Highkey In Love With The Idea That When It Comes To Their Relationship, Charles And Edwin Are The Complete

highkey in love with the idea that when it comes to their relationship, charles and edwin are the complete opposites of their usual behaviour.

charles, normally with zero impulse control or patience, is so so so careful and attentive with edwin, concerned about doing it all just right, spending hours planning their dates and content to take it all slow

meanwhile edwin, normally prim and proper and patient and self-disciplined, has repressed his wants and needs and feelings for 100+ years and now that he no longer has to?? he has no fucks left to give and will kiss charles senseless whenever he damn well wants to

This is so incredibly detailed and so well thought out, it is breaking my heart and also I really really need someone to use this information to whump the both of them

Iron Burns

Something I'm super curious about is just how badly iron hurts when a ghost touches it. I posted a little ramble about Charles being chained and unable to help Edwin while she tortured him, and how we didn't get a reaction shot of him hearing Edwin screaming. And something clicked in my brain. I will preface this by saying that I can't prove anything, and could very well be completely wrong. This is just a possible explanation/option.

This was supposed to be relatively short, and that did not happen lmfao Here's your long post warning 😂

Charles VS Iron

This is Charles we are talking about. He is fiercely protective of Edwin, and let's be honest, can get physically violent when provoked. He was sitting there, listening to Esther, until she specifically brought up rescuing Edwin from her plans. It's only when she says that that he starts moving, and he very obviously intended to attack her.

It confirms in Charles' head that there is a specific reason why Edwin is separated from him, and that is bad. Very bad. He possessed Esther to get them out of their first fight with her; she very nearly succeeded in getting them eaten by that Forest Elemental. She is seriously dangerous, and he knows it. Whatever she has planned for Edwin, Charles knows it's vicious and vile.

That thought spurs him to physically attack Esther, without hesitation. Based on the fact that his hands are open, Charles was going to grab her rather than hit her, and, based on her proximity to him, by the throat. That is the only effective attack from his position I can think of; it's the only way he can completely incapacitate.

Logical reasoning aside, choking someone is a pretty common violent anger response. It's probably because it's the easiest way to kill someone with your bare hands; in shows, many characters use a weapon to hurt their adversaries. It's the bullet, the blade, the bat, or whatever that actually hurts them, makes contact with them. It feels different when it's literally you hurting them. Your hands are weapons on their own if you know how to use them. Ex: Vi from Arcane has boxing as her go-to fighting style.

Okay, I went on a bit of tangent there, but my point is that Charles is fucking pissed. This is Charles, who fears being like his father, wanting to hurt Esther.

Violence is the last resort for all of their cases and situations. Charles will take out his cricket bat if he senses danger, but it's more of an intimidation tactic than a true threat. Charles does not actually attack anyone with the cricket bat who is not already an established threat. He takes it out during their first encounter with Esther, when they meet the Cat King, in the Devlin House, when the Night Nurse first shows up, in the forest against David, and against the snake. Most of those encounters are not a matter of negotiation; the first fight with Esther, the Devlin House, David, and the snake were all situations where "talking it out" was not an option, so pulling out the cricket bat to intimidate them would have been pointless. When he takes the bat out in those cases, he's already fully intending to use it. When he takes it out against the Cat King and the Night Nurse, he waits. He holds it up to send a message. It says, "Don't make me hurt you, because I will if I have to."

Charles doesn't want to hurt people, and usually tries his best to find another solution; even when we see him having to fight someone, a military veteran no less, he apologizes and only defends against him because he knows this is a ghost who's cursed, and doesn't deserve it, despite his violent behavior. They attempt to talk the Night Nurse out of taking them for several minutes before she attacks him. She attacks him mentally and emotionally in a way the others don't see and can't fathom; you could even argue that it is a physical attack as well because she makes him relive being beaten by his father and stoned by his friends. The Night Nurse does not hit him, but she hurts him, hurts him bad. When Charles hits her with that music box, despite what the others see, he's retaliating, not initiating. Because again, Charles wants to find another solution first.

But with Esther? He is so far passed that. He is so furious that he wants to attack her. He wants to hurt her. And that is before she starts torturing Edwin.

When he heard Edwin screaming, do you realize just how angry Charles would have been? I can't comprehend how badly he would've wanted to break free and fuck Esther up for what she did. Charles is genuinely intimidating when he's angry; he would have been absolutely terrifying.

Tiny Note: this is the best shot of Charles in the whole show. Let my boy beat the shit out of someone without getting judged for it, please! Let him go apeshit, please!! 🙏🏻

I struggle to believe that anything would have stopped him from getting to Edwin in that state, iron collar be damned.

But Charles doesn't. He doesn't break free. He tries, and continues to fail repeatedly. Almost every movement makes the collar burn him.

The thought I had was how little Charles would care about his own safety/pain if it meant saving Edwin. This boy willingly enters and traverses Hell itself for him. He tells the Night Nurse that if he goes, he can either succeed in bringing Edwin back, or get stuck in Hell so she knows where they are. Charles admits that he would rather be stuck in Hell with Edwin than spend another second without him. When Crystal asks, "What if something happens to you?", he has no response. He honestly does not care if something happens to him, but he doesn't want to admit that to Crystal's face cause that would hurt her, so he refuses to answer.

Getting hurt does not matter to him, so just how painful was that iron that Charles, at his angriest, and in his most desperate state, could not break out?

We see him pulling on the chain and struggling, but he's moving as little as possible because he's trying that hard not to touch the collar. He lets go because it hurts too much. Even when his bag is just out of reach, which is the solution to all of his struggles, he can't bear the burning long enough to get his foot under the strap.

Based on all of that, my brain told me this: the iron burning was so painful that Charles could not endure it long enough to escape, even in his angriest and desperate state, listening to the most important person in his world screaming in a way he has never heard before, and pleading for Esther to stop hurting him.

Like, that sounds crazy to me. Seeing how angry he got at the Night Nurse, and the intensity of his rage in that scene makes me wonder what was going through his head while chained up.

Edwin VS Iron

But my brain was not done with this information. One of my favorite details that I want to be explored in the future is how nonchalant Edwin is while his hand is burning.

He did not notice it was burning until Crystal pointed it out. He looks and sounds genuinely surprised when he sees it. His expression and the way he says he was careless makes me feel like he wasn't in pain and trying to play it off, but was upset with himself for making a very noticeable mistake in front of Crystal while trying to show off and prove a point.

Edwin's pain tolerance is so high that he does not even notice a simple iron burn.

The second time he gets touched by iron is when Esther knocks him across the garden. He looks down at the burn that's what's hurting him, but I don't buy it.

This boy just got swatted like a tennis ball across a courtyard into a small greenhouse.

We all know that Charles does the fighting/takes the hits, so Edwin getting hit like that is probably a new feeling. Since iron makes them tangible for a couple seconds, he probably physically felt it when he landed.

Being burned and crashing into things are two very different sensations, and one of them Edwin hasn't experienced in thirty years. The burn is localized to his hand, and it's a burn. It stings. Hitting a structure that fast and landing like that is going to effect your whole body. It's aching, it bruises every part of you, from your skin down to your bones. It's so much more uncomfortable and hindering than a simple burn. If you burn your hand, you can still operate day-to-day almost normally, but if you mess up your body in some way, you're not going to be able to walk without being in pain. If you asked me which one I'd rather have happen to me, I would take the burn so fast.

Point being that him looking distressed and hurt after that hit makes a whole lot of sense, despite his high pain tolerance. It probably surprised him more than hurt him. It doesn't last long either.

The only time we see him truly react to iron is in Esther's torture device, which is obvious but I'll talk it through anyway.

The cuffs restraining his arms are touching his bare wrists, tightly and constantly. His wrists smoke from it. Him gasping at that makes sense.

But the real kicker here is obviously the rods. Upon first glance, it looks like they touch down on his torso, zapping him or whatever you'd call that, on a surface level. But if you pay close attention to the shots where he's somewhat transparent you can see that those prongs are actually going through him, at least a little bit.

I took a screenshot, up-ed the brightness, and marked where it looks like the rods hit him, versus where they actually end.

Edwin moves around a bit, so there are definitely some shots where they are just touching his skin, but that's kind of the point I'm trying to make. The rods are not moving, they are static, so when Edwin's body moves around them, they stay put. That is fucking painful.

The rod is not moving, but Edwin's body is, and there is nowhere for his skin/muscles to go but through the metal, like it is cutting through him in reverse. If you push a knife down to cut through something, like a carrot, it cuts. But if you hold the carrot, and push it down on the blade, it still cuts.

That would explain even more why Edwin reacts to whenever Esther touches him, even when the device is paused. It would also explain why he was begging Esther "don't come any closer" during one of the cutaway shots.

If you think about it, that doesn't make any sense. Esther's proximity to the device doesn't determine whether it's on, off, or higher/lower. She walks around the room with her glass of ghost juice or whatever you want to call it. She gestures with her hand when she turns it on and turns the intensity up.

Esther getting closer to him wouldn't matter since the device is already on. That is, unless she was actively doing something to him while torturing him. Considering how sadistic she is, I wouldn't put it past her to mess with him whenever she got bored of just watching. Touching him, shaking him, whatever, would almost definitely make it worse. Edwin not wanting her to get close to him would make perfect sense if she was occasionally doing something like that.

So, we have iron making him corporal, burning him, and zapping him with some kind of electricity-like energy, that are also piercing into him, and yet Edwin doesn't scream from the pain initially. There's quiet moaning that you can tell he's holding back, but he doesn't gasp or yell. This is same metal that hurt Charles so badly he couldn't escape in his angriest state. It takes hours of prolonged exposure and gradual increasing of the intensity to make him scream.

The secondary question to this whole thing is just how high is Edwin's pain tolerance that he is able to endure that while withholding making noise?

I can't comprehend it, honestly. Though Edwin spent 70 years in hell being literally torn apart over and over again. We have no idea how long he feels the sensations of his previous body after he respawns or how quickly he does so, especially since the manner of death in this case wouldn't be instantaneously fatal. If his head and heart are in some capacity intact, he'd still be alive for at least a few seconds. As Dr. Alan Grant explains to that kid about raptors in Jurassic Park, you are alive when they start to eat you. It would be believable if Edwin is basically immune to pain unless it's a fucking insane amount of it. I mean, in the Cat King's words to Esther, "Edwin has been through more pain than you, or I, could ever imagine."

That would be pretty fucking crazy if this is all true/accurate.

Is it intentional? Probably not. Could I be reading too much into it, and unintentionally hyperbolizing it? Absolutely. I'm using observation and some information about their characters that I can't actually prove to be true. Maybe I'm just seeing things with the prongs and they're not going through Edwin. I can't prove that Charles would've been angry enough to break out of restraints if they hadn't been made of iron. Maybe iron effects all ghosts differently. Who the hell knows?

Even if I'm not 100% accurate, we do at least know for sure that Edwin has a way higher pain tolerance than anybody else based on the burning hand that he didn't even notice was burning, and how long he was in that device before he started screaming, and that's badass as hell on its own.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this essay & would like to support me, you can give me a tip on my Ko-Fi! ☺️

Autism acceptance includes accepting all autistic manners of communication.

That means supporting autistic people who talk in a "very childish" way. (I do this a lot irl)

Autistic people who do "TV talking" (this means talking like a character from your favorite media,basically talking in quotes and copying their speech patterns,as far as I know)

Autistic people who use echolia.

Autistic people who are very awkward/quirky when they communicate.

Autistic people who are overly technical,or have very sophisticated and articulate speech.

Autistic people who mumble.

Autistic people who talk really fast.

Autistic people who can't control their tone of voice/inflection.

Autistic people who talk in a monotone voice.

Autistic people who use different kind of sounds,or body language to communicate.

Autistic people who talk slowly and draw out their syllables.

Autistic people who use a lot of sentance fillers.

Autistic people who refer to themselves in the third person

Autistic people who use Aac devices,communication cards,etc etc.

Edit: acceptance of nonverbal autistics is also necessary. Nonverbal people deserve love,respect,acceptance,accommodation and support.

Beautiful ghost boys <3

Edwin and Charles DEAD BOY DETECTIVES, S01E02, The Case of the Dandelion Shrine

These boys are haunting me body and soul this is so fucking beautiful and I am going INSANE

obsessed with charles & edwins version of orpheus & eurydice because like. in this version of the story looking back saves you. of course it was always going to end this way (there’s no version of this where I don’t come get you). you’re not doomed by the narrative, I love you. I chose you over heaven the day we met, do you think hell could stop me? there’s no force on this earth that could stop me from loving you, including you. come on, let’s get out of here. take my hand.

This is what my soul looks like actually

Super tiny Mycena Roseoflava.

Photographed by cyanesense