Nea: You Look Nice. Who Dressed You, The Great Depression?

cale, explaining how he’s so calm all the time: you know those days when you’re like “this might as well happen.” my life is already so weird.

I love Link and Allen (the parallels between their relationships with their father figures are great too!), but I have to say, I was kinda with Kanda in the whole “don’t take him with you, he’s going to betray you.” Like, I understand Link’s reasons and I’m not mad at him.

but at the same time, when Allen agreed wholeheartedly to take Link along, I was just thinking “girl stand up”

It's actually funny how humans decided "fuck living in caves with all these creepy crawlies", got out of caves, built houses that have all the nice parts of a cave without any of the yucky parts, and then all the little bugs and spiders and other creepy crawly creatures that used to also live in caves thought "sweet, new and improved caves" and moved right back in with us.

I haven’t read the alma karma arc recently, so I could be entirely off base, but does anyone else think that the second exorcist experiments might have been trying to recreate what happened with past!allen? like I don’t remember if there was a given reason/inspiration beyond “need more soldiers, why not revive old ones,” but the basics seem rather similar to me.

a person is revived after being killed (or as good as) in the body of a child with no concrete memory of who they were before (or so I assume in allen's case but that could have happened later).

injuries are unnaturally healed by using the helix of life—in the second exorcists’ case by taking it from their future/lifespan and for allen using someone else’s life.

I think the timeline might match up, too. I don’t know exactly how old allen starts out as, but we do know that present!lavi is older by like 3 years. I think allen looked between 5-8 (terrible at estimating…), so if we go short, that’s ~8 years for the final result to be revealed to apocryphos. And kanda’s been alive for 9 years chronologically, which would put allen’s age at like 6-7. That seems like adequate time to get weird fantasy sci-fi experiments up and running.

and with the way apocryphos was looking at that light cocoon allen was in, I wouldn’t be surprised if he took some inspiration, one way or another.

me, starting d gray man and seeing Allen: what a nice, polite young man :)

me, seeing Allen gamble: what a… nice?… polite young man :)

me, seeing Allen get into arguments and fight with Kanda and Cross: what a… nice?… polite?… young man :)

me, finding out more about the 14th situation: what a… nice?… polite?… young?… man :)

I’ve changed my mind, I’m not Sisyphus anymore. I’d rather the boulder just fuck me than push it up hill.

I might make a more in depth post about this later, but there’s something about Allen and Mana’s ways of grieving that stick out to me. They’re so similar, but I think there’s one key difference:

Mana forgets, Allen doesn’t.

When confronted with guilt over hurting a loved one (regardless of circumstances) and the grief of losing them, Mana couldn’t stand to look at himself to the point he literally changed his own face. He spent years searching for the very brother he killed. He hated himself so much he became someone else (Adam). It wasn’t it his fault (Adam’s), it was his fault (Mana’s)

Allen is similar, but ends up swinging in the opposite direction. When he’s at his lowest, he couldn’t cope with it either, becoming catatonic (is that the right word?). After he comes out of that state, it’s because he needs to keep a promise that he (Allen) made to Mana. And like Mana he’s acting like a different person! But he’s still Allen and he carries the guilt of turning Mana into an Akuma directly. He can’t change his face. Everything about his appearance is a constant reminder. It was his fault, and he’s going to spend everyday atoning for it.

cats being capable of understanding accidents and even giving you a little head bonk to let you know you're still cool makes it infinitely funnier that they don't understand when you're trying to help them

cats when you step on their tail: i'll admit that was rather ouchie, but given the lifetime of goodwill and trust between us, one must conclude this booboo is but a fluke.

cats when you try to get their claws unstuck from the couch covering: this nefarious bitch has never had a single honorable intention in their dishonest and shameful life, this must be one of their sinister plots or perhaps even an attempt on my life,

Sometimes I think about Allen’s habit of making terrible horrible deals with the devil, not asking any of the terms… but also they always come at very vulnerable times.

the first time, he’s dying and all of his comrades have been wiped out. The second, the only person in the world he loves and who loved him has just died (and he’s like 10, max). The third time, he’s just found out that his whole life’s a lie and he’s probably a construct—though to be fair, he was kind of given the terms on that one.

but I guess that is sometimes a characteristic of deals with the devil is that they come when desperate