frankly, i'm tired of feeling like i have to preface every post / conversation i have about owen with "I KNOW HE'S A HORRIBLE EVIL MURDERER" as if we don't already know that. i'm tired of having to go "of course he sucks, of course he's awful," or else have to turn him into the butt of a joke. i can't stop thinking about him. i miss him. i adore him. this eternal walking wound, this terror of endless teeth. i love his big bug eyes and his flat affect and those little glittering moments where he laughs or jokes or offers kindness. i love that he is constantly pulling his punches despite all his hissing and spitting and i love when he is clever and biting and quick and cruel. i love that he is sharper in social situations than he gives himself credit for and i love that he is angry and scared and grief-struck and hurting and i love that none of this is separate from the damage he has done, like a meteor which blazes brilliant and untouchable through the sky and scars the earth forever with its impact. when i was in high school, i would go on long walks during which i daydreamed about entering a room and finding my younger self there. i'd think about hugging her for as long as she wanted.
i have a playlist on my phone called "hey owen :]" and i know how it got there in the sense that i remember making that playlist and i guess why it's there is "because i wanted to" but it's four songs about love and care and trying again and i don't know why i... i don't know. i don't know.
(from chilicheesecake0 on tumblr)
to quote directly from my discord messages from jan 26, 2026, 19:17:
the thing about v!owen is i think about him and i don't even know what i want to DO with him. usually treating a character as an instrument is EASY there is no attachment -- but can i even call this attachment, what IS THIS -- but i try to think about him and i just. i want to grab at him. fistfuls of his cowl. i want to gently wash his hair. i want to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with him in front of a roaring hearth. i think about him knee-deep in snow. i see him walking away. i don't know.
this would actively be easier if what i wanted was to fuck him. someone once described thinking of oakhurst and getting this incredible sense of homesickness and i have . whatever that is for owen
i will not save him. he refuses to be saved, and to suggest otherwise would only make me an object of ridicule. but i want to take his hand and squeeze it, just for a moment, before he goes.
(from ringtiledlemurder on tumblr)
this is primarily prompted by scott and owen's weird conversation in episode 1 in which owen says "i lived here when i was just a boy" and scott replies "you were a boy... and now you're a man?" they banter a little about owen's Extremely Manly Features and then i thought about owen being transfem + the implied self-actualization that would have to come with her realizing + the themes of queerness and transformation that come with vampires + the fact of louis being word-of-god trans and what that does to the owen-louis relationship and . well for a time i was very good at taking this as an angle for writing character/relationship studies. and now when i think about girl owen for too long i feel... SOMETHING so intensely i wish i could burst into tears just to experience some kind of catharsis.
pokemon is such a visual medium to me that i basically can't ever do anything with pokemon AUs. there's so much in terms of matching/contrasting styles between trainer and pokemon and showing off accessories/moves/abilities and attending to gesture/positioning/interaction that falls kind of flat when you try to deliver it in a text-based narrative to me? but that never stops me from wanting to come up with pokemon teams.
| Pokemon | Notes |
|---|---|
| Houndoom | i am aware this is an extremely basic choice. but it FITS. the motifs of fire and bone, the terrible reputation that precedes them (did you know houndoom's pokedex entries alternate between talking about its eerie calls feared by humans and pokemon alike and how its fire causes burns that never stop hurting?), the general doggishness of them both. i wonder if people whisper that maybe it was houndoom that gave owen his scars, that the damn pokemon is barely tame, should've put it down when it first started roaming around in the woods near town. i wonder if owen and his houndoom are joined by a sort of understanding of what it is to be mistrusted at every turn, to be an animal that belongs with a pack and to not have one. or if this is a diffculty between them, knowing each exacerbates the wariness evoked by the other and wishing for another companion. i wonder what owen looks like if he finds fiercely devoted companionship long before louis, and i wonder what he looks like if even pokemon hold him at arm's length. i think about owen, someone who was reviled for his sickness, learning what it means to be feared for your strengths not on the night he slaughters all of oakhurst, but on the day he walks into town with a houndoom at his side. |
| Crobat | louis's. i thought about pulling the classic trope of [evil/grumpy character has a friendship-evolution pokemon to show their secret goodheartedness] with owen, and anyway crobat is literally a bat and he's a vampire so it works out, but then i thought... it's fun if he doesn't, actually. i don't imagine he was cruel to the pokemon around him or anything, in much the same way i don't imagine that he was Actively Despised by Every Single Person In Oakhurst. there's a lot of room between [not treated horribly] and [loved]. but you know who would be the perfect image of the most loving trainer in the world? of course you know. and it adds interesting complication, right? because now owen isn't the only person in the story who knows who louis was and what louis was like. sure he can't get into protracted arguments with a crobat, but he can see a distorted mirror of his grief and his knowledge of his beloved. louis's sweet, spoiled crobat torn between sticking with its former trainer's favourite person and deciding to have no part in the ruin owen seeks to visit upon its former trainer's beloved home... |
| Buneary | people make a lot of jokes about owen being the world's biggest and most unrelenting hater and i... don't know what to do with that. on account of the extremely biased ways that i look at him and make sense of him. i mean i make those jokes too, and it's not as if they're entirely off the mark -- he is a miserable and intense person -- but hater is not actually how i'm inclined to describe him. however, it is difficult to deny that "only non-[legendary/mythical/etc] pokemon to start with a base friendship level of 0" suits him in a certain way though. i think about lopunny being a friendship-evolution pokemon. the depth of unrealized potential love and dedication and growth this pokemon might represent. and owen's buneary is cared for, but it never evolves. |
hey. guess what. it's fic rec hours. a duty to myself by audioEidolon. i read this about a week ago (it is february 8th at the time of my writing this) and it is a significant part of the whole reason i made this shrine. owen in this fic is SO CUTE i kept wanting to bang on the walls about it. i was up at all hours wailing disconsolately at my friends, mostly to say things about as articulate as "i like him so so much help me i like him SO MUCH ;-; !!!!"
something i'm so so tender about is the multiple times in this fic that owen is just absurdly mean / angry and legs looks straight at him and goes "oh. you are hurting very badly." sorry for being stupid and emotional and easy like that about this but . i am. that's owen, isn't it. and there are plenty of people who are like owen here who will never meet a person who can look at them and reach under their armour and find the festering wound they're curled around, but owen, in this fic, gets lucky. he gets legundo.
I REALLY CANNOT OVERSTATE HOW GODDAMN FUCKING CUTE THIS LITTLE GESTURE IS. HE FEELS SO GOOD HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HIMSELF BUT HE'S ALSO FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE NOT TO ACTUALLY HURT LEGS. HE'S BANGING HIS FIST ON THE BED AND SQUIRMING LIKE ONE OF THOSE FERAL CATS THAT EXPERIENCES THE BLISS OF BEING FED AND PET AND RESPONDS BY JUST GOING NUTS WITH PURRING AND KNEADING AND ROLLING AROUND. THAT'S SO CUTE THAT'S SO CUTE THAT'S SO CUTE I'M GOING TO IMPLODE.
truly the amount of angry cussing owen does throughout this fic about legs being good at this and making it enjoyable for him is inspired. inspiring. gorgeous. that's so fucking cute. the amount of HOW DARE YOU energy radiating off him. can i say it? me-core.
(from hawkeye-swift on tumblr)
so. saint owen, he of the wreckage of devotion, he of the grave from which none will rise. saint owen, saint owen. you may well despise me for my softness, for my easy little life, for claiming you and i could be the same sort of thing. look. i called the thing i felt love because i didn't know what else it could possibly be, and in its aftermath i am terrible. i, too, am a liar. i, too, am selfish and unrepentant, never opening my hands to any world beyond my own. like you, i want to die. like you, i want to be ruinous.
(from givemeyourteethplease on tumblr)
a selection of extremely charming owen moments, based solely on my own memory from watching his POV all the way through twice and then seeing clips and also drift and pearl's povs. moments that are not present in his actual POV itself are marked with †.
| Session | Moment | Commentary |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Owen smacks a bat while mining and goes, "Oh, sorry!" | I just think this is so cute. It is so blatantly just Owen-the-real-life-guy being startled into automatic apology but it's also . adorable if you read it as an in-character thing. |
| 5 | Right after Drift's turning, Owen comes running into the Scott-Drift exchange, smacks her, and snarls, "Your days are numbered," before running back out.† | Drift is ALREADY having the absolute worst day/week/month of her life, man, you DON'T NEED TO DO THAT. It's so funny. This isn't in Drift's POV either, it's only in Scott's. |
| 7 | Drift comes running into a castle vampires meeting talking about how they're burning down the forest, and gets a chorus of "Yeah we know already" but Owen makes a point to say to her, "We only just found out though, it's still valid and good information to bring us."† | This one's only in Drift's POV that I've seen. It's very cute. It's hilarious when Owen's team player spirit bleeds through and then it just reads like v!Owen can't help himself, he wants to bring people into the fold. |
| 7 | Right after killing Avid, Owen says to Pyro in a low growl, "I want to kill you so badly right now." | Sorry for thinking this is cute. In my defense this is cute. Or hot. One of those two. It's very rare for me to hear a human voice that I would actually describe as a growl, but this is one of those! Wanting to kill someone is like sex. |
originally written in a dazzled rush on the evening of november 8th, 2025, after haemalhart's unwinding threads
i was turned in the final days of summer. what was ahead of me was change, the leaves, the weather, all the rhythms of life. the world would sink into its own mulch and sleep a while, come back to colours it had forgotten, a fresh throat from which we could pull songs like well-water. i was turned and what was coming was winter. i ached, deliriously at times, all through that summer, and he was cool stones, he was deep sleep. he promised me snowfall, and the two of us, us pair of clever rabbits huddled together somewhere so warm the blizzard would seem a dream. he promised me, lavishly, as many blankets as i wanted, a laughing amendment to as many as you can carry. autumn, then winter, then spring, and i dared not even dream of a whole year; it would be riches beyond any i had ever known. so i thought of the coming cold. i would not hurt again. the birds would go. the fields would lie fallow. he would be just down the hall or, if i asked it, in my bed with me, sharing in my kingdom of blankets.
my tumblr posts about owen:
(posted october 13, 2025, 11:34)
i cannot imagine a version of the story where owen gets out okay. who would still believe in him at this point, other than the doctor? avid, last session, is So quick to draw the line between the newly turned and [scott+owen]. martyn identifies owen as "unapproachable." pyro, to scott and shelby, talks about owen being distant; scott only seems to care insofar as anything owen does will affect how easy it is for scott to pursue his own interests. pearl has an "obligation" to kill that which kills others, owen included. legundo can try as hard as he likes, but ultimately he is still just one man, everyone else is deeply entangled in their own negative feelings about owen, and owen's hurts run far deeper than something that can be fixed just by making him human / removing the hunger / taking away vampiric weaknesses.
my imaginings are shaped by the fact that i watch owen's pov first every week, and the information the creator decides to show us is hardly unbiased information. there's a specific story being told here. maybe there's hope for v!owen that cc!owen just chose not to show us. but i think even if there is, owen has not found himself in... easy circumstances. he takes open delight in scaring and hurting the humans. he rejects out-of-hand every suggestion that he act differently than he does. he lies and manipulates and scorns. he counted how many people he killed, and then he rattles that number off like pointing at a badge of honour.
right. we've been talking about unsympathetic victims. we understand that someone can be both "victim" and "perpetrator." we see what is happening here. but we also see where the others are coming from, yes? if you will not stop killing/hurting us, we will stop you by whatever means necessary. if you will not take the repeated offers to help or live peacefully, we will stop trying to give you that opportunity. no one in oakhurst has the capacity to keep reaching out their hand only for it to get bitten forever. there is a world where, with much more time and far greater resources, i think owen could get out okay. that's not what this story is. there are only so many people willing to help, and their capacity to do so diminishes by the day as people get more afraid and groups get more fractured. given this, if you were someone seeking to help, why wouldn't you prioritize the ones who will actually take your offers of help, who seem most on the fence and afraid and in danger?
one of the things i love about cc!owen's roleplay characters is that they're fucking liars. and not only are they liars, but they're good at it. they get away with it for at least a while, keeping the ways they are hurt or have been hurt carefully hidden and never letting themselves be saved. i think there are ways to read v!owen's choices (the constant willingness to pause a moment and tell "his story"; the fact that he, before this session, had not actually killed or turned anyone; the fact that BOTH times that he has gone to oakhurst to kill their cattle, he has left a few alive) as... a person, in agony, screaming for someone to argue with him, whether to prove him right or wrong. to say to him that something is horribly wrong and has been horribly wrong for a long time. but someone who is afraid of you and what you can do is mostly going to be too busy to read between those lines and see anything familiar in you. compassion is DIFFICULT, and all the more difficult when your life is on the line. i don't really blame any of the others for deciding owen's a lost cause. the damage he has demonstrated himself to be capable of and interested in is real. two thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine people are dead because of him. regardless of whether he's lying about that exact count, i do think the fundamental thing being conveyed there is true: he is a murderer.
and now i feel like i have to say i do say all this from a place of profound sympathy for owen. it's a belief i've held for a very long time that, granted a sudden and significant increase in the social or physical power i had, i would do awful things on purpose. i know thinking that and actually doing it are wildly and importantly different things, but... yeah, dude. i snap at the people working the hardest to look out for me and fake everything until i explode and the first thing i feel when i hurt someone deliberately is best described as triumph. i am intimately familiar with the version of me that would do everything he did and more in his position. i would not blame anyone for responding to that unkindly. and i think if i survive longer than three decades it will be pure luck, and perhaps the fact that i have access to more people and more chances than he does or will.
i dunno. i woke up this morning thinking about this. picturing his body laid out in a tomb, though i really doubt whatever gets him in the end will decide to bother with little formalities like that. and i'm there, like a ghost looking at its own body. i've been thinking a lot about the fact that vampires don't have reflections, you know? it's fun to ask questions about self-image, and distorted mirrors, and where you look to catch a glimpse of yourself. i don't think owen's a mirror for me, but i do look at him and see something, like a prophecy sent down the long wire of time.
(posted november 15, 2025, 20:37)
i hope, whether he lives or dies in that finale, owen never experiences a single second of doubt or regret. i hope he commits himself entirely to being those teeth louis was too good to bare. i hope he will not be turned from his course for anything, i hope he proves everyone right that he was always too far gone to be saved, too mean too sharp too prone to biting every hand offered to him. i hope he sees his death coming unafraid and i hope everyone who looks at him mistakes him for a real person all the way through. i hope he hurtles toward his end with all the brilliance and clarity and self-immolation of a meteor and i hope if anyone asks how he can live with himself he makes it abundantly clear he has only ever been a dead thing given purpose by gravity
(posted december 21, 2025, 23:15)
in case you were wondering how i'm doing, i've been thinking "it's so stupidly obscenely unfair that he (mass murderer, specifically went out of his way to kill at least one child, turned [the person who made the most consistent efforts to reach out to him and help him] against this person's explicit wishes in an attempt to drop a ticking time bomb on everyone) will never ever get another chance and i just keep getting second chances forever".