#sunless shadow slave

And tell me it's not Sunless in Antarctica. These dark reddish circles around eyes from permanent painful lack of sleep. These white lips chapped from supernatural cold. Just change knitted jumper and shirt for functional bodysuit and that's him, pretty haunted doll boy.

.....And I JUST understood how uncanny it had to be for those Antarctica civilians. Like. Imagine. Everything is FUBAR. Apocalypse's next chapter came for YOU specifically, so you run. Luckily, you meet a military convoy. Even more luckily, it has an Awakened unit and it has a Master!

And then you see the Master in question and he is an uncannily pretty fragile child. As in, 15 years tops. Maybe 13, when he stands between soldiers with supersized weapons. He looks like maybe he shouldn't be given standard cutlery just in case it's too heavy. You feel the intense need to wrap the child in the blanket and protect him. All the soldiers treat him with reverence that verges on priests-before-god and call him The Devil.

And then he orders whole convoy to drive straight over the edge of the deadly ravine at full speed while pursued by an avalanche of Nightmare Creatures and before you darkness swells and forms the whole damn giant suspension bridge that ceases to exist half of an inch behind the last truck.

Not that things happening to him generally in the plot are probabilistically reasonable in any way; but it was lampshaded in the best possible way; this boy is Fated, he's both blessed beyond reason and cursed beyond reason, probability looked his way once and decided it has an urgent business elsewhere; and even after he stopped being Fated, many of the improbable things happening to Sunless was explainable as consequences of things that happened when he was Fated still.

Now however, he entered an entirely new arc where he really SHOULDN'T have it THIS easy. He's heavily nerfed. He's facing enemies more powerful than ever. It shouldn't go this easy for him.

(I mean, I know that Doylist explanation is that he WILL get that particular boon no matter what and also if he dies his un-resurrectable companion dies and this level of additional guilt would mess up the themes and so on. But. Let's look at Watsonian reasoning at the moment)

All of this can be explained, if we assume that all of his current opponents were handpicked to be defeatable particularly by Sunless.

Which makes sense, because ultimately, they all were indeed handpicked by Weaver at some point.

But also doesn't make sense, because, while Weaver was Demon of Fate, Sunless is currently not touching strings of Fate at all, as he literally physically represents the hole tore apart in the tapestry of Fate; his presence might be at best deduced from unexplainable lack thereof; he should be undetectable and uncontrollable.

In order to bridge all this mess, I'm choosing to believe that current arc is proof of ultimate mastery on Weaver's part: that Weaver actually managed to provide controllable environment yielding the expected result through the uncontrollable and undetectable medium.

@griffinborn wasn't convinced by my answers and wants more input and a poll but doesn't want to post a poll. Okay. I can post a poll!

(Don't pay attention to order, it's not manipulated at all! I don't have any hidden agenda here!)

Propaganda: calling them Shadow Siblings is skewed towards Sunny. Rain's only Shadow trait is being his sister and that's it. They have, however, lots of traits in common that they both have*. So, imagine going years forward when Rain is as powerful and far more famous than Sunny, who needs to remain as little known as possible. What they should be called then?

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* traits like. Being cute disasters. Obliviousness. Out-of-chart-cuteness. Being possibly only Earthlings named after their future True Names at birth. Owning their Flaws like winners and terrifying the living shit out of everyone. Achieving feats that no one Earthling ever thought to be possible. Not stopping at what their overpowered Aspects gave them and mastering a whole separate branches of sorcery without Spell's crutches, by grit and wit alone. Did I mentioned obliviousness? Anyways—

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Reblog so we can have a decent sample before the week ends!

Put any opinions and propaganda into reblogs!