Curate, connect, and discover
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