#bear behavior

So anyway, I was thinking about bear behavior (as one does when obsessed with a murder bear), and I realized that Skitzo can obviously GROWL because... he's literally a BEAR!

But here's the thing - in my AU, his growling isn't just random aggressive noises. It's actually his WARNING SYSTEM and honestly? It makes so much sense!

Basic Bear Communication 101

Like think about it - real bears growl as a warning before they attack! It's their way of saying "hey, back off or things are gonna get ugly!" Very much nature's version of "I'm giving you one chance here" energy! 🐻💀

So of COURSE Skitzo would use growling the same way! He's not just gonna immediately jump to violence (well, sometimes, at least in my AU) - he's gonna give you the courtesy warning first!

The Escalation Process

Picture this scenario:

Someone's bothering him (touching him too much, being annoying, etc.)

Skitzo starts growling - this is your CUE TO STOP

Person ignores the growl like an idiot

JAGGED KNIFE TIME! 🔪

The growl is literally him being NICE and giving you a chance to back off before he resorts to his canonically jagged stabbing implement! He's practically a gentleman by murder bear standards! 😂

The Audacity Of Ignoring Bear Warnings

And then imagine someone getting stabbed and having the NERVE to be like "HEY WHAT DID YOU DO THAT FOR?!"

Dude... he GROWLED at you! That was proper bear communication for "please stop!" You ignored basic animal warning signals and now you're surprised by the consequences?? 💀

Skitzo would probably just stare at them like "I literally used my words (growls) and you chose to ignore them. This is entirely your fault." Very much "I tried to be polite but you made me resort to violence" energy!

Why This Headcanon Works

It makes perfect sense for his character! He's not completely chaotic - he has his own system of warnings and escalation! The growl is his way of saying "last chance before I murder you" which is honestly more considerate than most demons would be!

Plus it adds another layer to his communication methods alongside the body language and potential speech! He's got a whole arsenal of ways to tell people to back off before resorting to stabbing!

In Conclusion

Respect the growl, people! When a murder bear gives you a warning, LISTEN TO IT! Don't be the person who gets stabbed and then acts surprised about it!

The growl-to-stab pipeline is real and entirely preventable if you just pay attention to basic bear communication! 🐻🔪

admittedly she wasn’t super keen on the topics I enjoy in fiction—and she still doesn’t like it herself personally, which is totally fine. She, like any good mom would, questioned things like “what if the wrong people see darker fictional ?” “What if people use it for the wrong reasons?” And contrary to what some say, I actually do believe those are valid concerns, especially for a parent to have. She just wants to make sure I’m safe. She wants to make sure that things that happened to me in the past don’t happen again, and I love her for that.

But over the past year of me slowly explaining things, she gets it a little bit more. She gets that while what happened to me and my friends in the past was bad, that had nothing to do with the fiction involved. I’ve showed her psychological studies that state clearly that there is a difference between fantasy and desire. She knows how much I value psychology, knows how much I care for others, she even told me once when I asked her if I could by myself a book that was a bit on the darker side “I don’t have to worry about that sort of stuff, I know that you know how to separate words on paper from what you should be doing in real life. Buy the book.”

Survival requires taking in at least as many calories as your body requires, and thriving requires ingesting more energy from your food than you use when you move. For bears to be able to survive hibernation, they have to take in a huge amount of excess energy through their food in order to bulk up enough. 

Hunting is a huge energy expenditure - that’s why all the large predators have strategies that minimize how much they have to work. Some big cats stalk their prey and only invest energy in one final leap; canids work together so that the effort of chasing and taking down prey is shared. Bears have the ability to do a huge amount of damage to other animals, true, but it would be exhausting - and if they got hurt in the process, they’d be seriously screwed. They’re also not really built for hunting: they’re not stealthy, their claws are adapted for digging rather than killing, and while they’re capable of great speed they can’t keep it up for long. 

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Woods? Part I: Fear of Bears

The media dramatizes chance encounters with fierce animals, poisonous plants, disease-born insects and other creatures that could be viewed as a threat to our existence. Fears associated with the outdoors can stem from comments made by parents and other adults. These anxieties are fueled by news worthy events about people getting attacked or bitten. Filmmakers perpetuate these fears even more by…