Volossya @zoloteh-volossya - Tumblr Blog

"Silly question about the "skeleton in the closet" Celine swaps, cause if dead-Celine swapped physical places with main-Celine, doesn't that mean the opposite is also true and main-Celine has to dig herself out of her own grave in the alternate universes before she can interact with anyone? (The potential metaphor in that scenario *shakes fist at sky*)"

Yes that is the implication isn’t it :)

Ooooooo what if dead!Celine's huntrix see her digging out of her grave >:]

They just... visit the grave and hear someone desperately screaming and shouting and it's hard to breathe and see a literal hand burst of out the soil

Celine dragging her shirt over her face so she doesn’t breathe in dirt as she smashes her way out and digs and bleeds and digs and who would’ve thought six feet could be so far?

And she’s some kind of crazed as she breaks the surface and drags it back down and

There are her girls, watching, white-faced

Rumi blinks back tears of frustration as she grabs another fistful of weeds and slices them off at the roots, applying more force with her sickle than perhaps necessary.

Trainees at Sunlight Entertainment still get Chuseok off, even after the... change in management. But they get less time off than they did than they did before, just the three days, and a demon attack forced Rumi, Mira, and Zoey to miss their flight to Jeju. All the other flights were sold out and had been for months, so they'd had to catch a (packed) train and then take the ferry, at which point they'd been so late that none of the stores were open and there wasn't anywhere to buy food for the grave offerings. Rumi couldn't cook them herself because she'd never learned how, she’d always thought she’d have more time, that she needed to focus on learning to fight and could learn the recipes and rituals later. But now Celine is dead, and Rumi will never again sit and make songpyeon side by side with her in the kitchen and she will never learn how do to the traditional Hunters’ gut rituals because there is no one left to teach it to her and without someone to advocate for her with management she wasn’t able to get to the hanok with enough time to clean so it is the first day of Chuseok and the graves are still overgrown.

Rumi dumps the weeds into the wheelbarrow and grabs another handful. It’s slower going than she remembers it having been in the past with Celine even though she has Zoey and Mira with her now. Part of it is that neither Zoey nor Mira has any real experience with gardening but honestly, most of it is that they’re tired and they’re hungry. Every day is a full day of idol training, and then after that they have to sneak out for additional combat practice – Rumi trying desperately to remember what Celine taught her, how Celine taught her – and trying to help Mira summon her weapon (Zoey had managed to summon her shin-kal from the Honmoon just a week before… before that night. But it’s been months and Mira still can’t pull anything more than a stick that rapidly falls apart back into Honmoon threads and so she’s been forced into combat with nothing but her fists and it’s so dangerous, Rumi knows it’s so dangerous, but what else can they do?) and they’re not eating enough for idols let alone idols with a demon-fighting sidejob but the management won’t listen to her and all the other idol groups know that they’ve received favoritism and so there’s this constant tension hanging over them in all their classes and whispers in the hallways and…

There is a dull thump from within Celine’s burial mound.

“Did you… hear that?” asks Mira, holding up her pruning shears like they can somehow serve as a weapon.

Zoey and Rumi meet each other’s eyes. Zoey gulps and nods.

There is another thump, louder this time. Rumi’s palm feels clammy around the sickle. “Mira, get behind me,” she says. She keeps her gaze fixed on the grave, but in the corner of her eye she can see Zoey backing away and summoning her shin-kal.

The sound of something shattering rumbles through the ground and the soil on top of the mound immediately slumps inward. Rumi holds her breath as the suddenly disturbed soil begins to ripple, then shake, then churn. A single pale hand shoots out of the dirt, then another. They grasp the turf on either side of the mound and Rumi can see the tendons in those familiar wrists straining as they heave.

Something white and round bursts out of the grave and Rumi stares at it in baffled horror for a moment before it is pulled down to reveal Celine’s face. The white thing is her shirt; she’s in the same outfit she was wearing when she died and her throat is whole, unblemished, untorn.

“Oh,” she says, and her voice is warm and rich and so unlike those horrible bloody gurgles that were the last sounds Rumi ever heard her guardian make. “Hello, girls.”

Celine sees the girls, pale and fearful and so so young, and every system she has shuts down into the need to comfort them, whether or not it’s even possible. “Oh. Hello, girls.”

Rumi makes a ragged, wretched sound, holding out the sickle with shaking hands—Celine no longer owns one of those. “C-Celine?”

“Would one of you mind helping me up?” Celine asks steadily. She could probably push her way out, even from this awkward position, but she’d rather not if she doesn’t have to.

Zoey half-starts, and then stops, holding her shin-kal between them with trembling hands. “Why should we do that? How do we know you’re not—Rumi?”

Rumi doesn’t seem to have any better guess as to what Celine could be, but she still tries to hold herself between them, even while keeping Mira behind her—Mira is surprisingly accepting of this, for all that she’s looking over Rumi’s shoulder, eyes wary and narrow.

“I’m afraid I’m not,” she says, as gently as she can, pushing up, gritting her teeth against the pain bursting up from her hands. “Your Celine, that is, though I’m a human Hunter, which you can test any way you’d like.”

“The hell does that mean?” Mira asks, raising her pruning shears as if they’re the best weapon she’s got.

Celine manages to get a knee out of the grave and onto the ground, crawling forward. Rumi stutters back, into Mira.

Celine’s heart breaks a little more.

“I’m not your Celine,” she says, carefully, sitting up and trying to avoid any hint of aggression to her body language. “I’m prone to moving between worlds. I’m sorry.”

“Prove it,” Rumi says, shaking and brave and Celine sees her Rumi and sees Sarang and sees every other Rumi she has known all too briefly and it breaks her heart. “Prove it!”

“We are Hunters, voices strong,” Celine sings, the same mantra that was Rumi’s lullaby, the same words that have always come to her when she has nothing left to remember, and the Honmoon of this world lights up around her, ragged and starved and still so familiar. “Slaying demons with our song.”

The sickle, the pruning shears, the shin-kal—all of them fall. Rumi clutches her hands over her mouth to muffle a scream.

(The Honmoon does not shake. Celine doesn’t know how she would’ve kept breathing if it had.)

Rumi claps her hands over her mouth to muffle a scream. Celine (not her Celine, but still Celine) rises to her feet and Rumi’ is moving before she even thinks about it. She throws her arms around Celine in a desperate hug and buries her face in her shoulder. Celine smells like dirt, her favorite shampoo, and something uniquely Celine that Rumi thought she’d never smell again. She knows it’s a misstep as soon as she does it – Celine has never been a hugger – but she can’t bring herself to let go as she breaks into loud, gasping sobs, clutching at her guardian’s back like a baby. To her surprise, Celine relaxes into the embrace, cradling the back of her head with one hand and slowly rocking the two of them back and forth.

Rumi only pulls back once she’s gotten herself back under something approaching control, sobs reduced to sniffles. This close, looking up, she can see the differences – this Celine has more gray in her hair, more weight to her frame, and unfamiliar wrinkles. She is also frowning, and her hands come up to cup Rumi’s cheeks and swipe her thumbs along her cheekbones, leaving trails of dirt as they do so. “Aegiya, your eyebags look like bruises. How much sleep have you been getting?”

“We haven’t,” says Mira from behind her, and Rumi can hear the exhaustion in her voice.

Celine’s frown sharpens. “You should be resting, then. Let’s return to the hanok.”

“We can’t!” exclaims Rumi. “It’s the first day of Chuseok, and we haven’t— the graves are still overgrown.”

“The thing about graves,” says Celine, her voice wry, “is that they’re not going anywhere. They will still be here if you return to clean them later.”

Rumi boggles at her. She remembers spending countless hours in this graveyard as Celine painstakingly tended to the graves, first playing and later, when she was bigger, doing her part to help out with this sacred duty to those who came before. “It’s disrespectful!” she says, and then, because that’s not enough, she needs to explain, she continues with, “To my mother. To you.”

“If I was angered by disrespect I would never have gotten anywhere with Mira,” says Celine, which is another reminder that she is not Rumi’s Celine, who never had a chance to get anywhere with Mira, not really. She lightly grabs Rumi by the shoulders and says, “Rumi, every Hunter in those graves knows the weight of the duty you carry on your shoulders. And every one of them knows, as you do, the danger of heading into battle stymied by sleep deprivation. They would not want you to weaken yourself for their sakes – our duty to the dead comes after our duty to the living, always.”

And Rumi does not know how to say it. How much she misses Celine, how much time they spent together in this graveyard, tending to it in quiet companionship. How much of a punch in the gut it was to come to visit Celine’s gravesite only to find that it had been covered with weeds in the months she had been in Seoul. How much of a failure it felt, that she couldn't keep Celine and couldn’t even upkeep her resting place, the place Celine had spent so much of her life maintaining fastidiously. How wrong it feels for her to be telling Rumi to leave it alone now. “But,” she tries, “you spent so much time…”

Celine sighs. “For the first four years of your life, Rumi, I didn’t tend the graves at all.” Rumi blinks at her, shocked. “It was too much, trying to take care of an infant and maintain enough popularity to sustain the Honmoon and address demon incursions and begin laying the groundwork for what would become Sunlight Entertainment. Money was tight enough those first few years that I didn’t have the funds to hire someone to come clean up in my stead, either.” Celine smiles sadly, staring at Miyeong’s grave (right next to hers). “Part of the reason I spent so much time here when you got older and I got my feet under myself again was because I was trying to prune back years of neglect.”

Rumi boggles at her. Celine didn’t talk about the early years, except occasionally to pull out embarrassing photos from when Rumi was a toddler, and she’d never mentioned any sorts of struggles with money.

Zoey chimes in, a hopeful lilt to her voice as she says, “Does this mean we can go take a nap?”

“Naps are great,” says Mira. “Count me in on team nap.”

And Rumi, outnumbered, concedes.

They all slip their shoes off by the door, and Celine tells Rumi to go wash her face. It’s gentle, not… There’s no edge to it.

Mira doesn’t really get why she’s thinking like that, but she does notice that Celine’s worse off of anything of them, covered in gravedirt, with her hands all bloody and torn up from digging.

“You should take care of yourself first,” she says.

Rumi’s eyes get wide as she looks down at Celine’s hands, snd Zoey says, “I’ll get the med kit!”

It’s under the couch, right where they left it, a little dusty, just like everything else.

“Celine,” Rumi says, and she takes Celine by one unbuttoned shirt cuff and tugs her to the couch.

“I can—“ Celine starts. And stops. She sighs. “Thank you, Zoey. Rumi, why don’t you go get some water for everyone? You shouldn’t fall asleep dehydrated.”

And Mira watches. Rumi can get twitchy when she doesn’t have something to do, and Celine isn’t saying it to get rid of her. She’s quiet as Zoey wipes down her hands and starts pulling splinters, even as her jaw tightens and tightens and tightens. She asks reasonable questions about what they know about medical care and makeup.

She’s good, just the way Rumi always said Celine was.

And, apparently, some other Mira trusts her.

And Mira watches.

Rumi is soaking in Celine’s presence, desperate for it. She didn’t wash her face while getting the water.

So Mira gets up.

Rumi and Zoey both turn, pause. It makes other trainees make fun of them sometimes, how hyperaware of each other they are, a three-in-one.

“I’ll be right back,” she says, and they relax.

It doesn’t even take her a minute to go and wet down a paper towel. Her own hands are dirty from the gardening, so she pauses to wash up, incredibly glad that she was smart enough to get her press-ons off before going out.

The ridiculously mundane thought makes her snort. Her life is insane.

She takes the paper towels back and gives them to Rumi. Celine stands up, making room—her hands are done—and Rumi grabs her dirty dress shirt and looks at her wide-eyed and—

“We can fit four,” she says.

“Totally,” Zoey agrees. “I sleep in a fetal position anyway.”

Celine’s expression softens. “Let’s finish cleaning up first, hm?”

#kpdh #collaborative storytelling #celineverse

Mira awakes overheated.

They’d crammed themselves into bed, Celine-Rumi-Mira-Zoey, barely fitting. Over the course of however long they’ve slept for, Rumi has migrated onto Celine, draped atop her with her face tucked into Celine’s neck and her legs sprawled across Mira’s calves. Completing the Mira-furnace is Zoey, curled right up against Mira’s other side and snoring softly.

After a moment, it becomes clear that Celine was the one who woke her. She’s gently shaking Rumi, who makes a disgruntled sound and tries to bury her face deeper into Celine’s neck.

“Please stop,” whispers Mira.

“If you girls don’t get up soon, you’ll ruin your sleep schedule,” says Celine, much louder than Mira would like. Zoey twitches and begins making the soft snuffle-snorts that Mira knows precedes waking.

“Ever since you died, Rumi hasn’t had a sleep schedule,” Mira whisper-hisses, frustrated. This is the most peaceful rest she’s seen Rumi get in months. “Management had to move her out of the trainee dorms because her nightmares kept waking everyone else in the room.”

“Wuzza? M’ name?” Rumi lifts her head, bleary eyed. A beat later, she shoots up onto her arms, her eyes bulging as she stares at Celine.

“Good afternoon, jagiya,” says Celine. “Sleep well?”

“I thought…” Rumi laughs wetly. “I thought it was all a dream. But it wasn’t. You’re back.”

Celine winces. “… For a few days, yes.”

The joy and relief slide off of Rumi’s face. “What do you mean?”

“When I travel like this,” says Celine, “it is typically only for three days or so. Then I switch back with the version of myself I replaced.”

It’s fitting, Mira thinks distantly, that the dead return for Chuseok only.

“Can’t you stay longer?” Rumi pleads, grabbing fistfuls of Celine’s sleep shirt. “We’re not ready. I’m not ready. ”

Celine reaches up and gently wipes Rumi’s burgeoning tears away with her thumbs. “I’m sorry, jagiya, but I really have no control over it at all.”

“Do you know how it’s happening?” asks Zoey, sitting up and peering down at Celine.

Rumi, on the other hand, has an expression that Mira has come to learn means that she’s working herself up about something. “Only three days, and we wasted precious hours on sleeping!” she exclaims angrily. “There’s so much we need to do, there’s so much I need to learn, Mira still hasn’t—”

Celine raises an eyebrow, and Rumi shuts her mouth with a click. (And Mira’s hackles rise, even though she tells herself that this is normal, this doesn’t mean anything, her instincts are not helpful here).

“Sleep is important,” says Celine mildly. “As is food.”

At the reminder, all three of their stomachs growl. Mira casts her mind back, trying to determine when they last ate, and realizes it must have been some snacks on the ferry ride over last night. Rumi had rushed them to the graveyard as soon as they pulled up to the hanok, distraught at its sate of overgrowth, and neither Mira nor Zoey had the heart to ask for a breakfast break. Or a lunch break, for the matter. It must now be mid-afternoon and Mira is starving.

Obtaining food, however, is less simple. All the local restaurants are closed for Chuseok, and Celine opened the refrigerator and immediately slammed it back closed again. Mira realizes that they hadn’t thought to empty out the refrigerator in the devastation after Celine’s death. The last dinner she ever cooked for them has been sitting in there, molding over, for months.

“I’m sorry,” says Rumi, “I didn’t think…”

“Your were grieving children,” dismisses Celine, and normally Mira would object to being treated like a child (she’ll be nineteen in just a few years, which means she’s practically an adult already), but Celine’s voice is so heavy with… regret?… that she hears no condescension in the statement.

Celine pulls a package of frozen meat out of the freezer and hands it to Zoey to defrost. She assigns Mira the task of cooking the rice (the only thing – barring ramyeon – that Mira can be trusted to cook, because her culinary skills consist of applying boiling water to the situation and nothing else). Then she turns to Rumi. “Come,” she says. “Let us check the jangdokdae and see what we can find in the garden.”

Celine can’t connect to the new honmoon and believes it’s because she’s unworthy of it and that it hates her. The real reason is that she’s so scared of showing faults and fears that it’s interfering with her ability to connect to the honmoon. She won’t admit or acknowledge it though.

She doesn’t tell anyone and avoids everyone especially Rumi due to having a major crisis about how she went about everything and believing everything will be fine if she just gives everyone space and ignore everything.

This only gets worse when one day she awake to see that she has patterns on her chest over her heart. Needless to say this does not help her mental or emotional state.

This will come to ahead when Rumi gets sick of everything and corners her demanding to k ow what’s going on and if Celine truly hates her for destroying the old honmoon.

Always love some heavy angst! Imagining Celine trying so hard to get through this conversation and just completely falling apart, absolutely horrified that she’s so often hurting Rumi, losing it

And Rumi fully does not get what’s going on but clearly she came to the wrong conclusion before

emeraldspencer

Very Important Detail Question: Are the patterns purple or iridescent?

Because obviously she'd be upset about succumbing to Gwi-Ma in some way, but imagine she somehow indebted herself to Rumi, and she's still trying to avoid her.

In fact, that's what tips Rumi off - she can feel that imbalanced connection (though of course she doesn't have experience with it, so she can't recognize it for what it is), sees that as the connection grows stronger Celine is avoiding her more, and deduces that they're related somehow.

Do you think it would hurt more if Celine can't recall what she sold her soul to Rumi for, or if she remembers EXACTLY what happened but didn't realize the ramifications for a brief period of time.

Okay, this was going to be an argument against this making sense, but I actually talked myself into it, so bear with me here

My preferred read of canon is that Rumi is not and never was a demon nor a half-demon: she was part-demon, born in a flux state between human and demon. The ending of the film reflects her choosing humanity over demonhood

Demons are defined as being controlled by shame, which is where the marks come from—after all, Rumi has patterns, but Gwi-Ma doesn’t know about her. When she rejects shame in WISL, her patterns actually start to glow blue, the color of souls. They’re not a demon anything anymore

While Jinu got his patterns after making his deal with Gwi-Ma, and calls them his mark, they grew to consume him because of his shame. Between him and Rumi, we can see that patterns aren’t a mark of ownership or deals made with demons, but a mark of shame

Now, of course, we see plenty of others patternless and struggling with shame. So there must be some form of magic involved in getting the patterns. A deal, however, does not appear to be it. From our two data points, we can maybe argue that the cause of the shame has to be magical in nature (Rumi’s conception/existence as a mistake, Jinu’s deal), but that sample size is absolutely tiny, so who the fuck knows lol

So: we could get Celine some patterns that are connected to Rumi as much as her own shame… as long as something magical happened between them that makes Celine feel like a bad person. Like, say, the destruction of the old Honmoon happening because Celine pushed Rumi to that point

And we could also totally have everyone not knowing that rule and thinking that Celine has somehow signed her soul over to Rumi >:)

ghost-357

I'm so sorry, all I can think about is that when the girls find out they try and figure out what the deal was, so:

Rumi (with her head in her hands):...What about that deal we made when I was six?

Celine (confused): the one about the ice cream?

Mira: Rumi, I doubt you guys making a deal for more ice cream counts as a soul selling deal

Rumi: you don't know that!

Zoey: I mean technically we don't know how deals work, but wouldn't the patterns have appeared ages ago if that was the case? It has to be about something more recent

Rumi and Celine: ...

Yessssss and neither Rumi nor Celine wants to talk about it, both viewing it as something they did to the other, and whatever revelations Rumi might’ve had about not allowing shame to control her lately, it’s so very easy to slip back into discussing the compromises they negotiated about Celine’s work trips when Rumi was ten instead

Rumi keeps going over it in her head afterwards, but she was out of her fucking mind that night, terrified and horrified and in so much pain, and she can’t remember but—maybe she did make Celine promise her something? They talk about a promise, right? And she knows Celine would’ve done anything to keep her from—

Weirdly I feel like Celine would be made okay with both that night and having patterns if she thought she sold her soul to Rumi during it. Whatever happened while the Honmoon was down is another matter, but that would help

…which she would then start fucking herself up over, because how could she be happy about becoming a demon? And so the spiral gets deeper

(Mira and Zoey are begging for them to go back to the lovely end of film revelation about communication)

#kpdh #discussion #celine #rumi #a former-hunter demon would be absurdly strong; celine is very aware of this #but per hunter lore the only way to kill a demon (or contractee) that won't just send them back to gwi ma is via honmoon weapon #and celine can't pull weapons from this new honmoon #which leads to The Tree Incident v2: Uno Reverse Edition as she asks rumi to handle the problem #imo her patterns would be purple until she deals with her shame so things look very bad! to her!

Alternatively...

Celine, desperate after Rumi teleported away and the Honmoon went down completely: "I would give anything to fix this."

Several minutes later: the Honmoon reforms, except rainbow this time

Half an hour later: the news shows clips of some massive concert in Seoul that confirm that Rumi is alive

Several hours later: Celine takes off her shirt and finds patterns on her chest

Celine: "Worth it."

assortedbowloffruit

post-idol awards panicked cornered animal rumi as that one captcha art trend. send tweet.

#kpdh #fanart #rumi #ough...

verballocket-blog

the gojugaru was henceforth store-bought

#kpdh #fanart #comic #celine #rumi #heh

nneurodivergentturtle

Notice how over time the rainbow shine on their clothes get less, to the point the sunlight sisters don't have any shininess?

I think it's to show how they're striving for the "perfect honmoon" but losing the message and connection to the honmoon. I'm willing to bet that the gen before Celine's started the "faults and fears must never be seen" (or how it is worded now)

And also how after Hunter/x made the new honmoon their clothes begin to shine again? And along with rumi's patterns? because they weren't running off of shame but connection

i swear to god if this was obvious from the start but I'm only catching on to it on my 40+ rewatch I'm going to flip (mildly)

#kpdh #discussion #neat observation!

thewitchofwonders

story: it’s about sexual abuse (or features sexual abuse as one of its main themes)

the fans: but what if there was no sexual abuse

👏👏👏👏

#fandom

a-driftamongopenstars

the horror of being "god's favourite princess". literally one of my favourite horror themes. the god loves you and it's so scary.

it will always choose you. you cannot die. you'll always come back because it loves you so much. you are its right and left hand, its eternal weapon. it will drown you in its light. light as horror. darkness as horror. what if it thinks you are its best friend.

you are god's favourite princess and it's terrifying.

#fe3h #byleth #the silver snow route is the worst for this but byleth is only really freed from it in crimson flower

Mirror Mirror, Pt. 2

[Part One, wherein Celine (relatively canonical, slightly post-canon) swaps places with Celine (evil monster who has never given her Rumi a name and keeps “the demon” locked in the shed, several years pre-canon).

Mirror!Celine is currently tied to a chair and being watched by Mira, while Rumi and Zoey aim to get to the Hunter archives. Main!Celine has managed to get Rumi’s counterpart a meal and a shower, and made her think she’s definitely dying—why else would Master be so kind?]

They run into Mira and Zoey in the hallway. Both of them startle upon seeing the girl. “What’s it doing in the angeori?” asks Zoey.

“Showering,” snaps Celine. She does not mean to be sharp – especially not to sweet, sensitive Zoey – but the casual, thoughtless cruelty with which they refer to the girl grates upon her soul. “Don’t you have laps to run?”

“Where’s its muzzle?” asks Mira, grabbing at her forearm and cradling it close in against her chest. “You said— it’s not allowed to take the muzzle off except for feeding time.”

“if you are uncomfortable, you can go straight back to the bakgeori after you complete today’s training,” says Celine. When Zoey and Mira meet each other’s eyes, expressions confused, she adds, “Don’t you have laps to run?”

That does it, and the two of them jog lightly out of the building, though Mira looks over her shoulder at the girl as she goes.

Throughout the entire exchange, the girl has been standing behind Celine, head curled down and tucked into her neck, hands clasped behind her back. She follows meekly as Celine leads her to Celine’s room.

“You can sit on the bed,” says Celine, and the girl stumbles, hesitates, and then obeys. And it is obedience – this is not an offer taken, but a command followed. The girl sits daintily on thevery edge of the bed, trying to shrink in on herself and take up as little space as possible. Her eyes dart all around the room, taking in every detail. (Rumi had been a vivacious, proactive, inquisitive child. Much, it seems, has been beaten out of this child, but Celine is glad to see that at least a spark of her curiosity remains.)

Celine needs answers – what happened in this world, how she was brought to it, and how she can take this child out of it. Leaving her in these circumstances is utterly unacceptable. But Celine will eat her designer loafers if the girl can read, and the Hunters’ archives are musty, unheated, and not generally a place people voluntarily spend time in if they can help it. At the very least, her bedroom is a more comfortable place to spend the day in than that awful shack. Unfortunately, though, there’s nothing for the child to do. There’s a TV in the living room, but it’s probably best that the girl stays out of common spaces – Celine doesn’t know what Mira and Zoey will do to her if they stumble across her unaccompanied, and she is afraid to find out. Without the ability to read, navigating a phone would be difficult, and Celine doesn’t have any games downloaded on her phone anyway. Wait, games! Sunmi had a much beloved Game Boy back in the day, if she can just find that…

Celine slips out of her room and into the room that once was Sunmi’s. It’s just as Sunmi left it – untouched by time (though obviously touched by a duster regularly, the room is dust free – her counterpart must maintain it religiously). Sunmi was always an organized woman – Celine finds the ancient console and her collection of cartridges in one of her shelves. Most of the games involve far too much reading. Celine briefly considers Space Invaders (Sunmi’s favorite) but the poor child does not need more violence in her life, however stylized. On the other hand…

“Let me teach you how to play Tetris,” Celine says as she walks back into her bedroom with the Game Boy, its charger, and the appropriate cartridge. The girl has not moved from her position on the bed. She watches with wide eyes as Celine sits beside her, plugs in the console, and explains the game.

When Celine hands the Game Boy over for her to try, she cradles it as if it is something foreign and precious. Once the girl has demonstrated that she can press the buttons despite her claws, and has successfully landed a block, Celine stands up.

“I have business to attend to,” she says. “Stay in this room until I return. Make yourself comfortable. You may play the game to pass the time, if you wish. I will return with dinner.”

With the girl as best situated as Celine can manage, given the circumstances, Celine marches off to the archives for answers.

___***___***___

This version of Mira is definitely more mature than the gangly, aggressive teenager Celine has spent the past year trying to mold into someone who could be Korea’s darling. Nothing Celine has said has elicited a response, though several times she has watched Mira visibly wrestle down the urge. She will give her counterpart in this world one thing – she has evidently had far more success with Mira’s PR training than Celine has. If only that dedication and resolve were aimed towards her duty, and not an entirely misplaced loyalty to a demon.

(Celine cannot fathom what her counterpart was thinking. These Hunters obey a demon! They drew on her, a fellow Hunter, in its defense! She must have been delusional, in denial of its nature, and permitted the girls to bond to it like it was a person, despite the taint evident in the patterns all over its body. Her own Mira had been fooled by its humanlike facade at first, after all. If she hadn’t learned her lesson early…)

Her duty to the world demands that she fix this before she returns to her own world. The demon has left, yes, but with a known destination (even if the idea of a demon with access to the Hunter’s archives makes her skin crawl). Mira should be easy enough to overwhelm once she gets free, and then she can give pursuit. The difficulty is freeing herself in the first place, but this isn’t her first trip around the sun.

“I need to use the bathroom,” she says.

The demon very nearly stops breathing when Master says play.

A demon does not play. Playing is for fun. Fun is liking. Demons are not supposed to like things. That is very bad.

But.

Master gives it “Tetris” and shows it how to play and smiles when it makes the bricks disappear. (Smiles! At the demon!) Then she says it can keep playing the game.

“I will return with dinner,” she says, and then she leaves.

(The demon must be very, very sick, if being bad is not important.)

The demon plays the game. It has a little song, that beeps and cheers at it, and it is such a happy game that the demon has to put it down and get off of Master’s bed before it makes a mess and curl up in a ball and whine.

It is sure that Master will be angry if she finds it cannot even be obedient enough to play, but it does not want to die.

Let her be angry! Let her hurt it! If it is going to die, let it die on its own terms, insolent to the last! Maybe it should make a mess—Master said to be comfortable, after all.

The wretched impulse sings through it, and the demon rips its claws against the floor, scarring it.

It stares down at the pale lines with a trembling feeling in its chest that it thinks might be victory. There is no way Master will be able to be gentle now.

Slowly, it crawls back up and fetches the game again. The cheery song plays as it restarts the game.

It is a good game, fitting the pieces together just right. It reminds the demon of how it sometimes moves little splinters of wood from the walls and fit them into other boards in the kennel, when the hours inside are just too long. Has it been playing all this time?

It is so engrossed in the game that it does not notice how it has found its way to laying on its stomach, or how its claws have begun to soften—not until the door opens and it jolts, dropping the game to avoid damaging it.

Zoey and Mira stare back.

///

“Huh,” Mira says. Her eyes narrow slightly, thoughtfully.

She does not say anything else.

Celine knows that this is deliberate. It’s still frustrating.

There is neither a way for her restraints to come with her were she to get up, nor a way to arrange for her to relieve herself without getting her out of the chair, she reminds herself. Mira’s only option is to let her out, at which point Celine will be able to overpower her.

“Huh,” Mira says again. Then: “What do you do with your Rumi?”

“Excuse me?” Celine asks. (Mi. The shared character in her partners’ names. It feels like a blasphemy every time she hears it.)

“You kept telling us to chain her up,” she points out. “So I figure you didn’t just potty train like a normal person. What do you do?”

Celine looks placidly back. If Mira wants to know, she’ll hear it. “I did teach it to use a toilet. It has to pass for human to be useful. Usually it’s content with the bucket in its kennel, though.”

Mira’s fingers twitch along her gokdo. “Sure. That doesn’t sound humiliating at all.”

Celine shrugs. “Personally, I’m not a fan of marinating on my own filth—speaking of, we are on a clock, if you don’t mind?”

#kpdh #collaborative storytelling #mirror mirror au #i do not actually think derpy and sussie are demons but mira heard that they were once jinu's and so they obviously must be demons #but she has recently hastily constructed a mental box called 'demon but not a danger' for rumi and shoved those two into it as well #(i do not think rumi is a demon either but mira is working with limited information and understanding here)

Celine-seonsaengnim has been acting fucking weird all day.

She was spacey this morning, then she was fussing over the demon for some reason, then she dragged them from training and set them to making jjigae (Mira has literally never made jjigae before), then she took some of the jjigae to the demon even though it’s hours before its feeding time, and then she washed it in her own bathroom and let it walk around inside the hanok, unmuzzled. She hasn’t supervised their training all day, she didn’t watch to make sure they held their forms correctly or count the number of laps they ran. Mira stopped singing after two laps and their seonsaengnim hadn’t popped her head out of the angeori to remind them that she was always listening for them even if she wasn’t directly watching them. It’s completely and utterly out of character in so many ways, and Mira… doesn’t like when the adults around her suddenly change their behavior. When suddenly, they’re unpredictable. So. She’s built up the courage to ask Celine about what brought all this on. Hopefully, they can just… talk things through and Celine-seonsaengnim will have a simple explanation for all of the weirdness and everything will work out.

When she mentioned her plan to Zoey, she’d made a face like she was pretty sure things were not gonna just work out, and decided to tag along even though Mira knows she hates confrontation, especially with adults. This is because Zoey is amazing and the most awesome person in the world, except for maybe their third soulmate, who they haven’t found yet. Which is fine, it’s not like Mira is frustrated about it or anything.

They do not find Celine-seonsaengnim in her room. They find the demon. Unmuzzled. Unchained. Lying on its stomach on seonsaengnim’s bed and kicking its heels in the air. (For a horrible moment it looks so much like a human girl and Mira is reminded of the mistake she made at first, assuming that its nature matched its appearance. Then it notices them and the resemblance to a human is shattered as it scurries backwards on the bed, animal-like.)

“What are you doing!?” asks Zoey.

The demon is tense, hunched over in a crouch on the bed. “Tetris,” it says.

Sure enough, there is a positively ancient looking Game Boy lying on the bed. 8-bit music blares faintly from its tinny speakers.

“Where did you get that? You're not allowed—” Zoey sputters. “You’re not allowed in here at all!”

“Master brought me here,” says the demon, hunching up even further. “Master gave me the game.” Its tusks glint in the dappled daylight from the window and Mira—Mira remembers, intimately, exactly what it can do with those teeth when unmuzzled, how quickly it can move when unchained. Like it is now.

“You’re not wearing your muzzle,” says Mira.

“Master didn’t give me the muzzle,” claims the demon.

“She would never let you… Have you done something to her!?” asks Zoey and possibility strikes Mira like a bag of bricks. For Celine-seonsaengnim to start fussing over the demon and ignoring her Hunters entirely… had the demon reached out to Gwi-Ma somehow? Could he control minds!?

“No!” exclaims the demon, but its eyes dart from side to side and it looks suddenly doubtful.

“Right,” says Mira flatly. “You’re going back into the kennel while we figure out what’s going on.”

The demon blinks, looking taken aback, and for one brief moment Mira thinks this will go smoothly. Then it narrows its eyes. “No.”

“Look,” says Mira, summoning her gok-do. She hears the slight shing of Zoey likewise summoning her shin-kal. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

The demon bares its teeth.

---*---*---

Mira isn’t stupid. She knows what Celine is trying to do here. She’s been tossed around the training room enough to know what’ll happen when she unties this evil alternate version of her mentor, and she refuses to put Rumi at risk like that. But leaving Celine tied up for days, marinating in her own filth (as she so vividly put it, eugh) is (a) absolutely disgusting and (b) a level of cruelty that Mira can’t bring herself to stoop to. So, she’s been wracking her brain for alternatives. Breaking Celine’s legs and dominant arm would do it, but Mira refuses to consider the idea further, is sick that she even came up with the idea. If she could get two sets of really strong shackles that fit Celine’s wrists and ankles, she may be able to free one limb from the duct tape at a time and shackle her – if there’s enough chain for her to walk and nothing more it might work. But Mira hasn’t the faintest idea where to find things like that, and they’d need to be quality, Celine would be able to snap shoddy fake imitation stuff with ease.

It’s the best idea she’d got, though, so Mira sends a brief, reflexive prayer to the Honmoon for help and pulls open Naver on her phone.

She’s peering at a kink specialty supply website with the worst graphic design choices known to South Korea when the Honmoon answers her prayer. A yellow ripple swells out of the Honmoon and the weird blue tiger and creepy bird that started following Rumi around periodically after the whole Saja Boys DebacleTM rise slowly out of it.

“What the hell is that!?” exclaims evil Celine.

Mira got an idea. An awful idea. A wonderful awful idea. “Rumi’s pet demon tiger and demon bird,” she says. The demon bird narrows its eyes – all six of them – at her. The tiger is also looking at her, though without judgment and with only one of its eyes.

Evil Celine’s face pales with horror. “Why aren’t you killing it? Get it away from me!” The demon bird’s eyes narrow even more and its creepy toothed not-beak curves into a frown that no normal bird could manage.

“That’s not Celine,” Mira assures the two demon animals. The bird tilts its head quizzically. “Not our Celine, anyhow. Our Celine has switched places with a Celine from another world who chained her Rumi up in a cage, on account of the whole demon thing.” The bird narrows its eyes again as it studies Celine carefully, and the tiger’s eyes focus and its stupid grin shrinks into something resembling a concerned expression, which gives Mira the hope that these two can understand what she’s saying. “Listen,” she says. “I need to untie her so she can use the bathroom, but I’m worried she’ll try and hurt Rumi. Could you, like, sit on her if she tries to leave?”

“You would feed me to demons, Mira!?!” Celine practically shrieks.

Both the tiger and the bird blink at evil Celine. The tiger rises to its feet and nudges its head against Mira’s hand, which Mira hopes means, ‘Yes, Mira, we love Rumi and will help you defend her from this weird evil version of her not-mother.’ She doesn’t have many experiences with pets, but they’re supposed to wanna protect their masters, right? Assuming they consider Rumi their master, anyway. Rumi had kinda implied that she may have gotten custody of them after Jinu got flambéed (good riddance), so they probably do, right?

Regardless, it’s Mira’s best bet. At the very least, if it comes down to a brawl she'll (probably) have help. Here goes nothing.

Posts that just fundamentally misunderstand horror movies like The Thing, that have thousands of notes, are turning me into the joker.

"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.

"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.

Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.

I'm using this post to add on why I keep a pretty safe distance between me and the media I'm a fan of, and the fandom. This is a useful place to start, because it's touching on the technical parts of fandom that drive me up a wall.

In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.

Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.

And to bring it all back to The Thing, that's why the fandom, who do not care about the text of the film, are such a source of frustration. Wanting it to be about a nice monster is also not wanting to sit with the way the film approaches human trust and the speed with which a belief in everyone being a potential enemy creates systemic breakdown. It's much less comfortable to examine human flaws inside best intentions, and fandom effectively pushes that uncomfortable idea entirely out of its sandbox.

#fandom #discussion

mylordshesacactus

In your Thalassian etiquette worldbuilding, I remember conversations where you (or eightdoctor) said that if one partner gets a promotion/demotion that switches their respective positions on the hierarchy, the roles of principal and subordinate are likewise expected to switch. What happens, however, if the promotion/demotion results in them now being equals? How does that interact with the stigma against same-ranked relationships?

The convenient thing about Society TM is that there are sooo many factors that go into how we rank ourselves on a hierarchy that there's almost always something else you can use. Family wealth, or noble status, or even seniority at rank.

We're VERY good at figuring out who's higher on our made-up ladder!

The funny answer of course is: Break up. Your relationship is now a sin.

Thank you for the answer!

So, in an AU where the Third War didn't happen (or played out differently), how would Sylvaina play out? Obviously, if they meet when Jaina is young the hierarchy between the Ranger General and a journeymage (no matter how capable) is clear. But 20-30 years later, when Jaina is an archmage, Lord Admiral, and influential in Dalaran to boot, the situation seems less clear cut.

Reasons for Jaina to become the primary:

Combined head of military + head of state > head of military

Fuckoff powerful

More diplomatically influential

Reasons for Sylvanas to remain the primary:

Much older

Is the partner who actually understands the Quel'thalan social scene, the only social scene that matters for purposes of Thalassian relationship dynamics

Her family has a storied history in Quel'thalas and Jaina's does not

Of course a human-quel'thalan relationship probably doesn't follow typical quel'thalan customs in all aspects, but I'm curious which factors you would consider more relevant to the hierarchy.

wowerehouse

Oh, that one's easy! However powerful Jaina is? In Quel'thalas, the only person who outranks the Ranger-General is the Prince.

But isn't the problem that we're no longer dealing solely with Quel'thalas? If King Teneras Menethil II of Lordaeron were to visit, Ranger General Sylvanas would not outrank him. Therefore, she shouldn't outrank Lord Admiral Jaina Proudmoore either, unless Quel'thalas lends no weight to foreigners' titles in their relationship hierarchy system. (Which might cause diplomatic problems, I feel? Like imagine if a minor elven noble was dating a major human noble but the elf was still considered the primary - that could cause a lot of offense when the human finds out how the elven system typically works!)

#sylvaina #discussion

mylordshesacactus

In your Thalassian etiquette worldbuilding, I remember conversations where you (or eightdoctor) said that if one partner gets a promotion/demotion that switches their respective positions on the hierarchy, the roles of principal and subordinate are likewise expected to switch. What happens, however, if the promotion/demotion results in them now being equals? How does that interact with the stigma against same-ranked relationships?

The convenient thing about Society TM is that there are sooo many factors that go into how we rank ourselves on a hierarchy that there's almost always something else you can use. Family wealth, or noble status, or even seniority at rank.

We're VERY good at figuring out who's higher on our made-up ladder!

The funny answer of course is: Break up. Your relationship is now a sin.