Bugs. Bugs On My Screen.

bugs. bugs on my screen. 🪲🪲🪲

(don’t repost) arr i love juno steel and his constant stream of one liners

I don't think the scene with tiny!Arthur in Intermezzo is talked about enough.

John seeing little baby Arthur in a world where he grows up with loving parents, a good childhood, before all the trauma. Before John.

Sick and fucking twisted btw that Arthur is a man so defined by yet so dismissive of religion that fate decided to force the gods upon him whether he liked it or not.

Arthur’s parents killed themselves in financial struggle and he was brought into a religious orphanage, in which they told him that god would relieve him of his pain. Yet he only found proper healing when he turned to art - to humanity.

When that art killed his daughter, he left it at the door right next to any fleeting traces of religious belief he still had.

And then, he built himself up. Not with art or religion but with perseverance and a friend that believed in him. But Arthur Lester is never a man who can have anything for himself for too long, and the tangible gods of his universe ruin his life and host his body in one swift motion.

It’s a kind of sick irony, to finally be wrought of everyone reassuring you with the possibility of a benevolent deity only for the very existence of it to be disproven and mocked by the actual entities that fill that void.

Gods are real, and they are far more frustrating than Arthur could have ever previously thought.

Ive fallen and I CANT GET UP…

Who’s the fire lit for?

In Part 45 we are introduced to Malam, a mysterious character who seems to enact justice for children who die unjustly.

He approaches Arthur, and seems surprised when he discovers that he is the one who lit the fire, as he expected a child to have done so.

I don’t think Malam’s expectations are completely unfounded, as it is not really present Arthur who lit the fire... but the child that went to the Boys' Brigade who did:

I think that Arthur unknowingly lit the fire both for Faroe and himself (or more correctly, his past child self). Malam was not called in by the fire to bring justice to just Faroe, but also to Arthur.

Arthur had been forced to metaphorically kill his child-self and his innocence and forced to grow up too quickly for his own good. His childhood had been cut short so suddenly and brutally by his parent’s death, a grief too big and complicated for a young child to understand and work through.

Even now, on the inside, Arthur is still that wounded and timid child. He is still carrying that pain with him. However, the hostility he had to live throughout his life only granted him more wounds and bruises. The soft, childlike and gentle parts of himself were hardened under layers and layers of scar tissue. Arthur had to learn pretty quickly that it was never safe enough for him to be kind and patient with himself. He was never given the time to process his traumas. No one taught him or showed him the love and care he so desperately needed and cried for so long for.

The hurt was drowned by more hurt and it was never tended to, never really cared for. But it never really disappeared or healed. It always stayed deep within him.

But now (finally), for the first time, Arthur’s most devastating traumas (the loss of his daughter, and the loss of his own innocence) have been recognised.

His childhood cry has been finally answered.

The kid Arthur was can finally rest now that Malam stopped by his fire.