we don't talk about it enough but duck and billy's relationship in amnesty is truly a tragic one.
imagine: you rescue a mindless drone. you save his life, you give him autonomy, you give him language. you teach him trust. you protect him at your own expense. you name him billy. he knows three words in your language, and one is your name. you promise to keep him safe, and he betrays his programming to help you in return. he defies everything he was designed to do in order to aid you.
you save him from being a drone, but in doing so, you kill him. he was never supposed to be here this long. you gave him freedom at the cost of rapid decay, and now he's dying. and if he could just go back to his home planet, he would live, but he doesn't want to. because you're here. duck newton, his first friend, his savior, his guardian. you showed him that there is a better way to live - with free will, with pizza and playstations.
he's damned if he stays and damned if he goes. but you can't watch him suffer. that's not who you are. you're duck newton, local beefcake, defender of the disadvantaged. so you wait until he's engrossed in his video game - in humanity, in freedom of choice - and you strike him down out of mercy.
billy reverts to his original form: a four-armed being of light, once a drone, now a friend. he's beginning to disintegrate, but he has unfinished business here. he never finished his video game. and you give him one last gift of mercy: you lie to him. don't worry, you tell him - that character you're worried about? she's fine in the end. no, i know it seems bleak now, but she turns out okay.
you can't give him anything else, so you give him hope. it's the same thing he gave to you, all those months ago when you saved him.
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so my boyfriend is very into cologne and i have smelled a whole freaking lot of cologne because he usually asks me to smell them before he buys them and so i have this weird pocket of knowledge of mens cologne that i never use until im watching celebrity interviews as background noise and they inevitably answer the "what do you smell like" question and then i judge them heavily because they all say either fucking chanel blue or tom ford ombre leather or dior sauvage like. you are a millionaire. you can afford to not be basic thank you and goodnight.
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The Exorcists’ Masks of Virtue
The vast majority of Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have a notable design element that other angels don’t: their masks are missing an eye. Specifically, the right eye.
I believe this is a reference to the Bible, Matthew 5:29. Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
He’s being hyperbolic. Mr Free Healthcare was not pro-mutilation. What he means is that you have to be willing to make sacrifices to prevent sin. The context of the eye metaphor is him condemning adultery and warning that even something as easy, casual and small as a look full of lustful intent can lead to further, worse sin if you don’t notice your sin, hold yourself accountable for it and do the work to not let it influence your decisions. This will probably be hard. It could be very, very painful. Changing your perspective can feel as horrible as plucking out your eye, so many people can’t bring themselves to do it. But although it won’t feel that way in the moment, it’s healthier for our general wellbeing in the long run to abandon traits and behaviours that damage ourselves and/or others.
(You may notice that Jesus’s teaching that you can have sinned, redeem yourself by giving up sin and thus escape damnation is the founding principle of the Hazbin Hotel. You may also notice that it contradicts everything the Exorcists believe.)
The Exorcists seem to follow this idea of painfully excising badness for the sake of the greater good devoutly to the point of placing it above teachings like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, with their job being to remove sin, in the form of sinners, to protect Heaven. Hence the missing right eyes. They’re a declaration of moral righteousness and inability to stumble.
But the truth is that the Exorcists all have their right eyes. Their flawlessness is a facade. Underneath, they are untouched, think themselves morally untouchable and, as shown by their horror and outrage when even one of them is killed, would much rather be physically untouchable too. This perfectly represents their complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own faults, let alone improve. They are never the ones who sacrifice. They force the sinners to sacrifice and don’t compensate it with any salvation. They metaphorically rip out the sinners’ eyes, but still condemn their entire bodies as inherently, permanently sinful. So they’ll just have to do another Extermination to get the other eyes! And another one to cut off their right hands! And so on until there’s nothing left.
The only exception to the rule is Vaggie, both in appearance and character. Her mask has the left eye crossed out instead. Even before her expulsion, she’s set apart to the audience as an Exorcist who has the capacity to, shall we say, see a different side of things. Her mask having its ‘sinful’ right eye reflects her understanding that the Exorcist worldview is wrong.
When she almost kills a demon child, her hateful vision clears. She discards the part of herself that’s an unquestioning, merciless agent of death, terror and grief… and as punishment for what Lute perceives as treacherous weakness, gets her eye plucked out.
Of course Lute leaves her with only the ‘sinful’ eye. It brands Vaggie forever as the inversion, a perversion, of what the Exorcists are meant to be.
You know, all this talk of eye removal in the Bible reminds of another line - ‘an eye for an eye’. Adam directly quotes it in “Hell is Forever”. He uses it to frame the Exterminations as Old Testament-style punitive justice; the sinners did harm and so they receive it. But putting aside the debate about how ethical the concept of revenge is, the entire point of taking an eye for an eye is that it’s proportional. The punishment fits the crime. If someone cuts your eye out, you shouldn’t murder their whole family in front of them and then slowly disembowel them to death. That would be the sin of wrath. You should just make them pay without excessive pain or collateral damage. This is the fairest form of revenge.
The Exorcists don’t do that! The Exterminations aren’t proportional to the wrongs of all they hurt, nor was Vaggie’s brutal punishment equivalent to her extremely mild insubordination. Lute literally takes Vaggie’s eye, and more, after Vaggie does nothing to her! That’s the opposite of the phrase! Adam and his soldiers are wrathful and cruel, deriving satisfaction from others’ suffering. But they just can’t stop going on and on about how disgustingly evil the sinners are, in total hypocrisy… despite some of the sinners being far better people than the genocidal Exorcists are… it’s like they’re obsessed with specks of dust in the sinners’ eyes when they have massive logs stuck in their own. Oh hey, that’s in the Bible too!
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something that kind of bothers me about modern feelings toward the epic of gilgamesh is how it's been COMPLETELY watered down to being "gay". Bear with me as I explain.
this is more of an extreme example, but I see this take all the time (not the yaoi part. the gay lover part). it's boiled down to the fact that it's gay over literally anything else in the epic. Gilgamesh's lament to Urshanabi about Enkidu's loss is overshadowed by the fact that Gilgamesh is mourning his gay lover. Gilgamesh is on a journey because he lost his gay lover. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were gay.
Now I understand that with a modern lens, people tend to lock on to how unabashedly Gilgamesh mourns Enkidu, because it's gay and because it's the oldest written epic in human history. People feel deeply connected to the idea that people like them have been around since the dawn of literature. But placing exclusive focus on the nature of the relationship as gay, rather than why the relationship or its loss was important, erases the story the epic is trying to tell.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story about love, yes, but it is not a love story. It's about the fear of death, coping with loss, and desperation to stave off the inevitable. It's about the bonds of friendship, about hardship, coming to terms personal change and losing pieces of yourself as you learn and grow. It is about consequences, arrogance, death, second chances, mourning, yearning, loving and LIVING. The Epic of Gilgamesh is about the entire human experience and one man's struggle to accept it. What does it mean to have lived? What does it mean to have loved, and lost? What does it mean to die, and to be remembered? What does it mean to be human?
It is perfectly okay to find appreciation for the Epic because of Gilgamesh and Enkidu's relationship. But also understand that the world's oldest story is not about two gay men who loved each other. It is a story about being alive.
TLDR;
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Thinking about sex where they just need you so bad that they can't wait anymore. Where as soon as you get inside, they're pinning you to the wall, or pushing you down onto the floor/couch/bed. The rough kisses, the almost tearing of clothes, wandering hands, and the sounds they don't even know they're making. The tight hugs, the desperation as they sink down onto you, needing you as close, as deep, as much as possible. The muffled "I love yous" as they struggle to keep their lips off your body enough to breathe. I just want that love making, wildly desperate, overwhelmingly intimate sex so so badly.
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