cunt toward enemy season 1 notes

💥 SPOILERS FOR CUNT TOWARD ENEMY 💥

COLOR

Bombs are associated with “colored wires”.
So everyone has their own color.

Lazur = blue
Cortázar = the language fits one of his backgrounds and it means something like “old stable”

Rubicon = a menacing but beautiful red word. Don’t cross him…

Calendula was the obvious name for the third character, as it is an orange flower (opposite on the color wheel from Lazur’s blue), means little clock (time is a theme of the book and Calendula seeks to minimize and control time), and it kind of sounds like Caligula. Triple significance.

ELEMENTS

A bomb is impossible to fit in the brain. So I explode it into Time + Destruction. These are impossible to fit as well, so I divide again.

Everyone has a wristwatch.
Everyone carries a countdown on their arm.
The mundane reflects the unspeakable.

Knowing these simple elements allows me to extrapolate the connective tissue between everything.

HOROLOGY

Rubicon’s watch = the dadcon watch, alligator strap vintage luxury, aged skin heirloom. kill something and wear it and possess it.
Lazur’s watch is an accident, his heart worn on his sleeve. it’s not a “serious” watch, people underestimate him.
Calendula’s watch is expensive, engineered, efficient, steel, soulless. radium hands made at the expensive of innocent lives, the sacrifice obfuscated into materials.

POV

POV is sympathy. I only introduced Rubicon’s POV when another threat was about to appear.
I keep his thoughts secret in the early chapters when he’s the primary threat, to preserve tension.

CALENDULA

Calendula is a bone seeker. He replaces pieces of the system with himself. The agency can’t taste his toxicity. Lazur is the silent feeler, the sensitive wet tongue, the bomb-sniffer dog.

Part of Calendula is from the billionaires who get juiced on their son’s blood and and pour millions into delaying their mortality by inches. The combination of youth-reaping fetishization and desire to halt time felt appropriate for this story.

THANK YOU

Thank you dunkin and faust and laevos for beta reading and everyone else i’m forgetting who’s bounced back the sickly rays and encouraged me 💜
Thank you everyone who left a comment, every single one made me so happy 💜

Seeing people’s amazing fanart really motivated me to finish the first season 💜 It’s easy to write a longer thing and wonder whether anyone will want to read it, if the crazy sparks can hit another soul…then there’s a reminder that it has a life outside oneself. and i have my Rubi shrines here.

Some recent ones by 99chivalry:

RUBICON

immense suffering but kind of tapdancing ahead of the pain, latching onto obsessions, jokes, skittering between modalities
i find it relatable because a lot of my personality was forged against a backdrop of constant physical pain
with pain it’s hard to be consistent
i think of people who are seen as “acting out”
the type of kid i was seen as
they don’t think about the reasons for it
but pain sharpens time, can make one impatient, hungry, because each second has a cost attached to it. i always wanted to be doing something that was worth the pain of living