I Keep Circling The Edwin-and-the-Cat-King Thing.

I keep circling the Edwin-and-the-Cat-King thing.

So like, in most media, a character like Edwin -- prissy and fastidious and virginal and so unbelievably repressed it took him a hundred and twenty years to realize he was gay -- would be presumed by fandom to be ace, or demisexual. Because how the fuck do you go a hundred and twenty years (or more like fifty, because of Reasons) without noticing something like that, right?

Except then he meets the Cat King, with all the unbelievably horny framing for their interactions, and suddenly it makes sense.

Because up until that point, Edwin's existence has revolved entirely around his epic, larger-than-life, transcending-time-and-space-and-death love with Charles. Of course it didn't ping him as strange that he's filled with warm fuzzy butterflies every time Charles is close to him. Of course it fills him with joy to gaze upon Charles's beautiful face. Of course he basks in Charles's rough-and-tumble physical affection, a liberty of touch he tolerates from literally no one else. None of that is the least bit alarming or confusing, because it's all just the natural outgrowth of how he loves Charles more than anything else that exists in this universe or any other.

…......And then he meets the Cat King -- a complete stranger that he neither knows nor likes nor trusts -- and discovers that boy howdy his dick does not give a single fuck god damn about any of those things. The Cat King proves beyond even Edwin's capacity for denial that he is wholly capable of sexual arousal completely decoupled from any emotional attachment, and it is THAT which makes Edwin realize that he's a big ol' homogay.

His attraction to Charles could be rationalized away by the transcendent purity of their love for each other, but the fact that this filthy hoboslut cat-man makes him hard so fast his head spins is… more difficult to rationalize.

So yeah. I am absolutely, 100%, an endgame Edwin/Charles shipper, but I am also fascinated by the role that the Cat King plays in Edwin's journey of sexual self-discovery and I think they should fuck at least once.