#rubyposts

[chaoticke-rambles]

Reading Harrow the Ninth be like

Harrow, in the prologue: "You see, I am insane." Me, then: haha, yeah, I know Me, 220 or so pages later: oh. ohhhhhh. I s e e. That may have, ah, understated it a bit

[rubyandthesea]

i always fall in love, what can i say- i’m a flirt?

🍒i think my boobs are stars… big and bright ☆⋆｡𖦹°‧★

[chaoticke-rambles]

Man, my favorite thing about Gideon's narrative voice reappearing in Harrow the Ninth is how aggressively contemporary she is, because everyone else in this necromantic space opera is fully committed to the bit and Gideon's "shut up about your stupid bones and get laid" mentality is a relief. Harrow is out here like "I actively performed a lobotomy on myself and have spent the last nine months bleeding out my facial orifices whenever somebody says your name because I manually removed you from my memory to save your life. this is normal and cool." And then Gideon finally gets to show up and go "hey, you get that's messed up right? you see this right?" and it's so. incredibly validating as a reader because everyone else treats this like normal and expected behavior.

[chaoticke-rambles]

The thing is: Simon being revealed to be gay is really cliché. We’ve all seen it before, the bully who goes after the gay kid because he has a crush and doens’t know how to handle or confront that. Been there, done that. So it got me thinking: why do I find it so impactful when Dead Boy Detectives pulled it?

Because it doesn’t matter.

Simon doesn’t feel like he was revealed to be gay as a way to expose “hidden depth,” which is why this move often feels cheap to me. It’s not used to justify his actions, and he is not excused for them. The narrative makes no apologies for his behavior. He murdered Edwin and the narrative underscores that

Instead, Simon being gay matters simply because it matters to Edwin, and that’s why this scene works. The revelation does not change how the audience is meant to feel about Simon; you maybe understand him better, but that is all. However, it changes everything for Edwin, because he’s recontextualizing all of these memories from when he was alive. The scene works because it allows Edwin to see himself in Simon, and to forgive himself for being gay and for being lonely. It’s not about Simon. It was never about Simon. It’s about what this knowledge about Simon means to Edwin.

[chaoticke-rambles]

I've convinced three people now to watch Dead Boy Detectives and every single one of them has texted me after the first episode like "It's sweet how Charles is clearly so in love with Edwin!"

The only person who has not clocked this boy's obvious bisexual crush remains Charles Rowland himself.

[chaoticke-rambles]

I’m interested in how both Charles and Edwin treat the whole idea of being “detectives.”  Obviously, they are detectives.  They have formed a detective agency, they run cases, it’s their whole thing; it’s how they spend their afterlives.  But it’s more than just that.

They both take the detective work very seriously.  Edwin comes off, generally, as more serious than Charles about it, with his little asides about being a “proper” detective and the methodical ways he likes to do things, but Charles is clearly into it, too.  And sometimes it feels so clearly like they’re playing at the idea of being detectives that it’s almost like a game or a roleplay for them.  They want to be (and are) detectives, but they are two teenage boys who have styled themselves after the idea of being detectives.  Then there are moments where this “performance” of detective work begins to break down.

For Edwin, this happens earlier in the season.  In the first episode, he admits that the detective work matters because he needs it, emotionally, to matter.  His and Charles’s cases didn’t get solved, no one cared.  He needs someone to care.  That’s his investment in being a detective; its more than just a game for him.  When the Cat King casts his truth spell, this is only built upon.  He says he does the detective work, too, because he wants to stay out of hell.  For a while, though, I was trying to find Charles’s investment.  Yeah, his case was also written off when he died, but didn’t seem as upset about that as Edwin.  On the first watchthrough, I wondered if Charles’s investment in the detective work was simply because Edwin was invested.

Then there’s episode 4, when Charles beats the Night Nurse, and part of the speech he yells at her is about being a detective.  I think that’s when it started to click for me that there was something deeper going on with him, too, about the detective work specifically.  Charles is upset he died, he never came to terms with it.  I wonder if part of the reason he’s so invested in being a detective is because it gives him a sense of purpose and impact that he misses from being alive.  He could never stop the things he wanted to stop, never protect the people he wanted to protect, but at least he has this, with Edwin.  At least they are detectives, and Charles can feel needed, feel like his life didn’t end so early for no reason at all.  

I think a lot about the concept of ghosts having unfinished business and how that might apply to both Charles and Edwin, and I think that the detective agency, despite how it sometimes comes off as playacting, is deeply tied to both of their psyches.  Edwin needs the detective agency to feel like there was a point to everything that happened to him.  That maybe no one cared he disappeared, and maybe he ended up in hell, but it wasn’t for nothing.  They can try to keep it from happening to anyone again.  And Charles?  Well, he needs the detective agency because there was no point to what happened to him.  He shouldn’t have died, and he’s not ready to move on to an afterlife.  He needs to feel like he’s needed, like there’s something he can do.  If it hadn’t been a detective agency these two formed, it would have been something else because they had too many deep-rooted issues that have been sublimated into the agency itself.

[chaoticke-rambles]

Me every time Vis gives into his rage issues

[chaoticke-rambles]

Does anyone else think about how Edwin’s soul traded hands between demons before he even arrived at the Doll House?  In episode 7, it’s said that Sa’al "traded his soul to a demon, who traded it to another demon, who traded it to something worse."  We know what the spider demon did with him, but we don’t know how long it was until he came into the spider demon’s possession, or how many of his decades in hell he was in its possession.  How many of those 73 years were spent in the Doll House?  How many were spent with Sa’al?  How many were spent with the other two demons?  What did Sa’al or those other demons do to him?  Episode 7 tricks us as the audience into thinking we know the shape of his experience in hell, but we really only know the end of it.  73 years is a long time, and we’re not given a timeline for when Sa’al traded him away or how many of those years were spent with the spider demon. There are still a lot of horrible things that could have happened that we don’t know about