actually while im feeling sad about stupid bullshit (not being popular anymore oh woe is me) lets take a little summary of atbb's pre-hiatus inbox
someone trying to roleplay as sans because they didnt look at the blog for more than two seconds
someone saying the skeletons are cute and asking to hug them
someone asking to be friends with [Enter Skeleton Here]
someone asking what their brothers are like
How are you?
You're cute!
You're cool!
How have you been?
Nice outfit!
Nice outfit!
Nice outfit!
Nice outfit!
someone who does not understand the concept of dramatic irony who wants very badly to explain the full plot so far to characters who would never know that in any context otherwise as if that wouldnt be lame as hell for them to suddenly know
why is [thing that was a very big plot point]
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
YOU'RE CUTE
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
HOW HAVE YOU BEEN
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grinning emoji. you know which guy im thinking abkut rn. how well does he deal with being a catch and release
ok originally i had paragraphs upon paragraphs about why vallen is what he is but it got too complicated and far away from the og question so. sorry it took me a while 2 answer this LOL !!!
anyways. pretty well actually? like of course the nature of what they are BOTHERS him, why wouldn't it, but it's not like its their fault what happened happened. being made into what they were for the reasons they were is on the people who did it. vallen, at least by the end, knows what he wants and that the only persons whims he's to be beholden to are their own. he's not going to feel guilt on behalf of what another person used them to do, and they sure as hell aren't going to spend the rest of their life questioning why they are where they are because he knows why-- because he wants to be. and that's all that matters
vallens kind of ended up being a bit of a narrative foil for cherry (gay as fuck in my opinion) the more i focus on him because you know how i love my parallels and contrasting personalities , and one big way this manifests is how they regard their memories. obviously cherrys very attached to and fixated on what little they can gleam from the vaguest hints of whatever they lost and is very bothered by this lack of answers for where they came from or why. vallen, meanwhile, is characterized by a need to forget-- to bury their memories, not think about it, distract himself or erase it through any means necessary. it's only when that lack of memory becomes a problem that it starts to bother them-- when he starts noticing that something is very, very different and they cant pinpoint what happened or why, only a terrible sense of dread and a vague idea that something awful has happened. the one time hes spared the burden of remembering is the one time he, you know, **needs** to remember what happened-- to figure out whats going on with themself and, later, to help someone he does actually end up really caring about. (i also, sometimes, wonder if there's some resentment to be gained from knowing someone who got the chance to leave it all behind and start over in the exact way you'd want to. food for thought.) it's a wake up call to how he's been living-- do they really want to live their whole life pushing these things down, not confronting it on a meaningful level, just letting what happens to them happen and praying they'll black out before the worst of it? probably not. it obviously doesn't fix everything but it does get them asking some difficult questions that they've been ignoring for a long while now.
anyways when they're first confronted with this stuff he pretty much wants nothing to do with it-- he doesn't know anything about why theyre like this and wouldn't be able to help otherwise, and besides that he's not getting involved in something that seems like someone else's problem to deal with. he does kind of come around but it's less out of a desire to find out what's wrong with him and more of a desire to figure out why it's such a big deal for cherry because they just. Dont get it. she's lucky not to remember anything, after all, and why waste your time on something that's probably going to hurt you in the end when you can live your damn life and move on with it. and learning those answers does kind of actually endear them to each other and whoops they're friends now toooooo fucking bad
fizzle does find that vallen has technology within him that suggests remote piloting and this does IMMENSELY bother them and he does get it deactivated as soon as he can. the idea that he's been used in a way that negates any part of his will or wants makes him feel sick and angry and does motivate him to be involved with the story but he comes to make peace with it because. whatever he was used for, it. wasnt him. and they are not going to let someone give them the guilt that THEYRE supposed to possess. (more parallels. being made into something for the purpose of what someone else wants. continuation of the themes of "you are not responsible for the shit other people do to you" etc) which also baffles cherry bc if it was him she'd have a crisis of conscious . vallens good for making them calm the hell down sometimes i think but that's another post
the literal concrete reasoning for why vallen is what he is only comes out during that stretch of time where cherry is dead and that reasoning does initially throw him for a loop-- the idea you were made to find someone else and that not only did it work but it's the pretext for Why you came to care about them is unnerving-- but those people are gone now, and he's not controlled by them or anyone else anymore, and he still stays up at night to watch diagnostics flicker and to see if anything at all comes back online outside of their input, and he's sick of other people defining what he's supposed to feel or want and god damn it, they're the closest they've been to being happy in a while, and he refuses to let that be defined by anything else. he cares about people because he chose to and that's all that matters, and anyone who thinks that's a weakness to be utilized is not only wrong but fucking stupid. they're here because they want to be; if they didn't then they wouldn't. he's not going to let that define what he feels or thinks because that's up to them and not someone else.
anyway he's still not quite to the point where i want them, obviously, but i am trying to take the initial idea of their character-- someone who isn't impacted the way others were by this singular event partly because theyve already been through so much that this just. doesn't faze them the way it probably should-- and trying to extend it in new ways. vallens really bad about fitting into the molds other people make for them and letting other people tell them what they feel or what they are and i do like the idea that they end deciding to prioritize their wants and needs and feelings after Not Doing That.
there's some interesting themes here about the nature of autonomy and how that feeds into things like addiction and objectification but ill spare you the analysis on that. blows the fuck up
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