#cackling at the sheer morbidness of phillip hatching king to cook and eat him

[inamindfarfaraway]

I can’t really get into Luz/Hunter roleswap AUs because I just think Luz is the perfect main character and Belos the perfect villain thematically and everything and don’t like Hunter and Camilla taking their places, as cool as Golden Guard Luz is. But what about a King/Collector roleswap AU, since they’re equally foils? Introducing… the Collector Clawthorne AU!

King:

Centuries ago, searching for the power and knowledge he needs to destroy witchkind and a hideout after committing too many crimes on the mainland, Phillip discovers an island conveniently not on any maps and in its dilapidated castle, an egg. He uses a spell to hasten the egg’s hatching, in case it’s an animal he can eat. It turns out to be a baby Titan. The only son of the dead ‘god’ that formed the Boiling Isles. The most powerful being known to exist in this dimension, revered by the witches. Phillip sees potential in this.

He names the baby King, an assertion of both his great power and that it is still inherently inferior to Emperor Belos’s own (and mirroring how Jesus was mockingly called the ‘King of the Jews’ by his killer). King is raised to be the Jesus analogue in Belos’s twisted repurposing of Puritanical ideology to control the people. Witches can’t deny Belos’s righteousness when he’s the protector and in a sense regent for the Titan’s son, the spirit of the father supposedly entrusting him to guide society to become ‘pure’ and worthy of King’s inheritance. But just as the Roman Empire put Jesus to death and hated and persecuted the Jews, Belos inwardly has no affection or respect for King or his father and despises all the magic Titans preside over. Instead he’s leading the boy up a mountain of lies to be his sacrificial lamb. Eventually learning a substitute for the Collector’s draining spell, he plans to murder and fully drain King on the Day of Unity to provide it with the required power.

King is extremely sheltered, not remembering ever leaving the castle grounds, and though everyone knows what he looks like very few people see him in person except on special events. Belos can’t have the sinful riffraff contaminating his precious messiah. This surrounds him with mystery and speculation, even more than Belos and the Golden Guard. It adds to the narrative of his divinity that nobody outside Belos’s inner circle knows his true nature or behaviour. King is spoiled in every way except real love. And how can you miss something you’re never known, right? To prevent him feeling any troublesome empathy for or attachment to witches and demons, he’s constantly treated like he exists on a higher level than them. It totally isn’t crushingly lonely at all, definitely. He cultivates a cold, stern, temperamental, domineering, arrogant facade to feel a degree in control over his life, hide his crippling self-doubt and need for validation and appear as the strong, commanding presence he believes a Titan should be and he has to be to have worth. His emotional growth has been severely stunted and he's very fragile and volatile. The only people he respects are his guardian Belos, who he’s forever indebted and unhesitatingly submissive to, and his father whose lingering soul Belos claims to be able to communicate with. He says that the Titan has big plans for King. That he cares about him, and wants him to be the best he can be and make the world a better place. So if his dad wants, no, needs him to suffer a little to that end - i.e. regularly giving blood and other body parts to the Emperor’s Coven to charge tools and weapons and spells; or going through intense (brutal) training to master and test the limits of his powers; or generally being Belos's personal lab rat to increase his magical knowledge and ability - how can King refuse? How can an act be wrong if it’ll make his dad proud of him? Love him? And it's all for the greater good, of course.

He’s a brother figure to the first few Golden Guards. They aren’t meant to be peers, King has none, but they have no other fellow children for company besides each other, so it just keeps happening that they form a relationship varying from gradual trust and solidarity between victims of abuse to wholehearted sibling love and friendship. The Grimwalkers each rebel at least partly out of wanting King to be safe. Belos gets tired of this. He develops a new dimension to his abusive parenting: inventing a golden child vs scapegoat dynamic for King and the current Grimwalker. The Grimwalker envies and resents King and always being inferior to him fans the flames of his insecurities and desperation to prove himself; King is now unable to befriend him and even more emotionally isolated, and is subtly encouraged to unleash his resultant anger, frustration and bitterness at the Grimwalker, ensuring the latter won’t warm up to him; in a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps them both vulnerable and useful. It absolutely doesn’t traumatize King whatsoever when Belos kills the Grimwalkers over and over. They bring it on themselves. And he knows better than to care about lesser beings anyway - the Grimwalkers don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. They don’t matter to his dad. They aren’t important like him! Belos would never do anything like that to him… right? At least, not as long as he plays his part. Right?

He’s grown to Titan mid-adolescence by the present day and is roughly the size of Tarak. His horn was also broken by Jean-Luc when Belos stole him in this continuity, but King was told that wild witches who kidnapped and tried to kill him to harness his power for destruction were responsible. This helps explain why Belos is so ‘protective’ of him and gives him a grudge against wild witches. He wears gold caps on both his horns to conceal the imperfection, part of an elegant, regal outfit consisting of comfortable white robes with gold and purple accents. The clothes likewise hide scars from all the experiments and surgeries that have been done on him. His circlet of woven gold wires seems strangely spiky for the Emperor’s Coven’s aesthetic… until you realize that it’s a crown of thorns.

The Collector:

Eight years ago, Eda stumbles upon a tablet of some weird crystal with a crescent moon etched on it. Looks expensive. She could probably sell it. Once she returns home, it starts to glow. Okay, it’s magical. She could definitely sell it -

Oh. She brought home a child. Shit.

Correction: she brought home an ancient, immortal, godlike child called the Collector who has been sealed away and must communicate through the tablet. She agrees to free them because she doesn’t know why they’re in solitary confinement, but it’s clear he’s a kid however long he’s been alive, and she doesn’t approve of child imprisonment on principle. His voice, laughter and shadow form soon triggers the Owl Beast’s trauma from their imprisonment by an Archivist, and they take control of Eda’s body and attack. They attempt to destroy the tablet and manage to not break but fracture it before Eda can restrain them, which inhibits the Collector’s pinky promise release ritual when Eda performs it. Like when a crack on your touchscreen makes your interaction with the display glitch. This means that only a tiny fraction of magic can pass through, giving the Collector a physical form, but his actual magical power is inaccessible. The Owl Beast is furious to have a Collector here. The Collector is having a tantrum that they "can’t do anything!". Hooty is excited to have a new inhabitant. Eda… is overwhelmed. She calms the Collector down and vows to find a way to free their magic someday.

In return she gets the story of the Archivists, the Titans and how the Collector was unfairly punished for his people's crimes. Learning that her supposed curse is in fact a sentient animal trapped unwillingly and harrowingly moves Eda to sympathize with and respect the Owl Beast. She works on negotiating with it and accesses her harpy form years earlier. It’s awesome.

Meanwhile, although she doesn’t acknowledge it aloud and the Collector doesn’t even notice because he has no concept of parents, she slips unintentionally into being their mother. She just can’t bear to abandon this kid, who as ancient as he may be, is very naive and trusts her and has been alone for so long and can't stand it. And she relates to being pigeonholed as a troublemaker and considered irredeemable by adults. So they get a room. The room accumulates a large collection of toys, books and furnishings. The tablet is kept safely cushioned in a secret chest to prevent its breaking, theft or mishandling. She accurately deduces the Collector has often been deceived and manipulated and tries not to talk down to him or lie to him, but he doesn’t understand much beyond game metaphors initially. For example, she describes the Coven System as a really strict, boring game the mean bully Emperor Belos forces everyone on the Boiling Isle to play, because he designed the rules so he always wins; Eda thought everyone should get the chance to win and broke the rules, meaning now she and the Emperor’s Coven are playing a special game of hide and seek where if they catch her, she’ll be taken away forever. Yes, even though she promised to help the Collector. The Emporer’s Coven do not honour pinky promises. Yes, they’re that bad. She nicknames the Collector Collie (narratively representing his identity as an Ordinary Kid With a Family). He is ecstatic to have companionship, especially the way Eda and Hooty don’t demand any knowledge or services of them like every previous ‘friend’ they’ve had, rather love him in and of himself. Finding unconditional love feels much nicer than lonely omnipotence, they slowly settle into contentment with relatively mundane life. It’s an infinite upgrade to prison besides. Eda disciplines them with gradual success. She introduces them to concepts like empathy; that they can be wrong and that’s okay; that what they find fun isn’t necessarily fun or good for everybody else all of the time; that people can sometimes do hurtful or unpleasant things and not be evil, etc.. Collie has equals now and feel the consequences of their actions. Not to say that he matures beyond pre-Season One King until Luz arrives, but he’s way ahead of the canon Collector.

Hooty is his best friend. They get along excellently, sharing an eccentric, kinda disturbing sense of fun and humour and remaining in the Owl House when Eda goes out, with Hooty a surprisingly competent babysitter.

Collie adores and dotes on Owlbert. Eda repeatedly takes measures to childproof her staff and must teach them to be gentle with Palismen.

Then Luz arrives in the Demon Realm. And the entire history of the Boiling Isles is set to change forever.

#collector clawthorne au #me: (points at collector) you get found family wholesomeness and moral growth! #king: what do i get? #me: :) #me: P A I N #no but in this au instead of king growing up slowly and healthily and the collector never maturing at all bc they’re a god #we have the collector growing up slowly and healthily and king never getting to be a kid at all bc of how belos abused that he’s a titan! #also phillip and eda both didn’t intend to take in a kid and wanted the object they found the kids in for self-benefit #but upon meeting the child inside #eda went ‘OH MY TITAN A KID i’m a PARENT now’ #and phillip went ‘ah… a TOOL’ #cackling at the sheer morbidness of phillip hatching king to cook and eat him #luz: were you ever held as a child? #king: (referring to restraints on an operating table) yes #alternatively #king: yes i was kidnapped once #the owl house #toh #the owl house au #toh au #toh roleswap au #roleswap au