Honouring one of the most beautiful ff pieces ever written, "Lullaby for a stormy night" by ravenbringslight on ao3. The scene in the hot spring will just..haunt me.forever.
THE THRILLING AND NOT AT ALL REPETITIVE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MAN AND KID DANGER: “A CHRONOLOGY OF ENTIRELY TRUE AND HEROIC EVENTS COINCIDING WITH THE END OF HISTORY” [1] [2] [3]
Henry Hart returns from Dystopia. He grew up and his hair grew back out, but it’ll take more time to get refamiliarized with the mundane.
[ Henry’s figure is ominously silhouetted, staring at Ray with the whites of his eyes and a glare of light where his heart should be. Ray smiles invitingly, and stands with his hands on his waist, wearing only a towel. A laundry basket sits next to him. Posters are mounted on the wall to his back, including Captain Man merchandise, motivational material, and a reference to The End of History and the Last Man. ]
Following the resolution of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued in his 1992 political novel The End of History and the Last Man that global democratization and the expansion of Western, liberal values would bring about a post-war, post-development society. Democratization was the process in which civilization reached its final form; it would mark not only the end of communism, but the end of history. No more glorious revolution. No more hunger. The world could remain where it was. Fukuyama was, of course, wrong.
To be a hero is to know: there will be no end of history. You may hope for one, but you act as if it will never come, because it won’t. Otherwise, what is the point? There will be crime, and war, and hurt children. No amount of blood or money can save us for-ever. Your symbols cannot finish what has been started, but they can keep you alive until then; when you fight for long enough, it is hard to return to the repetitive things:
To living with people again.
To walking in the daylight without flinching, and, most importantly—
Camerupt (and Numel) sketchdump! Drawn with various traditional media (coloured pencil, acrylic paint, mechanical pencil, fineliners). Hope ya like seeing sketches, too, instead of only finished art, lemme know!
please ignore this if you disagree. this is just me thinking out loud but i keep coming back to this impulse shauna had to EAT the ear and of course there's been all this talk about how she wants to consume jackie. how it's wanting to destroy her how it's wanting to be as close to her as possible. but i'm interested in the physicality of it. like there is the metaphor of cannibalism and then there is the REALITY of it
i read about mortuary cannibalism in the past and i believe it wasn't even the close loved ones eating the dead usually because often it would be too hard for them and even those who weren't as close and were the ones to consume the dead would sometimes throw up while eating. like let's put aside for a moment everything this means narratively and metaphorically. there is the physical act of putting a real uncooked half frozen eat into your mouth and the fact that that's the ear of a person you LOVED. the ear you may have whispered secrets to during class and one you felt against your cheek when the two of you hugged. and shauna does that after gently caressing the ear in her pocket for an entire day
i think there's an interesting component to how she's interacting with dead-jackie. some part of her brain acknowledges that jackie is dead while a much larger part of her refuses to. and i think at least on some unconscious level she's aware of the way the cold preserves jackie's body. after the initial shock of finding jackie when we see her sit in the same room with her now she's keeping her distance. there's this feeling people usually get from seeing their dead loved ones especially if it's been a little while since they died - a feeling of alienation. the muscles are no longer animated, the skin no longer warm. a feeling of this person being foreign to you in some way suddenly. and so a part of me wonders if on some level she wanted to stop the ear from rotting now that it's not frozen, warmed by shauna's hand and safe in her pocket. i don't think it would be a conscious thought but it's just. walking around with that ear in your pocket. not wanting to part with any part of jackie. wanting to consume her yes but also wanting to preserve her in a very physical way in a sense