@val-the-bun you are Evil. You are evil putting this in my inbox.
More were-harpy Vaggie but it's sad now and everything HURTS
(copy pasted here bc the format in the ask got effed but i refuse to suffer this alone)
val-the-bun asked:
And then, of course, *the trial happens*.
And *the absolute shit timing of the fallout*.
Charlie is too stuck in her own spiral while vaggie just... Tries to hole up on her own (her usual 'nest' was in their suite. But she didnt want charlie to have to deal with her).
Charlie is curled up on vaggie's side of the bed, buried in blankets while she questions if anything they had was real.
While vaggie is in agony for the first time in three years since she'd started changing. Every fiber of her being wants to call for charlie. Yearns for that safety... but instead she bites her tongue and just curls in on herself, alone in the room she hastily barred shut. ~~She deserves this. To be alone.~~
Not sure which hazbin is the one to hear vaggie's pain and tries to check on her (let's go with angel and husk).
The hasty barricade she put on the door isnt enough. Not when the others are trying to force it open.
Vaggie tries to scream for them to go away. The last scrap of clarity she has before that warning turns into a predatory *shriek*. Vaggie's monster form tears apart the already falling barricade, and bursts into the hall.
'WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!'
'Fuck if I know, just run! Angel, hurry up!'
Vaggie is *tearing through the halls*, jaws snapping after Husk and Angel. They manage to hit the lobby, Husky grabbing Angel and flying like his life depends on it.
Meanwhile monster vaggie leaps after them... *right into the chandelier*.
Charlie hears the sound of that distant, shattering crash down below, and she *realizes*. Suddenly those painful worries have to get shoved down as charlie bolts out of their room.
'Please dont hurt anyone. Please, please, *please...!'*
Charlie's heart sinks as the shadows around the hotel start to writhe, and radio static fills the air.
'My my, what a surprising turn!'
Vaggie is *shrieking*, thrashing against shadowy tendrils as she tries to claw at Alastor.
'Now now. *Stay down*'
A rap of his cane, and vaggie's practically being crushed into the floor.
'What the fuck is wrong with you?!'
Husk is holding Angel back, looking away as Alastor starts to raise his hand. He cant watch this...
'Let her go.'
Alastor freezes when he feels the tip of an angelic spear under his chin.
There, standing at his side, in her full demon form, *is Charlie*.
'Ah, miss Charlotte. Lovely to see--'
'Let. Her. *Go!'*
For a moment, everything is quiet except for the sounds of vagging struggling, her talons digging into the floor. She's bleeding, golden blood pooling on the lobby floor... *And dripping from the claws on Alastor's hand.*
'Oh, very well. Good luck!'
Vaggie is snarling when Alastor lets her go. She starts getting ready to pounce when Charlie steps in front of her, spear in hand. Vaggie starts backing away, looking less like a predator and more... *like a cornered animal*. Her whole body seems coiled to run away as she keeps backing up, snarling and shrieking more in warning than anything else.
'Was it a lie?'
Vaggie shrieks at her, swiping at the air in the hopes Charlie would stay away.
'When you told me you didnt know what this was, was it a lie?'
Angel starts to step forward, but husk grabs his arm.
'Just let them do this...'
'Did. You. Lie?!'
Vaggie backs right into the wall, feathers flaring with a hiss.
'Was any of it real?'
Charlie can feel the tears on her cheeks. But what she wasnt expecting was to see tears in Vaggie's eye... Even as she snarled, and shrieked, and snapped her fangs, she was crying.
Charlie presses forward, Vaggie raising up over Charlie with a hawk-like screech, talons lashing out... But they dont connect, her talons *trembling* as they stilled inches from Charlie's face, her own spear aimed at her chest. Vaggie's eye is wild and afraid, but Charlie can see the *pain* there, too. She let out another shriek, closing her eye like she was bracing for the inevitable...
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My favourite thing ever is the way Ashley gets Leon to smile. Honest to god, his most sincere and genuine smiles are the ones he's given Ashley.
Now if she could just get him to laugh, that would be something completely unprecedented.
Sorry, it just occurred to me literally today that Leon never laughs -- even one time -- at any point in this series. Other protagonists, at the very least, laugh at how stupid a villain's plan is sometimes. Not this guy. Not our Leon. He's too dead inside. Bro doesn't even laugh at OG Salazar, who may as well have circus music playing in the background any time he's on screen. We stan a depressed king.
I was actually thinking about this a little last night -- again, in the context of the whole "Ashley is Leon's anchor to reality/his road back to himself" thing that I've talked about before, while also paired with the shitpost-but-not I made the other day about Leon's sense of self-worth and identity.
Leon drifts further and further away from himself as the series goes on, and not only does he not smile anymore, he becomes downright sullen. There was a time -- a significant period of time, actually -- where you could have said that one of Leon's defining traits was his optimism. That stops being true by the time of Damnation; Leon's optimism is replaced by hollow machismo in a poor attempt at a coping mechanism in that movie -- and, by the time of Vendetta, even the machismo has fallen to the wayside. By the age of 37, Leon has completely and utterly embraced the creeping sense of despair that's been hounding his steps for years.
That has never been who he was. But it's who he is now.
And, as soon as I had that thought, something occurred to me that I somehow had not noticed in the 18 years since RE4 OG has been out:
Ashley is a foil for Ada.
That wasn't her intended purpose when she was created, but it's the narrative role that she's come to inhabit as the series has gone on and Leon's character has progressed without her.
In OG canon, Leon thinks of Ada as a part of himself that he can't let go. But the longer he clings to her, the less of himself he becomes.
And the last person to actually see him as his true self, lifted up from the despair, and without hiding (fully) behind a veneer of machismo was Ashley -- someone he did let go. Even in OG, he is very genuine and very sincere with his affection for her (platonic or not) in a way he really isn't with anyone after RE4.
So, when you point out that his smiles for her are genuine, there's really something to that. He trusts Ashley with a piece of his heart that he doesn't show to anyone else post-RE2. Like, literally, the last person who probably saw him like that was Sherry, and we already know that Leon estranges himself from her almost completely after they're taken into CIA custody following RE2.
And the Remakes make this way more obvious than the OG games did, too -- not only because of the RE engine being great for facial expressions, but because of the way the script changes make certain parts of Leon's character more noticeable. If you go straight from RE2make to RE4make, the entire opening sequence involving the cops and the hunting lodge is absolutely horrifying. If I was a new fan coming in from RE2make to RE4make, I would be knocked on my ass and going "This is not my Leon. This is not the sweet boy that I know. What the fuck happened to him?"
RE4make does such a good job with sharply juxtaposing who Leon was with who he is now. By the time of RE4make, Leon is so beaten down and tired and closed off and angry and, honestly, scared -- that he almost kind of feels like a completely different character. Except, he's not a different character. He's still Leon -- just, Leon with his blinders ripped off and his heart broken.
And, we know that he's still Leon, because every once in a while, the sweet boy that we know comes back. It's infrequent, and it's only for a few moments, but he's still in there. And it always -- every single time -- is only ever Ashley that pulls it out of him.
And Ada? She forces him to retreat again immediately, and he locks himself back up tight.
So, when Ashley gets permanently erased from Leon's life and Ada becomes more of a permanent fixture in it, that sweet boy from RE2 disappears, and he's replaced entirely by the version of Leon that's heartbroken and angry all the time -- because Ada is a constant reminder of all that he's lost, whereas Ashley, as his only true success story, was a hopeful reminder of all that he could potentially be.
I honestly don't think that Capcom even realizes that this is how they've written Leon's character. I don't think it was intentional for Leon's smile to fade with Ashley's absence in his life.
But that's just kind of how it happened.
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saw a post talking about t.im as a 'nepo baby latchkey kid' and .... that's it that's him-
i think it was on the blog that i deleted a while back but i've always seen jack and janet d.rake in their late 30s / early 40s when they have tim, and only really having him because it's the societally acceptable thing to do. all their friends have kids already, and they need someone to pass things along to when they die, right? do they hate him? no. are they neglecting him on purpose? no. but are they good parents / do they put in any effort to parent responsibly? ALSO NO. <3
i definitely see the d.rakes viewing their parenting style as totally fine because 'what kid wouldn't want all this stuff? he's set for life!' janet stays with him when he's a baby, and they ship him off to the boarding school all their friends sent their kids to as soon as he's old enough. if his parents are gone on business trips during school breaks (really common), he's usually staying over at a friend's house or just vibing on his own at their estate when he's "old enough" (i wanna say 10-11 is when they start leaving him on his own, so he has time to go fan-stalk batman and the robins... but STILL TOO YOUNG).
t.im never sees it as a problem because that's how he was raised, he never really knew anything else. he treasures the time that he DOES get to spend with both his parents (going out to sporting events becomes something he's really into because he knows he can get them to go with him even if they'll spend most of the night talking business), but he's SO USED to being a latchkey kid and being left to his own devices that the mindset stays with him forever.
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