Cristobal / 23

Xerneas, Forbidden Light

I started talking to it. Probably not my best idea, I’ll give you that, but it’s not like I had anyone else around. I would tell it about my day as I readied for bed. Jeff was a dick at the meeting this morning. Had the best hot dog off the best cart in the city for lunch. SIX reports due by Friday? Kellen must be trying to kill me. I even wished it good night. And it just stared, with its glowing red eyes.

One night, I had to stay late at the office. Really late. Remember those six reports? They turned into fifteen. And if I didn’t get them done for this major client, it was my head on the HR guillotine. So I stayed late. I ended up crashing on the sofa in the break room and woke up to more work on my desk. That was Thursday morning. I had to get this all done by Monday.

On Friday night, around ten, I decided to go home and get some real sleep before going back to the office to finish this insane task. And then I felt it. Something was here with me and it wasn’t the janitor.

I looked in the corner and there were those eyes again, surrounded by shadow. I sighed. I really didn’t have time for this, not here.

“Ain’t you got shit to do?” I snapped, walking to the break room for yet more coffee. So much for going home to sleep.

A growling sound, then a deep, rasping voice said, “I miss you.”

I stopped. “What do you mean, you miss me? Aren’t you a demon or something?”

“You didn’t come home. I’ve been worried. What are you doing here?”

We’d never conversed like this. It was almost comforting, like a friend would be.

“I’m working, man. I’ve got a big client coming on Monday and Kellen put all these damn reports on my desk and if I don’t get them done, I’m probably gonna get fired.” I ranted as I took off my tie and ran my fingers through my hair.

The demon paused, thinking. It moved slowly around the room, taking it all in.

“Do you want me to eat Kellen?” it suddenly asked.

I laughed, “No, don’t eat Kellen. It’s not really his fault.”

“Then what shall I do?”

I sighed and considered. What could a shadow demon do to help me?

“Do you know anything about graphic design and marketing?”

It paused its roaming. “I ate an artist’s soul, once.”

“Good enough. Just sit behind me and tell me what looks good.”

First of all, I’m very excited that you consider me an expert opinion! The part of me that minored in English and spent an inordinate amount of time reading translations of Dante has a lot of opinions on this.

I would suggest that Olaf exemplifies envy. If we’re going by classical definitions, envy comes about as the direct result of vanity (believing, for instance, that you’re the world’s greatest actor). It manifests in a constant desire for what other people have (an enormous fortune, sapphires, and so forth), and it isolates the envious person even from their henchmen friends, who abandon them when the envy eats away at their basic humanity.

Esmé, to me, represents greed. She does have elements of the wastefulness of gluttony, and while she’s indulgent when it comes to food, it’s not her driving character trait. What does drive her is the pursuit of material possessions, and greed (in the Dantean sense, at any rate) has just as much if not more to do with objects than with money - a never-ending desire for more and better, and an obsession with the things a person considers “theirs.” That, to me, is what drives Esmé: her desire for more-more-more while clinging onto her sugar bowl, dammit what is already hers.

I think there’s a very strong case for Georgina exemplifying lust. If we go by the Netflix adaptation, this is a woman who literally winds up dead as a direct result of giving in to her baser instincts. And since lust is generally accepted to include lust for power, money, and control in addition to sex, a woman who hypnotizes people for profit and is then seduced into scheming and (presumably) sleeping with her ex fits the bill nicely.

Sloth as a concept is probably the trickiest of the deadly sins to pin down. There are a lot of conflicting ideas about it, but most of them share an element of inappropriate inaction. You could stick almost any of the Baudelaire guardians in this category, but I think Mr. Poe or, as you suggest, Jerome, make excellent candidates.

Monty totally exemplifies pride. You’ll get no argument from me on that one, or on Carmelita as wrath, which leaves us with gluttony. May I suggest…

“Why on the candy??”

I get to Hogwarts and am immediately judged for something that was NOT MY FAULT

A random Slytherin in my year decides that I’m her personal enemy FOR NO REASON

I have made friends that I would already die for

Snape hates me FOR NO REASON

I keep losing house points for things that are NOT MY FAULT and getting blamed by my entire house.