Chapter 123 (Words I Couldn't Say)

June art

Unique

Special thanks to @shoujocowboy for beta-ing my little comic script. You made it better, as always.

“Smile! Our god, among other things, is watching.”

Getting back into WTNV. Kevin, you wonderful mistake of nature. You scary.

rb w/ a controversial food opinion

something people don’t talk about enough: both extremes in autism

almost every autistic trait has something to do with extremes, and for most of them, autistic people can be on either end of the scale. sometimes this is for hyper/hypo sensitivity reasons, and sometimes it’s due to overcompensation.

examples of some typical autistic traits and their equally austistic counterparts:

no empathy? how about having such extreme empathy that you cry when your stuffed animals are ignored?

no/wrong facial expressions? how about exaggerated facial expressions because you learned early on you were doing it wrong?

nonverbal? how about being hyperverbal and not knowing when to stop talking?

highly advanced vocabulary? how about when you can’t remember common everyday words in conversation?

can’t tell when things are awkward? how about having such an sensitivity to awkwardness that you can barely stand being in the room when an awkward moment happens on tv?

has a meltdown over a small tag on their shirt? how about being so oblivious to physical sensations that you don’t know you broke a bone?

doesn’t follow social norms? how about a strict adherence to social norms, often accompanied by severe anxiety that you’re not doing it right?

can’t stand bright lights and loud noises? how about pressing lights so close to your eyes that you’re temporary blinded and constantly making noises when it gets too quiet?

no eye contact? how about intense, sustained eye contact that you don’t know when to break?

constantly rocking back and forth? how about being unable to walk without getting disoriented?

remember this when people say “you don’t seem autistic” - there is no quintessential autistic representation. this is what we mean when we say it’s a spectrum.

Mods are asleep post forbidden tits

Trauma (Iruma)

Until this arc it felt like Iruma’s childhood was swept away, only brought up as a joke. To be fair, this is a comedy series, and those jokes are funny, but it felt like the series wouldn’t be living up to its potential without a more serious look at how Iruma’s upbringing affects him. Then, I reached the Harvest Festival, and all my expectations were met and exceeded. This event was finely crafted to perfectly simulate the environment Iruma grew up in, with the vastness of the forest, the need for survival, and the overwhelming isolation, causing his repressed trauma and emotions to gradually rise to the surface as the festival dragged on before finally exploding in what I consider to be the most emotionally cathartic scene in the series.

During Iruma’s training scenes (both in the Training arc itself and flashbacks), the matter of his parents is brought up casually, like it had been previously. While this aspect of his childhood had already been well established, moment like this still serve as important indicators that Iruma still thinks about what he went through. It’s also a reminder that Iruma grew up with parents that only saw him as a useful tool for chores and as a source of income. I also want to draw attention to the number of near-death situations Iruma had been through prior to living in the underworld. That scene occurs when Bachiko has Iruma fire off arrow after arrow at the very least over 100 times, meaning that there were probably hundreds of instances, starting from a very young age, where Iruma almost died. Between arriving in the demon world and starting the Harvest Festival Iruma had only been in legitimate mortal peril maybe three times, which is comparatively like a vacation if you think about it.

Iruma’s survival instincts are also expanded upon. Even living peacefully, Iruma retains his natural instincts to avoid all danger and uses this ability to his advantage, but that same peace prevents us from knowing what his exact mental state was before getting surprise-adopted. The Harvest Festival fixes that by placing him in a similar environment that causes him to unwillingly revert to a purely survival-oriented mindset. This ends up revealing a lot about Iruma, even explaining some of his quirks that seemed more outlandish, such as emotional repression to the point of not recognizing feelings like desire or anger. It also shows that his so-called “overwhelming crisis evasion capability” (heralded as the ultimate defense mechanism) is what his survival mode looks like while operating at its lowest capacity. His peak survival mode is represented by an amorphous black blob whose simplistic design conjures the idea of returning to base instincts. As specifically stated, Iruma has been operating like this for most of his life, relying solely on his base instincts and foregoing everything else, which would account for his lack of understanding even relatively simple emotions.

Now let’s get into the cause of Iruma’s trauma. To date, this is the longest they make an appearance, and even then, it’s only as an illusion, so we still don’t know practically anything about them. However, I would argue that it’s unnecessary to learn about them outside of their impact on Iruma, because this is fundamentally a story about Iruma’s self-discovery and him finally learning how to be human. Since they were the main obstacle to his natural development, their own thoughts are less important to the narrative. While Iruma does later say he’s not afraid of his parents, that ends up feeling more like a comparative statement when taking his immediate reaction upon seeing them into account, as well as how their faces are never shown, giving them a more nightmarish quality even compared to the other illusions. There’s a level of control that they’ve instilled into him that genuinely makes Iruma feel like they could whisk him away from home. Sullivan is easily one of the most powerful demons in the underworld, yet in Iruma’s trauma-addled state, even he isn’t an obstacle to the whims of his parents. This harkens back on Iruma’s inability to say no, born from years of psychological manipulation that can be seen in the question “aren’t you a good kid who always does as he’s asked?” His parents wanted someone who wouldn’t cause trouble and do whatever they wanted, so they taught him that saying no was wrong and that he’d only be praised if he did as they asked. So, while Iruma has gotten more assertive in the underworld, due to the years of damage inflicted by his parents, there’s a legitimate concern that he’d be powerless to go against him.

<prev | next >

I headcanon that there are nights where Dave just can NOT sleep, due to anxiety and feeling so on edge even if nothing's there to hurt him anymore. Karkat can slip back into his old Alternian sleeping patterns pretty easily, so it works, in a way.

He sees Dave walk in from the corner of his eye, slouched over and scruffy-faced, still wearing his wrinkled pajamas. “Morning,” he mumbles, drifting nearer.

“It’s two in the afternoon,” Karkat says, lowering the book he’s reading a fraction of an inch. Dave stretches, using one arm to wave dismissively in his direction. His shirt rides up when he does this, and Karkat lowers the book another inch, raising his eyebrows. It’s irritating, really, how distracting that is. “I had assumed that you’d return to the inexplicably diurnal ways of your species once we’d settled in here, but apparently not?”

“Well, you know what happens when you assume,” Dave yawns, standing over him. His hair is a mess. He probably hasn’t even brushed his teeth. “Something something ass, something something, you and me…” he shakes his head, and then he turns and flops onto the couch. His eyes are still closed. Karkat pokes his leg with one socked foot, and they flutter back open. “Hell,” he says. “I never said we couldn’t just be nocturnal. Fuck it. This is troll land, right?”

Karkat rolls his eyes. “A fantastic idea, really. Everyone else will love it.”

Dave just waves at him again, or rather, his arm makes a spastic fluttering motion that Karkat assumes is supposed to be a dismissive wave. He snorts, raises his book, and gets back to reading. Entire minutes go by without interruption, which is almost as distracting as actually being interrupted, because Dave never just lets him read. He narrows his eyes over the top of the pages. Dave’s eyes are closed, again, and he’s just kind of sitting there, hands loose at his sides, mouth slightly open, chest rising and falling like he’s actually somehow gone right back to sleep.

“You know,” Karkat says, and Dave’s eyes snap open. “You could try a cold shower. Getting dressed. Taking care of basic hygeinic needs instead of being a lazy jackass all afternoon.”

Dave blinks a few times, and then sighs. “Firstly, fuck cold showers.”

“I’m just saying, they wake you up.”

“I don’t think I stink, yet,” Dave says, and then he lifts an arm and sniffs himself like an actual animal. Karkat kicks him.

“Don’t be disgusting,” he says.

Dave catches his foot by the ankle. “Don’t kick me,” he shoots back. “I’m fragile.” He then neatly plucks the sock off his foot and tosses it over the back of the couch, an action which is as irritating as it is mystifying. Karkat tries and fails to pulls his leg back.

“What the fuck,” he protests.

“I forget, are you ticklish here?”

“No.”

“Liar,” Dave says, grinning.

“Don’t you dare –”

Karkat kicks him with his other foot, Dave grabs his other ankle, and everything rapidly goes to hell from there. Dave pulls him down across the cushions toward him, Karkat drops his book with an undignified yelp, and Dave twists and flings himself over his defenseless body, nearly knocking the wind out of him. Not that Dave is heavy, exactly, it’s just – he’s all elbows and knees and other awkward, knobby ends – and before Karkat can really do much meaningful protesting, Dave has him caught up in a smothering embrace. Karkat’s arms are trapped against his sides, Dave’s knees are bent between his legs, and his nose is poking into Karkat’s neck. He squirms uselessly, kicking his heels against the back of Dave’s legs.

“Let me go, you ridiculous goddamn clingbeast! I’ll have you know I was twelve chapters into that book and things were finally getting good –”

“Good,” Dave repeats, snickering into the skin under Karkat’s chin. Karkat swallows, hard. Shakes his head.

“Yes, good, and if you’re going to go back to sleep, the last thing I want to do is be your goddamn slumber platform for the duration of this imbecilic expression of your inability to properly moderate your own fucking biological processes!”

“Sexy, you mean,” Dave says, and Karkat growls beneath him. Dave exhales loudly – he has definitely not brushed his teeth – and squeezes his arms tighter around him. “Whenever you say a book is finally getting good what you mean is that it’s finally getting sexy.”

“Untrue.”

“Totally true.”

“Certifiably false.”

“One hundred percent absolute purestrain truth, my dude, no shame. Your legendary thirst for textual smut is insatiable, so what.” Dave is half mumbling again, and Karkat can feel his face going all shame-blotchy, but he tells himself it’s anger instead and growls louder. Dave sighs. “I love it when you make alien noises at me,” he says.

“I will roll over and dump both of us unceremoniously off this couch,” Karkat warns him.

“Doesn’t it feel kinda nostalgic?” Dave lifts his head, hunching up so Karkat can see his face, all pulled into something that looks genuinely curious. “Snuggling up on a couch together? Shit, all we have to do is drag out the old husktop –”

“Are you feeling homesick?” Karkat cuts him off, incredulous. “For the fucking meteor? Is that what this is?”

Dave drops his head back down and doesn’t reply immediately, and Karkat can’t decide if that’s confirmation enough on its own or not. After a bit, Dave sucks in a breath and shakes his head. “Not really,” he says. “I mean, not exactly.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and Karkat feels his brows pull down, an actual thread of worry tangling up with his irritation and fondness and the ever present awareness that his legs are being held apart by Dave’s knees, right now, and – God. He nudges the side of Dave’s face with his chin.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m good,” Dave says, maybe a little too fast. “Just, you know. Sleep, sometimes. It’s, uh.” He exhales again, shaking his head. “God, this is so dumb. You’re the can’t sleep guy, not me. Sorry for stealing your thing, damn, what a douche move, self.”

Karkat’s growls taper off, subtlely changing tone and timbre to become an equally chest-rumbling sound that means something entirely different. Dave sits up, untangling his arms around him. He runs his fingers through his hair, a nervous habit Karkat is pretty well familiar with, by now, which does absolutely nothing to remedy the fact that it’s still sticking out comically in every direction. Karkat blinks up at him. “Uh. Is there something I could do to help?”

“It’s probably just some bullshit acclimation nonsense,” Dave says. “Like, hey, sorry, new environment, all your weird nervous senses are going to start going haywire for awhile while we adjust to having sunrises and sunsets and middles of the night again, but nah. What it actually is, as far as I can tell, is that I just expect bad things to happen at certain times and I never thought about it because it’s been so long since I’ve even seen the sun set that it didn’t occur to me, but it’s like –”

He stops, abruptly. Karkat raises his eyebrows at him. “It’s like…?”

“I never realized how much I noticed that stuff,” he says, and then he punctuates this statement with a shrug like it’s no big deal. “It’s kind of frustrating, actually? To think you’re totally over something and then to find out that maybe the thing is more persistent than you realized? To think, I guess, that maybe it’ll just keep coming up in ways you don’t expect forever, and maybe you’ll always have to worry about being kind of fucked up or whatever because you don’t know exactly what makes the thing come back, or least, feel pretty shitty again.”

“Hey,” Karkat says. He reaches up and wraps his arms around Dave’s sides, twists his fingers in his shirt, and pulls him roughly back down against him. Dave complies easily with this, collapsing obediently back down. “Has this been going on this whole time?”

“I don’t know,” Dave says. “Kinda, I guess. I mean, I thought it was fine, at first.” He laughs, quietly. “It’s not that big a deal. I know, god, that was a lot of words, sorry. But it’s really not.”

“I knew I should have bothered you more about this,” Karkat mutters. He thinks back, turning the months since their arrival here over in his mind. His own sleepless nights. Teasing Dave about adopting nocturnal habits on those not so rare occassions when he would join him, up at all hours. Sitting together and talking the nights away, or … passing the time in any number of other ways. He coughs. Dave is shaking his head.

“If there’s one thing we can all count on you for,” he says, “it’s to consistently and predictably blame yourself for other people’s shit basically all the time. Fuck, are you Dirk, now? You sound like Dirk.”

“Oh, come on,” Karkat protests.

“Blah blah, all my fault, I should have done this, I could have done that…” Dave thumps him lightly on the shoulder. “I didn’t want to talk about it. And I didn’t want to make it a big deal. Still don’t, actually.”

“All right,” Karkat concedes. “Fine. What do you want, then?”

“Nothin’,” Dave sighs. He presses his face against Karkat’s chest and just lays there, breathing softly. Karkat moves his fingers in nervous patterns on his back. His purring comes and goes in little stutters. Dave lifts his head and – with this absolutely fake air of forced casualty – says, “Maybe just this for awhile, I dunno.”

“Okay,” Karkat says, swallowing hard while a burst of warmth lights up all his pathetically easy to please emotion centers. “But if you want to try keeping normal hours, for a change…”

Dave laughs. “You’d like that, I bet. I can already feel your future smugness smothering me, Karkat, I’m drowning in it.”

“No – look. I’m just saying, if you can’t sleep, wake me up, okay? I don’t care when we’re awake! Morning, evening, some hideous mashup of one and the other, whatever! And we don’t have to talk about it!” Karkat clenches his teeth, making a nebulous gesture with one hand. “I just don’t want you to be up and feeling all shitty or whatever by yourself!”

“Yeah,” Dave says, wiggling up closer, so his face is up against Karkat’s shoulder. “All right.”

“… Okay,” Karkat agrees, hesitantly. His arms fall back into place around him.

“Sounds good.” Dave is mumbling, again, and Karkat sighs. He fishes around over the side of the couch for his book. Dave shifts against him, cracking one eye open to observe this, and snorts. “Can’t believe you’re gonna read a sex book right over my head while I’m trying to cuddle,” he says. “Rude.”

“You’re going to be asleep in five fucking seconds,” Karkat says. His fingertips brush the spine of his book and he snatches it up, wiggling his shoulders against the couch cushions. Settling in for the long haul.

“Am not,” Dave murmurs.

“And it’s not a sex book! It is a romance novel, there is plot. Characterization! Drama! Narrative with satisfying theme and purpose…”

He trails off, because there’s no point. The five seconds have passed, and Dave is, as predicted, soundly asleep. Karkat sighs heavily, but his body betrays him by resuming its steady, contented rumbling. Embarrassing. He shakes his head, slings one arm around Dave, and reads until his own eyelids start to droop. Good.

Maybe eventually they’ll manage something resembling the waking hours of a sane species.

Me: cries every time I see a drawing of sad/crying Spock

Me: cries inside every time I draw Spock crying