#one of his hyperfixations is hating mages and magic. another one is his liking towards croissants and grape (comfort foods) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

immabethehero · 2 years

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Encantober/Egotober - Tragedy/Ink

OK... so turns out when you mash hyperfixations together... you get- uh... interesting results.

Anyway @encantober-official, @tracobuttons

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CW: Moving snake skull, ink nearly suffocating two people, slight vomiting at the end and bones breaking

Everywhere Bruno Madrigal looks, ink spills and drips from the walls of the white void. He can’t entirely explain what’s happening, but he knows not to touch it. He jumps over the puddles, much like jumping over cracks. It’s not so hard. He’ll survive-

Squish! Bruno screams as his foot gets trapped in the sticky ink. He pulls and pulls at his leg to no avail. He stutters over prayers as he tries in vain to free himself.

Suddenly, a blast of warm magic- he can’t think of another word for what he sees- eviscerates the ink, and he looks up to see Jameson Jackson smiling back at him. The moustached gentleman, whom he met mere hours ago, seems to be adept at magic, albeit a different sort of magic. When they get out of whatever this is, he plans on asking him about how magic works in his world.

“Do you know where we are?!” Bruno yells. Jameson shakes his head and motions to him to keep running.

{Don’t think about that right now. Just find an exit!} Bruno can barely read the gentleman’s sign as Jameson leaps across puddles, blasting any ink that gets in his way.

Bruno tries to will a vision to come to him, but ultimately decides against it. He needs his own vision to avoid the puddles.

Bruno is quite literally ripped out of his thoughts as a tendril suddenly ensnares his arm. He tugs against its slimy yet strong grip, screaming as the ink begins to climb up his legs and wrap itself around his body. In the corner of his eye, he can see Jameson’s hands covered as ink envelops him. The tendrils lift the men off the ground. Bruno kicks and screams. Jameson snarls and yells as he attempts to break his hands free of the ink.

“So weak, yet you fight on,” a voice says. Bruno and Jameson gasp.

{Who’s there?! Show yourself, you dirty rascal!} Jameson growls.

“No need for insults…” The world begins to rumble. Jameson and Bruno gasp as an ivory skull emerges from the largest puddle of ink. The beast slowly rises out of the darkness, its slimy form towering over the men. It looks down, the intense stare of its eye sockets burning into the mages. Bruno takes the time to look over the beast’s body. It has no legs, just a large noodle, and that odd skull… It dawns on him.

Bruno swallows back a scream. He hates snakes. “W-what do you want with us?”

“You…” The ink-beast lowers its head so that’s eye level with the men. “You two fascinate me… Always left behind.. Always the weakest ones…”

The coils of ink stretch up their ears. Bruno slams his mouth shut as it gags him. Jameson shudders as the ink wraps around his throat.

The ink-beast turns to Jameson first. “One, abandoned by everyone he loves- family, friends, even mere acquaintances- sacrificed to the monster like a pig on a stick.”

Jameson can’t move. Jameson can’t move! The ink seems to be squeezing his limbs together, as if to crush him. He feels the black goop knock his hat off as it attempts to cover his eyes. He shakes his head violently to keep the ink from engulfing him entirely.

Across from him, Bruno has gone limp, his head lulling as the ink dangles his body in the air like a child’s plaything. The ink-beast nods towards him.

“You, thrown under the bus, left for dead, forgotten by all you love.” Another tendril slaps Bruno across the face, leaving a black spot.

“Your lives are one never-ending tragedy,” the beast says. “Why not let it end already?”

Jameson shakes off the ink covering his eyes as a blinding green light flashes at him. He gasps as Bruno’s eyes glow a bright green. Around him, the ink hovers in the air, caught up in Bruno’s strange trance.

Bruno begins to writhe against the ink as slowly, but surely, a green tablet begins to form from the hovering ink. Jameson watches in awe. The beast roars and steers its giant body towards the prophet.

The ink around Jameson begins to slack, allowing the gentleman to free one of his arms. He snaps his fingers at the tablet, breaking it into sharp pieces. With a wave of his hand, he tosses the broken pieces at the beast’s eye sockets and hits it dead on!

The beast howls in agony, the noise piercing the men’s ears. Their inky prisons go slack, and they slip out of them, falling into the puddles below. Bruno jolts back to life as his body slams against the ground, bones snapping.

The beast thrashes and writhes, roaring all the while. It slowly pulls its body back into the pond, the screams fading away.

Bruno and Jameson lie on the floor, choking on air. Bruno gags and rolls over, sobbing as a burning pain spreads through his legs and thighs. Jameson coughs, spitting out chunks of ink.

As his coughing fit dies down, Jameson smiles weakly at Bruno. {How about we get out here, hm?}

Bruno manages a light chuckle before pain takes over his senses and his world goes black.

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#bruno madrigal #disney encanto #encantober #jameson jackson #jacksepticeye #egotober #egotober 2022 #apparently i can write #immabethehero #vomiting tw

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kirinda-ondo · 3 years

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You know him, you either love or hate him (or are moderately confused by my sudden dive into this hyperfixation); we're talking about Orko because I have a lot of feelings.

As a disclaimer, I am not gonna claim to be some kind of superfan. I am not aware of every single iteration of the lore and all of its secrets. I don't know anything about the DC comics. I'm only halfway through the 2002 series as of me writing this. I am not someone you want to have discussions on the wider Masters of the Universe.... universe with. However, after watching Revelation, the entire Filmation He-Man (and some of She-Ra, cause he was there too), and going on a deep dive of storybooks, annuals, and minicomics courtesy of He-Man.org and the lovely people who submitted their scans there, I do feel pretty qualified to at least talk about Orko.

So, with all that being said, I'd like to get into a little bit of backstory, if only for my followers who came to this blog for completely different things and are wondering where the hell my love for this funky little wizard dude came from all of a sudden. Truth is, Orko is actually one of my earliest faves! Mind you, I only had limited access to Masters of the Universe as a kid, only seeing a couple of rented VHS tapes and later getting my hands on a small pile of the Golden Books from Goodwill, but apparently it was enough for Orko to imprint himself into my brain. However, also due to my limited exposure, he kind of got shifted to the back of my head as I got deeper into other things. I still knew for a fact I liked Orko a lot though, even if I couldn't quite remember why anymore.

And then Masters of the Universe: Revelation dropped on Netflix. I'm not gonna get into my opinions of that show lest I open a flood of irrelevant discourse (for those uninitiated, it is a bit... divisive, to say the least). However my feelings on the matter did encourage me to go and watch the original and well, holy shit I love Orko more now than I could have ever comprehended as a kid. He is THE quintessential underappreciated comic relief character I tend to gravitate towards, and then some.

But before I get into that, let me back up a bit and explain. Orko is a Trollan, a race of magical little dudes that are basically floating sweaters with hats and covered up faces. Out of these Trollans, Orko is an incredibly fucking OP archmage. Like, they straight up call him Orko the Great, he's so powerful. But then, he gets caught in a freak storm that whisks him away from his home dimension and into Eternia. Immediately, he runs into a young Prince Adam, who is trapped in a swamp/tar pit and needs rescuing. Orko, being the upstanding lad that he is, uses his magic to save him but in the process loses the item that allows him to focus his magic to the swamp (in the 80s version, it's a medallion, but in the 2002 series, it's a wand). Worse yet, the magic (and dare I say the very laws of physics) in Eternia works pretty much the opposite as it does in Trolla, so he's been incredibly nerfed.

So basically, Orko is trapped in a topsy-turvy world away from friends and family, a world with magic he is fundamentally incompatible with. Ouch. He's not completely screwed, however, as he is rewarded by the king and queen for his heroism and appointed... the court jester. Double ouch. He surprisingly doesn't seem to mind though. He genuinely does enjoy entertaining people, even when his tricks only ever work like half the time because he's basically a Mac program trying to run on a Windows computer.

It's not all horrible though, as he does quite literally get adopted by the royal family and thus sort of become the entire palace's weird son/little brother (despite being older than many of them. He's very, very child-coded largely for the purposes of being a stand-in and example lesson to the actual children watching). But also, more importantly, he becomes one of the very select few to know that Adam and He-Man are one and the same.

But outside of secret-keeping, he is actually a pretty valuable ally to have against Skeletor and his dudes because even though his magic is kind of screwed up, when it does work, he's still one of the most powerful mages on Eternia. In various materials, he's created floods, a second winter, and hell, he can literally explode himself and still be perfectly fine. He's also really clever and can weasel his way out of a number of situations. In one episode, for instance, he manages to convince someone that he's He-Man and Adam is his "assistant" in order to free him from captivity so the day has a better chance of actually being saved. He's also got the ability to just be really frustrating and incomprehensible to the point that villains who capture him sometimes either don't want him or don't know what to do with him anymore, which is honestly really funny. In an episode of She-Ra, the villains tried to scan his brain but because the inner machinations of his mind are that much of an enigma, he got diagnosed a weirdo and broke the entire machine. Absolutely delightful.

However, there's a lot more to Orko than just comedy and bungled magic. He's actually surprisingly complex!

See, going into this, I expected Orko's whole situation be played entirely for laughs while the sadder implications of his existence go entirely unaddressed. Coming off the heels of characters like Cobalt and others I enjoy, I'm used to this sort of treatment by writers. But they actually don't do that. The depressing subtext is for once, actually TEXT, which was INCREDIBLY surprising to me. We actually get to see another side of him, a side that hates that he can't be taken seriously no matter what he does, a side that is well aware of all the trouble he causes and feels like a burden to those around him. He actually runs away on multiple occasions, fully believing that he's unloved and everyone would be better off without him, even if that couldn't be further from the truth (a point which the Sorceress hammers home with multiple straight up magical video presentations, and in the 2002 series, a literary adaptation, of why he is loved and important).

Underneath all the hyping himself up that he does, there's a lot of insecurity. He's someone who desperately wants to be loved and respected and feels that without funny magic tricks to entertain people, he has no inherent value (which is incredibly relatable if you are also known by people as The Funny One). At one point he agrees with the notion that he doesn't feel like much more than a pet, which is absolutely heartbreaking. Even when he gets the ability to go back and forth between Eternia and Trolla, his feelings of inadequacy now extend toward his family, worrying that his own uncle, the one who taught him everything he knows and greatly contributed to him being Orko the Great back home in the first place, wouldn't be proud of him. Being on Eternia highkey wrecked his shit, man.

However, even when given the opportunity to go back home for good, he always chooses to stay because he's loyal as hell. Even if he needs some reminders, he does know he's needed not just in the fight against evil, but just because his friends and newfound family genuinely love him. It's heartbreaking, but also incredibly wholesome. I did not even remotely expect a comic relief character like this to get this much depth and respect from the writers, especially not from the incredibly campy and cheaply animated 80s series. I am genuinely so unused to this.

But I think that's also what separates him a bit from his fellow Silly Kid Appeal Characters That Kids Fucking Hate ala Snarf Thundercats or Scrappy Doo. He not only makes a concerted effort to be an actually useful ally, but he's also in fact very self-aware of his status as one of these characters. He knows he screws up a lot but he actually tries to accept responsibility and fix it. It makes me wanna root for the lil dude. Now I understand if someone isn't a fan of the brand of humor he brings to the table, or feel like he's simply a distraction from the Cool Buff Dudes Fighting Each Other, but I hope you can see why he might also be a really appealing character to other people, both kids and adults alike. I mean, he was popular enough to be embedded into the canon despite originating from the cartoon and not the toyline for a reason, after all.

Orko is a fun, entertaining, but also complex, heartwarming, and relatable character. I know there is a faction of people that would disagree with me, but I don't think you need to change him all that much or make him a super serious character to be more appealing. He's already got a lot going on that a writer could easily work with. It all just depends on where you decide to focus. Take a lesson from the show and accept that he's fine just the way he is.

#kateh rambles #a defense of orko (aka 'i can't believe the subtext is actually TEXT this time')#i feel like there's more i could say but i can't get my thoughts organized let alone enough to have it flow with the rest of this #so there could be a part 2 at some point? maybe? i don't know #orkoposting

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