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these things are behind you, but you can see them still - if you’re lucky, you have the records. maybe you filled enough diaries to piece it all back together, make sense of the chaos of it all, listen in on the conversations again, a visitor, a spy to the people you’ve been. maybe you held on to the songs, a handful of feelings that cut through you that year. maybe january 2018 is all how could i have known and alright by keaton henson, and later, the year sounds like soon soon by tom rosenthal and september is all welcome to new york by taylor swift and then all my heroes by bleachers. 

maybe you did write a whole album about it. made it immortal. doesn’t matter how, but if you’re lucky, you really did build that giant teenage museum, so some version of it is preserved forever. look, this, all this is my teenagedom. this is what it looked like, how it tasted, how it ached and pulled and pushed and split me clean in half. this is how my hair felt and this is what i always had for breakfast and this was my favourite jumper. this is how we spent a summer. this was my handwriting. this is who i thought my parents were. this was the first of everything. this is the only picture i have from that night.

that doesn’t go away. is behind you, fades and changes and becomes something else in your memory as you yourself fade and change and, inevitably, become somebody else as well. still, it doesn’t go away - but once it’s in the rearview mirror, there isn’t any more of it.

this, this is all my teenagedom. this is all there is of it. this is how i spent these years. nothing else is ever going to happen to teenage me because the clock struck midnight and she stopped existing. this is everything those years were. all the people you imagined you might be at 17 when you were 14 are one finite person now. the year is finite. your sparkling, aching, messy, empty-bellied teenagedom is finite. nothing else is ever going to happen to it now. all the paths ahead of you slowly turn into the one that you chose, a singular, glorious, bumpy hike stretching out behind you as the years go on. time comes for your teenagedom first, then the next decade and the next, and there is no way to ever do it all, to ever live the lives of all the people you imagined, even briefly, you might become one day. the grand, sparkling mystery of your future has been solved. you have arrived, and you have unveiled all the secrets it ever kept from you.

the attics are stuffed to the brim with the things you’ve seen and lips you’ve tasted, all the songs you have ever heard and all the books you read and all the countries you ever lived in. this is what you did for your 22nd birthday. these are all the grand chances you took. this is the best job you ever had and this is the amount of years you had it. this is what it all did to you. this is where you’ve ended up. for every attic, there is a basement, filled to the top with all the things you didn’t do. for better or worse.

that. that’s the part that makes me lose my fucking mind. one day, the great and glittering chapters of your life will close, some gently, some violently, some too early. time inevitably runs out, and i want to spend it running around trying to fill it with so much of the sky-high rejoicing, despairing to death. there is so much comfort in not knowing what the future holds - but one day, i will have explored all the rooms i’ve built in this museum and everything i hung up here. hopefully, when have the answers, when i’ve found out what happens to me, when my teenagedom closes behind me - i will slip out the backdoor and look at it and say - oh, so this is what it became. 

Both Eve and Lilith were created expressly for Adam and he cast them aside - we assume in the case of Eve, given Adam talks about shagging other women and there’s no mention of Eve in the show just yet.

(I’m assuming any marriage would be on the rocks when one of you dooms all of mankind. Bit awkward with the next candlelit dinner.)

I wonder if, for Lute, there was something in the idea that, although she wasn’t made for Adam in the same way, she works harder than any other woman, past or present in his life, to act as if she were created for him - that she made an active choice to become what Lilith and Eve had no choice in being. And all the time she was waiting for Adam to notice that she was being more attentive, more supportive, just overall present for him (in both meanings of the word) because, hey, Lute doesn’t HAVE to be his companion but WANTS to be.

What intrigues me is that Lute’s version of Adam in her head is very close to how we see him with Charlie. So we have no reason to doubt her interpretation of Adam - her version is pretty on the money. This means that when ‘her’ Adam seems fairly bored with the concept of Lute professing her love…

Ouch. That she doesn’t even tolerate a version of Adam that loves her back - that’s a fantasy most people would bend their image of the person they loved for, even if it didn’t make sense in the way they truly acted. But Lute’s steadfast idea of the truth is so deeply engrained, and I imagine there’s a decent amount of self hatred in there too, that she couldn’t ever bear that.

She wants Adam back - exactly the way he was, even if that version doesn’t want her.

There’s a strange form of integrity there, to the memory of the man she lost rather than the love she never had. Her grief remains rooted in what was rather than what could have been. And still she prefers being in a form of emotional agony and unreciprocated feelings - because that’s better than being without him entirely.

It’s an interesting issue regarding fate, too: more specifically, Lute decided to look at what presumably God decided, thought about it, and went, ‘Nah. He’s my man instead.’ It’s ballsy and also incredibly tragic, in a way. It’s very old-school, ‘let’s defy the prophecy’ logic like in a Greek tragedy. And naturally it ends in a similar fashion.

It also serves to underpin the whole idea of questioning who deserves to be where and what is ‘meant’ to happen that we see elsewhere in the show. As OP says, Lute probably ranted to herself during her ‘creepy-in-the-dark-time’ - as Abel called it - that she wouldn’t have left Adam for Lucifer, or wouldn’t have eaten the apple. But of course that’s with foreknowledge of everything that’s going to happen. It’s easy to be wise after the event.

It almost makes me want to write a fic about an Eden!Lute, because while she is servile to the one she loves, she has a huge defiance thing that would have also come into play at the Garden. Basically: would Lute have gone the same way as Eve if not Lilith? For that matter, would she have ended up railing against Adam (and not in a wink-wink nudge-nudge say-no-more way) exactly as Lilith did?

Lute, Lilith and Eve are in this trifecta around Adam, and it’s all very, very anti-feminist, it’s all highly focused on The Man. But it’s ultimately the women’s choices that actually define Hazbin’s storylines. It’s what the women choose to do and the fallout of those decisions which create the plot. Meanwhile, the men generally get tugged along by the whims of women (Alastor by Rosie, Lucifer by Lilith and then Charlie, Vox and Val by Vel, Carmilla and the Overlords).

On a rp server I once helped to run and was the main lore person for, the endgame plot of ‘series one’ was the idea of a chauvinistic God being banished by a sister- and nonbinary-hood of characters who were decidedly not male and were deciding to push back against the patriarchal regime (with male characters in supporting roles to their nb and lady friends, naturally). And we chose that plot primarily because of the way that women do hold power in the Hazbin universe.

Anyway, I digress. Overall, Lute’s whole arc is very similar to the whole Tumblr knight idea of ‘I carry your burdens,’ ‘I live to serve my lord,’ ‘I’ll avenge him’ sort of thing of a highly dangerous individual who chooses to follow another with doglike devotion. It’s one of the great tragedies that the person she decided to follow isn’t worth her efforts.

But equally, can’t that be said for everyone who chooses to follow someone else? No one is the hero we paint them to be; we’re all human. The person you lionise will usually look daft or stupid or not that attractive anyway to most other people, just as their heroes look strange to you.

Eh. Adam’s still a dick, either way.

i see a lot of confusion and arguments around what is emo/scene or not so i wanted to make this blog as a fan of most of these genres to hopefully help clarify a little!

EMO this genre is the ORIGINAL emo, although it sounds completely different from the emo music most people know today. it originated in the DC hardcore scene in the mid-80s, spawning from post-hardcore and hardcore and gained more popularity in the 90s. bands include: rites of spring, sunny day real estate, moss icon, cap'n jazz, the get up kids,

if you want to listen to some emo music, here's a spotify playlist i recommend!

MALL EMO mall emo is what most people think of when they hear the word emo. i call it mall emo (not sure if others do or not but i think it's most fitting) because it's the bands whose merch you would find somewhere like hot topic or spencer's(not a dig at mall emo i love this genre so much). it's the music genre(s) associated with the emo style and gained a ton of popularity in the 2000s. bands include my chemical romance, falling in reverse, all time low, panic! at the disco, fall out boy, paramore, pierce the veil, sleeping with sirens, evanescence, escape the fate, flyleaf, taking back sunday etc.

here's a playlist (i know it says actual emo music, i think they mean actual mall emo music as opposed to like yungblud + tx2 type shit)

IMPORTANT TO NOTE: EMO AND MALL EMO ARE NOT THE SAME THING!!!!! however, getting mad at someone for thinking mall emo is real emo is kind of pointless. because of the popularity of the emo style, the word has evolved to more assosciated with mall emo in pop culture than real emo. most people don't know the difference and that's not like a personal failing on their part that you need to be rude about! if/when you explain it to someone, be respectful! i'm looking at you, garrett!

SCENE scene is a subculture within emo, with its own more colorful version of the same fashion elements, that gained popularity in the late 2000s/early 2010s. there are a lot of different music genres within the scene subculture but the ones people most think of is crunkcore, which is a mix between electronic, hiphop, rap, and metal. bands include: dot dot curve, ismfof, attack attack!, millionaires, brokencyde, metro station, the medic droid, kill paradise, chunk! no captain chunk!, jj demon, breathe carolina, 3OH!3 etc

SCENECORE scenecore is a subgenre of hyperpop that originated on tiktok. it uses the aesthetic of the scene subculture a lot, and scene related things are often mentioned in the songs. however, the difference between scene lyrics and scenecore lyrics is that while scene music mostly has lyrics about sex, drugs, love, partying, clubbing etc scenecore lyrics are oftentimes about self harm or other harmful behavior or weirdly fetishize scene people. this is a problem because it's essentially just harmful stereotypes about scene trying to perpetuate itself as actual scene music. bands include: 6arelyhuman, kets4eki, odetari, rebzyyx, d3r, asteria, luvwillow, etc.

here's a playlist