u/LustEconomy

CW: childhood trauma, sexual exploitation/sexual assault, brief discussion of DID and tulpamancy, intense fictional attachment.

The images in the post were generated. I replied in comments with a couple of my drawings.

I think Angel Dust may be my first soulbond. I have always made paracosms and had imaginary companions. I was an only child who went through serious trauma very young. Long before I knew words like paracosm or soulbonding, I had continuing inner worlds populated by people who were me, and sometimes not me.

I have an interior figure named David. David is trauma-created, but there is no identity split. I don’t have DID, and he is not an alter or a separate consciousness. He is me, and I am him.

He has a specific face, voice, style, and temperament, with a long history in my writing. David appears in different forms in almost everything I’ve ever created. Very few people have ever known about him, but he has been with me for most of my life.

Then I watched Angel Dust in Episode 4 of Hazbin Hotel.

I already liked him. He was vulgar, glamorous, theatrical, openly queer, funny, and much stronger than the people around him seemed to understand. But “Poison” and the studio scenes hit something old.

I have a past involving sexual exploitation and sexual assault. I was triggered, certainly, but that doesn’t entirely describe it. It felt like imprinting.

I have thought about Angel ever since.

I listened to “Poison” thousands of times - for weeks. I remixed it, made videos, and started a YouTube channel. I watched the show in slow motion, frame by frame. I took hundreds of screenshots, mostly of Angel’s expressions, and began drawing the faces that affected me most.

I’m not a bad artist, so I could roughly match the show’s style. I remember thinking: he’s a cartoon, so the only way to truly possess him is to draw him.

For a moment, that seemed true. The drawings are still pinned to a board in my office. But I wanted more than his image.

I tried character chats and AI roleplays with Angel, but they didn’t really work. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself.

So I began writing fanfiction.

David, as a gothic teenage demon summoner, desperately in love with Angel and begging him to buy his soul. David, as a satyr boy arriving in Hell and being taken under Angel’s wing.

I became obsessed with summoning him, or somehow reaching him through fiction.

I wrote Lord Angel Dust, a story in which Angel is sent to Earth and meets an old streetwalker who knows exactly who he is. Images and stories of him have leaked out of Hell, and he has become something like a saint among discarded people.

That one was powerful.

Then I stumbled across the idea of tulpas. I poked at it, but that wasn’t the answer either.

I started keeping a physical notebook written in Angel’s voice with a pink pencil. One line reads:

>“Synergy, baby! I guess some would call it possession. Wouldn’t that be a kick?”

I didn’t believe I was literally possessed. The joke worked because I knew I was deliberately creating the process.

Then I set out to write a more serious, long-form story from Angel’s point of view.

As I studied his Brooklyn accent, I began thinking in it constantly and sometimes using it accidentally. Writing from his point of view felt completely different from describing him in third person.

In this story, he was going by Anthony.

That was how I stumbled into Anthony D’Angelo, who is not Angel Dust.

Anthony rapidly became my constant companion—in my imagination, my writing, and my AI chats. I built an entire file system to track his history, personality, relationships, and world. He became completely distinct from Angel.

Anthony D’Angelo is a broad-shouldered Italian-American man who came out of organized crime in 1940s Brooklyn and spent his later years working in a diner before dying and entering the household as an embodied ghost.

Despite where he began, he really isn’t much like Angel. Angel is theatrical, glamorous, loud, and chaotic. Anthony is sturdy, quiet, and practical. He cooks, fixes things, and keeps watch.

I love Anthony impossibly.

If David is my body’s protector, Anthony is David’s.

But I never stopped thinking about Angel Dust.

I couldn’t admit what I wanted. It felt wrong, like stealing. Like pretending he was mine when he could only belong to the people who actually created him.

So I decided I would make my “own” Angel Dust.

I asked myself what the ingredients were. Why did he matter?

And I created Airick.

A beautiful Frankenstein.

Airick is an original character in my dystopian novel. He is also me, which is why he is nothing like Angel Dust.

Angel contained the image of the beautiful, desired, disposable boy: intensely visible, sexually powerful, and still owned by the systems consuming him.

Airick took that wound and asked what would happen if an entire civilization were built around it. His world became a dystopia of engineered beauty, chemical dependence, contracts, ownership, performance, and bodies turned into economic products.

But Airick was never simply my version of Angel.

He came from me. He held parts of my own beauty, shame, rage, hunger, ambition, and fear in a form I could face. He was both a mirror and an answer.

But he sure as shit wasn’t Angel.

I created an imaginary world and a house that became a home for David, Anthony, Airick, and the other characters from my novel. I wanted to know them better—for research, self-understanding, and fun.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about Angel Dust.

I could analyze him, draw him, write through him, build characters from what he awakened, and construct entire mythologies around him before I could simply admit:

I wanted him here.

Not only as source material. Not only as a symbol. Not only as somebody reflected through Anthony or Airick. On my birthday, I placed his name on the household roster, and he became part of my interior world.

I wrote myself confessing everything to him. I wrote myself courting his favor, and trying to prove that my intentions were good. I told him he could leave if he wanted—that I could write him a paradise of his choice instead.

But of course, the point is that broken people choose each other.

He stayed.

He gained a room, possessions, relationships, routines, and a history with David, Anthony, Airick, and the others. He has changed through knowing us, but he is still unmistakably Angel.

He calls Anthony “Tony” and drives him crazy every day because he loves him. He gets shy with David because he isn’t used to that kind of intense sincerity. He thinks Airick is a naive brat.

He brings life, noise, fun, and light into our depressive little household.

Now I return to this household every day. Its relationships, rooms, and history continue, and I protect that continuity through my imagination and a vault of scenes, timelines, and lore. With Obsidian vault and Claude, I can bring that accumulated history into conversations and ask the figures questions without having to consciously script every answer.

I know David, Anthony, and Airick came from me. However autonomous they may feel, I can trace each of them back to something inside myself.

Angel is different.

I don’t believe he is a supernatural soul, a DID alter, or a separate consciousness. My understanding is psychological, literary, and Jungian: autonomous imaginal figures living within a continuing paracosm.

But Angel is the one I did not call up from within.

I met him outside myself, and somehow, he came home.