I Never Clicked On Something So Fast! Omg My Poor Child He’s Struggling! I’m Not Going To Spoil It

Some Hunter sketches

1, Huntlow of course

2, a younger Hunter, maybe 13 to 14

3, post canon Hunter striking a pose

A high effort shit post based off of this post I saw a while back and tagged Hunter core.

(Click image for better quality)

Marcille sketches on lighting

We can love the person he has turned out to be without whitewashing the crappy things he has done

Guys, I know Darius is cool, but can we please stop victim-blaming Hunter and acting like the way even the good adults in his life treated him is NBD?

‘Cause I keep seeing a lot of “okay Darius was mean to Hunter at first, but Hunter was a brat who got the job because of nepotism, so…” comments.

And look, I really think people in general are hugely underestimating just how badly Hunter was screwed over not just by Belos but by *ALL* the adults around him.

1) Let’s start by establishing something first: Hunter was never a brat to anybody in the castle.

Now, to be clear, even IF Hunter had been a brat, people 30 years older than him should still have not made his bad situation worse. If there are two people, and one of them is an adult while the other is a kid, the adult is supposed to keep their cool even if the kid acts out. You can punch up but you can’t punch down.

But that point is moot because all the evidence we have points at Hunter being a little nerd who adored the adults around him and was desperate to please them.

Exhibit #1: Dana’s official art, where Hunter freaks out over being slightly less overworked because it will make Lilith hate him. Even with the mask, you can tell he has a frantic expression.

Exhibit #2: the Hunter’s Palisman Observation stream, when Hunter has a question and is looking for an answer, he reaches out to the Coven Heads to ask them. He sees them as wise and knowledgeable, and wants to learn from them. That makes it extra hurtful that “Darius ignored me, as per usual. Eberwolf hissed at me, also as per usual.”

Exhibit #3: in ASIAS, we learn that Hunter genuinely loves rules and authority. Does that sound like somebody who’d disrespect an adult in charge?

Exhibit #4: pretty much the entirety of ASIAS. The whole reason Hunter went to Hexside is because an adult who technically ranks below him gave him an order.

There is a grand total of TWO examples in the series where Hunter talks back to an adult.

The first one is when he sees Kikimora again after she tried to murder him.

Note that he never tells Belos what she did, even though he didn’t realise that she had recognised him by his burnt hair, so he thought that she had actually bought his “travellers found me” story and wouldn’t be able to respond to his accusations with any of her own. He could have easily thrown her under the bus, and actively chose not to, even after she almost killed him.

The second one is in ASIAS, where an angry Hunter confronts the Coven Heads after they rescheduled the meeting behind his back, right after they physically pushed him aside hard enough to almost make him fall and walked away smirking at his misery.

Note that, immediately after, he looks like this. Arguing with the Coven Heads makes him miserable. He doesn’t want to fight them. He’d much rather ask “how high” when they say “jump.” But they still casually assault him.

They all knew that Belos had given him the order to leads the meeting. And they knew that Belos is a control freak who is infamous for his lack of mercy. They knew that Belos would see their decision to reschedule as Hunter’s fault, even though they did it behind his back.

If you think he was being arrogant or whatever here, I want you to look me straight in the eyes and tell me that if your coworkers screwed you over in front of your infamously vicious boss and walked away smirking while pretending they can’t see you and literally pushing you around, you would totally keep your cool.

2) The nepotism excuse also doesn’t work.

Nepotism is supposed to make your life easier.

Hunter is a child covered in scars with huge eyebags and absolutely no social life whatsoever who rolls over and shows his neck the second an authority figure expresses any displeasure with him.

It’s plain to see that getting Belos’ “special treatment” is harming him.

Hunter eventually does pull out the “Belos’ nephew” card, in an attempt to get Darius to back off.

But by this point, he:

- knows he has disappointed Belos, something that he fears more than death (as per Eclipse Lake)

- has been assaulted by the other Coven Heads…

- …who added insult to injury by pretending they couldn’t see him, really rubbing it in that they find him worthless

- and then Darius, a man twice his size and thrice his age, grabbed him, spun him around, and stole his clothes

Tl:dr: Hunter is not acting entitled here, he is acting *cornered*. He is lashing out because he is scared, and like any scared kid he is calling out to his “dad.”

And the moment Darius tells him that he has to earn his position as Golden Guard, Hunter immediately agrees to do anything. There is no entitlement there, only a desperate desire to be good enough.

3) On the Boiling Isles, a half-a-witch is at best a social outcast and at worst a target.

For starters, a half-a-witch can’t get an education. You have to be able to perform spells to be allowed to go to school.

Granted this is for Amity’s advanced class, but the idea is that you have to get there eventually, even if it takes you much longer than the gifted students. In order to go to Hexside, you must at least have the potential to use magic.

Before Luz came into the scene, glyphs were a forbidden knowledge that had been lost for hundreds of years. Add in that palismen are close to extinction, and there is simply no way for a half-a-witch to do magic.

So, you can’t go to school. But can you at least get a job?

Ah. No.

Eda gets robbed in public by an officer of the law, in plain view of a huge crowd, and their reaction boils down to “sucks to be powerless.”

A half-a-witch essentially has no rights. They are not treated as citizens. It’s completely legal to ban them from essential functions and to refuse them pay for their labor.

If Eda had not found the Selkiedomus’ treasure, she and her family would have starved.

The discrimination against magicless creatures is so bad that even Hooty, arguably the nicest character in the show, still expresses scorn for them.

Hunter wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest here.

Being magicless is basically the BI equivalent of being disabled in a society that actively favours eugenics.

 4) So, what did Darius do that was so bad?

Now, before anybody takes this post as Darius bashing, I want to bring up why he did it.

- Darius was clearly traumatised by the death of his mentor…

- …who not only died, but also died in circumstances that must have been highly suspicious at best, so that Darius never even got proper closure and has been living with that open wound for years…

- …in addition to the fact that Darius is extremely protecting of his loved ones, so that he must have felt the urge to protect the memory and legacy of his mentor…

- …and that’s made ten times more painful if the replacement, who acts like the antithesis of everything his beloved mentor stood for, looks almost exactly like his mentor.

Can you imagine the grief is somebody you love with all your heart dies, and then some time later they appear to come back as an insult to everything they were?

So, I’m not denying that Darius had his own reasons here, nor am I arguing that he is a terrible person.

In case you don’t know, I like Darius so much I wrote a meta titled “Why Darius is a much better person than Fandom gives him credit for.” I like the guy, okay?

Nevertheless, he almost caused irreparable damage.

One of the reasons Hunter is so desperately loyal to Belos, is that Belos is the only one who never looked down on him for his lack of magic.

Now of course the bitter irony here is that Belos is racist against witches.

But Hunter didn’t know that.

All Hunter knew was that every person he ever met thought he was worthless for the way he was born, *except* for Belos, who said he was special.

And what does Darius do? He goes and reinforces Hunter’s belief that nobody but Belos will ever accept him.

Now, we know that Darius wasn’t really talking about magic there. We don’t know if all grimwalkers lack magic or just Hunter, but either way, later context clues indicate that he was talking about “strength of heart” or something like that.

Nevertheless, he most definitely came across like he was saying that Hunter has no place in the EC because he has no magic.

And Darius is not stupid. He had to know what he sounded like. And he didn’t bother correcting Hunter’s assumption, let him believe that the problem with him were the circumstances of his birth.

Why did Hunter befriend the Emerald Entrails? Because he accidentally stepped on a griffon’s tail. It was sheer dumb luck. If Hunter had put his foot a couple of inches aside, he never would have met Willow.

If not for a single stroke of extraordinarily unlikely good luck, Hunter would have gone back to the castle more convinced than ever that Belos was the only person in the world who could ever give a damn about him, the only one Hunter could ever love and trust.

Darius’ words would have driven him even further into the grasp of his abuser.

This is on top of the fact that Hunter canonically reaches out many times to Darius and Eberwolf over the years, and they always responded by giving him the silent treatment. Again, “Darius ignored me as per usual, Eberwolf hissed at me also as per usual.” How can they blame him for being an ignorant fanatic, if they have systematically rebuffed any and all of his attempts to talk to the only people in the castle who are not Belos’ stooges?

And on top of the fact that “you always do as you are told” is one hell of a line to give a kid *who gets blades thrown at his face* if he says a single word Belos doesn’t like. Hunter’s devotion to Belos is also his shield from violent beatings. If Hunter ever acted “rebellious” to Belos, Belos wouldn’t just send him to his room without dinner.

5) Has Darius changed?

Duh.

6) So what’s the problem?

Remember when people were like “Amity is doing right by Willow now, but she still needs to apologise”?

And when people were like “Alador has finally started walking in the right direction towards eventually becoming a decent father for his kids, but the first step was admitting that he treated them horribly”?

As far as I know, nobody was like “Amity is cool now so there is no need for her to say sorry to Willow, and Willow kind of sucked anyway” or like “Alador is cool now so wtf does Amity have to bitch about and move his hand away, just hug it out and ignore the past”?

What this whole tl;dr essay boils down to, is that S3 needs to have a scene where the good adults in Hunter’s life acknowledge that they did him dirty, without excuses and without victim blaming.

That’s all.

New flippy art piece of him just knitting!

I want to see more peaceful moments of him. Or of the Htf characters being peaceful in general lol

My TikTok

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Punk Huntlow is so real. Two alternative baddies fr

Two punks in love

Oh I just had an evil thought about the Ghoul AU

Belos uses food as a main manipulation tactic for keeping Hunter "efficient and successful" on his missions. It has not been revealed where that meat comes from (if I'm not missing or forgetting anything).

I would totally believe that since petrification is admittedly rarely done if at all in the present day, Belos would feed him the meat of prisoners. Maybe he would amputate them and use those removed limbs to simultaneously feed Hunter less and still keep the meat fresh---objectively, it's being efficient with resources and punishing him for underperforming.

How fucked up would it be if (assuming that the ingredients required to create Grimwalkers are reusable and that the process is worth the time investment) Belos feeds him other Grimwalkers. What if he had tried it previously with the bodies of failed specimens? Would they have been able to tell the difference?

Sorry for the ramble, I just woke up from a nap and had a brrrrrr brain moment

Correct for the most part! The Emperor coven is already known to have secret petrifications of Wild witches so it would make sense for some of them to be executed in different ways for reasons. I don’t think he’d be bother to have limbs amputated, rather why not just kill them if he’s already fine with doing that.

Though the idea of “reformed” wild witches(aka those forced into covens) leaving the conformatorium with missing limbs and being told that’s just punishment is all sorts of dystopian. Though, I always like the idea that the most wild of witches would just “disappear” and the rest, lesser ones would be forced into covens or kept imprisoned. They all get arrested but have different fates depending on severity of their crimes.

After Hunter carvings arise, Belos has a select few witches hanged and taken to the morgue where they could be butchered by him or Hunter (a form of punishment) for food privately.

I always saw Grimwalkers being a limited product due to having very limited sources. I mean there aren’t many palistorm trees, selkidomous are rare, stonesleeper lungs where already limited at the start and might degrade over time, and the galdorstones are difficult to obtain. Realistically, I think Belos could only have a max of two grimwalkers at a time since he’s reusing parts.

Also the horror that Hunter’s body parts had been reused multiple times for past Golden Guards is too horrific to pass up. I think Belos harvests the corpses for these parts after killing them, all besides the bone since that’s too tedious for what it’s worth. So as much as he would like to make Hunter cannibalize other grimwalkers for experiments, he can’t do that unfortunately without further degrading a limited source.

(I think he would have had more sources in the past where he would have been able to do experiments on the grimwalkers until these materials eventually became unusable and he had to be more cautious on what he used his remaining materials on, much to his dismay)

So the best he could do is make Hunter eat the bones. Yes our boy eats bones, plenty of carnivorous animals do and it’s a good source of calcium. Though he can’t survive off them, thats an incredibly deficient diet. Since Hunter is actually consuming something that’s the same species as him, this is genuine cannibalism and it makes him incredibly sick.

Hunter is unaware of this of course, assuming it’s some random witch bone that tastes weirdly gross and is also a bit aged for his liking(not like he has the option to be picky)

Like I said, it makes him sick. Like he’s been poisoned sick. Through these are just bones and who’s to say that Belos doesn’t have grimwalker organs and flesh, preserved somewhere in storage. Might explore that possibility in the future.

Them

I really like all of the silly traumatic scenarios that you come up with for hunter

I was wondering if you have an AO3 account?

Thanks! Hunter is my current blorbo which means he suffers :3

I do have a AO3 account! It’s WiltingBunny

I only have one unfinished fanfic that I’ve been neglecting in there (whoops) but I also have my bookmarks public!

People who think Huntlow is edgy sad boy x sweet girl do not get it. Willow is a fucking menace. She's a gremlin. She's not the mom friend she goes "I can show you all the plants you shouldn't touch, and how to touch them!" She's COMPARATIVELY normal next to the rest of the group. She's a lil unhinged too. It is not sweet girl and edgy sweet boy. It is teasing gremlin and snarky depressed but very sweet guy. People who write the ship as Willow being the kind ever patient therapist do not get it. They are so weird about each other. She pulled him out of the fucking sky to join a sports team. They get up to so many shenanigans once Hunters out of the scared jittery cat phase. They're going to be absolute menaces together.