yourlovingwound

im sorry i said that i wanted to replace your tendons and muscles with thin spectral cords of myself so i could draw you up and pull you around like my puppet. in retrospect that was kind of a weird thing to say and most people don’t wanna get possessed or whatever. could i instead coil myself around you like snakes and move you how i want with more brute force? is that more normal

ill just say what everyone's thinking. everyone i love has a shining thing that i lack and the only way i can have it is to claim them and never let them escape

A "demon" is a series of actions. A pattern of behavior with a name and identity and socio-historical connotations. It is not without "rules baggage". A "demon" is alike a "gambler", as is a "angel". Mind, these are not types of being. A person can occupy many of these roles, even sequentially. One can be made a demon, and one can stop being one, as one can become a gambler, and stop being one. A gambler is someone who is enamored with winning through luck. A demon is someone who is enamored with winning through agency- Someone who lives by doubling down. A high roller in life. A crowd forms around them. They say they will never die, and although nobody admits it, the crowd believes them. An angel is someone who is enamored with winning through passivity. To "fix" any of these patterns- that is, to negate them, leaving the person behind- is simple. One must only seek to bring the pattern to its natural end artificially. A gambler is banned from the casino and gambles with his pennies, his pension, until he dies or is killed. A demon is a engine. While other patterns's fuel is more mundane- money for the gambler, love for the angel- the demon's fuel is agency, and one must think for a moment before deciding how it is possible to deprive another of that without extreme measures. The answer decided on by our society is to target the methods by which the demon sustains its ongoing reaction- its combustion, to use a overwrought analogy. The demon is able to continue its pattern because it engages with the mechanisms delicate and vulnerable in the minds of all people. Although it believes it is the first to find them, it and its group, it is not- the anthropological record of the autoimmune response of societies to demons is as old as time itself. The society, the people that the demon uses as fuel, recognize the threat, and build a callous around it. when fire is starved of oxygen, it dies, and when a demon is refused a open ear, when the wildfire reaches the fire breaks and the door shuts behind it, the demon cannot save others quickly enough to replace those it loses. This is where the analogy fails. A demon is not a destructive force like a wildfire. Its fuel finds it. It finds its fuel. It would be foolish to assign morality to this reaction. The fire does not rape the kindling. The demon is not the lion and the fuel is not the deer- the demon is the wildfire and the fuel is the grass that both fuels it and grows in the fertile ashes. All the same, neither would have been born if the previous wildfires had not been snuffed out by their parents.