nothing, and then suddenly everything

🎨 chiqq0 on x

This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.

He loves ruin guards. He used to be interested in the Aranara. The studied desert ruins and ancient Sumerian gods. He studied the moons, he studied dragons, he studied humans and animals. He made an elexir of immortality, he cloned himself multiple times, and he artificially recreated a powerful moon marrow. His segments allow him to see into the past, which in return lets him draw conclusions about the future. He created a fake prophecy about himself and nearly became the fifth descender. He fucking dies for his last experiment and becomes a computer virus to Teyvat. This man has absolutely seen it all. And the abyss never even comes up. He's totally uninterested in it.

A butterfly is something beautiful and innocent. Something people would point to when talking about "enjoying the small things in life." A little spark of joy that comes and goes and makes people's days. Not meaningful per se, but a small creature that stands for the beauty of nature and life.

Portraying Dottore as taking apart a butterfly says a lot about him as a person. He's not the type to experience these small joys. He didn't learn how to be a child that simply watches and admires something beautiful. He takes beautiful things apart. Maybe because he wants to know how they work. See if he can understand them. Recreate them. If there's anything meaningful in this thing people seem to like so much.

Destroying something beautiful just out of curiosity seems fitting. Especially when it's one of the younger segments. There's also that aspect of taking away the wings of a butterfly. Making it unable to fly. Stealing it's freedom. Something that Dottore is entirely indifferent towards, because he has experienced this kind of destruction at such a young age himself. The destruction of innocence is a natural part of life to him. He takes living things apart and maybe that's because he wants to understand what was done to him. How it feels to be on the other side of the trauma he went through.

I can just imagine a little boy, abandoned by his family, sitting on the floor with an empty expression and numb emotions as he plucks pretty wings one by one from a butterfly, wondering what it's supposed to feel like to destroy something. Finding that he's way more interested in what a butterfly would do once left without its wings. His curiosity overshadowing the part of him that wonders if it's wrong to kill a little bug. That voice silenced through what he learned humans can do to one another. So what worth does a little insect even have? Its beauty doesn't save it from his hands.

And maybe something like that was the start to obsessing over the nature of things. Of life and what's beyond it. Or maybe...he's just always been this apathetic towards all forms of life. And the destruction of an innocent little creature at his mercy was the start of what got him abandoned in the first place. Since to Dottore, life and nature are arts to master and limits to conquer. And a butterfly is just a subject in his first ever experiment.