Yep, still in love with Hemostuck.
Dec. 9th, 2012 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitI spent last week coughing my internal organs out and trailing Kleenex everywhere I went, so there wasn't much else to do except drink tea and be miserable and abate my misery with fanfiction. To this end, I embarked on a reread of Hemostuck. (Both because I had the time, and because my throat being on fire makes even the kind of deep emotional pain that Hemostuck hits me with seem tolerable! :D I'm a wimp.)
I'm still completely, utterly in love with Hemostuck!Eridan; I want to, like, tenderly kiss his fins and feed him oranges and maybe take him shopping somewhere expensive. (This is nothing new; it's my standard reaction to Hemostuck!Eridan. Actually, it's my standard reaction to most Hemostuck!characters!) I found myself noting more of Eridan's implied past, this time round; I got hammered hard by the themes of use and abuse that surround Eridan.
Roach (or possibly uA) once said that "the question asked in 'The Fisher-Prince' is 'who owns Eridan Ampora,' and the answer, distressingly, is not 'Eridan Ampora'." That has stayed with me as close as any actual line from the fic, because it's so very pithy yet dead-accurate a summary. Eridan doesn't own himself; being seadweller means he's open to the most basic violations of his bodily integrity. The entirety of "The Fisher-Prince" is a string of subtle and unsubtle examples of times Eridan makes or attempts a deal that ends with him being hurt.
The examples of how Eridan's caste strips him of self-ownership range all the way from very mild, almost foreshadowing, moments to graphic and frightening incidents. The sheer repetition is a key feature, but more than that, it's how the repetition spans every level of cute and funny and threatening and scary, each building on the one before. The earliest warning signs may well be dismissed by many readers as 'just the way things work' or 'not too bad'; by gradually expanding both the severity and the sexual content, Roach and uA tie all of them together (which makes rereading a very rewarding experience - as witness this post) in a very broad picture of Why Eridan's Society Is Wrong.
For a careful reader, it's laid out clearly but abstractly in the very beginning. In contrast to Feferi's naive suggestions, based on the way the seadwellers she's seen dress and act when land dwellers aren't there, we get Eridan's reflection on flaunting what he is:
So you’re sea offal. You like the shamelessness of pointing a big glittery finger at yourself: daring the world to come at you.
You wish you weren’t a little fucking surprised when the world, time and time again, comes at you.
Here in the very first scene it's spelled out for us that seadwellers are refuse, and the world isn't kind to them, even when they're minding their manners on a legitimate business trip; that Eridan has firsthand experience with the world 'coming at him' for the way he was born.
This is confirmed and more solidly linked once Eridan reaches the capitol. No sooner does he reach the docks than he's forced to ignore "catcalling" bluebloods in order to get his cargo seen to; then he wrangles with a green-blooded customs agent who cheats him while condescendingly explaining supply and demand as if he couldn't possibly understand the concept. Eridan reflects that,
You have been selling your goods here for sweeps upon fuckin sweeps, and you know about supply and demand. You also know about getting bilked senseless, and you know oceans about being patronized. You would rather be patronized than all of the alternatives because you know far more about serious wounds, but it sticks in your craw nonetheless.
Scarcely one NPC in, and already we see what Eridan's choices in any interaction with land-dwellers are: submission (accepting the other person's decisions about how to interact), or "serious wounds".
His first move upon arriving in the city proper is to find somewhere to sell his kismesis ring; it's how he flirts with Sollux, and on the surface seems like it should be a pretty straightforward scene. He finds a pawn shop and begins bartering:
“Fifteen.”
“Six.”
“I’ll take nine if you promise to give the little palace starlin that’s gonna pick this up a run for every scrap a bullion he got.”
“I’ll give you ten if you let me touch your fins.”
With no lead-in, suddenly a goods-for-money exchange has switched targets: Eridan, not a piece of jewelry, is now the object in trade. Eridan tries to evade this 'offer,' but gives in when she won't drop it. As with the greenblooded customs clerk, Eridan has little choice but to go along with the shopkeeper's decisions about what he can offer, and what he can receive.
You grit your teeth and lean in, and she tugs, almost gently, at the middle lobe of your left fins.
“Never saw a seadweller this close up,” she says softly, and runs her fingers over the achingly sensitive violet-flushed tips.
“We’re like unicorns,” you grit out through your fangs, “only a long fuckin sight handsomer. You fill a pail yet, sweetglobes?”
“Don’t try your luck.” She flicks the lowest tip, a lighting-bright stab of pain you’re altogether used to, and pushes you away while you’re still wincing.
This lays out the pattern we've already seen in the abstract, which will repeat throughout the fic: as a seadweller, Eridan is depersonified, which strips him both of bargaining power and of the right to limit other people's bargaining, and allows others to make his body part of the negotiations, often sexually and in ways where the culmination on Eridan's end is pain, not satisfaction. This is the first explicitly physical example we receive, and the lightest in tone; Eridan's ability to grit his teeth and endure through sarcasm still might mask the essential wrongness going on for some readers. Ultimately, however, his attempt to make a basic business transaction ends with Eridan's body being part of what's assumed to be on offer, and with him being hurt by it.
A few scenes later, he's accosted by some blueblood thugs who get distracted from beating him up when they've got him pushed up against a wall:
“How many people can say they pailed with seameat?” he breathes.
“How many people would want to?” the girl says sourly, but she’s not stopping him.
And his hand on you is every single other hand that has ever been laid on you so that’s when your knife cuts a wide, silky arc over his belly, as easy as anything could ever be, and your brain’s one long litany of God oh help me God because you don’t know how many more times you can go through with this before there’s nothing left of you.
Later, the same bluebloods corner him again, and one takes him down with a flying tackle:
He rolls some bit of himself between your legs and there are teeth scraping up against your throat, and again you can’t say you’re surprised that any of them are getting off on this. You’d be surprised if they weren’t, them so worked up and furious and you so fucking lowblooded that you should be fucking grateful anyone’d care to touch you at all, you with your fucking blood that screams use me to anyone as wants to take a shot.
Just in case we missed it in that first interaction, now we get the no-holds-barred version, the X-ray view of what's underneath. The customs agent and shopkeeper didn't shout or draw a weapon, but the attitude, and the outcome, are the same: Eridan is not in the category of people who are allowed to say no, and there's no way for him to enter that category. Except with brute force and unhesitating violence, and that only works against bluebloods, who are scarcely higher higher than Eridan on the social scale; if anyone who mattered ever tried to lay claim to him, what recourse would he have?
That the answer is "None" becomes blindingly clear when he encounters Kanaya in a similar condition:
Sometimes you’ve lain awake in your recuperacoon at day thinking about Fef looking like that, panicking all hot with anger in the palms of your hands, but mainly that’s to distract remembering yourself looking like that in an uncountable plethora different mirrors in truly terrible amount of different ways. You look like that right now. You are an embarrassment. It takes away the last thing you are, which is seadweller, and it makes you finally into thing -- makes you into an object, a cringe reaction, a ripped-up dress with blood all over it, something that never got the chance to say no. Some boy whose body is freehold.
Kanaya's technically a greenblood, middle-class and respectable; if she can't defend herself against those who live in the palace, Eridan wouldn't have a chance. We already know that seadwellers are always at risk for being feral; pulling a clam knife on a highblood would get Eridan killed, perfectly legally.
The other thing I noticed on this re-read is how widely the attitudes that make seadwellers 'freehold' are believed and repeated by the characters. In between getting jumped, Eridan spends what feels like the entire fic being told that he looks like he just had sex -- by Sollux ("You look like you’ve been pailing half the dock.”), by Karkat ("I am not walking around with someone who looks like he just pailed a combination harvester."), by himself when he guesses what the greenbloods around him think ("giving you the same old side-eye only moreso because you still look like you pailed a steamroller"). No one distinguishes between 'being assaulted' and 'having sex', even when Eridan's wearing a ring that labels him as being in a committed relationship. Even when they personally know him, and how much he values that relationship.
Eridan himself, upon seeing Sollux again, reacts as though he might be under suspicion of adultery: “Never want anyone but you, Sol, I swear it -- ” and when he's naked, he's surprised that Sollux isn't disgusted by the signs of what he's been through. (An astute reader will remember, when Eridan pulls the shower curtain over himself, that he swore in the very first scene of the fic that no one except Feferi would ever see him naked, ever. Now here he is... Sollux has the best of intentions, but is still disregarding Eridan's choices because he assumes he has that right.)
At least Sollux, though, is aware of more than he seems to understand at first; near the end comes this exchange, which also makes Eridan's self-doubt explicit:
“You’re mine,” he [Sollux] says finally, simply, pushing into one of your bruises. You yowl some. “I own you. Did you really think that thome shalebloodth from the hoodring could get their ugly pawth on you and take you away?”
“Don’t,” you croak, and you’re five again, not knowing whether you want him to not talk about it or not know or not -- stop, basically, all tied up in this terrible nausea of tenderness. “Don’t.”
Between that exchange and the later one where he tells Eridan flat-out that "Nobody, not th -- scumsucking blues, not anyone -- can ever change how I see you without your.... express... consent, asshole", I wasn't entirely surprised to see confirmation on the official Tumblr that Sollux's "nerdlings" are essentially rescue cases, and include seadwellers amongst their number.
The other interesting things I noticed were a whole bunch of stuff about Feferi, in the context of Eridan's experiences in the capitol.
The only other seadweller in the fic, and in many ways a sharp contrast to Eridan (the traveller, the brawler, the city man, the trader) in her confinement and isolation, Feferi still shares certain things in common with his experiences -- namely, her vulnerability to the end results of land-dweller attitudes. I was surprised by just how often Eridan considered Feferi encountering the kind of sexualised violence he routinely receives.
Eridan worries about Feferi in a lot of ways. Over the course of the fic, he worries about how little she sleeps, because they can't afford sufficient sopor; about the toxins she picks up from deep-diving; about her sanity in the isolation they live in -- underneath all of it, he never loses his base awareness that because of the colour of her blood she'll be killed remorselessly at Ascension, denied any chance at life based solely on her blood. Though he dwells on it less, this is a grim reflection on Eridan's own chances of making it to adulthood; at the start of the fic he's bitterly sardonic about the popularity of cuttlefish as spaceship-compatible pets:
It goes to show how many of your people end up making it to Ascension Day, though, because you can’t imagine any seadweller worth their salt wanting to keep a fuckin cuttlefish around, but you try not to think about that too hard.
Most of all, though, Eridan worries about Feferi ever being forced to stand where he's been. He might dodge the question of his own survival (and in Lost Teeth Like White Jewels, Karkat susses out that he doesn't expect to survive Ascension because he'll go down with Feferi), but he's dead set on the twin notions that she'll live as long as he can make it happen, and that if she ever experiences the things he does, it will kill her.
One day you’ll come back and she won’t be here, you’ll come back with the money and she’ll be a pile of gills and gibs showing where someone used her up -- [...] -- or she’ll be gone to the deeps for good, one more ragged monster to keep the landdwellers on their toes. Better that you’re used, little by numb little, than her all at once.
Knowing what he faces, going to the capitol, he nonetheless chooses it because the alternative is allowing her to experience that cycle of depersonification--interaction--assault--pain. Having already reflected that he wishes he'd stop being surprised when the world comes after him, he makes Feferi promise to be on guard while he's gone and keep the rifle by her at all times; he doesn't trust the world not to come at her, too, no matter how far away from the world she might be.
She says, “Don’t let anyone touch you.”
“I never let anyone touch me,” you say, and you step over the railing and into the tug and start working the winch downwards.
Which says a lot, both about Eridan's experiences and about Feferi's; she's already observed that he never comes back from the city "really fine", and she knows at least some of the why: when Eridan goes there, people touch him when they don't have his permission to do it. No wonder she spends his absences sick with worry over him, despite her own desire to leave the ship for a change.
Eridan's first reaction upon returning to the Corbenic calls the reader back to his warning/fear upon leaving -- that he'll find only "gills and gibs", Feferi destroyed by someone who sees her as a thing to be used, and her too proud and naive to submit for survival's sake.
Just a few scenes before, we're treated to a passage that highlights the sexual nature of oral bleeding to trolls, in case we've somehow overlooked it:
[Sollux] licks at his lips-- not ragged tatters like your own, just barely nicked, just barely even teased at. The dark flesh is barely punctuated with little stars of gold and the thought of coaxing out more of that warm blood of his sort of makes a spark of desire roil in your belly but you’re not ready, not tonight.
All the better to make us feel Eridan's instinctive fear when he finds Feferi:
But then she sees you: she utters a low cry and scrabbles up, skinned knees, torn mouth -- you drop the knife and wrap your arms around her and she laughs, a wet, wealy sound and you’re home, you’re home.
No wonder he assumes Gamzee's bloodied body is a corpse. Barring his kismesis, that's what he's made of everyone who's tried to take a bite out of him without his consent, and what he tried to teach Feferi to do should anyone pull that sort of thing on her. Death is the only way he can maintain any kind of boundary that won't be ignored, land-dwellers see his kind as objects to be used in any fashion they choose, and what applies to seadwellers applies doubly to Feferi, whose blood colour means she's living on borrowed time.
I'm still completely, utterly in love with Hemostuck!Eridan; I want to, like, tenderly kiss his fins and feed him oranges and maybe take him shopping somewhere expensive. (This is nothing new; it's my standard reaction to Hemostuck!Eridan. Actually, it's my standard reaction to most Hemostuck!characters!) I found myself noting more of Eridan's implied past, this time round; I got hammered hard by the themes of use and abuse that surround Eridan.
Roach (or possibly uA) once said that "the question asked in 'The Fisher-Prince' is 'who owns Eridan Ampora,' and the answer, distressingly, is not 'Eridan Ampora'." That has stayed with me as close as any actual line from the fic, because it's so very pithy yet dead-accurate a summary. Eridan doesn't own himself; being seadweller means he's open to the most basic violations of his bodily integrity. The entirety of "The Fisher-Prince" is a string of subtle and unsubtle examples of times Eridan makes or attempts a deal that ends with him being hurt.
The examples of how Eridan's caste strips him of self-ownership range all the way from very mild, almost foreshadowing, moments to graphic and frightening incidents. The sheer repetition is a key feature, but more than that, it's how the repetition spans every level of cute and funny and threatening and scary, each building on the one before. The earliest warning signs may well be dismissed by many readers as 'just the way things work' or 'not too bad'; by gradually expanding both the severity and the sexual content, Roach and uA tie all of them together (which makes rereading a very rewarding experience - as witness this post) in a very broad picture of Why Eridan's Society Is Wrong.
For a careful reader, it's laid out clearly but abstractly in the very beginning. In contrast to Feferi's naive suggestions, based on the way the seadwellers she's seen dress and act when land dwellers aren't there, we get Eridan's reflection on flaunting what he is:
So you’re sea offal. You like the shamelessness of pointing a big glittery finger at yourself: daring the world to come at you.
You wish you weren’t a little fucking surprised when the world, time and time again, comes at you.
Here in the very first scene it's spelled out for us that seadwellers are refuse, and the world isn't kind to them, even when they're minding their manners on a legitimate business trip; that Eridan has firsthand experience with the world 'coming at him' for the way he was born.
This is confirmed and more solidly linked once Eridan reaches the capitol. No sooner does he reach the docks than he's forced to ignore "catcalling" bluebloods in order to get his cargo seen to; then he wrangles with a green-blooded customs agent who cheats him while condescendingly explaining supply and demand as if he couldn't possibly understand the concept. Eridan reflects that,
You have been selling your goods here for sweeps upon fuckin sweeps, and you know about supply and demand. You also know about getting bilked senseless, and you know oceans about being patronized. You would rather be patronized than all of the alternatives because you know far more about serious wounds, but it sticks in your craw nonetheless.
Scarcely one NPC in, and already we see what Eridan's choices in any interaction with land-dwellers are: submission (accepting the other person's decisions about how to interact), or "serious wounds".
His first move upon arriving in the city proper is to find somewhere to sell his kismesis ring; it's how he flirts with Sollux, and on the surface seems like it should be a pretty straightforward scene. He finds a pawn shop and begins bartering:
“Fifteen.”
“Six.”
“I’ll take nine if you promise to give the little palace starlin that’s gonna pick this up a run for every scrap a bullion he got.”
“I’ll give you ten if you let me touch your fins.”
With no lead-in, suddenly a goods-for-money exchange has switched targets: Eridan, not a piece of jewelry, is now the object in trade. Eridan tries to evade this 'offer,' but gives in when she won't drop it. As with the greenblooded customs clerk, Eridan has little choice but to go along with the shopkeeper's decisions about what he can offer, and what he can receive.
You grit your teeth and lean in, and she tugs, almost gently, at the middle lobe of your left fins.
“Never saw a seadweller this close up,” she says softly, and runs her fingers over the achingly sensitive violet-flushed tips.
“We’re like unicorns,” you grit out through your fangs, “only a long fuckin sight handsomer. You fill a pail yet, sweetglobes?”
“Don’t try your luck.” She flicks the lowest tip, a lighting-bright stab of pain you’re altogether used to, and pushes you away while you’re still wincing.
This lays out the pattern we've already seen in the abstract, which will repeat throughout the fic: as a seadweller, Eridan is depersonified, which strips him both of bargaining power and of the right to limit other people's bargaining, and allows others to make his body part of the negotiations, often sexually and in ways where the culmination on Eridan's end is pain, not satisfaction. This is the first explicitly physical example we receive, and the lightest in tone; Eridan's ability to grit his teeth and endure through sarcasm still might mask the essential wrongness going on for some readers. Ultimately, however, his attempt to make a basic business transaction ends with Eridan's body being part of what's assumed to be on offer, and with him being hurt by it.
A few scenes later, he's accosted by some blueblood thugs who get distracted from beating him up when they've got him pushed up against a wall:
“How many people can say they pailed with seameat?” he breathes.
“How many people would want to?” the girl says sourly, but she’s not stopping him.
And his hand on you is every single other hand that has ever been laid on you so that’s when your knife cuts a wide, silky arc over his belly, as easy as anything could ever be, and your brain’s one long litany of God oh help me God because you don’t know how many more times you can go through with this before there’s nothing left of you.
Later, the same bluebloods corner him again, and one takes him down with a flying tackle:
He rolls some bit of himself between your legs and there are teeth scraping up against your throat, and again you can’t say you’re surprised that any of them are getting off on this. You’d be surprised if they weren’t, them so worked up and furious and you so fucking lowblooded that you should be fucking grateful anyone’d care to touch you at all, you with your fucking blood that screams use me to anyone as wants to take a shot.
Just in case we missed it in that first interaction, now we get the no-holds-barred version, the X-ray view of what's underneath. The customs agent and shopkeeper didn't shout or draw a weapon, but the attitude, and the outcome, are the same: Eridan is not in the category of people who are allowed to say no, and there's no way for him to enter that category. Except with brute force and unhesitating violence, and that only works against bluebloods, who are scarcely higher higher than Eridan on the social scale; if anyone who mattered ever tried to lay claim to him, what recourse would he have?
That the answer is "None" becomes blindingly clear when he encounters Kanaya in a similar condition:
Sometimes you’ve lain awake in your recuperacoon at day thinking about Fef looking like that, panicking all hot with anger in the palms of your hands, but mainly that’s to distract remembering yourself looking like that in an uncountable plethora different mirrors in truly terrible amount of different ways. You look like that right now. You are an embarrassment. It takes away the last thing you are, which is seadweller, and it makes you finally into thing -- makes you into an object, a cringe reaction, a ripped-up dress with blood all over it, something that never got the chance to say no. Some boy whose body is freehold.
Kanaya's technically a greenblood, middle-class and respectable; if she can't defend herself against those who live in the palace, Eridan wouldn't have a chance. We already know that seadwellers are always at risk for being feral; pulling a clam knife on a highblood would get Eridan killed, perfectly legally.
The other thing I noticed on this re-read is how widely the attitudes that make seadwellers 'freehold' are believed and repeated by the characters. In between getting jumped, Eridan spends what feels like the entire fic being told that he looks like he just had sex -- by Sollux ("You look like you’ve been pailing half the dock.”), by Karkat ("I am not walking around with someone who looks like he just pailed a combination harvester."), by himself when he guesses what the greenbloods around him think ("giving you the same old side-eye only moreso because you still look like you pailed a steamroller"). No one distinguishes between 'being assaulted' and 'having sex', even when Eridan's wearing a ring that labels him as being in a committed relationship. Even when they personally know him, and how much he values that relationship.
Eridan himself, upon seeing Sollux again, reacts as though he might be under suspicion of adultery: “Never want anyone but you, Sol, I swear it -- ” and when he's naked, he's surprised that Sollux isn't disgusted by the signs of what he's been through. (An astute reader will remember, when Eridan pulls the shower curtain over himself, that he swore in the very first scene of the fic that no one except Feferi would ever see him naked, ever. Now here he is... Sollux has the best of intentions, but is still disregarding Eridan's choices because he assumes he has that right.)
At least Sollux, though, is aware of more than he seems to understand at first; near the end comes this exchange, which also makes Eridan's self-doubt explicit:
“You’re mine,” he [Sollux] says finally, simply, pushing into one of your bruises. You yowl some. “I own you. Did you really think that thome shalebloodth from the hoodring could get their ugly pawth on you and take you away?”
“Don’t,” you croak, and you’re five again, not knowing whether you want him to not talk about it or not know or not -- stop, basically, all tied up in this terrible nausea of tenderness. “Don’t.”
Between that exchange and the later one where he tells Eridan flat-out that "Nobody, not th -- scumsucking blues, not anyone -- can ever change how I see you without your.... express... consent, asshole", I wasn't entirely surprised to see confirmation on the official Tumblr that Sollux's "nerdlings" are essentially rescue cases, and include seadwellers amongst their number.
The other interesting things I noticed were a whole bunch of stuff about Feferi, in the context of Eridan's experiences in the capitol.
The only other seadweller in the fic, and in many ways a sharp contrast to Eridan (the traveller, the brawler, the city man, the trader) in her confinement and isolation, Feferi still shares certain things in common with his experiences -- namely, her vulnerability to the end results of land-dweller attitudes. I was surprised by just how often Eridan considered Feferi encountering the kind of sexualised violence he routinely receives.
Eridan worries about Feferi in a lot of ways. Over the course of the fic, he worries about how little she sleeps, because they can't afford sufficient sopor; about the toxins she picks up from deep-diving; about her sanity in the isolation they live in -- underneath all of it, he never loses his base awareness that because of the colour of her blood she'll be killed remorselessly at Ascension, denied any chance at life based solely on her blood. Though he dwells on it less, this is a grim reflection on Eridan's own chances of making it to adulthood; at the start of the fic he's bitterly sardonic about the popularity of cuttlefish as spaceship-compatible pets:
It goes to show how many of your people end up making it to Ascension Day, though, because you can’t imagine any seadweller worth their salt wanting to keep a fuckin cuttlefish around, but you try not to think about that too hard.
Most of all, though, Eridan worries about Feferi ever being forced to stand where he's been. He might dodge the question of his own survival (and in Lost Teeth Like White Jewels, Karkat susses out that he doesn't expect to survive Ascension because he'll go down with Feferi), but he's dead set on the twin notions that she'll live as long as he can make it happen, and that if she ever experiences the things he does, it will kill her.
One day you’ll come back and she won’t be here, you’ll come back with the money and she’ll be a pile of gills and gibs showing where someone used her up -- [...] -- or she’ll be gone to the deeps for good, one more ragged monster to keep the landdwellers on their toes. Better that you’re used, little by numb little, than her all at once.
Knowing what he faces, going to the capitol, he nonetheless chooses it because the alternative is allowing her to experience that cycle of depersonification--interaction--assault--pain. Having already reflected that he wishes he'd stop being surprised when the world comes after him, he makes Feferi promise to be on guard while he's gone and keep the rifle by her at all times; he doesn't trust the world not to come at her, too, no matter how far away from the world she might be.
She says, “Don’t let anyone touch you.”
“I never let anyone touch me,” you say, and you step over the railing and into the tug and start working the winch downwards.
Which says a lot, both about Eridan's experiences and about Feferi's; she's already observed that he never comes back from the city "really fine", and she knows at least some of the why: when Eridan goes there, people touch him when they don't have his permission to do it. No wonder she spends his absences sick with worry over him, despite her own desire to leave the ship for a change.
Eridan's first reaction upon returning to the Corbenic calls the reader back to his warning/fear upon leaving -- that he'll find only "gills and gibs", Feferi destroyed by someone who sees her as a thing to be used, and her too proud and naive to submit for survival's sake.
Just a few scenes before, we're treated to a passage that highlights the sexual nature of oral bleeding to trolls, in case we've somehow overlooked it:
[Sollux] licks at his lips-- not ragged tatters like your own, just barely nicked, just barely even teased at. The dark flesh is barely punctuated with little stars of gold and the thought of coaxing out more of that warm blood of his sort of makes a spark of desire roil in your belly but you’re not ready, not tonight.
All the better to make us feel Eridan's instinctive fear when he finds Feferi:
But then she sees you: she utters a low cry and scrabbles up, skinned knees, torn mouth -- you drop the knife and wrap your arms around her and she laughs, a wet, wealy sound and you’re home, you’re home.
No wonder he assumes Gamzee's bloodied body is a corpse. Barring his kismesis, that's what he's made of everyone who's tried to take a bite out of him without his consent, and what he tried to teach Feferi to do should anyone pull that sort of thing on her. Death is the only way he can maintain any kind of boundary that won't be ignored, land-dwellers see his kind as objects to be used in any fashion they choose, and what applies to seadwellers applies doubly to Feferi, whose blood colour means she's living on borrowed time.