- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It also helps that Fool Bloom, unlike Sailor Moon, does not expect its audience to be fluent in Japanese.
A Little Vice (Trans Magical Girl fic)
- Thread starter Shadell
- Start date
- Original Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Love Train
stack of bats
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Look, if you don't give yourself an on the nose punny name, you risk being called "Pissard" instead, and nobody wants that
13. Weekend Getaway! It’s a Bear, It’s a Plane, it’s a… Resinner?!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
trauma, characters expressing complicated feelings about their abusers
I flew. Avaritia's sins rose to a crescendo, then cut to an abrupt silence behind me, letting me know ey'd retreated to the Forest. I should have done the same. Instead, I flew until the sky grew dark enough to let me feel like I could vanish into it. Only then was I calm enough to tear a hole in the fabric of the world and follow Avaritia back to the Forest.
Avaritia was waiting in my room, sitting on my bed. Eir eyes lit up when I entered and ey tried not to look worried.
"Chiro!" ey greeted me. "You're okay? Nothing bad happened back there?"
I thought of the sensation of my hand around Inessa's neck.
"I'm fine," I said instead. My tone didn't quite manage to reach reassuring.
"I,"Avaritia hesitated, eir tail between eir legs. "I got you a cake. Wanna chat about how things went?"
I wondered about that. Did I? What would my partner think of me if ey knew how close I'd come? I hadn't meant to hurt Inessa; however much she irritated me, however impossible it would be to go back, however much I wished I could take everything she had and make it mine. She was too wonderful and amazing to hate. I didn't want to hurt her.
And yet, I wasn't sure what would have happened if Ida hadn't intervened at the end. Would I have stopped? Would I have been too caught up in that unfair anger at how she refused to see me as the monster I was?
"I beat Inessa," I admitted. "I had her on the ground, one hand around her neck. Ida intervened, so I ran."
Avaritia glanced at me, still clearly worried. "That's great!" ey said, forcing a smile. "Let's see if they underestimate you now!"
"I almost hurt her," I tried to return the smile.
"But you didn't, right?" Avaritia said as if that was what mattered.
"Like I said, Ida stopped me." I shrugged. I'd been glad to be freed from the impossible situation. And yet, I couldn't know what would have happened if she hadn't been there. Would I have pulled myself back from that edge? Why had I gotten there in the first place?
"The Saints are tough," Avaritia said. "They wouldn't have stuck around if they'd break that easily."
I wondered if that was comfort or irony in eir voice. I didn't know how to respond.
Ey stretched eir legs, then rose to stand, "I'm proud of you partner."
Avaritia stepped toward me, looming in a way that felt ever so uncanny.
"You proved that my jealous bat is strong and brave and beautiful now, that you're more than just a victim. You showed you can do this!"
Ey reached out for a hug. I froze for a moment and before I could return the gesture, Avaritia had smoothly stepped past me toward the door.
"Sorry, I guess you don't want to be cheered up, huh?" Ey laughed in a way that was almost natural. "I get it, it's scary, to fight and realize what you could do. It's okay to give yourself some time to get used to it, and you shouldn't pressure yourself if you can't handle it, partner!"
There was a hint of tremble in Avaritia's voice, the 'partner' more question than statement.
I shook my head clear, "Thanks," I said. "I think I just need a little time to think through things."
"If you're feeling up to it, we can go celebrate tomorrow," Avaritia said, almost sounding reassured.
I tried to smile. Avaritia deserved none of my anxieties.
"Thanks, partner."
The tension fled from eir shoulders, and Avaritia made eir exit with an almost suave line about letting eir jealous bat get her beauty sleep.
I spent much of the night wondering how the girl whose face I'd stolen was handling my actions.
---
I would have slept in if I had the option. That wasn't my habit, but for all Superbia haunted the Abyssal Forest as my father had haunted home the place still felt so much safer and more welcoming.
Unfortunately, Avaritia Wolf had very little respect for existential horror induced sleep deprivation. At least, not when ey didn't know about it.
The knocks started at 8am. I checked my phone's clock, rolled over and ignored them until they stopped. At 8:30am, the knocks returned. Again at 8:45. At 8:50, unable to fall asleep anticipating the next knock, I gave up on spending the day sulking in bed, dressed myself and cracked the door open.
Avaritia slipped in a few minutes later.
"Morning Chiro!" ey greeted me with far too much confidence for someone who'd spent the past hour knocking on my door every few minutes.
I tried to smile back, "Morning."
"Rough night?"
I shrugged.
"I had a lot to think about. I guess sleeping helped." At least the sensation of Inessa's throat under my claws felt a tiny bit more distant. I wouldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it. And now, at least, Inessa would never forgive me and wasn't that exactly what I'd wanted? What I deserved?
Avaritia sighed, "You sure?" ey said as if something about my answer had conveyed anything less than absolute serenity.
I hesitated. C would have withdrawn, hidden his feelings and spent the day ignoring everything around him or hiding in his room alternatively picking at scabs and drowning himself in distractions to avoid any real semblance of introspection.
But I was Chiro now, and I'd stolen Inessa's face. She would have shared her problems, talked them out and probably come out the other side a better person in about half an hour. Maybe that's what really drove my envy deep down, more than her looks, her loving family, her power or her ability to connect to people like she'd stopped being a hollow shell of a human being or…
Okay, I had a lot of reasons to envy Inessa, but that was one of them.
"Chiro?" Avaritia was looking at me, at Inessa's stolen face. I shook the cobwebs out of my head and smiled at em. Avaritia, of all people, would never deny the severity of my sins.
"I'm scared," I admitted. I wasn't like Inessa. For me, being honest felt like tearing off my skin and shoving my bleeding insides into everyone's faces. But envy demanded imitation, and here that seed of sin could give me the little push I needed to do the impossible.
"That you hurt them?"
"That I might have hurt her. That I can't go back, not that I want to, but I can't go forward either because I finally stopped running from all these negative feelings and what I became was so violent and I almost…" I took a deep breath.
"You didn't." Avaritia interjected, the substance of what I had or hadn't done to Inessa going unsaid, "Did you?"
I didn't have anything to say to that.
"You got a little caught up in the fight," she said, as if that legitimized the heat that had taken over me in the moment, "and you lost track of what you were doing. Besides, they're enemies! I get that you don't hate them, I don't hate them. But they're trying to stop us from doing the right thing. If they really don't want to fight, they can just not show up."
I hesitated at that. I couldn't imagine Inessa—or any of them—stopping just like that. They believed in standing up for what they believed was right no matter what. Avaritia was the same; eir faith in eir cause was almost existential.
Something in my face made em tense, and Lupin deflated a little. "But you still aren't really sold on sin are you?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I guess, it's just… It felt like I was someone else. Like, I've spent so long avoiding my feelings, avoiding jealousy and anger and wanting things at all and now that I know they're there I can't stop and they're so strong from moment to moment. I was feeling good and then she said something and I couldn't resist the urge to lash out. I don't know if it's the seed pushing me to choke Inessa or some part of me resents her so much I want to crush her."
"Okay," Avaritia breathed a sigh of relief. "We can work with this! You just need to get a better handle on your envy. Figure out what it is your seed wants and how you can direct it better. That way you'll be in a better space next time you encounter her."
I wondered about that. Would knowing that that envy howling inside my chest had nothing at all to do with what I'd almost done free me? Or was I better off sinking back into denial?
"How?" I asked despite myself.
Avaritia's only answer was a grin.
---
The cold winter sun refracted off the last bits of compacted snow struggling to endure early March. It made being outside that much more unbearable.
"Why?" I asked, staring at Avaritia with all the overacted frustration I could muster.
Why, when faced with existential crises, was eir only answer shopping? At least, we hadn't gone back to the mall. The area was at least a little better, one of the bigger streets in town trailing off from the city center proper to offer a number of shops, cafes and other miscellany that I'd never quite been able to conceptualize people actually visiting.
Avaritia grinned, and waved a hand around us.
"You see young Chiro," eir tone was insufferably smug, "you're worried about your sin, what the seed wants from you, or rather, what you really feel."
I wondered if that was true, was the seed simply a reflection of my own envies? Its influence felt more like an intruder at times. But I also hadn't realized how much Inessa's simple existence made me burn until so recently.
"And?" I asked, curious despite myself.
"Look around you! What do you see?"
I looked down the street, heavy with foot traffic.
"An unpleasantly sunny day?"
"And?"
I was a bat! I was supposed to be nocturnal! There wasn't supposed to be an "and" after that! I sighed.
"Shops?"
"And?"
"People?"
Lupin pumped eir fist. "Exactly! People, full of wants, of virtues. Sin."
Ey was right of course. The street was a cacophony of little songs. Envy entwined with a kaleidoscope of other sins I was far less attuned to hear. None called me the way Mr. Brown had called to me. None sang so loudly or so enthrallingly that I could not but gravitate to them.
Lupin nodded, "Right. Take it in, let their cries flow through you and figure out what matches your own. Make them the mirror that shows you what you really need."
Was that okay? It was different when Mr. Brown's envy had been so loud that I could barely help but hear. But this was spying, spying on the parts of strangers that they wanted more than anything to to hide, even from themselves. Who was I to peek at all of that for my own gain?
The thought of anyone else doing that to me made me sick to my stomach. And yet, wasn't it just because Avaritia had done that that I'd made it here instead of collapsing in on myself? I wasn't sure if that was the right thing yet. I couldn't believe the way ey did, for all I desired otherwise.
"It's fine," Lupin whispered in my ear. "You're not hurting anyone. You're not outing their secrets to the whole world or turning anyone into a Resinner, even. And, look." Ey took a deep breath, "It's obvious you're broken up about the fight. And the only way you're going to move forward, partner, is to figure out what envy means to you. The better you understand yourself, the better you'll understand how to guide that envy of yours and shape it and use it in the right ways."
"Isn't envy, well, envy?"
Avaritia bopped me lightly on the head. That was fair, it was a silly question. Mr. Brown's envy was a haunted longing composition as different from my own howling emptiness as night was from day. Of course it couldn't suffice to delay the inevitable.
"How?" I asked, accepting once more that I would put my own interests over the right thing to do.
"Just pick someone with enough of your sin to get a feel for, and, you know…" ey waved eir hand ambiguously.
"What?"
"I have faith in you, partner!" Avaritia gave me a bright and cheerful thumbs up.
"You," thinking of it, Avaritia had talked a lot about how little human contact ey'd had until recently. "You're just making this up aren't you?"
Ey had the nerve to wink at me as ey grinned. "Well, I mostly came to Greed in a big empty castle, but it definitely seems like a good idea," ey said cheerfully.
I glanced at the street.
"Is this an excuse to go shopping together..." I felt bad for saying it. I didn't think Avaritia would really take advantage of my malaise like that. Sure, ey'd manipulate me if ey thought it would help; ey'd shove a supernatural seed into me without asking first, if ey thought it was in my best interests. But for all eir impulsiveness, ey cared in a way that seemed almost impossible to explain. It was just easy to fall into the habit of teasing em, to let that mask slip and poke em the way I'd only ever really needled Inessa and…
"It's youth! Youth!" Avaritia said, cutting through my circling thoughts with mock outrage.
"But, seriously, I think… Well, we couldn't really do much of this kind of thing back in the forest. But, just going around school it's wild how different everyone's greed feels. I'm not that good at sensing things. But, feeling all the different ways it can express itself, all the emotions that are greedlike but don't quite have that sinniness to them, it seemed like it would have helped a lot if I wasn't amazing and already had everything sorted out."
I sighed. It was invasive; it was wrong. But I'd already done so much worse. And, I… I'd almost hurt Inessa. I didn't want that. I couldn't do that again even if I did.
Letting Avaritia take my hand and guide me down the street, I took a deep breath and listened.
All around me, songs spread out, quiet and desperate and beautiful in their own ways. I let them sweep me away as I looked for any that might spark something.
A hollow, thumping beat caught my attention. Slow and echoing, it seemed to almost pull everything around it into itself, or it would have, were it not so poorly nurtured. I had it in me to fix that.
Avaritia tugged on my arm and, embarrassed, I withdrew my free finger from my mouth and wiped the drop of blood off against my skirt, eliciting a painful wince from the wolf next to me. Right, I was listening, not making monsters.
"Well, what'd you find that made you react like that?" ey asked, glaring at my skirt as if there was anything noticeable there!
"It's hollow," I admitted as I actually looked at the source of that beautiful little baseline. She was smiling as she window shopped with her friends.
"I tend to think of my own envy as a hollow kind of sound, so one like that seemed like a good place to start."
They were laughing and chatting and I had almost turned their day out into the subject of horror. And yet, the envy was there, thumping quietly in every gesture, as steady as her heartbeat. A part of me ached to release it still, to make her face herself and stop denying that dark little emotion in her heart.
"Tell me more," Avaritia's voice helped ground me.
"It pulls everything in," I answered, thinking. "Or, perhaps it makes everything into more of itself, harmonizing as if it could insert itself into their melodies and pull them toward itself."
I looked more closely. They were staring at a display of jewelry, one of her friends talking. Wondering if she should buy it perhaps? The tiny song in her heart grew ever so slightly louder.
"She's jealous," I said, then blushed. Obviously she was jealous. I wouldn't have noticed her if she wasn't.
"Money, I think," I said at last. I wasn't sure why, but that felt right, or at least close enough. "She has a lot less than her friends; it makes her feel bad and a part of her wants to drag them down to her level."
Understanding came as soon as I put the first bit to words. She hated that they had more, and yet, her envy didn't drive her to grow or copy or become, or perhaps it did. Perhaps the little ways it tunneled into their songs weren't just to drag everyone down but to puff herself up in comparison? She had good friends, so obviously she could be worth something. And yet, it also wanted to tear everything away from them, to expose them for the privileged fools they were and drag them down to the world of have-nots.
"It's complicated," I said at last. Was that bad? Hating the well-off, just a little? I liked to think that society probably should be more equal, and yet, that didn't seem the way to get there.
Well, Avaritia would say that obviously sin wasn't bad, that virtue just maintained a restrictive status quo that only served those on top. But it was hard to think that that kind of quagmire of a vice could really change anything or save anyone. And yet, I still wanted to make her sing at the top of her lungs.
"Want to share more?" Avaritia asked, squeezing my hand gently to help pull me away.
"It's all messy," I said, watching the woman smile and joke. Who was I to judge? Her envy hadn't supped on her veins and replaced her face with a mask. She was nice and kind and happy and that envy was a tiny little thing, not like mine.
"Most people are," Avaritia said cheerfully. "It's a reason why people who are all about virtue are wrong. It's normal, you know, to want in the wrong ways? Anyway," she said, turning from eir imminent campaign speech to the immediate topic, "how do you think it compares to your envy?"
I wondered at that. We were both hollow. We both saw ourselves as failures compared to our friends. And yet, this stranger wanted to ruin her friends, to pull them down. What did I want? I had literally stolen Inessa's face, but I hardly thought I deserved to be Inessa Brandt. Both I and this stranger were hollow, and yet our emptiness was so profoundly different as to be incomprehensible from each other's.
"I'm not sure," I admitted.
Avaritia nodded companionably, "Plenty of fish in the sea Chiro, you'll figure yourself out sooner or later."
And so it went. We walked down the street and pretended to window shop and talked and I spied on any stranger who crossed my eyes. At the very least, it got a little easier to hold back that urge to set free every petty desire I found.
That particular want, even Avaritia agreed, was the seed mostly. And yet, refusing that urge earned no punishments. Ey were probably right, though it wasn't like I couldn't sympathize. I ached to tell people that those petty desires they buried were fine or good or that they could face those and be richer for it. My envy had grown in the shadows of my heart until I couldn't control it anymore, until it was all I had left. These petty desires weren't like me. They didn't need to eradicate themselves to change.
And yet… I caught my face—Inessa's face—in a window and sighed. Had accepting that twisted desire fixed anything? Envy had given me everything I'd never been allowed to want and that same envy would never let me confuse it for something of mine. I was happier, I thought, as a beast wearing the mask of a hero. But I wasn't fixed. My envy would give me any facade I needed, but my essence couldn't change. It would let me pass on its gifts or not, take the stage or not, so long as I didn't forget that Chiro and Invidia were people I could never be.
Something deep inside my chest pulsed comfortingly, offering a silent affirmation. So long as I basked in my nature, the seed wouldn't turn against me.
"It's strange," I said to Avaritia, watching a manager who'd just gotten promoted and begun to resent his employees for 'having it easy'.
Ey looked at me curiously, urging me to continue.
"Just, for so many envy isn't about wanting to change yourself. It's hating what you don't have, but a lot of them just want to pull everyone down with them."
"And that's not how you feel about the Saints?" Avaritia was rapidly developing a habit of rhetorical questions.
"Inessa's…" I didn't know how to express it. "She's a person I could never be. She has things I'll never have, but she's good and right and I don't…"
I didn't want to hurt her, did I? It would explain why I'd been so eager, why I'd needed to escalate this conflict at every turn.
"I don't know."
I'd like to say that I just wished I could become like her. But even I couldn't delude myself into mistaking that kind of admiration or aspiration for a sin. Sins were bitter and dark and twisted even if we needed them.
"Let's take a break!" Avaritia's words cut off my musings.
I blushed, even now, ey were taking care of me, watching and looking and knowing me better than I knew myself. In others, I'd hated that pushy halfhearted kindness, but Lupin seemed to get it in a way that they didn't.
"And do what?" I asked, sticking my tongue out at em.
"Well," ey tapped eir finger against eir chin, pretending to think, "I am a greedy greedy girl of course, and I just so happen to have a cute girl out with me, so, it would simply be outside my nature not to take her shopping."
I blushed at that and stammered agreement, letting Avaritia take the lead with a great deal more purpose. And there it was. For all it hurt to see Inessa looking back at me in the mirror, for all the people I pretended to be could never replace Charlie deep down, the pretense alone was light and joy and laughter in a way I wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
I giggled to myself and nearly bumped into a pedestrian.
He was tall and thick and he smelled of alcohol.
"S-sorry," I muttered. Then our eyes met, and he really looked at me and for one terrible moment I was back home.
I wilted under that scrutiny, waiting to be named, to be seen and to be dragged back where I really belonged.
There was nothing resembling recognition in his eyes.
The moment passed and the man walked past, muttering something under his breath.
Avaritia said something; I didn't hear it. Ey froze for a moment, then grabbed my hand and pulled. I stumbled after Lupin, down an alley, through a tear in the world, and back into the comforting emptiness of the Abyssal Forest. Somewhere in that process I managed to tell Lupin I was okay, that it was fine. I wasn't sure if that did anything to assuage em.
It took till I was in my room hugging a pillow before I could manage to give word to thought.
"I bumped into that man and," I took a deep breath. "I thought it was him for a moment. Umm, dad that is."
Lupin's frown took on a much more serious pallor.
"I don't think it was." I admitted, then laughed. I hadn't seen him in, what, two weeks? And I couldn't even tell him apart from someone who looked like him.
"But, I just… I expected him to see me and know because, well, even if I've changed I'm still me and even if he hates me, he's still my dad. I was terrified and, even then, I still wanted him to say something. Some little part of me still wanted him to say it had all been a mistake and to accept all this and welcome me back," I trailed off pathetically.
Avaritia, ey was far too much a wolf in that moment to go by any other name, nodded bittersweetly.
"It's hard, isn't it. There were good times too and they're never all bad and you want to just cling to those and you wish that others could see that little bit of it instead of just lashing out or telling you what's good for you. He," I wondered if it was my father ey was talking about or someone else. Either way, the words soothed, "hurts you sometimes and does bad things and that's not okay but that doesn't mean he doesn't also do nice things or that he's not suffering too in his own ways and you want to change things and make them work, even when you know that no matter how hard you try to greedily hold on to every tie you can, something's going to break."
Avaritia stopped abruptly, clamping down on something ey hadn't meant to share.
"Yeah," I said, wondering which of those that had hurt Avaritia so was the one in eir mind now. "And yet, eventually you have to go, and then you can't let yourself go back, can you?"
Ey didn't answer that. In its own way, the silence and the commiseration helped to soothe more than any advice would have.
And then evening came and Avaritia went to answer Superbia's call, to face eir monstrous savior alone to avoid any hurt to eir precious partner. When ey returned, eir hands were behind eir back, clutching something I couldn't see.
"Hey," ey said, radiating a casual confidence even more brittle than eir usual.
"Hey," I answered back.
Avaritia gave me a confirming nod.
"Thanks for earlier." I added when the conversation froze there into a moment of quiet uncertainty.
"I got you something," ey said mischievously, as if ey hadn't taken every opportunity since the mall to shower me with gifts. "I was going to wait for a happier time to give it to you, but, well, you seemed like you might need it now."
I blinked at that as Avaritia shoved something soft with a pleasant furry texture into my hands. I squished it experimentally. The plushie flopped. I looked at it and fell in love.
It was pillow sized, and dark purple, with large floppy wings protruding from the sides. It—he had a tailored waistcoat around his round body and long fangs protruding from his mouth.
"I'll name him Count Fruitula," the ears were short and the face had that youthful energy associated with fruitbats, or at least as associated with fruitbats as a plushie could be. Besides, he was clearly too nice to be a vampire.
Lupin's mouth shaped itself into a savage smirk and I felt my cheeks turn beat red.
"Thanks," I said at last.
"So, partner," ey said more seriously. "Superbia wants, well, if it works we could all get a lot stronger, but it'll be a little bit, well, I'll be fine because I'm kind of amazing, but, well, I need to think about this a little and I wanted to see if you thought you'd be okay on your own tomorrow after, well, everything?"
I mock-glared at em. "Of course I'll be fine!" I said at last, "Honestly, I'm not sure what I want to do or what my sin means, but I'm strong you know." Or at least I could fake it now, "I'll be fine on my own."
Ey grinned and thanked me with a quick, eep-eliciting hug, and then ey were gone.
I wondered at that. Avaritia, who declared eir greed was keeping others close and giving them the world, pushed me away the second ey faced eir own worries; that wasn't fair at all. But, well, I didn't understand them the way ey so effortlessly seemed to pull apart my issues. And platitudes didn't feel like the right response. I had too much experience to think that would do anything but make them wall themselves off, desperate not to seem like eir continued worries were my failure.
So Sunday passed in quiet contemplation. Besides, I might have been quite so embarrassed to spend so much of the day hugging a plushie and watching bat videos if Avaritia had seen me.
And, when Monday finally arrived I felt almost whole enough to look my former friends in the eye after everything I'd done. Well, at least I could mimic Inessa's confidence and pretend it was so.
NEXT WEEK ON SHINING VIRTUE ANGELIC HEART!!!
In order to help Inessa cheer up after her failure to transform, Ida takes her and their new friend Chiro for a girl's day out. Unfortunately for the girls, this puts them right in the path of Invidia's latest Resinner. Will Inessa be able to reawaken the flames of purity in time to help Ida defeat the monster!?
Tune in for Episode 25: A Close Shave!! The Root of Inessa's Worries
So, this one took forever! I'm still not happy with it in some ways I think, but if I let myself tinker with it more, I'm not sure it's going to turn out better than it is and most of the betas said it was good, so YOLO I guess.
I'd like to thank betas as usual, especially @Clown Bean who gave it a very thorough look after finally catching up
I'd like to thank betas as usual, especially @Clown Bean who gave it a very thorough look after finally catching up
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- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This chapter gave me the worrying thought of what would happen if Superbia went and appointed Chiro's Dad as a Beast (probably Wrath)
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Nonsense. Surely Suberbia understands how much Chiro's Dad's traditionalist conceptualization of masculinity hurt-
Wait. Oh.
Well surely he would consider Chiro's perspective and her thoughts before-
Oh.
Oh no.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Speedrun Lupin and Chiro's redemption arcs with one easy trick"
- Pronouns
- She/Her
One NEAT TRICK to bypass filler that magical girl anime writers DO NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!!!!*
* (Watch this seminar available at $39.99 to learn more!)
StarSingerBlue
Zenryoku Zenkai !
- Location
- The City of Lights
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Wait. Don't they know that Chiro is Invidia ?
I thought Temperance had already cottoned onto that.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
I really like the genuine heart-to-heart Chiro and Lupin had, because it feels like Lupin's "He" could equally apply to both eir and Temperance's escape from heaven's creepy christian private school or whatever and what Temperance said to eir as she abandoned Lupin and the Abyssal Forest.
Solarstream
It's all in the cards
- Location
- Zombie World
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Temperance has, but I think that Inessa and Ida are still being affected by a glamour.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
Lot of bad happened there.
But, for a moment, you wanted to.
I wonder if ey are more worried about C nearly going for blood, or of the chance that it might make her reconsider being a Beast?
Or you could, you know, just not attack.
...Yeah, Chiro is right, ey are just making it up!
The beginnings of the standard villain justification monologue.
Almost like everyone has those. But it is how we act on them that matters.
Oh boy, isn't this a knotted mess to unravel.
Oh no...
Well done, Avaratia, that was basically a perfect summation of the situation.
Plushie hugging time is sacred time.
Interestingly, no mention of Temperance.
mackhaon
Blame it on my misspent youth
- Location
- Kyiv
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Eh, as a man with... anger issues I personally don't see it - her dad is an angry, resentful asshole, sure, but Wrath? Wrath consumes until nothing is left, and that is not him.
Walker of the Yellow Path
Ho There!
- Location
- The Land of Memes
Yeah, but she's not telling anyone. She never told anyone who Avarita was either when she joined the saints.
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Someday, Chiro will learn to lie. Then her mental health will enter freefall.
Actually, with how good Avaritia is at reading the room, it might not change much.
Chiro knows she has a problem, and sees a better way. This is a good start.
Friggin' extroverts. If this doesn't work ey'll probably drag Chiro to a party or something.
This confirms that Ida and Inessa don't know who Chiro is. Or else that they're playing some kind of long con, but the former seems likelier.
Not what you want. What your seed wants.
Avaritia, is there something you know but avoid considering the implications of?
You sure those are the same things? Because the seed didn't come from C, that's pretty obvious. And the seed punishing Chiro for not being envious enough sure seems like the seed's desires clashing with Chiro's.
So you know that the seed's wants and Chiro's wants are different. And you know that denying what the seed wants can have adverse consequences for Chiro. And you compartmentalize those facts, keeping them a safe distance from the belief that accepting these seeds is just letting the Beasts express and pursue their true desires, unhindered by any external entity telling them what to do.
And some readers thought you're right. That Superbia is right. That Michael and the Saints must therefore be wrong, to some extent.
I wonder if they still think that.
So. There are two possible interpretations here. Either "he" is someone from Avaritia and Gula's pre-Vice lives, from the Tree, or "he" is Superbia.
I want to give each possibility the appropriate attention, but...the context doesn't make much sense if "he" is someone that ey already left and doesn't want to go back to. Maybe Avaritia has complex feelings about some unnamed character back at the Tree, but considering the juxtaposition of this rant and "Avaritia went to answer Superbia's call...alone to avoid any hurt to eir precious partner"...
I don't think anyone would like the fruits of that deal. Cdad would find Avaritia annoying at best, feelings for his "son" would be somewhere between disappointment and disgust, and Superbia doesn't seem like he shares many of Cdad's interests. Invidia would be mortified, and Avaritia wouldn't like that. As for Superbia...frankly, I don't think he'd make a very good Abyssal Beast.
On the bright side, it would probably give Avaritia and Invidia enough reason to actually bail.
It wouldn't be the first time that Temperance hid the civilian identity of an Abyssal Beast from her current friends because that Beast used to be her friend.
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Keep in mind that the logic of the glamour is basically "If I do not have direct evidence that this person connects to this identity I Do Not See It". They know that their friend is Invidia, and they know that a new girl named Chiro has come to the school after their friend disappeared, but there is no strict reason to necessarily connect these things, so the brain can not make the logical connection.
Temp is a special case, whether that be because she has more context regarding Chiro's situation, because of her knowledge of how the process works because of her time as Gula, or perhaps due to some kind of remaining connection to the Tree or what-have-you.
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Rather, Temperance implies (though does not strictly state) that it was as simple as Chiro wearing the earrings that she recognized that allowed her to make the connection.
Which Chiro then somewhat panickedly removed and hid, precisely because Temperance indicated it would give her away to Inessa and Ida.
(so of course they then did not see those earrings to help make that connection, themselves)
This is not to say that there's necessarily no other factors for why Temperance saw through it more specifically special to her, but she does indicate a more... mundane sort of reason why she'd know and the others would not get to make the connection.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but Inessa also saw Chiro wearing the earrings (also Ida did too I think from how the scene went), and unless she is playing a long game (which is absolutely possible but frankly I do not think she is that good of an actress) can't seem to make the connection. So I think there's a bit more going on there, but there's several good reasons why she might be able to figure it out.
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You are missing something;
Temperance shared an entire class with her, and then she removes the earings, before spending significant time with Ida/Inessa.
They may have seen her in the earrings strictly speaking, but if so probably only briefly and at a distance early in the school day.
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Aaah forgot that part where she told her. Fair enough then~
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Do we actually know that the seed wants different things than Chiro? Because it seems like the the thing the seed reacts poorly to is Chiro recognizing that she is envious and then refusing to do anything about it. Like, almost a mechanical backlash of calling up power in relation to the sin, and then repressing it and forcing yourself to eat the power instead.
Basically, it's not clear to me that Chiro doesn't want what the seed wants, only that the seed doesn't seem to want to allow self-deception on the subject of it's sin.
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First off, the very fact that Chiro chooses not to do something about her envy is evidence that she and her seed want different things, unless your definition of "want" is vastly different from mine. At best, the seed picks and chooses which of Chiro's wants "count" and punishes her for letting any of her other wants get in the way of that.
As a comparison, imagine that you had the Wrath seed, and also a younger sibling. When that younger sibling annoys you, you get angry and want to hit them. The seed likes that, but it doesn't like any of the reasons you have for holding back. Social propriety, a fear of parental punishment, actually liking the little shit deep down—none of that matters. The only want that the seed cares about is wanting to hit your younger sibling. Were you deceiving yourself about your true desires, or do you actually not want to punch your brother for stealing your books?
But there's a bit from this chapter, which I quoted right next to that bit you snipped out of my post, which makes even this best-case scenario suspect.
I cannot think of any way to parse this except "The seed wants some things, separately from its host, which influences how it affects said host". And this fits with a lot of other passages. Chiro definitely thinks of the seed's wants as separate from her own.
And when she brings this up to Avaritia, ey doesn't argue with the premise. Indeed, ey supports it.
Which is, incidentally, another quote that I put in my post.
It should also be noted that, as far as I can tell, this is the first time Chiro or Avaritia said anything about the seed's influence in any detail, at least since C became Invidia. The closest I found was this bit from episode 22:
Which, incidentally, puts another hole in your "It's just turning the power you built up against you" theory, because Chiro wasn't building up any power. She wasn't trying to, she didn't mention feeling any power building. She just didn't want to copy Lupin, and then she felt like garbage. The only way to square that with your claim is if the seed silently gathers power whenever Chiro feels envy for the purpose of using it against her, which is not what you actually seem to believe.
I don't know why so many people are insisting on treating the seed as an honest expression of Chiro's true desires. The only evidence we have for that is that Avaritia thinks it is, and she also thinks that turning people into monsters and making them hurt their friends and colleagues is another legitimate expression of their true desires. This is an absolutely batshit claim, and multiple characters have pointed out as much. Avaritia is many things, but ey is not a reliable narrator. And even ey occasionally hint that the seed doesn't always line up with your actual desires!
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For the record, 100% agree. Like, the whole thing at its core is that Chiro is suffering from major gender anxieties, and while this can take the form of envy, it isn't a totally off-base descriptor, that is absolutely not what that need and want and pain really stems from. Similarly, Avaritia's personality really clearly doesn't stem from greed. They've basically admittedly as much when meeting Chiro for the first time, that sometimes you have to essentially Rules Lawyer in order to do what you want to do. In eir case they were talking in the context of Superbia, but it is clearly just true in general with them, consciously or not. I think Avaritia is in many ways the kind of person Chiro needs right now, eir doing a good job with her, but ey absolutely do not have an entirely firm grounding on what's going on.
In absolute fairness I think Michael's narrative is potentially at least a little over-simplified too, intentionally or not, given how Avaritia talked about eir and Gula's parents. Very likely imo that both sides don't have things totally right, but Avaritia's perspective is absolutely skewed.
In absolute fairness I think Michael's narrative is potentially at least a little over-simplified too, intentionally or not, given how Avaritia talked about eir and Gula's parents. Very likely imo that both sides don't have things totally right, but Avaritia's perspective is absolutely skewed.
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I suspect we do have different concepts of want. I'm using (in my head at least, I could have spelled this out better) a distinction between first order and second order wants.
A first order want is just the thing you want. IE, Chiro wants to be (revealed to be?) a girl.
A second order want is a thing you want to want, when you don't actually want it. Chiro wants to want to be a boy, because that is the 'correct' party that she sees, and her actual wants are 'unacceptable'.
Wanting to punch your brother is first order. Wanting to want not to, in order to be a better person, is second order. It's a response reaction not to go with your original impulse, and substitute a different response that isn't your immediate desire, because it's better not to want that. So 'good' people want to not punch their brothers, and we all want to be good people, so we want to want not to punch.
She felt envy, then she denied her envy without every actually defusing it. I guess I'm using intensity of emotion as the equivalent of power, which I didn't think was a stretch given magical girl logic.
Silently gathers power, yes. For purposes of using it against Chiro, no. It's an intuition that feeding the seed with unrepressed envy makes Chiro stronger, but I'd argue that the purpose is to make her a more dangerous weapon for the abyssal forest.
Basically, it doesn't have it's own desires, it's a dumb thing that accomplishes it's goals by punishing self-control/repression of it's associated emotion.