#The Reveal (trope)

[whump-in-the-closet]

Ummm something with the team finally finding whumpee and untying them.

Whumpee repeating "I didn't break, I swear I didn't, I didn't tell them anything, I didn't," while sobbing.

It's true, whumpee didn't tell them anything, but all that caretaker cares about now is trying to calm whumpee down before they bleed out even more.

A Messy Rescue

whumpee slumped over until caretaker grabs their face, desperate to see if they're still conscious

wide eyes and split lip-- a flash of recognition-- and before caretaker can assure them that its all going to be okay, whumpee panics

"I didn't say anything, I didn't, please you have to--" their sentences fragment as they gasp for air. "You have to believe me!"

At first, the team is horrified that this is whumpee's recognition. They feel sick. One teammate turns away, unable to stand it. Unable to watch. It's wrong.

Caretaker snaps out of it first. "Help me cut them down!" Then, they notice whumpee's blood drenching through their once-white shirt

As the team works to free whumpee's wrists from the shackles, Caretaker frantically tries to assess the damage. But whumpee keeps thrashing, jerking out of reach and flinching at their touch.

Alternating between, "I didn't say anything!" and "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry- please don't-- please don't hurt me!"

The teammates all have these grim expressions, mouths in a thin line

A fluttering horror is embedded in caretaker's chest-- this is so much worse than they could have imagined

Even better if Leader, with real pain in their voice, says "We have to keep them quiet."

Caretaker pulls away for a second, hands half-full of bandages. "What're you saying?"

Leader breaks through the last bit of metal and whumpee slumps to the floor, shivering uncontrollably. Caretaker places one hand protectively on their back, rubbing up and down. They don't stop crying. Leader looks away. "Gag them. Or get them to shut up. We don't need them giving away our position to Whumper"

Carrying a gagged and sobbing whumpee out of the building, caretaker can't look them in the eyes. They keep whispering how sorry they are, but they have no idea if whumpee can even hear them or cares. It feels like betrayal, but they can only hope it was worth it.

"We'll get you better, I promise."

[pain-in-the-everywhere]

One of my favourite ways for the team to find out about The Horrors™ is to be sent a video of it by Whumper. Maybe the file was obvious about its contents, maybe the contents was disguised. Either way, the team watch the footage and they are horrified.

Is Whumpee with them when they watch the footage? Do they try to quietly slip away — realising what's about to be shown far before anyone else — but find themself frozen in place by panic as the others catch on?

Or does the team discover the footage without Whumpee, and have to decide whether to confront Whumpee or pretend they didn't see it? Does Whumpee walk in while it's playing, or walk past the open door and run away before the team can turn around and notice?

So much fun to be had.

[mamawasatesttube]

the whole "jason rules crime alley and none of the other bats are allowed there!!1!" thing is so funny like. tim LITERALLY lives in the theater where bruce's parents died,

[ceruark]

please humor me as i share with you one of my recurring daydreams/ scenarios before bed: pop star! reader x pro player! kaiser

prior to your relationship, your reputation preceded you. though you're one of the biggest names on the world stage, you're by no means a "diva" in the traditional sense; you also grew up in a poor neighborhood with a family who didn't care about you until you made it big, and you elevated yourself through your own hard work and talent. despite your fame and wealth, your fans sing your praises about how genuine and down-to-earth you are, and other celebrities you've allowed into your inner circle talk about how kind and caring you are in interviews of their own.

so when michael kaiser of all people approaches you, your friends are understandably incredibly territorial and hostile toward him.

but you give him a chance anyways— he is quite the flatterer, and that face is virtually impossible to say no to.

you were only ever supposed to be yet another stepping stone to put kaiser further into the limelight, just another box to check on his path to being the greatest. except, you had insisted that you two keep your relationship private for as long as possible; you'd seen how your peers' relationships often imploded after going public, and your friends told you that asking him to keep things under wraps was a good way to test if he actually wanted the relationship, or if he was just interested in your name. he agreed, figuring that you'll ease up eventually.

it's not easy by any means; the mask comes off long before you two go public, and you quickly come to understand why so many of his own teammates tend to keep him at arm's length. his insecurity is a deep-rooted, festering thing, manifesting as cold derision and a push-pull attitude that leaves you reeling and always guessing as to how he'll react to your affection in the moment.

and yet, you stay.

you could have anyone in the world, but you stay with him. you've seen the broken, bitter man hiding behind the pretty face and still haven't walked away. your friends tell you that you could do better, that you deserve better, and they're right, he knows it— but you never agree with them, and you never leave, either.

it gets better with time, as he learns to trust you. allow you inside, in response to the way you've accepted him wholly into your heart, flaws and all. improving himself is a struggle, but he's trying, and that's enough for you.

you've been together for a bit over two and a half years when he finally brings it up again. it's a lazy night; your tour ended a week ago, and now you're in munich, cuddled up against him on the couch and scrolling through your phone while he picks apart his most recent match, which is playing on the TV.

"liebling," he says, hand pausing where it was combing through your hair. you look up, expression as painfully indulgent of his whims as always. "what do you think about going public?"

you put your phone down at that. you place a gentle hand on his knee, smiling slightly. "if that's what you want," you answer. "i've just been waiting for you."

in an interview a month later, you "accidentally" let it slip that you're in a relationship—and it's going on three years.

the internet blows up with speculations as to who your mysterious boyfriend could be. your friends drop hints and jokes here and there, but no one can quite guess who it is, even with the help. the closest anyone gets is guessing it's isagi yoichi, who you had seemed friendly with when attending a gala for a fashion outlet you both have contracts with. of course, they couldn't possibly know you were familiar with him because he's your boyfriend's teammate, but regardless, the tantrum that results from those speculations leaves you and the münchen lineup amused for days—at the unfortunate expense of one of the team's twin aces, who swiftly denies being involved with you like that.

the public finally gets their answer at the next big industry award show, conveniently being hosted in paris the same week bastard münchen has a game against pxg. at this point, your fanbase is certain you're with an athlete of some sort, courtesy of your friends' hints, but they still haven't been able to place who or what sport.

when you show up on the red carpet donning a simple gold chain necklace with a beautifully crafted blue rose charm hanging off of it, sitting between your collarbones, the internet blows up.

and when you post a mirror selfie to your instagram story later that night, smiling at your phone as the picture shows nothing more than an arm wrapped around your waist—one covered in extremely recognizable tattoos—the platform goes down for nearly twenty minutes. which somehow pales in comparison to your phone freezing and crashing from the sheer amount of notifications you're getting.

well, it's not like you'd be able to pay any attention to the public reaction, anyways—not when the cause of the commotion is already pulling you toward the bed by the waist, fully intending to indulge in what the world finally knows is his, as much as he is yours.

[metamatronic]

I really like the "Champions get Resurrected" idea! I hope to see more of it in the future!

how to piss of the Bird™ (any % speedrun)

(this was my practice pass on how to draw Rito, so forgive the inconsistencies, loll)

[hurtwithallthecomfort]

I’m such a sucker for whumpees reuniting with people who knew them from before the whump whilst in the midst of recovery. Might be one of my favourite tropes tbh.

Whumpees who changed their name after escaping visably recoiling when they hear someone call them that.

Maybe they don’t want anything to do with their old friends. They left that life behind for a reason. All they’ll do is remind Whumpee of the past, something they’ve been trying to leave behind.

It’s worse if Whumper was a mutual ‘friend’. Especially if these old friends didn’t even know something had happened to Whumpee. Whumper had made up some poor excuse, saying they left for a job, or had gone missing under unknown circumstances.

Their old friends are extremely emotional, having seen Whumpee for the first time in so long, only for the previously cheerful and expressionate Whumpee to just stare blankly in response.

They try to have a conversation with Whumpee but they’re horrified at how much Whumpee has changed. The old Whumpee was sweet, and always polite, yet now they cuss every other word and hardly have anything nice to say.

Or, maybe Whumpee used to be rebellious and freespirited. Now, they’re mild and obedient, a literal shell of their old self.

Whumpee’s old friends jump in to protect them from some threat, believing their usually fragile friend would still need help, only for Whumpee to jump in and defend themself, since they had to learn how to.

Someone who knew the old Whumpee breaking down after seeing how much their dear friend changed, asking them what happened, though Whumpee can’t bring themself to answer.

That person feeling like somehow, deep down, they truly failed Whumpee. If they had just been there, they could have done something. They should have done something.

Caretaker noticing how uncomfortable Whumpee is and trying to remove them from the situation. Their old friends are furious, they’ve been kept away from Whumpee for so long, and now they just have to leave, without any answers?

Bonus points if Whumpee and the old friends weren’t on good terms before they disappeared. Friends who had one final falling out, siblings with a strained relatiomship, lovers who had broken up, etc etc.

[royaltea000]

Hmmmm…monkey

[bonefall]

Splashtail and Atheism

Hello. I am an Atheist and I call Splashstar an Atheist because he is based on widespread bigoted depictions of godless people like myself. There have now been several posts about this written as if they're trying to "correct a misconception," and I am tired of vagueposts completely missing the point of the criticism to get caught up on arguing semantics.

The misanthropic, god-hating "Atheist" character in Christian propaganda, which I feel Splashstar has some alarming similarities with, does not come from the writer's correctable "misconception" of irreligious labels. It is born from a hatred of nonbelievers.

Specifically, my point that Splashtail is a mashup of two popular anti-secular tropes common in religious media;

The assertion that there's no such thing as a "real" nonbeliever, and that Atheists are just "rebelling" against God because we're mad at him, want to do bad things without guilt, or have "lost our way."

The belief that morality itself stems from faith in a higher moral being, asserting that the irreligious are "evil" in contrast to the faithful.

Even passing familiarity with the arguments of Christian apologia seen in Chick Tracts, Pureflix films, PragerU videos, and so on, will have put these tropes in front of you. They are false and harmful, and they target Atheists.

For more on this, TVTropes has an entire article dedicated to the Hollywood Atheist and its sub-tropes. Note how many of these Curlfeather and Splashtail fall into, regardless of if you're arguing that they are "real atheists" or not.

Those that hate us do not care about semantic labels. To them, we are without God, A-Theistic, and they do not actually care what is at the core of your beliefs if it contradicts their narrative.

But, even worse, the "Splashtail Can't Be An Atheist" crowd isn't even totally correct on the semantics they're trying to have a pedant battle about.

Most atheistic organizations and online atheists define Atheism as "one who does not believe in God" and attempt to push a sliding scale of "agnosticism" on how hard of a "maybe" you're feeling about your lack of faith. In the sliding agnostic scale, Agnostic Atheists are a "probably no god" and Gnostic Atheists are a "definitely no god." Others describe that scale as "hard" and "soft" Atheism-- but there is NOT universal agreement on that definition.

There other definitions of an "Atheist," and even those who reject the "agnostic scale" completely (I am one of them). "Atheism" was historically the catch-all term for what we might now call "Irreligious," and more.

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy explores its many meanings, and proposes that what defines an Atheist is an active choice to distance oneself from faith; "Someone who rejects the premise of gods either based on lack of belief, or meaninglessness of the question." Matt Dillahunty, a prominent educator and activist, intentionally refers to himself as an Atheist when others (including religious people!) have tried to pressure him into using the label Agnostic, for reasons he covers in great depth. Historically, "atheist" simply meant anyone who denied the gods or acted impiously, evolving into use as a broad label for irreligious practices around the 1500s, until attempts to narrow it to "nonbelievers in deities" in the 1800s.

By EoP's expanded definition alone, Splashstar qualifies as an Atheist. The rejection does not have to come from a belief that Theism is false, but that the question is meaningless. He doesn't have to "believe" in StarClan any more than you have to "believe" in a total stranger. He rejects faith in it and lives without their influence.

But even more than that, "atheist" is a broad, stigmatized term with a history you can't erase. Hundreds of combinations of philosophies, spiritual beliefs, and logical positions have been called "Atheism."

"Atheist" can refer to Agnostics (those who aren't sure if there is a god or not), Antitheists (opposition to the belief in and/or worship of gods), Igtheists (those that feel that "god" is such a nebulous term that the question of belief is meaningless), Apatheists (people who just don't care), practitioners of Non-Deistic religions (such as Humanistic Judaism and some sects of Buddhism), and even heretics who spoke against religion like Diagoras of Melos (gay guy who chopped up a statue of hercules and used it to bake beans. king.)

In a fantasy universe where gods are provably, visibly real, the term "Atheist" is going to look a lot more like those historic and expansive uses.

Unless you want to argue that "atheism" by the narrow, popular definition of "believing in deities" can't exist in such a setting. So, arguing that Cloudtail stopped being an Atheist when he saw demons in OotS, in spite of this not affecting his spiritual practices. Or, dancing around using one uniting term, you could specifically say Curlfeather is a Misotheist, Splashstar is an Antitheist or Agnostic, Mothwing is Deist, etc.

You could have a discussion about how applicable these words even are in the setting. Or make up terms that satisfy yourself. You could do this forever. But I choose not to.

I think it's counterproductive to push people to learn a bunch of terms for hyperspecific branches of irreligious philosophy just to discuss clear anti-secular sentiment within the text of a book, actually. Or push people to abandon a useful word because fantasy isn't exactly the same as real life. Functionally, imo, all of those aforementioned cats are Atheists within this setting, living "without god" by rejecting belief-- and many of them invoke real world bigotry, with tropes much older than WC itself.

So the simple fact is; Calling Splashtail an "Evil Atheist" immediately communicates the narrative tropes I am criticizing.

Either by authorial accident or on purpose, Splashstar's lack of morality being tied to his rejection of StarClan invokes the demonized atheist trope, very much like the ones seen in PureFlix's God's Not Dead or Jack Chick's The Last Generation.

All the arbitrary wishing that the terms were more narrow and exclusive will not change the reality that those characters are intended by bigots as atheists. The terms of the discussion reflect that. Trying to tut-tut the fandom for calling a spade a spade is a smug way to phrase you completely missed the damn point.

[nexahexagon]

Something abt characters that do what they need to to survive, and succeeding. But looking in a reflection and realizing they’re so mutated and mutilated by what happened that they’re completely unrecognizable. And they can never grow past it anymore because it has become them, basically.

[madcatacres]

Leebyebye

[thursdaythen]

[whumpdoyoumean]

From Rahul Kohli's Instagram story

[pain-in-the-everywhere]

One of my favourite ways to do a trauma reveal is to have Caretaker look through Whumpee's sketchbook.

Maybe they've never seen it before. Maybe they've seen Whumpee drawing but never got a close look. Maybe they've seen the pictures before but never seen the details.

Either way, one day Caretaker finds the sketchbook left open in Whumpee's room. They know they shouldn't look, but curiosity gets the better of them because Whumpee has always been so secretive about it. Surely one glance wouldn't hurt...

The pages are full of pain and suffering in graphic detail.

At first, it just looks like a horror show. Blood, torture, captivity. But then Caretaker looks closer at the figure featured in every drawing and realises it's Whumpee. It doesn't seem in character for Whumpee to fantasise about that kind of thing, but Caretaker can't wrap their head around the other option which is that the pictures are memories.

They close the book quickly and slip out the room, trying to pretend that nothing happened. When they next see Whumpee, they have to decide whether to stay quiet about it or to confront them, risking betraying Whumpee's trust in the process.

[whumpdaydreamerx]

Caretaker having to rip Whumpee’s shirt off to find and tend to their wound…

OR

Having to cut the shirt off of them…

[lexalovesbooks]

I love chosen one characters and I love characters that are overpowered as all shit. I love characters with one-of-a-kind powers and I love characters who seem like they’re Just Some Guy until they do something that should be impossible and you’re struck with the realization that. oh. I don’t think this character is human. I love characters so strong they’re basically untouchable and I love characters who are slowly crumpling under the weight of being the only person who can keep the world safe but can never show it and I love characters who spend years hiding who they truly are until circumstances force them to reveal themselves and now they can never go back to who they were before. I love characters who don’t even know exactly how much they’re capable of and aren’t sure they want to find out. How powerful can you become before you stop being a person?

[pricechecktranslations]

Not sure if this was asked before, but what’s your favorite plot twist (or the one you think was the best written) in EC?

I've written about the Elluka-is-Levia twist before--genuinely I think that's the best one. I won't make another long essay about it but I think it added a ton of depth and really turned the series on its head.

Close second would be the Margarita-is-Eve twist. I adore it. I know a lot of fans come away from all this thinking the story unfairly maligns Eve but I really, really enjoy her as a villain. There was something so creepy about discovering that everything you knew about a character was wrong, that this part of the backstory which had up until this point been distant and far removed from the rest of the series was actually still relevant the whole time. It was Eve's debut in the novels, you know, not counting her other identities. Revealing that she had deceived not just Elluka but the reader as well.

It's true there are some parts of it that don't 100% work--I don't know what the deal was with Platonic, and she didn't sound particularly like Eve when speaking to Mikulia in her head--but there's so many elements that line up with it, I do truly think it was planned all the way back in the Daughter of Evil series, if not from the start. "Mikulia" being callous enough to murder her own child, the way the Sloth doll has been described as the "mother" of all sins, Irina carving it to look like Eve...It's one of those "the truth was staring you in the face all along" type reveals, but it just hadn't occurred to anyone as the kind of thing that could happen in-universe.

And it's one of those twists that's just. Not as easy to enjoy now that the cat's out of the bag, you know? Everyone takes for granted that Eve is the demon of Sloth, that most of the contracts in the series are unique in how they occur. But the twist completely changed how we (I, at least) viewed the series. The Seven Deadly Sins series frames itself as very formulaic with its first two books; contractor gets a demon vessel, makes contract, bad shit happens, they die and Elluka shows up too late to make any meaningful intervention or retrieve the vessel. The Sloth novel sets itself up as following this same formula. Only, we discover that there was never any demon and there was no contractor either. It was the spirit of a human mage instead, driven mad by living as a demon for centuries. It completely broke the formula.

And this also came at a time when the identities of the demons as a whole were largely unknown to us, so they were viewed as more monstrous beings (because all we knew was their corrupted animal forms). This made it stand out more that Eve was actually human, and thus not one of them. New fans of course know that the demons were all originally Second Period denizens, so Eve no longer feels like as much of an anomaly. I once had an anon ask what the line "false sin" meant in Crimes and Punishments because to their knowledge it was only "revealed" that Eve wasn't part of the original demon lineup in the OSS novels--No!!! it's referring to the twist of the Sloth novel! Argh!!!

Anyway, apologies for the long essay on that one. Another twist that I deeply enjoy and is absolutely ruined for all new fans forever is the reveal that Irina is the red cat, not the mage whose shoulder it perches on. The thing is that her (narratively) first host, Abyss IR, being an old woman gave her a semi-plausible reason to have history with the immortal Elluka, and it played into stereotypes about "evil old crones" besides (even Arkatoir talks smack about her for being old and creepy, which is doubly tragic in hindsight given that this was an innocent woman being controlled for who knows how long). And not knowing that it's actually the cat that's the problem creates a lot of mystery and tension with plot points like Elluka being "possessed" by Abyss, Mikina taking in the red cat later, etc. The beginning of the fourth novel starts with the heroes heading to Marlon to confront a great conspiracy that they believe Abyss IR is at the head of, and then when they get there they discover that she fucking died offscreen! Brilliant! Completely ruined by knowing the truth ahead of time!