I collect things, you know ~

Becasue I already knew Alastor genuinely saw needing others as an inherent weakness; everything he said to Vox about that was genuinely his opinion, not just something to get under Vox's skin. And it's the main reason they would never have been compatible as partners, because Alastor doesn't do partners.

But the second part of also "not being needed by anyone" defintely puts an interesting spin on a lot of his relationships, particularly with Mimzy. Because the implication there is that he has never kept her around because he likes feeling needed; in fact, he's probably continued their relationship despite her constantly asking him for favors because he genuinely found her fun and entertaining to be around.

It's also a good window into why Niffty and Alastor get along so well; Niffty is very attached to Alastor, but she doesn't need him in any sense he would consider consequential. She's very capable of handling herself. The only time we've ever seen him help her directly was apparently fishing her out of a toilet and if he put up with all of Mimzy's bullshit, that's a VERY small price to pay for the bond they share.

i love the way you see him and your artstyle's really cute, i've been craving more of your little doodles of him. your design is just perfect!!

if you can't think of anything general, more about alastor's adhd presentation would be cool. since viv said in an interview coffee is one of alastor's favorite foods, i was wondering if you'd think he uses caffeine to self-medicate since the idea of adhd wasn't around back when he was alive, and i doubt hell is out here advocating for psychiatric care.

i imagine alastor drinking 5+ cups of coffee a day just to moderately function...the first time he has a monster energy, he's like "ew" and then it becomes Crack to him (totally not projecting or anything haha). this is actually mildly scientifically backed because taurine (which is in most energy drinks) can actually reduce hyperactivity but isn't recommended to treat adhd because it has a lot of interactions with meds. but i find chugging a monster actually makes me feel normal.

okay i kinda went off on a tangent but this is me poking you with a stick to hear more about how you see alastor!!

HI!!! OH MY GOSH HELLO!!!!

I am so so excited to answer this oh my gosh thank you for sending this in i am a normal amount of invested in this character and my headcanons about him ( <- girl who has never been this insane about a character ever)

But first!! For a doodle i present to you

Adhd on adhd violence

Immediately I am going to say that we’re zeroing in on his adhd presentation for the headcanons im going to talk about. I am not a doctor I am just a weirdo who literally hyperfixated on neurodiversity for several months and still didn’t realize I had adhd until I got diagnosed 💀 so this is filtered through my personal experiences and understanding let it be known I am not a doctor!! This is going to be a rambly mess that is poor in cohesion but rich in passion lol umm

cw for internalized ableism and brief mentions of child abuse <3 also pain stimming. It’s not self harm but if you’re sensitive to that you might also be sensitive to this

That being said.. >:3

So. I don’t want to vague post but this whole concept formed because I saw a post pointing out how we’d only seen alastor pull his hair when he was “extremely stressed or upset” (tbc no hate to the person who said this op of that post ily I just interpret things differently!!!) and backed it up with screenshots of him during his season 1 finale freak out, and after Dont You Forget on the bench outside of Rosie’s. They then followed it with a screenshot of him grabbing his hair while rejecting vox’s business proposal

And I saw what they were saying and I just thought. Or…. He just does that during high emotion situations. Any high emotion situation. Even if that emotion is hysteria.

I bounce on my toes when I’m in stressed in high-energy situations. And when I’m excited. And when I’m extremely mind-numbingly bored. Some stims are only seen in response to particular emotions or situations, but most, at least in my experience, appear in a variety of contexts for various reasons. Alastor was stressed and scared in the season 1 finale, I agree. But he wasn't stressed outside of Rosie's. He was fuming. He was furious with her and with himself and there's no one around to take it out on so where does he put this energy?? Hands go into his hair. As for the bar scene, he was subejcted to a sudden and unexpected shift in mood. Hands in the hair to help regulate. If i believe the bar scene went down the way we saw it (i have a Whole Thing about that btw but i'll get into that another time) i could even tie some of his reaction to emotional dysregulation, along with the mix in of aspd i see him having as well.

And after i made that realization with his pain stimming, i started thinking about his touch aversion. He's so incredibly relatable in that if he initiates the contact, that's okay. That's planned and expected and he can end it whenever he wants. But other people touching him is unbearable. Its warm and disgusting and makes your skin crawl and just all around repulsive. A few weeks after i saw the season 2 finale, my sibling was behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. And. Oh my gosh ohhhh my gosh alastor should have ripped vox's head off live on air ITS ACTUALLY AWFUL no one is giving alastor enough credit for enduring that multiple times daily without so much as a word. He's hell's strongest soldier i'm serious it was actually nauseating.

But anyways!!! Touch aversion is often linked to neurodiversity and my hc of choice is of course adhd :3c

Everyone in the fandom latches onto lucifer's inability to remember names. I am shocked that i've seen absolutely no one talking about how Alastor just forgot about the whole Sir Pentious. It's played off as a joke until you think about it more and the language alastor was using during the scene, like,

"Who are you?”

[insert pentious spiel]

“Well, if all that were true you’d think i’d have heard of you!”

“I attacked you literally last week”

“???” (Head tilt static noises)

“We’ve done battle like… 20 times?”

“Well, you must’ve been really bad at this”

It just. It doesn’t sound to me like someone who’s perfectly able to recall but is needling pentious for fun. Alastor’s body language isnt jovial and silly like he’s being annoying on purpose. He just. Pentious was boring. Boring things dont get stored in the working memory. Alastor’s probably getting into random fights with idiots all the time. Pentious wasnt special. And later when Pentious comes to the hotel and apologizes for ripping Alastor’s coat, Alastor looks at him and says “I definitely remember you now” which. Why would he say that unless he genuinely couldnt remember before.

I’d say that Alastor probably struggles with remembering people and names just like Lucifer does. The difference is that Alastor.. actually cares. Alastor was raised as a human being around people where you can’t get away with blatantly and repeatedly not knowing someone’s name when you’re told and exist around them for an extended period of time. So he actually puts effort into figuring stuff out and remembering as opposed to Lucifer’s uncaring disregard.

Alastor’s a sensory seeker. This ties into his thrill seeking and love of adrenaline but that is also hand in hand with the aspd. He stims a lot but he's masking so it’s stuff he's learned he can get away with without being suspected which means the fandom doesnt clock him! But canonically he hums whenever he's alone, taps things, picks at his hands, swings his feet, there's a moment where he almost paces but stops himself and redirects to pulling his hair. He's. He's masking all the time and i really think he'd be pacing and fiddling with stuff and even more talkative if it wasnt, in some ways, beaten out of him as a kid. Either socially or literally depending on what kind of backstory you want to give him. (There’s a drawing of him done in an old stream labeled “would strike a child” with an arrow pointing to him. So. Let that color your perception of how he was treated however you like) He was a neurodivergent kid in the deep south at the start of the 20th century. No matter how loving one or both of his parents were, they would be doing parenting the only ways they knew how, which ended up strongly discouraging him from being visibly neurodivergent in a variety of ways. Pacing is the one stim ive gotten the most commentary on, the one thing people need to discourage no matter how little right they have to comment on how I regulate myself, and i just-

I think about him outside of Rosie’s. I think about him starting to pace and cutting himself off by sitting down and redirecting that energy to his hair. I think about it a lot.

Because the thing is. He has no idea something is up with him, would be insulted if anyone suggested it. So he thinks all of what he experiences is normal (it is. But. Ykwim) and that influences how he views other people. I imagine he looks down on other people who are worse at masking (or dont mask at all) than he is because he doesn’t understand that not everyone needs iron clad self control just to behave in socially expected ways, thinks people who do the things he got wrung out of him as a kid are just behaving rudely, even if he never quite understood why they were rude. It doesn’t matter, it’s what he was taught and it’s about the principle. Why are you pacing? Everyone knows you do that alone, where no one can see you. Why are you so fidgety? Did you never learn to force yourself still like everyone else did? He’s still got the voices of his parents and teachers in his head whispering stop it whenever he finds himself wandering without purpose or absentmindedly toying with whatever object he happened to pick up.

I can’t definitively decide where I stand for him with regard to RSD. I imagine it was worse when he was younger, when being too loud, too boisterous, too much, would have resulted in a correction, whatever form it took. But I also think his response to being scared has always been to get angry, which definitely did not create a cycle when he was alive, and yes he has only the normal level of loathing for authority why do you ask? Anyways, nowadays when something manages to poke at that soft spot he’s buried so deep I imagine it pisses him off to no end. He’s The Radio Demon, not the furious little kid he once was, forced to bend to the whims of those with authority over him. He’s allowed to be as talkative, as intense, as much as he damn well pleases. But even still, maybe, under the anger, something sharp squirms deep in his chest.

Back to the sensory seeking: he likes spicy foods with strong flavors, which is of course cultural as well, but I’m still counting it. He likes fights he likes getting thrown through the air and slammed into things and biting and scratching and running, tearing, mauling. It’s very enriching. Good for Alastor. Let Alastor fight people whenever he wants. I hc him as a major pain stimmer, extrapolating from how he pulls his hair. He clenches his fists all the time, and I think sometimes he’s digging his own claws into his hands just to feel the sting. I imagine he squeezes things he’s holding just a little too hard sometimes, so he can feel the edges of it digging into his hands. He chews on his tongue and the insides of his mouth. If he’s extremely overwhelmed, I can see him biting his own hands and arms (im not projecting sHUT UP-) he’d like rough and sharp textures, just to poke at and squeeze because they’re fun. Pain stims arent always a response to something negative, sometimes you just want to squeeze something kind of sharp bc it’s fun.

There’s the whole spinny chair. Spinny chairs are like crack to vestibular stimmers he’s so real. The coasting and spinning and leaning, especially because he couldn’t get up and walk around and scratch the itch the way he usually would. He was so incredibly mobile in that chair because he was trying to match his normal level of movement while still strapped down. Bc if he didn’t he would get zoochosis. He gets incredibly irritable and destructive and violent when he's understimulated.

I imagine he’s more prone to hyperfocus than to hyperfixation. Radio is his oldest and dearest one, it oscillates from hyperfixation to just a normal interest (that he’s still passionate about, of course), the intensity of it ebbs and flows but it always comes back. He can hyperfocus crazy style though, and sometimes locks himself away to read entire novels in a day, or go insane on some maintenance work that needs doing, or just build a new radio from scratch without taking breaks. He so clearly wants to talk about radio so bad but nobody asks him!! Begging someone at the hotel to ask him about his show I want to see him talk about it so so bad (I want an hour long special that’s just Alastor’s radio show. Please. Pleasepleaseplease)

There’s his hatred for change. This is mostly talked about in regard to autism, but unexpected or forced changes in routine can be incredibly distressing for adhders as well. Again I’m bringing personal experiences into this, but I was recently put into a situation where I had to get a new phone, and the idea of leaving behind my old one was so overwhelming I couldn’t process it. Ofc in my time of distress my brain turned to my hyperfixation and I literally thought “is this how Alastor feels? I get it now” I see where he’s is coming from, actually. Even if it started as just stubbornness or loyalty to his time or whatever, at this point he’s been using his selected technologies for so long. It would be so scary to change them now.

As for how he manages it!! Its so fun that you bring up coffee as a way to self medicate because i actually

We know he's no stranger to self medicating *gestures to the whiskey and cigaratte pain relief situation* and I can absolutely see him using caffeine to help get his head on straight. He’s never understood what people meant when they talk about coffee making them energized or jittery or anxious when it’s only ever helped him settle into himself, but it works for him so he doesn’t question it. He’s been doing this since he was alive. I also like to think he keeps a pen and a little notebook on his person at all times to help him remember stuff, particularly instructions he got for tasks when he was helping run the hotel. His working memory is rough so if he doesn’t write it down it simply will not be done. He managed to get “just write it down so you don’t forget!” to actually work for him because he’s maintained the habit for several decades. He drags music along with him wherever he goes for background noise, curtesy of his staff. Niffty is the sole reason his room is as tidy as it is. Loathe as he is to admit it, she really was a massive help when she offered to join his legion of contractees. He loses things all the time but it doesn’t matter if he can’t remember where he put something down because he can just summon it back into his hand. Being insanely powerful has its perks, even if it’s something as mundane a not having to worry about where he stashed his glasses.

Alastor did not "cheat."

There's a very small detail about his deal with Rosie that actually makes it VERY different from the other kinds of soul deals in the show. Most of the other soul deals are very straight forward, classic selling-your-soul type things: you are given (blank) in return for selling ownership your soul to the person giving you (blank). Or, in slight variation: your soul is taken by (blank) in exchange for whatever you asked of (blank). It's kind of one-and-done thing. You make the deal, you're contracted until one of you dies permanently (presumably) or the deal is forcibly broken with. Simple, right?

This is NOT what Alastor's deal is. His deal isn't giving Rosie his soul in exchange for power, it's Rosie giving him power and keeping his soul until his debt is paid. There's a very clear "out" clause. He didn't sell his soul, not really, it's just being held from him (like a frozen credit card, if you will) until he pays Rosie back by completing whatever "task" she has for him. Granted, we don't know what this task is or if either of them even though, so this could be a loophole Rosie exploits to essentially keep him on a leash forever, but I really doubt that she doesn't have some modus operandi that Alastor is integral to and will honor their agreement afterwards.

This very particular detail is what makes their relationship so interesting, but that's for another post. My point in bringing this up is that this isn't Alastor boosting himself on someone's power, not really. After all, it's pretty fair and completely transactional. He gets something from Rosie and he then pays her back for it, simple as that. To put it in a more mundane scenario: if you borrow an egg from your neighbor, you're probably going to let them take a measuring spoon next time they ask, because that balances it out. They just haven't done their balancing act yet. You're not dependent on your neighbor just because you borrowed something once, the scale just hasn't been settled, so to speak.

Because, really, Alastor doesn't NEED Rosie's power. Even with his staff broken (which seems to contain the magic Rosie gave to him), he's pretty damn powerful. Rosie definitely played her cards right in that regard, because Alastor very likely would've become an Overlord without any boost from her just fine, it just might've taken a few more years. He's no fraud. He's not even "cheated"—he's leveraged himself a head start that he's going to repay.

And it may seem incredibly skewed in Rosie's favor, but it's not really when you look beyond the soul-owning thing. Not only is it temporary, but they're both, at the end of the day, getting the same thing: power. Souls give you power, so Rosie gets power. Rosie gave Alastor power too. It's mutual. And with how she talks about him being "the one" (for her plans) compared to Alastor's ability to stand on his own, I would even argue that she might need him far more than he needs her. But that's also another post.

He puts up with Box Vox's shoulder touching despite it being uncomfortable.

He let's Niffty crawl all over him. We know he likes her and that she doesn't do it to make him uncomfortable, but we also know he's not a fan of touching.

He let's Mimzy bring tons of problems his way and clearly uses him for personal gain, a dynamic that might have been present during their time on Earth. Had it not jeopardized the terms of his deal with Rosie and her personal interest in the hotel, he would have let this lopsided dynamic continue.

this man doesn't know how to set boundaries with those he's considering close to him. He'll let them do whatever, put up with anything, until he snaps and goes all "THERE ARE NO FRIENDS IN HELL VINCENT"

I'm so. Interested in your theories, but i have some too. But basically during his life being compliant and convenient for other people was the only way to survive and get to where he wanted to be. Now in Hell he doesn't have to do it to survive, he can just scare anyone, and no one is really a threat to him. But it comes with the downside of being lonely. And for an extroverted person like Alastor it's hard. Not many people are willing to risk their life and just come up to him and talk. That's why he allowed Vox to get close. Because he was extremely lonely and wanted at least some connection.

So he's playing nice for people he likes, because he's subconsciously afraid, that if he tries to set any boundaries, those people will leave him, and he'll be alone again. That's why he wouldn't kill Vox, because even in current times they have that fucked up toxic connecrion that allows Alastor to feel less lonely.

I wrote a post a while ago going into just how terrifying Alastor actually is, and the fact that he was like this before the Exterminations even started (which is a WHOLE other thing I'd like to talk about), no wonder his name inspired so much fear.

In light of the recent episodes, we found out the Exterminations have only been happening for 7 years (which, WOW, that was a surprise, I thought they'd been going on for way longer), and Alastor's been gone for 7 years, so did he just

Did he just not have to deal with them? Ever?

Was the bi-annual Extermination with Adam the first one he's ever experienced?

Alastor said he'd been running all over Hell on some "fruitless crusade" but no one in Pentagram City knew where he was, or heard a peep from him, so it was unlikely he was actually in the city (makes you wonder where in Hell he was), and I'm just

Guy did not have to deal with that shit at all. He experienced one Extermination and got his shit wrecked, and I find that so funny. He really just strolled into that Overlord meeting, doo-da-doo, listening to Carmilla talk about how thousands of souls were killed, sitting there like he was present for all of it.

new album - SEAL OF APPROVAL!

lounge/exotica/surf/funk for summer 🦭🎸

I drew this somewheve at the beginning of june and was going to post after i finish IF, but next part is going to take longer than i thought to finish, so, i'm going to post some pride month stuff, because pride month is almost over LOL