your commitment to not only the rhyme, but the meter of your poems is so, so satisfying - I often see people neglect meter in stuff like song parodies or poems-as-fanart (which is fine! art doesn't have to be perfect!). but realizing that the first line of the secret life comic poem wasn't "for the record…" and instead incorporated /all/ the text (starting with the logo!! genius!!) and made the meter work exactly right in the first page was incredible.
I've been reading it out loud to myself now for days - you deserve the notes, the recognition, and the praise :)
i see what you did there with that final turn of phrase 👀
hahahaha tysm!!!! it’s something i’ve always been sort of picky about—english has these natural patterns of emphasis both within multisyllabic words *and* spanning entire phrases, the latter being a bit more flexible but still very much possible to make ‘sound wrong’, which makes sticking to a rhythm (especially throughout an entire back-and-forth conversation) pretty challenging and VERY fun to try and figure out.
(actually, in my experience song parodies are significantly *easier* to write (the words are anyway, music is Not one of my strong points) because following a tune takes a lot of the pressure off in terms of the overarching emphasis patterns)
but yeah this lil style experiment has been super interesting! v grateful to you and the other handful of people who both a) got the gimmick and b) went out of their way to mention it, i know it doesn’t usually occur to people to point out things they think are obvious, so i Mostly get feedback from people who *don’t* see the rhyme scheme
honestly i was concerned i’d messed it up for a while, bc after i posted the first part people kept saying it didn’t rhyme???? i thought i was going insane i was so confused lmao
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Catching up on Tower of God, and all these theories about how obviously Zahard is the one who did something to Traumerei’s memories and that’s the only reason he could possibly be loyal to him, and as soon as Bam or Gustang or whatever gives him back his memories he’s immediately gonna turn on Zahard are reeeaally weird to me, and diminishing to both Zahard and Traumerei as characters.
Everything we’be been shown about Traumerei so far paints him as a huge cunt, by choice, who gets off on the suffering of others (which is why he’s a favourite, of course <3 ). When he’s not napping or dead inside he’s short-tempered, capricious and cruel. A feature not a bug, if you will. While it’s true that we haven’t been shown the origin of his memory-and-emotion-discarding habit we have been shown occasions where he proactively chooses that course of action by himself-in the Yasratcha flashback, where he returned from the Nest to feed some more to Leviathan before dealing with Nen Nen and Wang Wang, and sometime after the incident, if you go by his distorted recollection of the event to Yasratcha. We know from Leviathan that Traumerei is the one who created him and kept feeding ‘filthy’ memories and emotions to him, in quite the amount from what it sounds like. These memories, going by what we know so far, would contain Traumerei at his worst, such as his punishment of Wang Wang, Nen Nen and Yasratcha for example, and likely be coloured by resentment and hatred rather than regret and sorrow (something soldified by Leviathans demeanour, imo) (meaning the current Traumerei is the ‘sanitized’ version).
That aside, how exactly would Zahard have found a way to force Traumerei to cut unwanted memories and emotions out of himself in a way that seems distinctly Traumerei (involving the creation of a Shinheu)? This is not the Hidden Floor, where they were simple data to manipulate and erase (without ill effects to their real/outside selves)! Why would Traumerei have kept up that coping mechanism over the millenia, if it was something forced upon him by Zahard? Why exactly would Zahard himself inquire after Traumerei’s memories, if a key piece of Traumerei’s loyalty to him was their erasure? Zahard himself is the one who brings them up in the first place! What seems like a realtively recent problem to boot, and in a way that seems more eager that he remember and out of worry for an old friend and comrade (’By the way, what kind of nightmares have you been having lately? Do you still not remember?’), (at the end of their strategy meeting, after the ‘business talk’ is already finished) than as some sort of insidious check-up to make sure that he doesn’t remember something from tens of thousands of years ago. It honestly feels like people projecting their dislike of Zahard onto Traumerei, when everything we’ve ever heard about him and are ever shown about him shows him as an ‘enthusiastic’ follower of Zahard and having an absolutely insane treshold of what counts as genuine loyalty. Heck, going by everything about him, it’s more likely that even if he had harboured resentment against Zahard, he would erase it himself to uphold the standard of loyalty he preaches!
In fact, I’d go so far as to say, in view of the Yasratcha flashback and obvious mirroring between him and Traumerei, that it’s far likelier that Traumerei came up with some weird revenge scheme as punishment for ‘abandoning’ him rather than simply being yoinked along by Zahard in something, and that, if he erased his memories because he found them unpleasant to deal with, it was not due to guilt or sorrow but anger and resentment (as we eg. see him exhibit in the flashback upon returning from a trip to the Nest, where he clearly has some leftover frustration).
A lot of fanon seems to view Traumerei as former emotionally softie of the group, who was a poor little meow-meow before he experienced a deep betrayal that emotionally hardened him. While I’m ready to concurr with the latter (and the general fact that the Great Warriors devolved into worse personalities with time) I’d like to point to the examples of what Traumerei perceives as ’betrayals’ in the story, and whether they seem reasonable and justified to feel betrayed by in the first place, or deserving of ‘punishment’, and then reflect upon the likelihood of Traumereis formative betrayal (assuming there is one, definitive one, or that it even involves the Great Warriors) being a cut and dry affair.
As for painting Zahard as the instigator of his unpleasant personality, it reflects an unwillingness to let people other than him be fucked up even though we already know plenty of other family leaders who are, as well as lack of consideration that Zahard might care about some people, like his oldest comrades, and they care about him in turn. Zahard confiding in Traumerei with regards to his views and plans in the first place, Traumerei going above and beyond his assignment to try to turn Bam against Gustang if he proves useful, for example. ‘But the order concering the Poe Bideau family!’- Gustang is the one who stirs the pot in the first place, the one who stole an item whose sole purpose is to defeat Zahard, the one who basically declared if not war certainly conflict, and let it be known that it’s not like Zahard put out a hit on Gustang (which would arguable be pointless, but we do know people as powerful as Eurasia Enne Zahard are capable of getting imprisoned) but merely his family, Gustang’s major instrument for affecting the politics of the Tower.
As of now it seems far more plausible to me for whatever leftover memories that are haunting Traumerei as nightmares to be something done by him instead of to him.
I think that it’s been set up that Traumerei is gonna remember something at the least, and likely something big (maybe eventually prodded by Bam, whom Leviathan told of at least some memories fed to him), but when he does it’s not gonna lead to a sudden heel-turn and alliance, problem solved, but instead a Traumerei actually out for blood, instead of bored and dead inside (anyone remember Bam’s refusal to let Leviathan go free bc ‘if I let it out [...] I’d be committing a sin against the world’ (TOG #531)? That Shinheu formed out of all of Traumerei’s most negative memories and emotions he discarded? That would presumably bubble back up inside Traumerei himself when he remembers?)
To close with a Maschenny quote that summarizes my hopes for Traumerei:
“Has it really disappeared now? That rage of yours? [...] Even if you say that rage has hardened and sunk in your mind, I don’t understand how it could just fly away in the wind like that. It gets more intense and clings to you even more firmly as time passes and you recall those memories. That’s the kind of emotion that rage is. And as long as that rage lives-war can break out at any time.”
-Khun Maschenny Zahard, Tower of God #390
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Hello hello on this fine day I want to ask what the seed in the seed arc stand for? A literal botanical seed? A seed more in a metaphorical way? A third more sinister thing?
lore ask anon i love u like the sun!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! here are terrible answers bc it is for the most part the last option with a little of the former two mixed in !
for context the term usually turns up in the following situations >
- seed arc (post lhnh travel arc for sky(+jack))
- seed kids (blood-related children of soulless. put a pin in this)
- seed mode (their inevitable end)
all of these are meta terms and not used in canon bc [seed] terminology goes back to outdated lore (pre-2015 moon system overhaul) where soulless immortality worked via "influence rules" essentially them being untethered from time meant the exact opposite where they'd fade away unless they anchored themselves into existence by influencing it. & it just so happened that everyone's least favourite oc of mine (hot minute since i last posted so yeah this is abt gray. yes we are skirting rabbit territory here. knife emoji locked and loaded) anwy his chosen method of influence accumulation was via "seeds of immortality" aka. lab-grow some landmine children and yeet them thru time portals so when they cause calamity all up and down reality it quadrubillions ur power.
now forget everything i just said bc this was pre black swan era where gray was a much more one-note machiavellian villain type guy. impossible that he used to be even more boring than he is now <3
anwy that's where the basic wording comes from, and in broad strokes it's still the same concept but the particulars have changed !! without getting into stupid soul birth rules the tldr is. after he accidentally gets stuck with a daughter, hold for [🐇], gray realizes that for the time he is linked to a mortal btwn incubation nd blossoming of a soul, it acts as a fairly reliable pain relief. nowhere near the levels of linnea's cold touch cure, but after losing her he has to make do, bandaid on a bullet wound etc. so he whores around a bunch and gets stuck with children he has no use for (hold for. 🐇) and disposes of them via time portal. the funniest thing is that he has no idea what happens to soulless halfbreeds after this.
what happens to soulless halfbreeds is this: any child of a mortal and a soulless will inevitably die when their moon blood eats thru their soul. for 99.9% of seed kids this happens around the time they come of age (20 yrs) with the one notable exception ofc being sky bc her birth mother was a descendant & having some of reina's spark in her translates to the bastard strength i am insane abt for the rest of my life, slightly more resistance to soulless blood (despite all the. 💉🐇🩹 yknow) so her total time wld have been at least a century, if not centuries, if she had not burned thru most of her soul to keep leah alive to see dream game. :) [i am exited from this line of thought]
INCOHERENT SORRY. wheres the road where's the point. this is a vry freeform answer my apologies OTL
it's not a botanical seed but it is very much a family lineage seed. soulless lineage, to the detriment of all involved. the main, named oc corners it touches are [ofc sky 💚] and also nashua in white crown. half-siblings the two of them, though never meet :3c & then there is ofc, seed arc; the terrible, terrible interlude. the decades after lhnh wherein sky grows into her own as she travels the world, and inevitably runs into children & young adults who carry a hint of night traces. who sometimes look a little too familiar. who are afflicted with an obstinate patch of bruises somewhere on their body, a condition she knows all too well. & who, without fail, die in agony the moment they reach adulthood. bc here is the last terrible detail,
seed kids don't simply die. they turn soulless for a short period of time when the invisible moon floods their body. congrats you have won a moon worth of pain !!!!! unspeakable agony in every nerve and cell !!! not quite soulless enough to bear it, but not quite mortal enough to die a quick death from it. some seed kids bloom into light illusion powers, some even unlock a little temporal distortion, but none of them are in a mental state where they can harness those abilities for anything more than extreme local destruction of everything and everyone around them before they burn out. so before long seed arc becomes about sky putting her unfortunate half-siblings out of their misery before they can hurt their own loved ones. killing children goes over so well for her psyche too <33
& ofc ofc. thanks to all of this. even way past adulthood as she is, sky knows she'll end up like all the others sooner or later. and given her unholy strength stat, she will cause [kyubei voice] unprecedented amounts of suffering. damage beyond belief with nobody short of a true ruler able to kill her. considering her overall resilience so far she might not even burn out naturally but continue to wreak havoc, turn into mindless killing machine. some might even call that modus 殺戮人形 >:)
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