Lord Vile - Blog Posts

Highly emotional about Skug's reaction to the empty world in Theatre Of Shadows.

Like. This is a man who has spent hundreds of years stripped bare like an exposed nerve to sensory input. He can't close his eyes. He can't put his fingers in his ears. He can't sleep. He's "learned to" sort-of sleep by meditating, but he has no way to fully turn off to the world around him.

He's also massively ADHD-coded, a condition associated with sensory processing issues - specifically, hypersensitivity to sensory stimuli, leading to sensory overload.

Add to that, that Necromancers all seem to have a heightened sort of sensory perception - they can all sense the echoes of negative emotions like fear, despair and misery. At a certain power level - which Melancholia reaches in DB - their entire way of processing sensory stimuli, the way they see the world, changes.

Skug is a natural Necromancer. He developed his abilities long before he joined the Temple as Lord Vile, and Vile very quickly outpaced the most advanced teacher they had for him. So he's probably had very little - if any - training in how to deal with those added sensitivities or tune them out. As a dead person commanding death magic - and someone so powerful he can use highly unstable Necromancy without his channelling object - he's probably more sensitive to these things than your average Necromancer.

So in Vile, you have an immensely traumatised torture survivor who's lost all human ways to cope with his pain (he can't comfort eat, he can't get drunk, he can't lose himself in sex, he can't sleep, he's lost his loved ones, he has no way of recovering at all), who's also already hypersensitive to how bright and noisy and Too Much the world is, and now has no way of disconnecting from all that stress, while his senses have been dialled up to 11.

So? Those random, pointless little solo expeditions into dead universes? Were actually probably a desperate man's last resort in trying to decompress, to find somewhere he could get some fucking peace and quiet. Somewhere to just make all the lights and the noise and the emotions that aren't his go away, to make it stop. The only outlet he had, to escape a world that was still hurting him. The only place he could relax.

Anyway vile needs rainymood.com and a lie down in a nice dark room thanks for coming to my ted talk

Always fascinated by this.

Love the effect of friendship and love on behaviour, especially that of villains or otherwise morally grey characters. This also suggests that the fundamental difference between Lord Vile and Skulduggery is love - love is what created Vile (Skulduggery losing his family and being consumed by rage) and love is what killed him too (Val’s companionship and love of Skul allowing him to move on and improve himself.)

I adore this duo so much - platonic soulmates for the win!

I’m a little obsessed with Skulduggery telling alt Vile that he’s the superior one in DotL because it’s such a fascinating trope subversion.

The typical trope is that a character who is a morally good person is faced with an alternate version of themselves who is stronger, but also evil. Then said character must battle with whether or not they value being strong or being good more.

And this is why I love Skulduggery here so much. He has spent nearly his whole life being the despicable one. He’s cruel. He’s strong and he bullies those weaker than him. Even if he is clever, he is ultimately a brute who’s spent so long being used as a weapon that he’s come to love it. He’s been strong his whole life, he doesn’t want to be strong anymore. He wants to be good in order to please Valkyrie.

And finally, he is faced with a version of himself who is even stronger than him, but also a worse person. He is finally the better person, even if that makes him weaker. He’s happy to be the good one. Even if it means getting literally dragged off and tortured, he gets to know that he’s not as awful as he could be. It is no moral battle for him, it is finally being able to claim moral victory.

And he’s never really worried, even when they take him away to be tortured. Because Vile is alone, there’s nobody in the world who loves him. Skulduggery, on the other hand, has someone who’d burn the world down for him. He doesn’t need to be stronger because he has someone he can rely on. And that’s how he gets away with claiming superiority to Vile. His growth as a character over the series has resulted in there being someone who will break him out.

Anyways, subversion of annoying tropes for the win. Skulduggery’s relationship with Vile fascinates me.