?

Allow me to convince you below the cut:

Evidence of Repetition Compulsion

But before we talk about the rescue motif, let's examine a more transparent aspect of Crowley's behavior that will provide a scaffold for the discussion of his Princess Peach obsession.

The Plants

Sure, Crowley is a hobby horticulturalist, but he doesn't do it because he loves plants. He does it because the plants are a representation of himself, and how he treats the plants tells us how he feels about himself. Importantly, how he treats the plants changes over time.

Season 1

He puts the fear of Crowley into them, destroying any specimen with a blemish and making an example out of it to threaten those that remain.

You know, just like God did to him.

This scene is jam-packed with symbolism, and we can simmer on whether his punishment of the plants is simply externalized self-flagellation, or reflects internalized standards of perfectionism, or if he feels so powerless that he creates a new relationship in which he is the one that has the power... We could simmer, but that's not the point of this meta, so let's keep going.

Season 2

In 2023, Crowley is no longer a domineering monarch, ruling over his houseplants with an iron fist; of all the memorabilia he has in his flat (the statue from the church, the original Mona Lisa), the only things he brings with him are his plants.

And for someone living in his car, he's taking pretty good care of them:

Someone else even noted that one of the plants appears to have spots, and clearly he hasn't thrown it in the garbage disposal for its transgressions. I wasn't able to see it myself, but I headcanon it because it fits with the observation that:

Crowley's attitude towards himself is changing.

He is evolving from internalized guilt and sense of inferiority to believing that he deserves care, even if he is a little blemished. It is this shift that brings it within the realm of possibility that he can admit his feelings to Aziraphale.

In both seasons, the unifying theme is that Crowley is reliving his trauma over and over, and then reliving his healing over and over. This cyclical behavior is, to my knowledge, incredibly characteristic of PTSD and CPTSD. In a phenomenon clinically referred to as Repetition Compulsion, the subject recreates and relives events of a traumatic past over and over in their present life, seeking resolution for something that has already happened, where the opportunity for true, satisfying closure is forever lost to the past. A huge part of therapeutic treatment is breaking these maladaptive cycles [citations]. But to our knowledge, Crowley doesn't have a therapist.

If this is how Crowley's CPTSD manifests in his relationship with inanimate objects semi-sentient dependents, how might it manifest in his relationship with his angel?

The Rescue Motif

The cycle of Aziraphale's self-endangerment and Crowley's nick-of-time rescues might look like just a cute part of their flirtationship, a necessary cover for their continued association, but I argue that it something much darker.

Crowley rescues Aziraphale over and over throughout history to try to absolve himself for the one time he couldn't.

But clearly, Aziraphale doesn't know that.

It only took one rescue for Aziraphale to realize that this kind of behavior brings them closer together - and he desperately wants to get close to Crowley. Please forgive the crudeness of the metaphor, but: when you need to drive a screw into a board and all you have is a hammer, you're gonna smack that thing on the head over and over with the only tool you've got. The problem is, this is really bad for the screw.

Aziraphale, by leveraging the damsel-in-distress motif, over and over again, is inadvertently triggering a trauma response from Crowley because he likes what he gets out of it, which is spending time with the demon he loves and growing intimacy. If he knew that this is what he was doing, it would be sick and twisted and go against everything he believes about himself as an angel, let alone being mortified that he was hurting Crowley.

So the only possible conclusion (given we take the above conjectures as fact (see @queerfables, I listen to you <3)) is that:

Aziraphale Doesn't Know About His Own Jimmification

What is it that Crowley could have failed to rescue Aziraphale from that Aziraphale himself is unaware of? Well, at the least, it would have to involve a mind-wipe.

We know, canonically, that the Metatron can and will mind-wipe angels without actually casting them out of Heaven. Just because Aziraphale is an angel does not mean we can assume that this ability was never leveraged against him.

If Crowley knew that they were going to do this to his friend, he would have tried to stop it. The repeating damsel-rescue motif (in context of the existing, plant-based evidence of Repetition Compulsion) is a strong indicator that his mission to protect Aziraphale from the memory-wipe failed, and he is living in an endless loop of rescue behavior to try to resolve his guilt about that.

So why wouldn't Crowley tell Aziraphale that his mind was erased?

To properly address that I will need time to write a part 2. But others are welcome to use this as a jumping-off point, please just cite the inspo; it's a little thing that brings me joy ^_^

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the meantime, if you enjoyed this, you may also like:

Why Crowley is Blind to his Yellow Eyes

A Nightingale Sang in 1941

Baraqiel and Azazel

The Erasure of Human!Metatron

[loneberry]

Again she goes out walking. She sees more and more clearly, precisely, what she wants to see. What she is reconstructing is the end of the world.

She sees herself—and this is what she really believes —in the same place, at the end, always, in the center of a triangular construction of which dawn, and the two of them, are the eternal sides: it is the moment when she has just become aware of that dawn, while they have not yet noticed it. She knows; they still do not. She is powerless to prevent them from knowing. And it begins all over again:

At that precise moment, some attempt—but what?— should have been made which was not. At that precise moment Lol is standing, completely undone, with no voice to cry out for help, with no convincing argument, with no proof of how unimportant the coming day was compared to that night, uprooted and borne from dawn toward that couple, her whole being filled with a chronic, hopeless feeling of panic. She is not God, she is no one.

She smiles, yes, she smiles at that remembered minute of her life. The naiveté of some eventual suffering, or even of some commonplace sadness, no longer plays a part in it. All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

And again it begins: the windows closed, sealed, the ball immured in its nocturnal light, would have contained all three of them, and they alone. Lol is positive of that: together they would have been saved from the advent of another day, of one more day at least.

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her—that if Lol is silent in her daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter it, but it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who had wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the future and the moment themselves. By its absence, this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many there are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is none the less there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you—never having been used—to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.

—Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein

[ears-awake-eyes-opened]

Hayffie = #2 (i.e. trauma reenactment)

My Hayffie fics and headcanons are rooted in my perception of Haymitch and Effie in emotional addiction (which is also referred to using many other terms).

On a personal note, 1-5 don’t interest me anymore in my own life. Partly because of years of self-recovery work. Partly because emotional drugs don’t really exist where I live the valley of the shadow of death. That said, I enjoy writing Hayffie, in particular, so in that sense I’m *feeling* the emotions I write for them. But it’s a much more academic experience than actually being on the roller coaster of emotional addiction.

Most people find my inner life somewhere on the spectrum from boring to disturbing, depending on their sensitivities. I lost the friends who used to get high from relating with me and visa versa. I don’t miss those people, but I don’t like feeling the void they used to play a role in filling.

Still, there are much worse pains than anything that lies in the void.

[mixedjournal]

if you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish--lao tzu