#a reclusive puppet maker or some shit

[inkyquince]

Thinking about... Old men... 🥰

[aguagua]

haha fuuuuuc I wrote a novel of headcanon for possible backstory for Donna B from re 8. I don’t really wanna share it in the tags. I just wanted a place to put it bc she is my beloved. Read it under the cut if you want 👊🤪

content warning : suicide and a lot of death

Donna Beneviento :

Born - 1947?

1950s - Sister passes, parents commit suicide

1986 - Claudia born

97 - Claudia passes

Approx. 97/98 - Joins M. Miranda

—-

Family / History / Backstory :

Benegario - Family ancestors branch off from Village and migrate to Italy —> Alps regions // Lombardy, Capo Di Ponte, Val Camomica

Leonardo Beneviento - Father

Andrea Fioralba - Mother

Leonardo was a puppet and mask maker, as well as a costume designer for operas staged at La Scala in Milan, and other more local theaters. His work was commissioned by many. He would also travel to Venice to sell and make masks for Carnevale. Eventually, he would begin to make toys, for his children, and sell them when they’d move to Village.

Bernadette Beneviento - Sister, b. 1942. Sickly child on and off.

Donna, b. 1947. Leonardo + Donna are close. He mentors her in making puppets + masks, she has an affinity for puppets. Spent many times in the backs of theaters, helping her father fit masks, alter costuming, and repair puppets. She loves opera. She’s gone to Carnevale w/ her father as well to make masks.

Possibility of move?? Bernadette is very sick?? M.M. Constantly reaching out to Benevientos anyway to get them to return to village. Possibly convinces them to move by saying she will help their daughter.

Father eases Donna’s nerves and tries comforting Donna about the move (leaving her friends and life behind) by crafting her Angie, a friend she will always have wherever they go. Donna is six.

Bernadette obviously does not survive MM’s experiments. Late 1957. Parents are both in hysterics. Andrea commits suicide in the following weeks, Donna witnesses this. Leonardo finds them both and is beside himself. Donna picks up the knife that Andrea used to end her life. Father tries to take it from her bc he doesn’t want her hurting herself. She freezes up and it’s like wrestling to get it out of her hands and accidentally, Leonardo severely wounds Donna. In immediate response, Leonardo in a state of pure lunacy, losing his eldest daughter, his wife and now assuming he had killed his youngest, ends his own life in front of her. Donna witnesses this too. This all happens extremely fast. It’s really volatile // reactive.

Donna just barely survives but her face is scarred and partially blind in her right eye. Clearly traumatized horrifically by the incident, she’s taken care of by the staff of the estate and Mother Miranda checks in often ((keeping her influence there))

Donna cannot communicate anymore herself, she’s latched onto her puppet, Angie and uses her to speak. Has bouts of isolation and has difficulty growing up w/o a family and navigating a very intense injury.

Inspired by MM’s “tireless work” to help save Bernadette and her being a sort of constant in her life now, she delved into studies of medicine and plants. Wanting to help other people who are sick.

Doll making, though, is a very sacred and special hobby to her and a craft she continues to hone privately. She’s extremely attached to Angie, treats her as her own sister. It’s all she has left.

Extremely sensitive about her facial scar + right eye, hides the right side of her face as much as possible.

Becomes a sort of medic to the Village. She sells salves, ointments, and medicines through Duke. Gives him toys and dolls she’s made to also sell, occasionally.

Beneviento staff raised her and helped her to slowly come out of her shell. Still very awkward, socially, and reclusive though. But, in becoming more social, she began to take patients in-house. Helped plenty, most of the time free of charge. This is how she had come to meet her eventual boyfriend, which was a very clumsy relationship that ended with her being pregnant, him leaving her and her trust broken.

Though, that resulted in Claudia being born! 1986. Donna is 39. Motherhood is what pulled Donna out of the dark. Even bringing her to much better communicate without Angie, though she still uses her. She’s a loving and very giving mother to Claudia who is very talkative and curious. Donna doesn’t mind all the chatter, she loved to listen to Claudia speak. There was a liveliness in the Estate and in Donna that hadn’t existed in a long long time. Claudia also adored Angie, Donna was at first hesitant and protective of Angie, but eventually permitted Claudia to take Angie and play with her however she wanted. Because of Claudias love for Angie, Donna began to make dolls for Claudia, often. Brilliant and beautiful toys with elegant and carefully detailed features + clothing. They’d even, a few times, gone down to the Village. Socialized some. Donna felt very Secure and in control for once.

But, like her sister Bernadette, Claudia was also sickly. Donna was just more equipped at giving Claudia the care and medicine she needed to live life happily. But, it came to a point in late 96, when no medicines or health care seemed to work anymore and Claudia was always bedridden and weak. Seemed only way to help Claudia at this point was to make her dolls that comforted her, But did not help her. In an act of desperation, being at a loss at what to do to save Claudia anymore, Donna turned to her idol, her new mentor of sorts, Mother Miranda. She pleaded for her to help Claudia and save her.

And MM did what she does best (lol).

** I think also MM might have been interested in using Claudia as a vessel for Eva so that doesn’t help either.

Donna snapped and snapped hard. Completely regresses to the way she was before. Is an Intense Agoraphobe. MM used the situation to her advantage. Manipulated her way further into Donnas heart empathizing w her Loss w her own and got her to join the family.

——

Post Cadou :

97 - Receiving the Cadou did not help her mental state. Actually became frightened of her own face At first because of the Cadou overtaking her scar and eye. reliving many traumas. this is an especially bad year.

Highly anxious, a manic depressive, still wont leave home unless it’s to see MM.

Attempts in some way to still cope with Claudias death by making and perfecting her dolls, has filled the whole house. She eventually learned of her ability to spread her Cadou amongst her dolls. Immediately does this with Angie + Angie very quickly became her own entity, Donna’s guardian, and lifelong companion.

Begins to experiment with what also she can use her Cadou for. She futzed with various plants and medicines, Angie once suggested she try reanimating the dead (that didn’t work) but Donna did end up accidentally making herself hallucinate, inhaling some pollen of an affected plant and she briefly saw Claudia. Began carefully studying this yellow flower and experimenting with it to see Claudia again. Tested it with her gardener, who then saw his late wife. Finding it worked, Donna, she tells the Gardener to come back again and she will show him the rest of his family. Before then she used the pollen to see Claudia again, but when she did it left her thinking :

“This is not Claudia, she will never be Claudia. I will never get her, my parents or sister back ever again. Why not just join them?”

—> in this hysteric state, she has a nervous breakdown, and when the gardener arrives, she doesnt end her own life. Instead, she took his. Donna still shows him his lost loved ones one last time, controlling the hallucinations to lure him around and out of the house and fall off of the cliff, crashing with the waterfalls.

She gave him the Gift of joining them. After taking the Gardener’s life, she fashioned a doll in his likeness and strung it up in a tree as if reaching toward the heavens.

She began to do this to any villager, who fell prey to Angie, who would come down to the Village, convincing them to experience Donna’s Gift, seeing their lost loved ones and subsequently tossing them to their own demise to be with them.

“None of her playmates have ever come back from that dank old estate.”

*** Donna really believes she’s doing these people a favor, “giving them a gift,” by luring them to the estate and killing them. It’s ultimately what she wants herself but won’t bring herself to act upon. ***

Okay woof holy shit that was a lot. I’m done for now. 😚

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Monster, Episodes 55-57

In which holy shit, holy shit, and furthermore, holy shit.

Holy Shit

So, is there a way to overuse the phrase “holy shit”? Because that’s where I’m at after this last stretch of episodes. Everything I could or want to say is subsumed with the desire to comically slap both hands on either sides of my head and say “holy shit” over and over again until the phrase loses all meaning. Holy shit, folks. Holy fucking shit, even. We just got our first goddamn flashback to the childhoods of Nina and Johann. We just got our most explicit deep dive yet into the life these two lived in the fateful days before Tenma saved Johann’s life in Dusseldorf. Sweet buttery Jesus, we’re getting answers! Actual goddamn answers! This whole dark web is finally unraveling right before our eyes! Not that it makes it any less gobsmacking; a good sixty percent of these episodes was just me receiving a new piece of the puzzle and losing another good two inches of my shit as I frantically tried to rearrange my thoughts and make sense of what was going on. Good fucking god, what do I even say? Everything is different now. Everything is coming together. Everything simultaneously makes far more sense and far less sense than it ever did before. And just to top the whole damn thing off, this deep plunge into the belly of Monster’s backstory finally brings us up to speed with the imagery and scattered moments from the OP that have been haunting us from the first goddamn episode. We’re really approaching the crisis point now, folks. There’s nowhere left to hide, and that’s really goddamn exciting.

There are so many sources to draw from- a notebook from Venderman’s father, Nina’s memories slowly returning, some knowledge from a creepy puppet maker, a final testament from General Wolf, and even a brief appearance by the Pretty Boy Bastard himself- and the tapestry they weave together is a dark and bloody one indeed. So let’s stop beating around the bush and dive right into parsing out just what all these revelations mean for the story we’ve been following.

Bonaparte’s Book Club

First, we’ve finally got some more information on Fritz Bonaparte and his mysterious Mansion of Red Roses. The father of the prodigal twins was a bizarre, graceful fellow, obsessed with the unsettling picture book stories he would write. He would invite children from across the village to be part of his book club, students at his reclusive mansion where he would read his stories to them and press them to figure out the messages behind each work. It seems I pegged him correctly in an earlier post; he saw his picture books as a way to express his experiences and understandings, an outlet for telling his stories to the world in a form they could actually understand. And as if the tale of The Nameless Monster wasn’t proof enough, he had some very fucked-up thoughts swirling around in that head of his. His tales are all tragedies, dark and sorrowful and ending with the lead characters suffering and/or alone. Why anyone let him keep writing for kids is beyond me; surely some parents would have wanted him burned at the stake. Never mind the fact that he apparently had another fucking kid we didn’t know about; the creepy puppet maker who was a member of this fucked up book club was apparently also a son of Bonaparte. But is he only a half-sibling to Johann and Nina, or does he share their fraternal bond? Because either answer would mean drastically different texture to Bonaparte’s eerie legacy.

But what truly sticks out to me after getting a chance to read more of his stories is how fundamentally hopeless they all are. The monster wants to get a name, but the only way he can do so is by devouring everyone around him, and once he finally gets a name, there’s no one left to call him by it. The demon offers to make a deal with two men, but no matter if they accept or refuse, they end up starving and destitute. The god of peace does so many things to help the people around him, but when he takes a moment to reflect upon himself, he sees inescapable darkness within him that must be snuffed out. Time and time again, his characters reach for good things, only for the attempt to leave them with nothing left to hope for. I can 100% believe Johann’s nihilism was a product of such a parentage; if my parents were reading stories like this to me every night, trying to make me understand and internalize the hopeless messages they portrayed, I’m sure I would have ended up a very different person. It’s a legacy of despair passed from father to son, a message that Johann now carries on for his dear departed dad. Whether Bonaparte with his books or Johann with his crimes, both of them want to make the world understand its inescapable entropy.

The question is: why?

The Massacre of Red Roses

And the answer to that question can only lie in the moment where, as the third Bonaparte child, the Monster itself was born: the massacre at Red Rose Mansion. Forty-six men of unknown distinction were killed and buried in the back garden, their blood seeping into the floorboards, and in that maelstrom, the Monster was born. But why then? According to the scattered sources we gather across these episodes, Bonaparte and his cohort of mysterious men were engaged in some sort of terrible experiment, but what kind of experiment would lead to so much bloodshed? Was the birth of the Monster their intention? And if so... what, even, is this mysterious Monster? Because the more information we get on it, the more certain I am that there is something... outside of nature going on here. The way everyone talks about this Monster is almost like it’s a demon, some supernatural force risen from the blackest pits of hell to wreak havoc upon the moral world. And then, Nina spends so much time talking about how Johann was the one taken to that mansion and subjected to Bonaparte’s book club, but somehow she’s getting flashes of that experience like they’re her own memories returning to her. She’s literally retracing the path Johann told her he took when he was taken away from the apartment above the three frogs, but the memories that flow back to her... are her own. Hell, that’s even true of that moment some ways back where she remembers Johann being taken away, but then she remembers herself being welcomed back by, well, herself.

It’s almost like... like she’s seeing through Johann’s eyes.

What, exactly, happened on the night of forty-six deaths? What was achieved? What power, if any, was brought forth? Why does it seem like Nina and Johann are somehow psychically linked? Because this can’t be a case of simple psychopathy anymore. There’s just no way all this is tied to a single troubled mind with a death wish. And then, just to make things even more head-turning, we get an honest-to-god flashback to the night Nina and Johann’s adopted family was killed, with explicit confirmation from Johann that it was the Monster who killed them in order to take the kids away... and there was someone else in the house that night. Someone else walked in through the front door, someone who could have just as easily pulled the trigger as Johann. And his body was nowhere to be found when the cops arrived. But if that man was the Monster, then what the hell is Johann even doing? Or did the Monster somehow transfer to him at some point? Is Johann a victim of circumstance, or did he take this calling of his own volition? Where did this evil come from, and is it a force beyond the minds of men? What was Bonaparte hoping to achieve by making children understand his stories? Did Kinderheim occur before the massacre of the Red Rose Mansion? After? Somewhere in the middle? My head is spinning with a million different possibilities, each one making less sense than the last. All I know is that right now, I am less certain of what’s really going on in this show than I’ve ever been. And that thought terrifies me.

A World With No Names

That said, for all the chaos and confusion of this peering into the past, there’s one thing it makes very abundantly clear: Johann genuinely loves Nina. He may be a sociopath hell-bent on a nihilistic vision quest, but his sister is the most important person in the world to him. He sees them as two halves of the same whole, and given the possibility of a mental link between them (and if I remember correctly, didn’t the nameless monster in the story split himself in half to look for a name?), he may be more literal than I thought. As a child, he speaks of giving the world to her, acorns and shopping malls and the blue sky above all for her. When they escape the terrors of the Czech regime and make it to the windswept border, he refuses to leave her behind, even as he feels them both sinking to their deaths of exhaustion. And when the Monster comes knocking at their door once again, like the God of Peace, he asks her to destroy the darkness inside him, promising her that even dead, he’ll still be with her. Because I am you, and you are me. Two halves of the same whole, two nameless monsters stripped of their identity and clawing to find new ones so they can return to being one, being whole again.

Names are such an important part of this show’s darkness. Johann and Nina were stripped of their original names as part of Kinderheim’s darkness, molded into blank slates without identities of their own. As they ran across the border, Johann couldn’t answer Nina as she begged him to say her name, even as she called him by the new moniker he had been given. It was only when Wolf confirmed his new name as Johann that he accepted that title, turning it into a badge of purpose as he began his quest against the world. In his darkest moment, he saw a world with no names, where he was as lost and stagnant as the nameless monster from his father’s fairy tale, grasping at straws in an empty world as death slowly overtook him. Names are akin to existence itself in the language of Monster, and those stripped of their name become representatives of the darkness underlying all humanity. They are the forgotten, the unspoken, the voiceless screaming silently in formless rage. And according to Wolf, with Johann’s mission reaching a fever pitch, it won’t be long before those nameless hordes- maybe the last of the lost Kidnerheimers, maybe the former children scarred by the Red Rose Mansion- come scrabbling back to the surface to feed. Munch munch. Gobble Gobble. Gulp. Until they finally have names to call their own once more.

At least, that’s a theory. At this point, there’s no telling just how off base I am. All I know for sure is that Johann is searching to complete his name. To find the other half of the nameless monster he sees himself as, and grant her the same grace he’s fighting for himself. Because that’s the only way he sees to make sense out of... everything. In a world that’s as hopeless and inescapable as the loneliness of the nameless monster, she’s the one guiding light he can still see. And he wants to keep that light burning as long as he possibly can.

Find Your Happy Ending

And that leaves the twins at a crossroads. Their legacy is one of darkness and despair, of countless tangled threads and shards of broken glass. They are the nameless monsters wandering a cold world with no one to speak their names. So where do they go from here? For Johann, the answer is to literally burn the past to the ground, to wipe away all remnants of the person he no longer is until the shadows are no longer cast over him. Speaking to the portrait of his mother, it almost sounds like he’s beginning to find closure for the darkness in his past, making peace with where they came from and where they’re going. He wants to understand, to let the rest of the world understand, and let that understanding purge it all away. But Nina hasn’t given into that despair just yet. Not with Dr. Tenma’s words still echoing in her mind: “Tomorrow will be a good day.” Tenma as an agent of hope is the one force that can hope to stand against the Bonaparte’s broken legacy saying that no, the world isn’t doomed, the future isn’t set in stone, and your path still awaits for you to make of it what you will. And if there’s nothing but bad memories waiting for you in the past, then all you have to do is make better ones in the present. The sins of the past weigh on everyone in this show, from Tenma to Nina to Johann to Venderman to everyone in between, as they try to make sense of the mistakes of their forebearers that still color them today. But the melancholy stories Bonaparte wrote are not the only stories they’re able to tell. If there are still happy ending out there, then they’re worth tracking down, no matter the risk.

And that light is what drives out protagonists forward. As Johann burns away every shred of who he used to be, Nina and Tenma and everyone else look to build up everything they have the potential to be. Even nameless, they hold fast to the names they’ve come across, the people they’ve become giving them new names to speak as their own. We are lost to the strands of time, but even forgotten, there’s always the chance to find yourself anew. To remember the names you once held, or hold onto the names you now have. The conflagration will pass, the fires will die, and the sun will rise tomorrow. As long as that faith holds fast, then tomorrow will be a good day. And god willing, we can hold on long enough to see it through.

Odds and Ends

-”I find myself coming up with a theme for each of my trips.” Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.

-Over the Rainbow. Of course that’s where he hid it.

-”When you start a long journey, you gotta have something in your stomach or you won’t last to the end.” This guy gets me.

-”It’s all beginning to spin out of control!” Oh, we are far past that point, buddy.

Good god, man, this show takes me places. See you next time!