#death proof

Her breathing is ragged. There’s a certain sense of perverse delight as she looks beyond the gathering of trees, catching glimpse of individuals wandering alone in the darkness. The cones of their flashlights bob and search, the whispers of their tense conversations bounce off the wood and into DEATH PROOF’s ears.

They don’t even know she’s out there.

They don’t even know the danger they’re in.

Tomie doesn’t know the danger she’s in. She doesn’t know that she’ll be DEATH PROOF’s first victim. Arms crossed, she wanders with a smug disconnect from the terror of the scenario. It’s a scenario she’s intimately familiar with, after all, but she doesn’t understand that the silver screen’s always been there to protect her.

As it’s always been there to protect Ashley. That silver screen may as well be a silver bond bringing the two together. Tomie Katsukawa was someone that she’d always admired, despite never paying much attention to her movies. Someone creatively vicious, someone artistically determined, someone Japanese like her. It’s not until her third watch of The Butcher’s Table, complete with live director commentary, that she gives it the utmost sincerity of a watch and solidifies it as her new favorite comfort movie. Silly to say, but this is her big sister now— the sibling she never had— and she would love nothing more than to build a snowman.

Alex, despite their unique supernatural sense, doesn’t notice DEATH PROOF in the trees. They grip at the edge of their beanie, the heat of the garment leading beads of sweat to trail down their brow. Down their jacket-bearing body. They’re warm, and within this cold forest, warmth is the clearest giveaway to your position.

Alex’s warmth extends outwards, offering itself to Ashley as a gift. Offering a new home, a new job. Offering a chance to start over and on a sustainably easier path, freed from Californian cost of living and that oppressive blue thumb. No string attached, just don’t be weird. That can’t be hard, right? It… feels like an admission of defeat. She can’t accept it.

Seemingly undeterred by the oppressive atmosphere, Angel takes his small strides through the mud, clutching Samantha softly to his chest. He has nothing to worry about with such a powerful partner at his side, right? The axe hurtling through the chilling air comes to bring fear back to his heart.

And Ashley thought she needed a partner of her own. There was a sense of envy that she couldn’t even place, and likely never did, leading her to finding a haunted doll of her own and pretending like she could have the same bond that Angel and Samantha had. A whole wealth of besties around her, and she thought the only solution was a pathetic mimicry. She couldn’t even commit to it, beyond showing off to him.

Leofweard is the most equipped to fight the unseen evil, he’s fought all sorts in his time, but this isn’t his time. He’s a man temporally stranded, and he will die in this forest without ever seeing his loved ones. A 13th century peasant knight, bearing the banner of the death flag. He’s shown his opponent mercy one too many times, and that concession has sealed his fate.

Yet Ashley had wanted him to find his way home, and early. He’d granted her wish to learn battle, and had singlehandedly redirected her from indiscriminate slaughter into honorable displays of her self-improvement. She learned to do things for herself, for herself, not just to lash out against the world. Her gratitude had swollen so large that she wanted to come to the past with him and fight at his side, find the answer to her aggression in a world without the advanced surveillance technology we have today. In his wisdom, he knew that Ashley needs to confront her fears of the modern world and adapt, instead of merely taking shelter behind his pot lid shield.

Though she’d hoped to catch Myles alone, the one most aware of the danger of the woods through repeated experience, and the one whose fear shakes the trees the hardest, he’s hand in hand with Wyatt. The two can band together, watching each other’s backs, keeping each other calm through their shared touch. But don’t they know? Those closest are the ones most readily torn apart by DEATH PROOF.

Wyatt’s arrow comes screaming past Ashley’s head, and she launches back with a grin. This is the fruits of everything she’s trained for, an equal match with a worthy opponent. An opponent that had started out this whole mess with a nervous flick of silverware, now fights with purpose and resolve and respect. While he fights for a lot, he fights too for Myles, almost as much as Ashley fights for Myles as well. She fights so that he can fear her, and on her own terms. So that he can rest his head, and so that she can wear a hat, striped shirt, and clawed gloves, and torment his dreams. Her angle is no longer just cruelty for villainy’s sake, but for self-actualization. Maybe the difference is negligible for the one on the receiving end, but Ashley’s shift in attitude has mostly been horizontal anyway.

A beast stalks the dark woods, but it is not just DEATH PROOF. Jeanne panickedly stumbles through the overgrowth, arms wrapped tightly around their chest, containing the feral impulse within. However, their containment isn’t perfect. The scent bleeds through, catching the killer’s nose and leading her straight to her next victim.

Ashley finds this victim within the fog, a swirling of gas meant to terrorize the living yet finds no fear within the dead. Proudly, she steps forward to her certain demise, wearing the same smile as always. The intensity of this battle, against a monster with no capacity to hold back or plead for peace, is exactly the kind of high she chases. This is a creature stronger, faster, sharper, yet she does not fear death. She is

DEATH PROOF places a grim hand on a branch, pulling it down and straining the bark, as she eyes her next victim. The young man Alex is going over his lines out loud— he’ll try to reason with the killer. He’ll put the confidence he has in peace against an unstoppable force of nature, and the futility of this effort only serves to bring him to the dirt. Cowering, whimpering, holding on to the only response he knows. His only means of struggle against the inevitable.

It’s an effective response. When Alex gets the upper hand (by doing nothing) and traps Ashley in a corny, buttery prison, she’s made to listen to his preaching in full. She’s furious, but she knows she’s been bested, and she cannot bring herself to think lowly of him for his efforts. It’s a valuable lesson, that even the weakest target should be taken seriously, and she turns that rage into a further eagerness to kill.

The vampire believes herself invincible in the dark night, and Azusa’s steps take on a subtle confidence. Like many others, she’d conquered the hunter of the woods before, but that was on her turf. An open concrete field. These woods and this lake are DEATH PROOF’s domain, and she will soon learn that the Beast of Ikata is far, far from home.

Much like Tomie’s presence, Azusa helped Ashley to feel at home. Where she grew up, there was basically no one like her. Her parents had moved out on their own without wholly considering the effect it’d have on their future child trying to fit in. Even beyond that though, the moment vampiress Azusa agreed to a duel was evidence that Ashley’s horizons could always continue to expand.

Though he walks with full expectation and eagerness for a barrage of knives coming his way, Juli’s doom is sealed with an axe. He’s got an outward bratty confidence that hides his insecurities, a typical asshole character that’d get the worst murder in order to wring out the biggest cheers from the average audience. He may expect this fate, but he will never see it coming.

But there’s so much more to his fleshy innards than merely peeling back the skin to view them. He’s said it himself, but their two souls are alike, in a twisted fashion. Two people who came into this test determined to be the villain, who were stopped at every turn by those who could see the good in them. And so Juli went from Ashley’s most mistrusted to one of her most trusted— the bearer of their blood pact. She’ll be there to take his life some day, but for now, he can live to see the sequels.

The audience’s ire for Juli is nothing to the rotten attitude of Piper. The backing sounds of breathing grow rougher as DEATH PROOF’s fuming rage observes the siren’s cocky self-righteousness. The view even begins to tremble, until it launches towards its prey.

Watching Josie’s transformation had been so fascinating. Ashley’s cruelty is a product of revenge against the world, and here is someone seeking that same revenge against the world. Piper’s means of exacting this was spiteful violence against innocents, just what Ashley sought within her own villainy. Yet these two never found a way to connect— Piper held herself like one of the many awful customers in Ashley’s time, and Ashley was always watching. The only way these two could ever see eye to eye is intertwined in a bloody struggle.

Red Revenge is the one holding her arms out, shouting for the killer to come try her. She’s too tough to be brought down, right? The camera doesn’t even give her the dignity of showing DEATH PROOF’s face, and that acknowledgement from the audience is all that’s necessary to presume how this encounter goes.

Red wasn’t quite Ashley’s first blood, but hers was the first that felt earned. The wrestler’s pride kept her from considering an attack from behind, and Ashley took much needed validation to even continue her rampage. It tasted good, and that taste brought her all the way to where she stands now. The two are well overdue for a rematch, come to think of it.

‘I don’t belong here’, thinks Luci. She repeats it out loud, again and again, breath foggy with stress. Just when she thinks she’s alone, the howl of DEATH PROOF’s laughter rips through the branches, reigniting the fear once again. Keeping that flame stoked is the only thing keeping her alive right now, after all. Don’t rest. Don’t take a breath. You could blow out your only salvation.

Yes, keep stewing in your fear. Stew until you boil over. The sensation of being blindsided by someone snapping in rage and pulverized to death probably ought not be so entertaining, but it was. It was the twisted confirmation that the heroine should win and the cruel should lose. Maybe that’s what this was all about for Ashley, becoming the villain and being passionately pulverized for it. Luci did her this solid, and she could only return in kind by passing her the truth of how she doesn’t belong here, yet does at the same time. Somewhere where she can be loved by her peers.

A sense of bravado hides the terror within Amara’s heart. She walks with faux confidence, arms swinging rigidly at her side, as she repeats to herself that she’s ready for anything. She repeats to herself that she’s got nothing to fear, she’s been through worse after all. She repeats

Ashley sits in a chair by Amara’s bedside, leaning forward and gazing at the sleeping woman. The paint on her nails has dried, the heat from her laptop from the screening of Katsukawa’s The Butcher’s Table has bled away, and the scent of crushed tomatoes has finally subsided. Calm has finally hit, after a long night having the most fun of her life. Ashley’s presented herself as someone to be feared, and though she can taste that fear in Sleeping Beauty (though she’s dressed in a different Beauty’s yellow gown), the girl still finds enough comfort in her to rest. Amara finds enough comfort to

~‘…Ashley’

What?

[♪♪♪] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9SAUq5-V7o 

Piercing through Ashley’s haze, piercing through the shuffling of wind and wildlife in the trees, piercing through the warm silence of the RV, Amara’s plea reaches her.

~‘ASHLEY!!  I have to– I have, I have to show her what a normal sleepover is like!!  And, and maybe we can still, stab some– stab some effigies or, or whatever– but!  We can paint each other’s nails again!!  And watch horror movies and she can laugh at me f-for getting jumpscared!!  And, I can tell her, how–’

~~‘I love you, girl!!’

–It was never a romantic proclamation. It was a new feeling for someone who had resigned themselves to nihilism, to misanthropy. That nothing mattered, and no one mattered. But Amara mattered. Amara mattered more than anyone else had to her up until that point. Amara mattered more than her cheating father, more than the mother who ran away at the first sense of abandonment, more than any passing ‘friend’ made in her childhood, than any coworker or customer she’d watched the secret lives of. Amara was someone Ashley genuinely loved.

And just as Ashley had sensed the fear underneath Amara’s bravery, she senses her own fear underneath her own show of character. Fear of an unrealized being, of an eternity in a living prison. Piercing through that fear, piercing through her Ten Year Walmart placard, piercing through twenty-four long years of negative reinforcement, sixteen hands reach out to her, to bring her back to life. Some eagerly, some with fear and trepidation, some proud, some with a touch of disgust, but they’re all there.

DEATH PROOF Ashley accepts the boon and is invited out from the dark, into the light of the moon spotlighting a clearing in the trees. The barehanded grip on each of her two handaxes carries a misplaced leathery sound effect, as she stands across from Death Herself and her smiling cohort, Mellow. She smiles back, because even their hands had been there to help, and points grimly with one of her weapons.

“The point of all of this is to make the point yourself, even if it doesn’t exist in the first place. Carve it out of stone, if we have to! Because even Death has a weakness that can be exploited.”

Esmeralda’s typical passive discouragement only served to invigorate her further— the more she’s told it’s impossible, the more she believes in herself as a bringer of death. In that way, Esme has been nothing but the most supportive friend, always offering Ashley a challenge to be overcome.

Mellow’s curiosity and mystical aura was the spitting image of a Disney Princess, and could only serve to invigorate her further— the competition declared by the face in the magic mirror is one she’s glad to meet on the field.

As a girl brought up by Death and Princesses, it is only right that she surpasses both by her own merit. Though it may be a long road ahead, it’s a road she’s got to travel, and a road that she can’t simply forsake to flee into the past.

“And my work’s not done. I’ll stalk Esmeralda to the ends of the Earth and beyond. Back into space if I have to, by the tenth installment. I’ll be the one to put Death in the grave, and even as a… a normal human girl, pink flesh and red blood and black hair, I’m never going to stop. That’s what makes this life worth living.”