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lilfriezatyrant · 2 months

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As the evening draws to a close, you listen to the last nightly broadcast of the radio demon, who also resides in the hotel. It's as if he has rehearsed a lullaby just for you, because it doesn't take long for your eyes to get heavier and heavier and you finally fall into a quick slumber.

"We'll meet again,

Don't know where,

Don't know when,

But I know we'll meet again some sunny day."

But then in the middle of the night, quite subconsciously, a steady goose bump slowly spreads over your body, starting on your arms, along your upper body, your scalp, your back and finally ending on your lower legs.

A strong cold shiver hits your palm and you abruptly open your eyes, observing your own hand dangling just outside the bed. Maybe it's just that your blood circulation has been disrupted and cut off by the perceived heaviness of your hand, because you can no longer even feel your fingers. A feeling that you actually have very often when you get into this sleeping position...

You now try to lift your arm to position yourself differently, but you realize that this is not possible... as if there is an additional weight chained to it.

What the...?

With a perplexed expression on your face, you crawl to the side, look directly at your hand, but you can only make out the silhouette and widen your eyes even more in a confused reaction. Something... stuck to the palm of your hand?

Oh god...hopefully it wasn't Niffty causing a bug battlefield in your room again and you might be bathing your fingers in their slimy little guts.

But wait...the little demonic maid always cleans all the rooms very meticulously...so it makes no sense at all.

Or...was it even a small, shelly minion of Sir Pentious that you accidentally smashed in your deep sleep while turning around? Sounds brutal, but those egg boys are unfortunately more fragile than they look.

...strange thoughts when you've just woken up. And it doesn't feel like egg yolk either.

You then feel this now volatile substance get caught between your fingers and you react instinctively, but with your other hand, which doesn't seem numb and first turns on the small bedside lamp on the little shelf within reach.

It's only a weak, dimmed light, but at least you can now see what's on your other hand.

...a black, visible, umbrageous hand clasps yours and you can feel the cold grip more than clearly.

You immediately realize who it is; after all, there is only one person in this hotel who can summon a shadowy apparition.

Still, you wonder what his shadow is doing here; you're used to it accompanying you from time to time, but it's the middle of the night and you're not in any danger...right?

"Is...um...everything all right? Or why is Alastor's dark companion visiting me?" your voice asks in a somewhat timid manner and in the next moment your hand is pushed further and further upwards and you can only watch silently as the shadow rises more. As if it were passing the ground without any resistance.

(Admittedly, it was very cute to watch as the two shadowy ears appeared on the ground first.)

It is now right next to the bed and only now do you realize how tall it actually is, both the shadow and its owner (and this has nothing to do with your current reclining position.) He towers over most demons, after all.

You can now see the outline of the eyes and mouth clearly and are greeted with a mischievous smile, it continues to hold your hand in its, giving the back of your hand a charming, fleeting kiss that sends an even colder shiver through your body, but it feels warm at the same time...like an icy fire.

Your cheeks flush as the silhouette briefly pats the back of your hand with its other hand, which is probably meant to serve as some sort of reassurance.

"Why are you here? Did you just come to check on me...?" you don't really understand. And why did he only send his shadow here?

Maybe it was just a little scouting to see if everything is really okay.

Although you know that the shadow has no voice and will only answer non-verbally, it would seem strange not to ask any questions. After all, you've known the cunning overlord's silent companion long enough to be able to read its reactions.

But his next action came so unexpectedly and in a flash: both hands are pinned next to your head and the lower end of the shadow, which now has a tail instead of legs, had darted around your legs.

"W-what...", but the quiet presence forbids you any further words and places an index finger over your mouth with a deliberate touch.

A cool tingling sensation is also placed on your lips.

Your tiredness is conjured away and it's not just because of the cold contact that the shadow causes... it is as close to you as your own shadow. Even closer.

It feels as if it is constantly seeking you out and is your protective companion.

Even back then, when you were shopping alone in the city, you were never really alone, you always had a secretly defending and watchful guardian at your side.

And at this very moment, the creature seems to be studying you curiously, this time he is not just a silent observer.

It is so close to your face that you can even feel its cool but fresh breath. Like fresh rain... that's how you feel the pleasant scent. Perhaps even a mixture of rain and snow.

"Are you on patrol or are you here voluntarily?“ Your voice remains quiet, almost a whisper, but your lips are once again sealed with a single finger. Either he doesn't want to answer that, or you really shouldn't ask any more questions.

The shadowy figure's permanent grin forms into a much larger and more malicious one. Both wrists are firmly in its grip again and without warning it presses its mouth directly onto yours.

The moment stands still for you, your eyes are dilated, your pupils are trembling in your iris.

Completely surprised, you can only manage a subtle gasp, but the shadow detaches itself again, mimics a giggling reaction with its facial expressions and finally widens one more eye curiously.

But before you could realize that it was actually a kiss, the silent shape doesn't hesitate and reconnects its shadowy mouth with your lips.

Although your chest fills more with cold, your face feels extraordinarily warm...it resembles a paradoxical supernaturalism...

Your eyes close slowly as it interlocks its obscure fingers with yours. And even if this being has a shadowy appearance, you can still feel material... as if it wants to be felt.

You intuitively squeeze your fingers together more, embrace this coldness more and more and don't want to let go of it. The shadow shows the same reaction, pulling you more into its grip and making the initially fleeting kiss more intense. And it seems to be learning with every passing second. Also that you need air to breathe again after a short time.

The shadow's head tilts to the side, secretly wondering why you're gasping for air so exhausted, before it finally understands and holds both hands in front of its mouth with a silenced cackling.

"Oh...of course you…think it's funny."

You're still panting, trying to normalize your breathing again, but blush even more when you say to your guest quietly:

"But...it was very nice..."

The shadow's chuckling gesture dies down again and its curiosity seems to have been reawakened.

Once again, it pins your hands against the sheet, very slowly dedicates his face to your right, open palm, gives the inner surface a discreet but nonetheless prolonged kiss before drawing a heart-shaped outline with his ghostly index finger.

Your face probably couldn't get any redder... You wonder if these are his true feelings? Does the shadow reflect this...?

Its fingers interlock with yours once more, humanly delicate.

As you swallow, it watches your throat closely and its curiosity is still piqued.

You wonder what it is going to do next, but you feel as if your own voice is stuck in your throat as you can't utter a word. Embarrassment envelops you and it is such an unfamiliar atmosphere for you, what this apparition has drawn you into. But it doesn't feel uncomfortable at all, quite the opposite is the case.

You simply accept the offer, or rather the dark creature's thirsty curiousness.

When you feel the touch of its lips on your neck, you flinch for a moment, but then let out a very light, pleasurable hum and instinctively stretch your neck even further to give its touch more surface area. For a brief moment, you can even feel its grin on your skin become even more distorted in amusement. And like a curious child, it even licks it with its shadowy tongue, nibbling gently, before something in it is awakened and it even bites into it.

Hard.

Too hard.

With a sharp pain that makes your whole body twitch and you let out a pained scream.

"AH! What the hell...!"

The shadow then straightens up immediately, but remains on your body, strokes the wound with an angular finger and guides it into its jaw. He tastes the sanguine essence and seems to be thinking about how he could make up for it.

You now place a hand on the wound yourself, which fortunately is not particularly large, but you still seem more startled than frightened, although it could have torn out more than just a scrap of flesh...

Next time, be a little more gentle. These words remain in your thoughts, however, as the shadow approaches you again and slides its tongue over the maltreated area to indirectly send an apologize to you.

"Do I really look like a snack to you?" you have to giggle sheepishly at this and feel more warmth return to your body as it places one palm in yours again, drawing further gentle heart shapes. If that really was an accident then it's already forgotten. Although your neck continues to throb with pain, all the gestures the shadow makes compensate for this mishap.

But time seems to have already passed when the door to your room opens and you look in the same direction as the shadow and two glowing red eyes stare at both of you, along with a radiant, ominous set of bared teeth. A voice rings out, echoing throughout the room and radio waves laced in the sound.

"Did we go astray again, didn't we?"

Is it just your imagination, or can't you see a small trace of blood on the mouth of the gentleman who suddenly appeared? Exactly the same trace of blood that his shadow shares.

Your blood.

#I finally did it #I finished this oneshot x3 #reader x Alastor's shadow #reader x Alastor #alastor x reader #fem reader #Alastor #Alastor's shadow #oneshot #have some fluffy times again I guess c:#even if I struggled so much with his shadow xwx #also the first time I made such a fancy ✨ title for a writing #my writing #hazbin hotel #(original song at the beginning: We'll meet again by Vera Lynn)#I needed to do that scene with his shadow 🥺❤ because it also deserves attention q^q #no egg boi was harmed during that writing <3

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onbearfeet · 22 days

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Queerwolf By Night: Queercoding, Media Literacy, and Werewolf By Night (part 3)

Lovely to have you back for this, the final part of our examination of WBN being queer as fuck. If you missed the earlier presentations in Media Studies and Writing Hacks With Kat, Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

We've gone through the Hays Code AND the AIDS crisis so far, and that's a lot, so could I interest you in a cup of coffee brewed over a campfire?

Thanks, Ted. You're a peach.

So let's look at the final scene of WBN through a queer lens. There's a needle drop, color is restored to the world, and we see Jack waking up in the woods to drink coffee, grunt at Ted, and eventually decide that sushi should happen.

(Side note: I have a whole rant about queercoding and sushi, but I cut it, so here's a gif of Aziraphale gayly eating sushi in Good Omens, which you should watch.)

Okay, enough queer angels. Time for more queer monsters.

First things first: this scene is SO DOMESTIC, y'all. They're literally playing house in the woods, in that Ted has built Jack an adorable little house and brewed his morning coffee. The camp is littered with little domestic touches like the French press and the guitar. It's a homey, if slightly eclectic, vibe. (Where did Ted find a payphone?)

There is no explanation for these objects being there, afaik; Ted and Jack both have presumably come from some distance away, involuntarily in Ted's case, so there's no reason Ted would know the location of a well-stocked camp to put an unconscious Jack down in if Jack even set one up. Presumably the camp is Ted's work, but there's never an explanation for where he got any items other than the robe and the phonograph. (I'm particularly curious about the flower mug, personally.) Yet the objects are not remarked upon, and the entire scene is played as if this is a relatively normal morning for the two of them.

In fact, most of the mechanics of the scene are effectively those of a morning-after scene, perhaps a morning after characters fall into bed for the first time. Jack wakes up groaning, crawls out of bed to see where he is, and finds his partner has laid out something like breakfast for him and is prepared to discuss the events of the night before whenever Jack is ready.

And speaking of that discussion, we once again have displays of queercoded masculinity: Jack and Ted being physically affectionate, playful banter, and emotional vulnerability when Jack asks about Elsa. You know the drill by now. The camera pans up as "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" swells and fades out.

Wait.

Rainbow?

Let's talk about music in this film.

Michael Giacchino is primarily known as a composer of film music. WBN is his directorial debut. I guarantee you've heard his music before, because it's basically in every summer blockbuster franchise. If you can't get John Williams, Danny Elfman, or Hans Zimmer (all of whom are getting long in the tooth), you get Giacchino and he turns in a fucking SCORE.

Now, I am not a music person. Not at all. But even my musically illiterate ass knows that traditional film scoring derives a lot from classical music, especially Romantic composers like Beethoven. And that means LEITMOTIFS, baby!

(I learned about leitmotifs from Bugs Bunny and Star Wars. Do not be impressed.)

A leitmotif is a short musical phrase that can be used to signify a character, object, or theme in a larger work of music. For a very basic example of this, look up the Force theme from Star Wars and watch a supercut of all the times it was used to indicate that someone was using the Force. Or just watch this Sideways video about why the music in Rise of Skywalker was ass:

youtube

Anyhoo. The point of leitmotifs is to give an audience a feeling without necessarily tipping them off to exactly WHY they're having that feeling. And Giacchino LOVES his leitmotifs.

So when he uses someone else's music, he's extremely aware of the emotions that can come attached to that music. It's literally what he does.

There are two pieces of music used in WBN that Giacchino didn't write: a late 1930s recording of Vera Lynn singing "Wishing Will Make It So" and Judy Garland singing "Over The Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz. Let's start with Vera Lynn.

Vera Lynn was an English singer most associated with big band music before and during WWII. During the war, she was known as "the Forces' sweetheart", both for her efforts to entertain the troops and for the fact that she was kind of every British fighting man's waifu. What Betty Grable's legs were to American GIs, Vera Lynn's voice was to British servicemen. She's best known for the song "We'll Meet Again", which is about exactly what it sounds like. She was a nice lady, by all accounts, and there is a ferry boat named after her now.

A Vera Lynn song about childhood and wishing is what Verussa plays in the labyrinth, apparently to annoy Elsa, who switches it off (even though that's going to inform everyone of where she is). For the purposes of queercoding, Vera Lynn is mom and apple pie, or possibly mum and fish and chips, and above all she is safe, compulsory heterosexuality. The Forces' sweetheart.

Judy Garland, on the other hand, is a queer icon.

I can't overstate what a Big Deal Judy Garland and Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz are in queer culture. The themes of the story, including acceptance of the unusual and embrace of a found family (along with the sapphic elements of some of the books), resonated so deeply with queer people that for several decades, "are you a friend of Dorothy?" was code for "are you gay?" The US Navy actually launched an investigation to find the mysterious "Dorothy" who was supposedly the ringleader of all the gay sailors.

And then there's the song itself, with its theme of longing for a faraway, more colorful place where those who don't fit in at home are loved for who they are. It's, uh, pretty resonant with the queer experience.

So I now draw your attention to the phonograph. Gramophone. Record player. Whatever it's called.

In WBN, we first see the player set up in the labyrinth, presumably by Verussa or at her orders. It's playing a Vera Lynn song about childhood and wishing, which apparently annoys Elsa so much that she switches it off, thus alerting Jack to her location.

The next appearance of the player is in the camp, where it's now playing "Over the Rainbow" beside Jack as he wakes up. Ted has presumably stolen it; there's no other candidate for that, and we already saw him swipe a murder robe for Jack, so why not a record player too?

In other words, Verussa Enthusiastic Heterosexuality Bloodstone sets up the Compulsory Heterosexuality Machine, after which Elsa Ally-Coded Bloodstone turns it off in disgust, and Ted swipes it and turns it gay for Jack's benefit.

That's the coding. That's BARELY subtext. I really don't know what else to tell you. This essay started with my making an offhand joke to bluemoonperegrine about Ted and Jack being "literally friends of Dorothy" and then realizing nobody else in the conversation had noticed this stuff.

So what do we do about all this? Is WBN queer? Does all the Wolfstone stuff pale in comparison to the glory of Russallis? Am I trying to start a ship war in a fandom so small it probably wouldn't fill up Vera Lynn's namesake ferry boat?

Jack, you can answer this for me.

Nope. Not trying to start anything. I happily read Wolfstone, and technically have written some. I love all three WBN leads and am happy to enjoy them in any configuration (although my personal preference is group napping in a puppy pile, because these characters deserve naps).

I just figured it was worth documenting all this so people who haven't had the benefit of my very strange education would be better equipped to recognize (and ideally enjoy) old-style queercoding when they see it.

Wait a minute. You promised writing hacks. It's in the series title and everything.

Shit, you caught me.

Obviously, queercoding isn't a universal tool. There are plenty of storytelling contexts in which it's much better to make characters explicitly queer. Representation matters, and all that.

But sometimes you won't have time for explicit confirmation (like when your story takes place overnight and nobody really has time to play tonsil hockey). Sometimes you won't be able to include it due to outside constraints (like Disney being Disney).

And sometimes, you'll remember that there are plenty of people who can't or won't pick up explicitly queer media. Homophobic parents who won't let their kids watch Love, Simon ... but who WILL let them read your YA novel about unicorns or whatever where there are two female unicorns who are, uh, life partners. Grumpy uncles who refuse to acknowledge their nephew's boyfriend until they notice that, hey, they kinda act like Finn and Poe from that Star War. And so on. Sometimes, coded rep is the best rep you can get ... and so it's useful to have. A good toolbox has ALL the tools.

So if you're building characters for your story and don't or can't have specific queer goals, throw in a little coding. Put a rainbow T-shirt on a kid. Let two boys hold hands or have literally any feelings. Let a girl say a girl is pretty. Look up some of the older symbols for queer love and have someone growing lavender in their garden, or use newer queer symbols and have a character crack an egg in a key scene. Have a character who's content without a romantic or sexual relationship, and has an arc about something else, because aces and aros exist too.

There's a whole universe of coding out there. Go add some layers to your work.

Or better yet--see if they're there already. You might surprise yourself.

Sometimes the monster has a familiar face.

#werewolf by night #media studies and writing hacks with kat #queer theory #queer coding #queercoding #jack russell #elsa bloodstone #ted sallis #writing advice #vera lynn #judy garland #leitmotif #michael giacchino #oh god please don't kill me for this #i am rambling not trying to start a ship war #if i seem defensive it's because I'm a Peggy Carter fan and the last few years in fandom have done psychic damage #friends of dorothy #thank you for being a friend of dorothy

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