#valancholia

MY FIRST POINT

valancholia is such an enticing, adaptive ship.

they're foils. they both have this horrific dichotomy of power and they're both trapped in relationships with men much older than them who are awful to them. the jealousy and rage between them is unnecessary and gets encouraged by everyone around them and it's brilliant. there's truly no real reason for them to hate each other, but they do anyways. they do to the point of murder, of violence, of rage.

they're enemies to lovers- or, if you're like me, and prefer everything real fucked, they're enemies And lovers! isn't there just something so damn intimate about hunting someone down? i mean, scarring them permanently, leaving a mark that will never go away, physically and mentally. a reminder of you on their skin for the rest of their life- isn't that romantic, in its own horrid way?

plus, they're extremely flexible! they've got enemies to lovers, but they've also got begrudging friends (in later books). they've got bickering and they've got working together. you want fix-it? just think about if one of them wasn't under the thumb of a more powerful mage. they've got popular trans headcanons and metaphors (melancholia's desperation for validity can absolutely be read as a trans thing, but that's a whole other post).

they're lovely. they're funny. they'd clash so hard, which makes them ten times more interesting. vote for valancholia <3

MY SECOND POINT

consciously or not, this fandom takes every chance it can to dismiss women. valkyrie is the main character of the series, and she's so constantly ignored.

the ship wars started with 5 wlw ships to 16 mlm ships. on ao3, valkyrie is tagged as a character 200 times less than skulduggery is, despite being the main character of the series. 7/10 of the top tagged characters on ao3 are men.

people who refer to the dead men never group her in with them, even though she has officially been a part of them for, i believe, seven books. fics, shippy or otherwise, completely ignore her existence in favor of connections between male characters who show up for a few books and never again, or between characters who literally never interact on page. hell, sometimes it feels like hopeless, a character who literally only ever shows up in a short-story collection outside of the main series, is more spoken about than valkyrie.

even those of us who acknowledge val as a real character don't escape this. the amount of people i see bringing val into stories or posts only to check their 'women involved' box, or reducing her into nothing but classic feminine stereotypes and completely ignoring who she is, is absolutely insane.

and this is only talking about val. we're not even mentioning china or tanith or stephanie or melancholia or any of the other hundred women in the series and the way they get turned into nothing more than girlfriends or wives of characters like ghastly and skulduggery. i can count on one hand the amount of times i've seen tanith mentioned outside of a ghanith post.

sorry here's your spoiler :

l wouldnt doubt melancholia shes ripped val to shreds she'll do it again

They're roommates your honour

They actually were cuz this started off as a drawing for an AU I came up with but yeah

They have heels on cause they went to a Sanctuary meeting and needed to look fancy

Dont worry they had jumpers over it

is this considered a shitpost cuz its on paper

I took my time with it :( ik melancholia looks copy n pasted from every single picture of a blonde ever but I swear I tried to make her look individual

But hey,

They said its not possible to draw a completely new face aye

Or i can label her as : based on dove cameron