So like, "Sunshine boi who is mentally ill" MK takes don't cut it for me. It's too simple.
Like, yes, of course MK is mentally ill with a self-esteem of wet-paper. But he's also complacent. He has no real motivations out side of saving his friends and maybe the world (which usually line up). He hate's change. He refuses to acknowledge anything that questions his world view. In 4x05 MK says he can just ask Monkey King if he's MK's dad. MK doesn't ask. After they free Wukong he doesn't ask about the curse, or the stone, or the visions of Wukong he saw. Why? Because he doesn't want to acknowledge it. He doesn't want to know about himself. In 4x11, MK pushes Macaque about what happened between him and Wukong, if only to cement Wukong's "good guy" status in his head. In 4x02 he didn't even question risking releasing the curse to save his friends. In 4x08, even after learning about Azure's view of Wukong, this doesn't change's MK's choices. He immediately wants to let Wukong out of the scroll, without considering what the best course of action would be. He just wanted to free Wukong, consequences be damned, even if it meant relying on this strange new power that scares him (which makes him the opposite of Macaque, who couldn't/wouldn't free Wukong from the mountain). This cognitive dissonance upsets MK so much that when Azure presses him about his relationship with Wukong in 4x13, MK snaps. He doesn't want to hurt his friends the way Wukong hurt him ("Can't you see you're hurting the people who care about you the most?" [3x10] and "I can't risk hurting the people I care about, the one's I have left" [4x08]). And yet, MK leaves in 4x08 just like Wukong left in 3x10, hurting his friends in the exact way Wukong hurt him. He always wanted to be more like the legendary Monkey King, and now he is. Now he has all of the worst parts of Wukong in him. Nothing else matters as long as he has his friends by his side. But what if he runs away? What if he pushes them away? What if his friends turn on him, seeing him for the monster he will become? What then?
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it will be forever funny to me how the flashback portraits of Wittebrothers made Caleb seem like he's had packing peanuts for a brain
(this post ended up becoming quite lengthy, and so did the tags somehow, because I kinda devolved into a rant closer to the end of writing this whole thing, so bear with me here)
so we know that Philip and Caleb became orphans when both of them were still kids. after that, they ended up in Gravesfield and, to fit in with everyone else who lived there, picked up witch hunting and started thinking that witches are pure evil. Caleb knew perfectly well that he's the only family Philip's had left and that he even may be his his only friend, since, judging by the portraits, they've only ever hung out with each other and we don't know if those two ever made any other actual friends.
until one day, during a witch hunt he and Philip were both a part in (something Caleb seemed happy to do, judging by his smirk there), he met a witch – Evelyn – someone he's been taught to hate and want dead by the townsfolk. someone who, again, in his mind, should be evil.
but he just suddenly does a 180 and goes "damn, you can make fire with your hands, you're actually pretty cool"
and then a few days (?) of talking to her later, he's running off to live with her in the Demon Realm, while simultaneously not giving a single fuck about the brother he's abandoning.
(he even runs off with a smile, with a literal :D face, I fucking can't lmao)
Philip ends up seeing Caleb get dragged off through a weird portal and later follows along, thinking something like "no, my brother wouldn't just up and abandon me without saying anything. he probably got captured by that witch we saw together that one time! she probably used some demon magic to bewitch Caleb and took him through that portal to kill him or worse! I gotta go save him!". and, after spending god knows how long in that realm, searching endlessly for his missing older brother, he eventually finds him. but he also finds that Caleb is not only perfectly okay and not hurt in the slightest, he's also peacefully walking together with the same witch who "captured" him, even holding hands with her.
and when enraged Philip tries to attack Evelyn, to protect Caleb from the witch who took him from his home, from his brother, still thinking that Caleb's under her control, Caleb just... gives him a hug and goes on to introduce the witch as his new wife to him (I'm assuming that portrait is the same day as the other three, if not the same scene), also adding on top of that that they're having a child. all as if nothing happened. treating the whole thing like everything's perfectly okay and just another normal day, fully ignoring the fact that he threw his brother away with no care or thought, leaving him completely alone, a full orphan, now with zero actual family left (in TTT, during their backstory, it's said that "Caleb did his best to take care of his younger brother", meaning that either they never got adopted in Gravesfield, or whoever adopted them didn't give a shit about the two, so they still mostly had to fend for themselves), all to go smash some random 5 out of 10 witchussy he talked to, like, 3 times. no fucking wonder Philip killed him!
(btw, jokes aside, it didn't seem like he intended to kill Caleb, because in that portrait where he's ready to kill with a knife in his hand, he's facing forward, while Caleb is actually to his left. so it just looks to me like Philip was gonna try to kill Evelyn again, and Caleb either jumped in front of her to protect her and got accidentally stabbed or he attacked Philip back, to, again, protect Evelyn, and Philip ended up winning that fight. but that's just my theory)
my brother in literal christ and literal titan – why in the FUCK are you just hugging it out with a smile on your face??? you ran off while giving absolutely no warning to anyone, especially your younger brother! why do you think he's here and actively trying to attack you and your new wife? you're not even trying to address the fact that you left him! at least when Luz ran off to a different realm without warning, she had a "I'm still at the camp" cover, so Camila wouldn't worry that much about where her daughter is, and even then she still felt bad for leaving her mother and planned to go back home once summer was over. this chucklefuck, on the other hand, just permanently portaled away to the Boiling Isles, knocked up a witch and fully settled down there, walking around with a big ol' smile and no care in the world. "Philip who? never heard of him"
the only thing that would sorta make this situation seem better (as in, not make Caleb seem like an overly naive ignorant brick), in my opinion, is if they added one more portrait – after the one where he meets the witch, but before the one where he leaves. in that portrait, Caleb would look like he's trying his best to convince Philip that witches aren't actually evil, and perhaps even try to get him to go live with them in the Demon Realm, all the while Philip's looking at him with either disagreement/disappointment/disgust or just rolling his eyes and full on ignoring him, while sharpening his witch hunt tools or something. then it would look like Caleb at least tried to make his brother change his mind, like he tried to offer him a chance to go with them. but no. with the way the portraits look in the final version it just seems like Caleb was fully on-board with killing witches since he was young, even pulling his younger brother along to think the same way, Philip also thought that Caleb was perfectly fine with killing witches, but once he actually meets a real witch (assuming they've never met one before) he instantly pulls an uno reverse card and just runs off with her, without so much as telling his brother beforehand.
I'm not trying to say that "Belos should've been redeemed, because he's the victim here and Caleb is bad and it's all his fault". he still murdered his brother and went on to manipulate everyone on Boiling Isles for centuries, with his end goal being the death of all witches, while simultaneously being stuck in the loop of "denial" and "bargaining" stages of grief – repeatedly trying and failing to recreate a perfect copy of Caleb, but also killing each one that came out wrong or went against him. Belos not being redeemed in the end was the right choice (ignoring the "Belos was always le bad" from King's dad), I agree with that. frankly, if he actually got redeemed in the end, I'd probably be seething for the next 3 to 5 years, like how I did after the Diamonds' "redemptions" in SU (yes I'm still pissed about that lol). I'm just saying that, from what was shown to us, Caleb didn't seem like that good of a person either, not as bad as Belos ended up being, but still not that great. and, once again, seemingly had a raisin for a brain.
(off topic, but during Masha's retelling of Wittebane's backstory, their "sounds like big bro got a hot witch girlfriend and little bro got upset" line was so fucking cringe, it gave me a fever for 3 days the first time I watched the episode)
k, rant over, I dunno what else to add
TL;DR: I think Caleb was dumb as a brick, because, from what was shown to us in their backstory, he seemed to have run off to Demon Realm and abandon Philip without telling him anything beforehand. when Philip came to BI to look for his brother, who he assumed was under control of the witch who "took" him, since he thought his last living family member wouldn't just abandon him, and when he eventually found him, and it turned out he wasn't in any danger at all, Caleb just brushed the whole "I left you for witchussy" thing under the rug and pretended everything was and is perfectly fine, even though it clearly isn't. rip bozo
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Headcanon time because my tag paragraphs get shorted to nada and I didn't realize
Okay I'm a dumbass and didn't ever realize or notice that tumblr has a tag cap, because at least to my knowledge it does not tell you that you've hit a limit. So I shall rant about a kinda dumb headcanon I have for the states.
Warning: This bitch is longer than I thought it would be, you have been warned!!
ALRIGHT SO. The way I tend to draw the height for states is based off of two things, their state size and vibes, this is however excluded for the OG13 and then some.
This rule-ish not applying to them is because they all have actual families. Now you may be thinking "What the hell does that mean" and I am so glad you asked.
I haven't really talked about outside of the headcanon things but both New Jersey and New York have families, NJ his moms and technically the devil from the bible, NY his grandparents.
This also goes for the rest of the OG13, they all have families that while those who raised them aren't around anymore that family line still is. This is to the exception of Maryland because he is somehow even farther from being human than states normally are.
Anyway because of this, the OG13 heights are not based in state size, instead it is technically a strange mix between family genes and land size, only technically because those like Mass and Virginia are both taller(mass) and shorter(ginny) than one would assume based on state size. It's basically a ruelette on whether or not you get genes over state size and somehow Rhode STILL managed to be short as hell, bro rolled wrong TWICE XD.
Now it should be interesting to note that it's pretty much only the OG13 that have weird height despite the few other states who have family are locked to their state size. This would include Texas, Louisiana, both the Dakotas, Utah, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Minnesota Wisconsin and Michigan- I see these three at least somewhat related in some way shape or form so thats why they are together like that.
So despite states out side of the OG13 having actual human families they are related to, it's only the OG13 that aren't state size locked and there could be some reasons for this.
For one it could be that colonies more or less aren't locked to their size, mainly because colonies can mix and it's shown quite a lot in history that there were no firm lines between colonies. So it would make sense that when the states (then colonies) were growing up they weren't locked to the size of the colony and rather just their family genes.
It could also be that because they were already adult age (or close to it) it was too far for weird border magic to effect them since they were too old and such. This would make sense and work well with this idea that the other states with families outside of the OG13 are sized locked because their borders were a lot clearer by the time they were older.
Another reason could be because they all have families, which yes doesn't make much sense but here me out. All of them excluding NJ and Maryland had normal human families, it could be that because they had families they were only labeled as personified states once the country became a country. This doesn't mean that they weren't already personifications, just that you have to be labeled a state for border size to take effect, however once again since they were all already adults or almost adults, it wouldn't take effect.
And the final reason I can think of could just be that they were a special case, considering the fact that (if I'm remembering correctly) there aren't personification of the Canadian provinces in canon. It very well could be that yes normally states whether they have family or not are state sized locked, but since they would have been a special case in that there weren't personification like them before that the magic creating state personifications was newly born and didn't have rules yet. This would also explain why they would have families to begin with, the magic had to pick those who lived there to be those personifications, meaning they originally human. The only real problem with this one is the fact that states outside of them have families, however this could be explained, it could have been a lack of people in the area to build a personification from, it also could have been in the southern states case that because family is pretty important there, it made sense to chose those from families instead while still keeping the rules in place.
Now this is a whole lot and it kind of sounds like I've gone insane thinking about this but honestly this is mainly just me typing before I think lol. Is it clear that I needed a reason as to why some states are not close to their state size, because I feel like it is.
I do want to say that the states do have some control over their height, Texas could get taller but it would feel wrong and that goes for most already tall states, it's vice versa for the smaller states who may already be at their height cap by default. I'm not super sure if the OG13 should be able to change their height slightly, mainly because they are all more human to an extent than the other states, of course ignoring whatever the hell Mary is and the fact that NJ is related to the devil from the bible because lord knows those two are not as close (or close at all in Mary's case) to being human like their fellow states with families.
Now height isn't super important but I feel it can explain some dynamics people may have. If you have a tall friend and a short friend, theres gonna be a lot of short jokes. Two short friends and it's a whole lot of complaining about not being able to reach anything. Two tall friends and it's either complaining about feeling claustrophobic in lower ceilings or feeling like your god because your taller than everyone. Two friends of the exact same height and it will always be a competition to see who is truly taller (it's neither but their in denial).
You have to think about these things when making characters because it can effect the dynamic, obviously not by much but still, it's important to know. So while this might seem like far to much thinking when it's literally just a funny internet series that was the only way you knew the news during covid, I find it important. Sure I may never actually write a proper fic and I will probably really only stick to my funny lil drawings, it feels important.
My drawings are like snippets to what happens in the day to day crazy-ness in either the Statehouse or just with the states, thus it is important to me that I have their heights to how I have my headcanons set up when drawing. It's small details like that, that convey a story when drawing without doing an actual comic, it brings life when I know my drawings can be a little stiff, it's about the story and maybe that's just the writer within me talking but I don't care XD.
Basically I just like having some sort of reason as to why the heights for the OG13 aren't consistent with their state size when I draw them. What can I say, I'm a dork :D.
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sunburst duo making me mentally ill again. hey did you know that throughout all 4 seasons that are out right now wukong has never landed a direct hit on mk or even someone wearing his face (cough cough macaque. but also he doesnt attack the ink mk after its weakened either). and all the buildup we have for a swk vs mk fight. god im so excited; we either get wukong desperately trying to avoid having to actually Hit mk (aka confronting things bc hes an avoidant bitch) or we get him finally Doing it (which he didnt even do while possessed). or both.
(i say this as if its not a win whichever way it goes because itll literally be a swk vs mk fight that we get to dissect)
I think currently, in my heart, I would love for the SWK V MK fight to have MK winning the whole time, with Wukong acting in self-defense. Obviously that wouldn't be enough to stand against MK, and at that point Wukong might just accept his fate (being so unwilling to fight MK he'll die for MK), and I then need Mei to come and save SWK's ass. Then we can get Samadhi Fire Part 3 and Mei can talk MK down.
But literally however the lmk writers decide to do it it's going to fucking SLAP SO HARD.
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