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minutiae.
headcanons and things that don’t fit anywhere else.
stats
major arcana: the magician.
power, resourcefulness, inspired action… and manipulation, manifesting one’s aims at the expense of others.
d&d alignment: neutral evil.
he’s in it for himself babes!
sun sign: scorpio.
i barely know my own signs so this is all i’m including for now. based on googling for 10 seconds, scorpios are stereotyped as ‘ambitious, intelligent, and confident’, and are passionate but guarded. i also just thought that him being an autumn baby just makes sense to me, given his gloomy, spooky aesthetics. maybe someday i will settle on a birth date so then i can celebrate his birthday!
hugo’s psychological specialisms.
i do associate hugo with methods that freud and people who directly followed after freud (i am specifically thinking jung and lacan) would use, because it feels very old-school and stereotypically psychiatric. he has little respect for modern-day therapeutic methods. some are too gentle, requiring a level of trust and faith in the patient’s efficacy that he simply cannot afford anymore, while others are much too touchy-feely and surface-level, validating the individual self rather than validating the gulf beneath the self where the real work must be done. (this is also something which tortures him, the lack of self he feels. or perhaps that’s just projection on my part!) i think this works because it grants him a lot of misplaced authority in confidently knowing what’s best. he thinks that psychoanalysis as a pursuit nailed it in one and dedicates himself to furthering that pursuit. his primary goal is to find the gaps between the defences of the patient, almost like a fencing match, just trying to get them in a vulnerable position and strike at the heart of their neuroses. it’s more like solving a puzzle (or a criminal case…) for him, as though healing the patient or client is the knock-on effect and not the object.
we do actually get some canonical insight into hugo’s methods as a hypnotherapist. in the knight, hugo is described by bruce as using techniques from stage hypnosis, presumably in the sense that he is using the very stereotypical fixation of a pocket watch while attempting to control patients and direct them to specific actions (sending him all their savings lol… very sexy and findom of him), rather than being a more hands-off guide, putting them in a calmer and more suggestible state where they might be able to speak freely and confront fears, compulsions, trauma. in earlier stories like prey, he uses trancey but less obvious stimuli and speaks in ways more reminiscent of a therapist gently guiding a patient uncertain about hypnotic states and the influence he might have over them, only to fill them with all the worst ideas when their guard is down.
his relationship with inhumane methods of psychological ‘treatment’ (most stereotypically, lobotomy and ECT used in inappropriate or excessive contexts) are more complex than simply ‘he’s fucked up so he would use these methods indiscriminately’. i can certainly see hugo incorporating these into his treatment because he’s self-aware of his own ‘abnormality’ in relation to the psychological norm, and feels a need to preserve himself by becoming the wielder of the icepick. he would also probably use them as a vindictive punishment. most patients don’t need such a heavy hand, though - they only need the threat that he will use them if they resist softer forms of treatment.
music i associate with hugo
for a while i struggled to link up my own music taste with hugo’s. in gothamverse he listens to opera, and i wouldn’t be surprised if elsewhere he used other forms of classical music as a muse of sorts. i could certainly see him enjoying some of those nineteenth-century attempts to link the anguish of poetry to song.
from my own collection, the most hugo-coded band is probably ulver (after they stopped being a black metal band and became a dark ambient one). i like them as a hugo band because they have a sinister, clinical vibe, but also a slightly silly, dramatic one. i wouldn’t say their recent synthwave phase fits this quite as well, compared to tracks from perdition city and blood inside. for modern hugo music you need lots of atmosphere and empty space, the promise of threat.