irl vampire girl

my (long-winded) attempt at breaking down bunny’s murder:

i find it vaguely frustrating when people say that they killed bunny over their Aesthetic issues when it ran a lot deeper than that. like yeah they do find him kind of repulsive for his habits but it’s about the fact they find him disrespectful. people often point to the grilled cheese and milkshake as them finding bunny’s personality unsavoury when that was about disrespect. for the bacchnal you had to be ‘clean’ this was achieved through fasting and bathing, something henry says that bunny struggled with. for bunny to be so careless about not even hiding the fact he isn’t partaking in their cleansing rituals, doing it in a space so populated as the common room was their last straw.

bunny was killed as a revenge kill more than anything. if you go by the basic categories of killers outside of sexual fantasy driven killers, bunny’s murder falls somewhere between ‘comfort-hedonist’ killers, those who kill purely for material gain, a fee, or profit (e.g black widows) as let’s be honest, they were all saving money with bunny gone or it fall into ‘missionary’ killers, those who kill for revenge, or ideological motives (e.g war criminals or those who kill prostitutes to cleanse society of them)

julian’s speech on ‘the more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed,then the more he needs some method of channelling the primitive impulses he worked so hard to subdue ’ in my opinion essentially boils down to a theory some neuroscientists hold called the tribune brain about how three separate parts of our brain interact with eachother, the R-complex, the limbic system and the neocortex. the R-complex is the most primitive part of the brain, and also the oldest. it exists in most species, from lizards to birds to humans and controls the instinctual self. so it controls the brain’s need to, kill, eat, reproduce and flee in the sense of danger. this is how human’s were solely driven back in the stone age. they did not yet have art, or food they planted themselves. they were very animalistic still.

this part of the brain still very much exists today and interacts with the limbic system, this controls emotions, memories and sensory and motor functions. it recalls emotional states and motivational behaviours. these two interact with the newest part of the brain, the part that makes humans differ from other species, the neocortex, it’s a highly complex part of the brain that controls philosophical, cultural, linguistic and expressive contexts. the neocortex is largely what controls the greek class, yet as they do not have a balance like most humans do, their r-complex ends up controlling them much more in the future.

julian says that he finds romantics to often be failed classicists, this reminds me of a very romantic approach to the birth of humans by Georgian philosopher Mamardashvili who said that the human species began when one individual mourned the death of one another. a newer take on this is that humans began with fear of the death (historian and psychologist Akop Nazaretyan). this is more akin to richard’s narration. his fear of the dead (henry and bunny) controls his narration and how he tells his story. his handling of the true narrative is largely controlled by the two ghosts that haunt the narrative.

one theory on the birth of killers comes from the fact that humans were, in their primitive forms, naturally killers. we fought and ate our own species for centuries upon centuries before the development of the more modern brain and how modern society rather than making killers, unmakes them. the way we now raise children and interact with society subdues these primitive impulses that control our reptilian brains. my theory is, that with julian’s isolation with the group, he essentially rebuilt this unmaking, making murder more of a feasible possibility ‘a redistribution of matter’. in their isolation the class have once more returned to the base impulse that controlled man dozens of millennia’s ago.

i’d also say for certain that the bacchnal helped accelerate the group’s return to this more primitive state, the way henry describes the experience of the ritual going correctly seems to reflect humans before the tribune brain, when human’s were controlled solely by the R-complex. a lack of balances between the tribune can certainly accelerate their predeposition to murder, their brains now permanently changed.

lowkey emma d’arcy is my fancast for both camilla and charles.

two of favourite descriptions the twins: