#the point of the film is literally you need valid cause to vacate someone from their home and doing otherwise for the sake of

[grahamkennedy]

Throwback to that time my mum was like "how can you be a commie when your favourite film is The Castle and it's about the rights of property owners". Oh you mean the movie about a working class family who aren't landlords, who live in a modest house they happen to own because it's 1997 and that's still feasible, fighting for their house not to be taken away from them by corporations? Yes they own their house but it's also 1997, when working class people owning their home wasn't weird, and half of their fight in the movie is "hey you billionaires literally have other options you do not have to strip us of our home it's just cheaper for you to tear down our house".

[bthump]

What are your thoughts or analyses on the phallic imagery in berserk? Less so the more obvious ones like seen in Casca’s nightmares which are obviously pointing to her sexual trauma, but like we see with the vagina-esque monsters and how Guts’ sword is alluded to being like a penis in some cases. Sorry if it’s a weird question lol

Sorry for the wait on this lol, I was on vacation for a while, and it's also a topic I wanted to spend some time on because I love it and I wanted to be relatively thorough. Thanks for the ask!

So yeah, disclaimers out of the way, Freudian analytical theory is very silly, very gender essentialist in ways that can often be transphobic and misogynist, and as far as I'm aware pretty much wholly unrelated to real psychology. Back in the 70s and 80s you had film theorists who took it seriously as a genuine glimpse into the subconsciousness of humanity or whatever, but now it's pretty much just a readily available source of sex and gender related symbolism that's easy to understand.

And in Berserk I do genuinely think it's a valid lens to view the story through because Miura is often quite heavy handed in utilizing it as symbolism. I mean, Guts literally gives someone an orgasm by stabbing her at one point. Some of this can definitely be a stretch, taking established symbols and running with them, but some of it is also almost certainly purposeful. I'll leave it to you to decide what you see as legit and what you see as stretching believability here.

This is very long lol

So yeah, it starts off strong in Berserk with Guts' oversized sword. Swords are dicks, ie sources of masculine power, especially in Berserk

and in the context of the story the dragonslayer is Guts overcompensating imo. And it's not compensating for a small dick lol, which would be more the purview of comedy, but for a loss of masculinity, ie Guts' childhood abuse from Gambino, and rape trauma. It's about his need to prove himself because he was made to feel like he had to, imo.

And it's not just the size of his sword, his obsession with it is also a major factor. He has a grandiose speech about how his sword is like a part of his body (hmm) and that it's been at his side through everything and he's always relied on it. The dream he lands on is to be the best and strongest sword fighter ever. He's currently having a breakdown over not being able to hit someone with his sword. He has a recurring tendency to break other guy's swords lol. At one point Casca screams at him that he essentially cares about his sword more than her. etc etc.

In the story dreams are at odds with emotionally healing human relationships, and dreams are represented by swords (Guts' sword obviously, Casca becoming Griffith's sword, Griffith calling the throne a sword while taunting the king in the dungeon as well as his vision of himself throwing him a sword and pointing to the castle in chapter 72).

So through a Freudian lens, Guts' sword can also be said to represent emotional isolation, positioning masculinity as emotionally isolating. Which, yk, fits with Griffith also equating dreams and masculinity in his Promrose Hall speech (a man must achieve a dream before he can have a family or lover) and, I suppose lol, Casca getting "softer" and more feminine as she falls for Guts, as femininity is therefore the opposite: emotional reliance on and support of others.

So if swords are dicks, then it follows that wounds are vaginas, ie yonic symbols. Also pretty obvious when you read some of the lines during the Guts and Casca sex scene lol. "I too want a wound I can say you gave me." These can represent weakness and victimization (I did warn for misogyny lol) and/or (often sexual) relationships and emotional openness.

So you have the relationships - "licking wounds" with Casca; Guts letting Casca stab him when he thinks about abandoning Griffith; the Beast of Darkness calling Casca the wound Griffith left so Guts can keep feeling the pain Griffith caused; Griffith scratching his own shoulder where Guts' sword pointedly didn't wound him; Griffith being out of reach of Guts' sword post-Eclipse; "let's give him a heap of raw iron;" and Farnese grinding on Guts' sword while possessed and Slan directly treating being stabbed as sexual penetration for the most obvious examples...

Also I'd argue that any time Guts gets his ass kicked in a fight it functions as an echo of his rape trauma symbolically and subconsciously to Guts. Both kinda obviously at times, like eg when Slan overpowers him and tears off his shirt while wounding his chest, and kisses him after the stabbing, causing Guts to feel a burst of fear

or when Rosine stabs Guts through the mouth as another enemy who flirts with Guts mid-fight. And of course the first duel with Griffith in which Guts unilaterally sets the stakes to sex slavery because he's projecting.

But also a little more subtlely, such as when Zodd is given the same position as Nightmare Donovan in Guts' concussion nightmare after he kills Adonis, or all this consistent imagery that rapists and apostles tend to get.

Or, interestingly, the way the Berserk armour functions as self-harm as Guts fights by penetrating Guts to "heal" him.

Something that solidifies its hold over Guts and makes him lose more and more of his positive humanity to his urge to kill.

So yeah, from a Freudian angle I'd suggest that Guts is driven to fight to reclaim the sense of masculine power he was stripped of when he was raped, and every fight can be said to be a repetition of his rape trauma in which he (usually) successfully fights back, but also continuously retraumatizes himself rather than healing.

I'm going to delve a little deeper into how phallic and yonic symbols intersect with the characters' relationships now that we've outlined some of the preliminary symbolism, starting from the Golden Age.

The first duel between Guts and Griffith is rife with Freudian symbolism, very overtly. Griffith stabs Guts and then Guts proceeds to have a nightmare about his rape trauma. Then he projects that trauma onto Griffith when he assumes Griffith wants to fuck him and adds sexual stakes to their duel. Then, yk, he takes Griffith's sword into his mouth lol.

Griffith winning by dislocating Guts' arm can be easily taken as a symbolic unmanning/castration, nicely introducing us into Guts' three years of growth towards prioritizing relationships instead of aimless sword-swinging to prove himself. It's also suggestive of penetration when you're primed to look for sexual symbolism (and if Guts offering Griffith his ass and then biting a sword doesn't prime you for it, what does?):

And the two of them losing their swords in the course of the fight and resorting to unarmed combat can also be taken as a telling symbol of the conflict between dreams and their relationship with each other. They lose the symbols of their dreams and contend only with each other, in a more positive contrast to the second duel that ends their relationship, in which they fight only with swords and never touch each other.

Wounds come into it when Griffith nearly gets killed rushing in against Zodd to save Guts, leading to the most impactful moment of their relationship, where Griffith admits he did it solely for Guts' sake and had no other reason. Griffith also points out how wounded Guts is after that fight, in what I'd call a nearly flirtatious way:

And if you follow these symbols completely strictly this scene suggests Guts retreating into his defensive masculinity in his sword exercises after being defeated/emasculated by Zodd and accused of not valuing his personal relationships by Casca, and finally finding a new, more constructive purpose for his sword after Griffith essentially confesses his devotion to him.

Dedicating his sword to Griffith in return for the wounds Griffith suffered for his sake, with, it has to be noted when the topic is freudian symbolism, his sword held at exactly crotch level.

In the second duel Guts destroys Griffith's sword before leaving, a symbolic castration which is most likely intended to represent and foreshadow Griffith's subsequent loss of power when he throws his life away and ends up tortured in a dungeon for a year. More interestingly imo, is Griffith tracing scratch-markes on his shoulder after sleeping with Charlotte and while crying over Guts - the same shoulder Guts' sword didn't quite hit when he won the duel, drawing attention to the lack of a wound by Guts' hand, a wound he created himself and traces in his devastation.

You have a nice... I don't know what the comic terminology is lol so I'm just going to call it a match-cut here, with Griffith and Casca both getting penetrated by the same number of arrows/skewers, to signify Griffith and the Hawks' fall from power, in contrast to Guts' growing phallic power as he pursues his sword swinging. Power which he demonstrates when he returns and saves the Hawks and Casca and Griffith by swinging his sword a lot and defeating a lot of powerful enemies and, if I'm gonna be crass, healing Casca's suicidal despair with his dick lol.

Interestingly though, before he does that he lets Casca stab him while experiencing the guilt of having driven Griffith into a torture chamber by leaving. It's a wound that highlights his emotional connection to Griffith and vulnerability to those emotions, even as he tries to deny them. He then manages to successfully deny them for a little while longer after having sex with Casca.

In this Freudian context, Guts and Casca's sex scene is an affirmation of a relationship, but one which is emotionally uneven, with Casca ready and willing to emotionally rely on and support Guts, but Guts still dedicated to his sword-swinging dream, inviting Casca with him but only as long as she doesn't get in the way of what he wants to do. This does fit with phallic symbols being associated with emotional distance and yonic symbols being associated with emotional closeness lol. (Also fittingly, the one way he does open up to her is about his rape trauma after a flashback.)

It's worth noting that in this disconnect Casca erroneously assumes Guts fought the hundred men and "bled" for her, making her want "a wound" from him in return. Guts fighting those hundred men is much more reminiscent of his fights against apostles, the fights that revolve around replaying his rape trauma to make himself feel better. Casca assumes they already have an emotional bond due to Guts' wounds, but she's wrong - Guts specifically thinks to himself during the hundred man fight that he's not doing it for Casca.

This is reflected in the Wyald fight when Guts insists on fighting Wyald, again as part of the whole reaffirmation of masculinity thing I outlined at the start of this, when Casca just wants him to run away. The Wyald fight is pretty overt about being about Guts' rape trauma imo, moreso than most fights in the story. Wyald's rapiness is made a point of from Guts' point of view when he sees him wielding the torso of a woman sexually impaled on a pike and gets extra angry, and when he literally cuts off Wyald's dick when he's about to rape Casca, and then has his pointed line about needing to "settle the score with him... with them... by his own sword."

SO ESSENTIALLY to sum up this subsection, I think you can argue that what prevents Guts and Casca from being an equal relationship is Guts stlil being hung up over needing to prove his masculine power through sword-swinging, rather than embracing his emasculation (which, remember, tends to signify positive relationships in this context) and coming to terms with it ("immersing himself in sorrow" as Godo says much later.)

Like, to return to Griffith, it's fitting that after Guts destroys his sword and he goes through a year of torture and is thoroughly emasculated, he's able to recognize his feelings for Guts and understand that Guts is more important to him than the dream, the "sword called the throne."

But he doesn't quite come to terms with his emasculation either. This symbolism is one explanation for the wagon scene where he propositions Casca - a desperate bid for some form of power. Not the strongest explanation imo, but since we're currently in the business of actively looking for this symbolism, it definitely fits. Casca's rejection and pity reinforce Griffith's emasculation, and overhearing her tell Guts to leave again is the final straw. Relationships are a bust, swords are now his only recourse, as we see when he has a vision of himself throwing him a sword and pointing to the castle.

You could take the nightmarish vision he has of a life with Casca as Griffith rejecting emasculation, but an alternate way of taking it is Griffith regaining a form of phallic power, and the emotional isolation that goes with it. After all, it's implied that he has a child with Casca, while totally withdrawn and emotionally isolated.

I once said in a different silly essay that Griffith choosing the dream is, in a way, Griffith choosing another version that nightmare, and that take also fits here.

And hey, it's another reason for Femto to rape Casca lol, if we want to ascribe meaning there, and of course we must in this kind of analysis. In the wagon Griffith essentially offers sex to Casca for the faint vestige of masculine power it could give him (emotional isolation and a child); in his nightmare he imagines that life and it drives him to suicide; and after becoming Femto he forces sex onto Casca and then continues on to embody emotional distance and masculine power.

This power is painfully demonstrated through the rape of Casca, but also subsequently through his pure untouchability (often in pointedly sexualized contexts); through his phony relationship with Charlotte and ascending to the ultimate patriarchal role of king/emperor and taking that sword called the throne; and I guess also through his actual sword lol which he still uses.

An example of sexualized untouchability - check out the positioning of that third thought bubble, in this scene where Griffith lords his invulnerability over Ganishka.

And look at all those pillars, I'm js.

And I'd be remiss not to point out the most recent confrontation with Guts where Guts tries many times to hit his naked body with his giant sword, completely fails, and then Griffith kidnaps Casca. More very on-point emasculation symbolism, it might as well be Guts trying to fuck him but unable to get hard lol. His breakdown afterwards doesn't do much to disabuse you of that notion either.

Anyway, back to post-Eclipse Guts. There's not much else to add that I didn't cover at the start, but in brief:

Guts has lost his arm during the Eclipse, which is an emasculation - he loses it while watching Femto rape ~his woman~ so it's like the most traditional symbolic castration there is lol. And of course he replaces it with a bigger, better, and more overt phallic symbol: a canon. And like the first thing we see him do with it is shove it into the mouth of a monster he's banging and blow her head off. So yk, there's that.

And there's Puck, who exists to help bridge Guts' emotional distance and essentially serves as the feminine counterpart to Guts' masculinity for a while. From his magical empathy, to his tiny size, to his lack of genitalia (note that in Freudian theory the lack of a penis is an indicator of femininity rather than specifically the presence of a vagina), to his connections with female characters Theresia and Jill, even arguably to his introduction where Guts saves him from a bunch of men throwing phallic knives at him by skewering them with his own (bigger) projectiles, this is consistent during the Black Swordsman/Conviction arc era.

Chestnut Puck is a lot more boyish, with his particular humour, his cameraderie with an annoying teenage boy, and now having his own feminine counterpart in Ivalera, but that's fine because his thematic job as a feminine influence on Guts is over after Guts starts collecting more friends.

And as far as the RPG group goes, there are a few notable instances of phallic symbolism for them too. Farnese and Serpico are an obvious example, with Farnese sexualizing the wounds Serpico voluntarily suffers for her, when she demands he duel for her honour a bunch of times.

Farnese brandishing the end of her whip at him doesn't hurt the freudian power dynamic symbolism either lol.

In the Conviction arc Farnese wielded a sword she was incapable of using, suggestive of her true femininity under a brash masculine surface, and when she softens in the Millenium Falcon arc she becomes a caretaker with only a small dagger for self-defense. That said, she does get that epic moment of stabbing a tiger in the eye with a long silver pole (candlestick) when she rejoins Guts' crew rather than becoming a housewife, so she still gets some badass phallic weapon imagery lol.

Serpico wields a thin rapier in the Conviction Arc, which Guts easily grabs in his hand, and in the Millenium Falcon arc he switches to a... limp feather duster lol. Serpico is very feminized compared to Guts and his weapons fit as part of that, but they're still effective weapons. You could maybe argue, within this Freudian lens, that this is indicative of Serpico's healthier relationship with masculinity. He's not compensating for anything, he's at peace with himself.

And god I gotta say something about Guts and Serpico's duels. In the first one you have Serpico delaying Guts while Farnese steals Casca from him, and part of that delay is to force Guts into a fight where he can't wield his sword, a parallel emasculation to Casca being kidnapped.

Then you have their confrontation after Farnese's no good very bad night, which is just incredibly suggestive lol.

You cannot tell me this isn't Guts getting blueballed when Serpico leaves after one quick exchange. Particularly coming in the same chapter featuring possessed Farnese grinding on Guts' sword (which Guts was much less interested in, incidentally). Also: wounds as sexual imagery again. Guts licking the blood off his cheek? Come on.

And finally you have their fight in Farnese's basement, in which Serpico attempts to hinder Guts by surrounding him with giant pillars, which Guts smashes through as he dodges around them. Another neat illustration of Guts' pure phallic power and Serpico's much more effeminate style.

One final note to address part of your ask, which didn't naturally fit into the rest of this lol: I would interpret vaginal imagery in monsters as mainly castration anxiety, yk, vagina dentata vibes, the fear of sticking your dick in a hole you can't see into. There's actually a lot of interesting stuff to consider in terms of the feminine as the unknowable other when it comes to Freudian theory, but that's like, not something I would expect Miura to lean into first of all, and also it would take another essay of explanation. If you're interested in that kind of Freudian analysis though I'd recommend the books Men, Women, and Chainsaws by Carol J. Clover and The Dread of Difference, edited by Barry Keith Grant. I took a course on women and horror films ages ago and read chunks of those, and it was very fun, and iirc both address Freudian imagery in horror.

Okay! So that's the rundown of like, all the examples of Freudian imagery that interest me at least lol. This isn't exhaustive ofc, Berserk is long and not stingy with this stuff, but this response is already so long and meandering lol, so I'm going to wrap it up here.

To sum up, phallic imagery often represents masculine power as well as masculine flaws (like emotional isolation) in Berserk, while yonic/vaginal imagery tends to represent feminine weakness as well as feminine virtues (like emotional connection and vulnerability). As a general rule, the more phallic imagery someone violently swings around, the more fucked up they are. Phallic violence is used to compensate for past trauma, but it only continues the cycle of violence. The way to break that violence is to accept one's wounds and focus on them, to heal, rather than trying to distract from them.

I don't think this is always the best way to interpret Berserk lol, but it adds another dimension that very often complements the surface meaning and thematic resonance of the story, sometimes purposefully, sometimes likely incidental. And either way it's a lot of fun to read into!

[filisaceaf]

oof ok i have a lot so you can choose (phan aus for the headcanons ask): detective au (one or both of them), au where dan is still a fan/never met phil in 2009, supernatural au (one of them is not human), x-men-type mutants au, hogwarts au (i had to :p)

You wanted only one AU you said? I’m sorry, Phan is my hyperfocus of the month so it looks like you win the headcannons of 3/5 the AUs and you know what? I’m not even sorry my homie.

This is long so I threw it under a cut.

Detective AU

1. Okay so, one would think Dan is the detective with his charming good looks who could get him into locations easily and charm people but Phil is actually a great detective because even though he’s tall, he just lives his life wanting to help people find something lost or someone missing or make sure people are not being unfairly treated. Dan is more his handler, part secretary (look someone needs to make sense of Phil’s notes, file them in a way that makes sense and is easily accessible to other people, and make sure Phil doesn’t overwork himself into a migraine like he has the past three weeks) and part paralegal at Phil’s little detective agency. He is very protective of his boss.

2. Phil loves being a detective. He doesn’t like to “spill tea” on clients like some people like to think he does, but he likes helping 80 year old women who were robbed get their wedding rings back or help someone find their missing child (he wishes those cases turned out a lot better than they usually do, but at the very least he helps people begin to grieve). He likes helping find justice and is actually pretty particular about what cases he’ll take. He hates doing cases about people thinking their spouses are cheating and really he does those if he’s desperate to make sure that he can pay Dan and his bills.

3. You can pry this one from my cold dead hands but Phil definitely has a corgi named Watson that he likes to dress up in plaid. Watson comes to the office with Phil because of long hours and has a little bed under Phil’s obnoxiously large desk that he bought specifically so he could have a bed for Watson there. Phil likes to pretend he’s hurt by Watson also curling up under Dan’s desk (but really he just goes soft for Dan’s voice going high pitched and “hello Watson”).

4. Dan is not a lawyer in the AU, but he did complete a paralegal program! As a paralegal, Dan can do legal research for anyone, but usually he does it for any jobs Phil did that end up needing to go to court. He can also draft legal documents and is also a notary; he just can’t legally represent anyone in court. Dan likes to joke that he is a slacker to the fact that “I’m a lawyer, but the bare minimum of one”. They met at college when Phil was in his last year of majoring in criminal justice and media studies and Dan was still on the track to wanting to be a lawyer. He took a gap (period) of years, had an existential crisis, became better friends with Phil during that time. Phil originally started his detective agency with another partner and when they left, Dan took over the secretarial side of things. It took him a few years, but he eventually went back to school to finish his paralegal certificate and Phil cheered the loudest at his graduation ceremony.

5. I don’t know how these two get together in the AU, but just know it is a slow burn. Like literal years and months and eons of mutual pining with them taking Watson on walks and late nights at the office and shared coffee runs and Dan always being scared Phil is going to do something super dangerous for his health like climb in a vent or park to close to a gangster’s house and get shot. After they get together, they do agree that Dan should get a another job because working together and living together with Phil’s unpredictable schedule was causing some fights for a long period of time (because they didn’t live together before this point). Dan does still stop by pretty often and double check the secretaries work and curl up in the corner of the sofa of Phil’s office (“Dan’s sofa crease” Phil affectionately calls it) and work on stuff for his other job at a nonprofit for mental health awareness.

Dan is a Fanboy and Literally the Biggest Philly AU (The barely alternate timeline tbh)

1. So, this is literally always my favorite kind of AU and I have a lot of soft feelings about these boys always managing to find each other somehow. But yes, Dan got discouraged after the like 100th time of subtweeting Phil and commenting on his videos and not getting a response, he never reached out to Phil for editing tips. Instead!!! He reaches out to a few other YouTubers years later when he’s going through his existential crisis and he’s like “you know, the last time i was happy was when I on YouTube all the time”. So he takes a gap year in university to try and see if it’s something he likes doing. He was not expecting for his channel to be well received. It takes him ages to figure out the jumpcut thing.

2. Because he never got to know Phil as young as he did, when they first meet at Summer In the City, Dan is actively trying not to lose his shit. Because holy fuck. This is Amazing Phil. This is the guy who he would play in the background while he studied and would donate so much on live streams and upvote and fuck he’s wearing some OG Phil merch with Lion on it. He walks around all day with his jacket zipped up because Phil can’t know he’s a fan; Phil is so smart and creative and funny and god. He’s completely turned upside down when Phil sees him and approaches him because “you’re danny’s snot on fire, right?”

Dan never regretted a username more in HIS LIFE and this exact moment lead to his rebranding months later

3. But they exchanged contact information and eventually did a collab video: Phil is Not on Fire. And they whole time, Dan is trying not to breathe too deep or do anything annoying because he’s in Phil’s bedroom??? His filming area??? His pants are on the floor like two feet away??? And when the tackle happens, Dan hopes he didn’t get a concussion and hallucinated the whole thing because Phil is warm and grinning at him with his tongue sticking out and holy shit, this is better than any video, gif, screen redraw, anything. Seeing it up close??? 

4. Phil doesn’t even notice Dan’s a fan until him and Jimmy do a ‘What’s in my tumblr tag?’ and Dan’s blog comes up with some Phil gif reblogs from back in the day and Phil just messages Dan screenshots. Dan is mortified. He’s going to delete his tumblr. He’s not Tyler (not that Tyler is bad, they’ve messaged a few times, but Dan’s not a /fanboy/ ((lmao he is))). Phil just giggles on the video and says that Dan is such a nice guy. Kind of. Definitely cheats at Mario Kart. Dan is literally going to die, this is the second best day of his life

5.They get together when they are both traveling for Playlist Live and they hook up at a party one of the nights there. Dan would be mortified if he didn’t wake up and Phil was still there. He didn’t take off in the middle of the night; he’s wrapped around Phil and Phil is mumbling under his breath about how Dan needs to stop moving and just sleep. Their coming out video is on Dan’s Channel and is Titled “I’m still #1 phil trash” which is a throw back to a privated video called “#1 phil trash” where it’s Dan talking about how talented and funny and inspirational Phil Lester is for six minutes because someone had asked him on Formspring who one of his idols was .

Hogwarts AU

1. Phil is from a magical household and his brother is a squib with a banging music career. Maybe it’s latent magic? Either way, Martyn is a sick af dj and Phil loves it when it’s time for summer vacation because he can visit Martyn in London and see some shows (he can’t go every night) or just wander around during the day with Martyn’s girlfriend Cornelia, who graduated from Durmstrang Institute, while Martyn sleeps off a late night show. Martyn being a Squib leads him to take Muggle Studies though because he wants to be able to connect with the world Martyn lives in and someday, at the rate technology is expanding, he is going to have to leave the isolating wizarding world. 

2. Dan is from a muggle family and it shows in the tenacious way he fights to be accepted by his fellow Slytherins. Every O on an assignment he gets is validation, because see I belong here, I’m one of you, I may not have families who can trace their magic past Bloody Mary or past the plague, but I am still one of Merlin’ people. He isn’t a braggart though; it’s more of an internal validation until someone asks him for help in a subject. 

3. Phil first really approaches Dan in his second year. He brought a hamster to Hogwarts (look, they’ve gotten relatively relaxed since Harry defeated the Dark Lord and the Peter Pettigrew Incident) and didn’t realize she was pregnant. The hamster had five babies and Phil remembered the lonely looking Slytherin who sat at the back of three of their house’s shared classes and thought “the boy needs a friend” so he gives Dan one of the babies. Dan names her Suki and spends so much time trying to make her happy.

4. Dan and Phil first kiss in Hogsmeade towards the end of their sixth year. Because look, these boys are magical but you can’t expect magic to help them get a clue. But they are sitting one one of the benches in town during early March and sipping Butterbeer and Phil just looks over and knows he has to kiss Dan. It’s a biological need. And it’s a good first kiss, warm and syrupy from the butterbeer.

5. Look I love Phil but I’m 99% sure Phil is someone who splinches when he Apparates. He leaves behind clothes more often than not, but there was one instance he left behind his left hand. Dan is fond, but it definitely explains the 20000 socks just lying around the flat they get after graduating.