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My cute vampire son who's finally started to leave the house

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Bat

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Papa Slime himself

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sometimes its like 3am and a body'll just go feral in a sketchbook....

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not human

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thank you for the suggestions!! hope I did these characters justice lol

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🐰🐉! best match! but in an emulated style! (persona au perhaps?)

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the end justiφ's the means

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🦑?

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they could never make me hate you <3

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does the sea know the moon looks back at it every night

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Den O being my first kamen rider and going into with that one joke post and the gif of Momotaros is so funny because Kamen Rider asks you to suspend all disbelief and then keep suspending and then suspend even more you didn't know you had. You get on a roller coaster and go "okay so there's a train that goes through time and this guy is possessed by 4 Djinn all based on folklore and they possess him to fight in battle." and you think you can follow it. Then 13 episodes in you learn one of the Djinn has a gun AND mind control powers he uses to summon break-dancing youth from nowhere and have dance battles. This is just a thing he does, unrelated to the train, the sand monsters, the time travel, and the sexual tension between the turtle and the red guy

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love when these two freaks are on screen together

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Kiva :3

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Shouma. My sweet summer child. My beautiful little monster boy. How did you get yourself into this situation? (Continued reflection on the divorce after my Hanto ramble. Thank you @necromanticzz!)

Well, the short answer is that Shouma is debilitating incapable of explaining himself, and it's probably because he thinks there isn't any explanation he can offer. Shouma thinks that he is a monster--a selfish monster.

One of the first things we see from him is agreeing that he's a monster, when the motw mocks him for the first little boy's mother's fear. Then Shouma justifies his presence with the fact that there are other monsters for him to stop.

We see a similar pattern after Shouma meets Dente, and then decides that he'll fight Stomach instead of running. Their selfishness is hurting humans, but Shouma can protect humans, so he has a justification to stay with them.

Shouma never approaches the human world as a place he belongs. We see from the flashback of his mother getting pressed that he'd been called a human by his siblings--that aside from his non-functional gavv, he was treated as basically a human. But he never calls himself human after leaving the granute world--once he can't be pressed, and he's around humans, he's a granute from that point forward.

Shouma is obviously a metaphor for multiracial human identity, feeling like he doesn't belong/qualify as any one thing by the standards of that culture. But how he's handled also reminds me of a trans/nonbinary narrative--specifically, the idea that trans people are treated by society as whichever gender would result in the most harm in the situation. Shouma very rarely even calls himself half-human/half-granute--he's just whatever doesn't belong where he is, neither instead of both.

Moving to his relationship with Hanto, the key factor in Shouma deciding that he doesn't have to keep his distance from everyone, and can go back to be with Sachika, is Hanto declaring that he (as a Kamen Rider) isn't a monster. God, it's amazing how Shouma is in the suit, but the acting still manages to portray that he is just bowled over by getting to be seen as a hero, not a monster. He fell in love with Hanto here.

Then, as Shouma spends time with Sachika and Hanto (especially after the Rider identity reveals), we see how afraid he is of them finding out he's a granute. For Sachika, it seems to be a fear of revealing anything that would upset her, would interrupt her happiness (that he decides is his responsibility). For Hanto, it seems to ultimately be a fear of him deciding that Shouma is a monster.

And Shouma does also feel guilty about hiding his identity--he worries about how it can possibly work out--but it never even crosses his mind that explaining himself could have a good outcome. The issue of trust is clearer on Hanto's end, but it's also there for Shouma--he has no trust that anyone would accept him for what he is. It's not even a consideration that he could. To him, it's a choice between, "Should I keep up the lie so we can be happy together? Or should I stop being with them?"

And when I tell you that when Shouma calls himself selfish for wanting to keep up the lie, it absolutely gutted me. That's what he said about Stomach Inc! About them literally eating people! But just wanting to be happy, wanting to not be alone, is selfish to him, because he doesn't think he has any right to it. *wails*

And finally, when Glotta drops the bomb, his only response is to freeze. Even when it's just Lakia asking if he's related to them, Shouma can't reply. (I wonder if he's going to continue to let Lakia think he's all granute?) But he completely shuts down when Hanto confronts him.

Like, if he had been able to respond to Hanto asking if he's a granute by saying "half," that would have changed the entire interaction! It immediately makes clear Shouma's complicated situation and makes space for explanations. But he couldn't--he doesn't see himself as having any claim to humanity where Hanto is concerned. He's a human to granute, and he's a granute to humans, and he has to earn his place anywhere by making others happy enough to justify his presence.

*deep breath* MY BOY IS SO FUCKING LONELY!!! 😭 HIS AND HANTO'S TRAUMAS ARE SO PERFECTLY POSITIONED TO TRIGGER EACH OTHER'S!!! I LOVE GAVV!!!

(Side note, part of why I have so many thoughts on this is that it parallels another obsession, Mairimashita! Iruma-kun, with the compelling approach to belonging and concealed social identities, and especially with the presumption of "predator" and "victim" roles as part of identities.)