Cosmic Pastries

[Image ID: A scratchy 8 page black and white comic with an accent colour of yellow, featuring Soleum and Saheon. Page 1, panel 1. A “Huh, what?” wobbly speech bubble covers Soleum’s face. He noticeably has horns like deers, and is shrouded in a grainy darkness. Panel 2, Saheon stares with a face of disbelief standing straight and clenching his fists. The background is barren, with only faint checkered lines to indicate flooring.

Page 2, features a large centipede sprawling across the page, dividing the panels into top and bottom half. Panel 1, a line separates a head view of Saheon and Soleum. Both of their eyes aren’t shown, and Saheon continues to say, “Ireum-nim?” The wobbly speech bubble covers Soleum’s face still. Panel 2, “That Ireum-nim?” Saheon remarks. A scene depicting a praying hand taking up the bottom left of the page, villagers praying, and a chicken statue.

Page 3, panel 1. Saheon’s fist clenches. Panel 2, a close up of Saheon’s mouth opens saying, “This is a joke right? You’re not actually some fucked up god… right?” Panel 3, a large portion of the page depicts a large sacred tree and Saheon’s sister hanging from it, wearing Korean shaman garments.

Page 4, panel 1. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of it myself.” Soleum says downcast. Saheon looks at him, but the viewer cannot see his face. Panel 2, Soleum now looks at Saheon directly and tries to reason saying, “I was brought into this world against my will.” Panel 3, we see Soleum’s face head on and his face looking desperate as he says, “There was no way of knowing a cult was worshipping-“ Soleum’s words get cut off. Panel 4, a dripping speech bubble with a large “Stop it” sits on top of an inky and grainy black gradient.

Page 5, panel 1 the frame starts melting as Saheon surrounded by darkness kneels down to cover his face. He continues speaking, “So everything…” Panel 2, the panel begins dripping onto Saheon in panel 3. Saheon bends over more to clutch his head lamenting, “So everything to bring you here was just an experiment?” Panel 3, a black goop covers Saheon’s head as he finally crouches down fully and clutch his head. He kneels on a pool of black and yellow messy scribbles. In large scratchy and hand written text, “Useless scapegoats for a god who doesn’t want it?”

Page 6, the background is blank and the page only depicts Saheon crouching down and clutching his head. A shadow is cast over him as Soleum meekly reaches out his arm to Saheon while still standing. His expression pained, and a yellow halo surrounds his head.

Page 7, panel 1. A close up of Soleum’s yellow and black eyes, and his tired expression. He says nothing. Panel 2, Soleum finally gets on his knees reaching closer to Saheon, the top halves of this bodies not shown. Panel 3, Soleum reaches out to a crying Saheon. Panel 4, Soleum gently hugs a crying Saheon who reciprocates. Soleum’s expression looks guilty while thinking, “What can I even say, when I don’t even deserve to speak?”

Abbie Mills:

Some fans hated her for threatening the Ichabod/Katrina ship and for being a black woman main character of a genre show.

Abbie Mills was a hero with a great backstory and really fun banter with Ichabod. I have to stop there because if I get into the fuckery that occurred on the show itself my blood pressure will rise.

Black police lieutenant who hesitantly throws in her lot with Ichabod Crane, even to the point of leaving him sticky notes around her house explaining how modern things like indoor plumbing, coffee machines and co.puters work. Gradually they become very close, to the point that when reunited after separation they run to each other and she jumps into his arms. At one point he holds her close, whispering into her hair to remember their bond and that he'd be back for her. Naturally, the primary white fandom basically ignored her in favor of Crane's dead (white) wife Katrina. Around the time it was airing I was cursed with seeing 'racebent' (aka they made her white )art of Abbie because apparently the artist 'couldn't relate to her' as a Black woman. Oh and the series itself did her dirty by killing her off at the end of the first season and carrying on without her for the second. Justice for Leftenant Mills (Leftenant is what Crane calls her, he's British you see.)

The whip-smart second lead who got so shafted by the writing team by season 3 that she was barely appearing anymore (and nearly all the cast were complaining about it, not just her actress) by the time they killed her off for cheap shock value (and some would say killed the show with her, considering the massive ratings nosedive).

Claudia:

She's a young black woman who is constantly ignored over the men in the show and reduced to nothing more than tragic pieces of the mens' life story by many of the fans and sometimes even the showrunners.

Not only is she just the best girl around but she's so incredibly complex---we as the audience still don't know the real and true her. I would die to get to know her but it's shocking a large part of the IWTV fandom isn't the same!

I can't speak to her treatment from book/movie fans but TV fans literally only talk about her in relation to being Louis and lestats "daughter". By the end of her life she's in her 40s and yet the fandom only treats her as their young daughter and she is defined by that instead of her actual character

due to claudia being a black woman who is directly opposed to everyone’s white male pookie (lestat) there has been a lot of misogyny thrown at her in the form of calling her a liar because the events of her personal diary (that was never supposed to be read by anyone) don’t align with lestat’s own account of events. she is seen as manipulative and selfish and someone who was trying to drive a wedge between louis and lestat, and her own classification as a victim of abuse in this family dynamic is undermined by her efforts to remove herself and find her own community. the abuse she faces by other male leads like louis and armand is minimized even if fans are able to see lestat’s abuse for what it is, even though armand staged a lynching for her, louis, and her companion madeleine and lied about it, alongside louis minimizing lestat and armand’s actions against her. the fandom is happy to take all the male characters at face value but as far as claudia is concerned everything she did was duplicitous and self-serving.

claudia deserved better from her “family” and it breaks my heart that her life in the grand scheme of things was cut so short just as she was finding her happiness. she is incredibly funny and the love she finds with madeleine is so beautiful. the struggle of being a woman in a body that is at odds with you and who you really are and what you want to be able to do in the world is very compelling and easy to empathize with from so many different avenues whether it’s by race, disability, and/or gender/sexuality. she is such an incredible character that should be seen as more than just an obstacle and loustat’s dead daughter. her and madeleine are the best lesbian vampires and everyone should be tuning into the yuri.

She's either a horrible and manipulative girl who lies in her own personal diaries for some reason about the abuse she faced from her white father or she's an idiot who got what was coming to her when she was lynched or just a tool to be used to further the relationship between two men. Her story is quite literally never her own, her diaries shared again and again without her consent and picked apart by both the characters in universe and fans.

She's literally so interesting and so well acted by both of the actresses who play her. She has such depth and her life was cut short due to racism, misogyny, and ableism. She deserves more than to be reduced to nothing but a liar or a tragic figure to be used to further the relationship between two men.

even people claim to like her will call her stupid for her actions in season two, even though she quite literally spells out her reasons for being so desperate to join the coven. In season one she's shown trying again and again to turn a person and make herself a companion. In season two she tells Louis (her father/brother who she loves but at this point he had gotten physically violent with her when she tried to convince him to kill their maker Lestat once and for all) that the only vampires she's known are him, their white maker (who beat Louis half to death, threatened Claudia by mentioning her rapist, got violent with her, and tried to kill her), the aforementioned rapist, and her white father's white side piece who he was planning to replace her with. She wants to belong somewhere with people like her, yeah she endures humiliation at first but considering what she'd been through at this point, it makes sense that she can justify it for a while to be a necessary evil. It's also important to note that she doesn't have all the information! Louis does not tell her that Armand threatened to kill him the night she was inducted into the coven. There was no way she could have predicted Lestat coming back or Armand and the coven's plan to lynch them. Why does a woman, and especially a Black woman, have to be completely objective and rational and borderline clairvoyant all the time to be deserving of sympathy?