#like aaaaa

Scylla: Ohh, you keep trying to kill me, lady! The former Sea-Nymph side of me says just forget it and move on! But, I don’t like to listen to her anymore.

Mel: That you don’t listen to yourself explains a lot. I know better than to try and kill an Oceanid. I just need you to get out of my way.

Scylla: Hear that gals? I distinctly heard the lady say I need you there, hoho! Our art changes lives! What say we change this one right now...? (Yes, I included the whole thing just because this bit goes so well with my lesbian Scylla headcanon, sue me.)

I got this conversation about 15~ hours and around 20 runs into the game. That is to say, I got this character-defining line very early into a game chock-full of similarly important lines and information all around.

By the time one unlocks the surface and reaches Circe, this conversation may have already been triggered and likewise forgotten, which is quite tragic as it reveals a lot.

In particular, this bit right here:

The former Sea-Nymph side of me says just forget it and move on! But, I don’t like to listen to her anymore.

Thanks to this, we can infer two things:

1) “Just forget it and move on!”

Scylla, as a nymph prior to the curse, couldn’t have been that cruel and/or wretched if she is willing to let something like someone trying to kill her repeatedly slide just like that. Might be because she’s an Oceanid, thus immortal, as both Melinoë and Poseidon point out, but still. She sounds quite chill. A bit of a diva even back then, yes, but quite chill anyway, which makes sense because nymphs are mostly beautiful and playful beings rather than malicious ones.

This is kind of proven by the first encounter Melinoë has with Scylla, in which she famously says:

“Ohh, hohoho, no way! No way. Lookit, gals, a lady! Ladies never come to our shows, you must be different, what’s your name? Oh, make yourself comfy, we’re just about to start, aren’t we, gals?”

Before Melinoë antagonises her and the band for no reason other than that they’re Sirens, asking whether they drown their “so-called fans” and if they even have any left, Scylla is actually quite nice and even polite. She asks for Melinoë’s name (which she NEVER gets, mind) and tells her to make herself comfy (again with my headcanon that she’s a useless lesbian, seeing how happy she is to have a woman there for once). If Melinoë had chosen her words better, chances are she could pass by the stage without a fight like Nemesis, who is confused as to how Melinoë made enemies with a musical act, and I say this verbatim. Because she is actually nice, in her own way, until she gets heckled.

Another possible reason for this line, though, is some lingering PTSD from her unfortunate run-in with Circe.

Sure, in Coral Crown she states Gods and witches cannot tame me / Curses are my endless muse, but being turned into a horrid man-eating monster for all eternity by a witch goddess (one of the most untouchable ones at that, being the daughter of Helios himself) because a god she couldn’t care less about was infatuated with her and not Circe... Well, that’s got to leave a deep psychological scar or two, no matter how flippant she is about the ordeal in her songs and pre-fight dialogue.

So, Melinoë being both a witch and a goddess could possibly be triggering that lingering side of her, hence why she is like “just forget it and move on!” with an unsaid “lest she curses us, too, like Circe did!” on the side, mayhaps.

What makes this interpretation even more interesting is that Scylla doesn’t really know who Melinoë is.

Melinoë never introduces herself to Scylla.

It’s only through Odysseus much, much later that Scylla learns that Melinoë is the Princess of the Underworld, and even then at first she just assumes Odysseus is pulling her leg there (er... tentacle...?) because he, as she puts it, was always the scheming sort. And when she brings it up to Melinoë afterwards for confirmation, Melinoë tells her to not concern herself with it, brushing the topic off for good.

This adds another layer of danger to Melinoë, right on top of the witch and goddess ones, even if Scylla doesn’t know it.

The fact that she develops a huge crush on Melinoë as their encounters grow in number (she can try to deny it and blame Bewitching Eyes on Jetty all she likes [and even IF Jetty did write the song, my personal headcanon is that it’s because she ships Scylla and Melinoë after watching them bicker and banter like a quintessential enemies to lovers trope, kissing truly is less gay than what those two have going on], but it’s painfully obvious that she wants Melinoë’s approval even without taking Bewitching Eyes into account as she keeps asking her what she thinks about her songs, which one is her favourite and whatnot) makes me think it’s not a PTSD thing, but rather that Sea-Nymph Scylla was just chill like that. Happy-go-lucky, passionate and driven, too, if her carefree attitude in the game is anything to go by.

2) “But, I don’t like to listen to her anymore.”

This, to me, is one of the most interesting bits of dialogue in the entire game since it implies that Scylla’s Sea-Nymph side remains as a pseudo conscience of sorts to some extent, and it adds a subtle element of tragic horror to Scylla’s otherwise comic relief character.

Because, in the myth, when Circe turns Scylla into a monster, she is terrified of herself. The curse is body horror at its finest.

Soon as the nymph wades in, her nether parts

Turn into dogs, then at herself she starts;

A ghastly horror in her eyes appears,

But yet she knows not who it is she fears:

In vain she offers from herself to run,

And drags about her what she strives to shun.

[Ovid, Metamorphoses, book xiv, 47-52.]

But it’s not just body horror, it’s the gradual decay and debasement of oneself, too. The anger, the pain, the shame, the self-hatred and self-disgust. All of that is more than enough to drive anyone, even an easygoing nymph like Scylla, absolutely mad, rendering who she once was a mere conscience that dwells in the back of her mind and that she listens to less and less with each aeon that goes by.

Not to mention the hunger.

A beast of such proportions, for she was quite huge, must have practically insatiable hunger. What is more, people knew and were wary of her, often trying to avoid the Strait of Messina altogether when possible, and this remains so in the Hadesverse as per Achilles’ Codex and the Scyllascion entry:

...There is a monstrous sea-creature that thrashes somewhere in Poseidon’s waters far above; we were very careful to avoid sailing across her trenches even in my sailing days. This rare breed is reminiscent of her dozen heads. Whether or not these creatures are related to Scylla, or merely appear to be, is a matter that is still contested, as no one has yet bothered asking Scylla herself.

This means that food was scarce, and on the rare occasion where sailors were brave (or foolish) enough to go through the Strait, they could get swept in Charybdis’ whirlpool if they weren’t careful enough while trying to avoid Scylla, thus denying her food for who knows how long. And this must’ve gone for aeons before Poseidon, as he himself claims in the game, got rid of her (and the Sirens) in the surface, thus ending in the Oceanus bit of the Underworld.

What is more, Achilles’ Codex mentions Scylla’s dozen heads, the Scyllascion is a fish that looks like a snake-like dog, Odysseus says she was a menace and that she caught half a dozen of his men like she had a separate set of teeth for each of them, and Scylla herself has a dialogue that is a little wink to her myth appearance:

“Go on and heckle us, lady! We’re big, we’ve got thick scales! Scylla’s got a voice like yelping dogs! Her lustrous hair looks like a bunch of snakey heads! We’ve heard it all!”

So, in a way, all this implies that myth-accurate Scylla was canon in the Hadesverse before she ended up in Oceanus after Poseidon yanked her from her rock at the Strait of Messina. I have a headcanon for this, too, and I like to imagine that Poseidon tried to smite her, injuring her gravely and making her lose the snake heads on impact, which then turned into a breed of Underworld fish on their own. As for Scylla herself, she has dangling misshapen feet in the myth, so those could’ve very well reformed into tentacles, and the shell she got attached to as a defence mechanism or something. Again, this is just my headcanon, though! :)

Ultimately, I think that the “Her disposition is of her own choice” line from her Book of Shadows entry is indeed true up to a certain point, if only because she had no other choice in the matter. What else was she supposed to do after she got turned into a hideous, ravenous monster? Be thankful to Circe for it? Act as a tour guide for those who sailed through the Strait of Messina? Refuse to eat and exist in a limbo of endless pain and hunger because, as an Oceanid, she cannot starve to death or be put out of her misery through any means?

As for the current time of the game, it’s not like she’s drowning actual, living people. She drowns Shades, that’s it. She doesn’t even get to drown Melinoë because she returns to shadow before anything can happen, so it’s not like she’s the menace she was back in her glory days. If anything, she’s rather harmless, all things considered. She is spiteful and vicious, yes. Ruthless in battle and in her songs (I Am Gonna Claw will never not be an iconic bop), too. Hella petty and sadistic at times, even. But come on now, after all that she’s been through for aeons, it really is no wonder that she is that way. Why she chooses to be the way she is. Her crash-out is just as valid as Medea’s, I dare say.

Maybe it’s just me reading too much into Scylla and everything that concerns her because she’s my favourite character and she fascinates me a lot (I am, indeed, so obsessed with her 😮‍💨✊🏼), but I can’t help but analyse her every line to these lengths, sorry.