Animal Lover

Animal Lover

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magical kiss?
Why can lucy change the guys back to human? No one else seems to be able to. Is she like a decedent of a witch so wile she dose not practice magic she has magical power inside her?
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DetSpooky  [developer] Jun 19, 2017 @ 11:13am 
Actually, we've got kind of a complicated answer for this one! STRAP IN TIGHT:

(Directly copy-pasted from our dev blog, which can be found here[animalloverdev.tumblr.com].)

“Here’s the reason that only the player is able to restore the boys back to normal and not Katy (or most people for that matter)

The rules of magic, in this universe, fall in line with a few basic rules which tend to pervade a lot of my writing (probably a byproduct of my own creationism and believing in a strange set of rules that the universe lives by).

Most ‘curses’ created by witches and wizards have a byproduct of their granted functional immortality because the universe cannot abide by an eternal ~anything~. Doesn’t make sense? To explain: death ends suffering. It’s a way out of any torture. To wish for someone to be tortured forever will always fail because everyone dies.

Witches and wizards, however, are magical and can prologue things beyond the natural life cycle and the malevolent ones have worked very hard to find loopholes. This is through the function of burden, which means that the spell can be manipulated by anyone who has the burden of the spell.

It’s functionally impossible to write a duration time of ‘Forever’ into a spell, and if a wizard or witch tries, then the spell only lasts as long as the caster’s lifespan (at best).

Aadara created this spell SPECIFICALLY for Edmund in a fit of rage after having found out that he deceived her. She wanted him to suffer long after she was dead (which she assumed to be very shortly as she had not yet begun to prolong her lifespan), and you can imagine that Edmund returning to the world of humans after she’s died, leaving him to resume his life in the future doesn’t sound very satisfying to a villain, and you can’t write ‘indefinitely’ as a duration.

Aadara placed the burden with ‘anyone with the capacity to do the accursed harm’.
This means a couple of things:

-Aadara could die and the curse would continue

-If she said ‘anyone who WISHES to do the accursed harm’, Edmund would be free as soon as everyone forgot about him, waking as his accursed age and resuming his life (and remember that Aadara had not yet prolonged her life)

-Harm, in this case, does not mean physical harm as Edmund and the others are immortal with bodies that will restore themselves and cannot be permanently killed. It must be emotional.

-Anyone who bears the burden of the spell has the power to reverse it as well.

-If Aadara had placed the burden of the spell on LITERALLY EVERYONE so that the spell would last for all time, then anyone would be able to change Edmund back, even people without the ability to harm Edmund

-If Aadara had placed the burden on Edmund, attempting to loophole it so that it would last as long as he was alive, then Edmund could change himself back any time he wanted.

This is why Katy is unable to turn Edmund back, there’s nothing that Katy could do or ever would do to do lasting damage to him. The player, on the other hand, can break his heart.

Seeing as Aadara used the same spell as Edmund’s on each of the boys, it all works the same. This means that Katy is actually able to turn Miguel back (as a universe in which the player doesn’t end up with Miguel eventually brings Katy and Miguel together. But you’re not supposed to know that.), but never gets the opportunity to try.

This is also my own personal canonical explanation as to why the sixth character proposed by the Kickstarter (and alluded to by Aadara in the ending) is not a part of the story: The player would not be able to change him back anyway, they never got a chance to be together, so the player has no leverage over him to potentially break his heart. It’s a good thing that he ends up freed at the end anyway, huh?

This brings me to one last repercussion that never made it into Animal Lover. The reason that the ability to break his heart is considered ‘lasting damage’ by the curse is that if Edmund (or any other afflicted) becomes hurt badly enough and becomes too guarded, they close their heart off to others. Thus, the pool of people able to harm (and by proxy, free) Edmund shrinks.

If Edmund’s heart ever became guarded enough to where no one could get through to him, then Aadara would be the only person left, and upon her death, he would emerge from the curse in a suicidal state, unable to form human connections with anyone, permanently. This means that, yes, the other cure for the curse would be to become so abhorrently miserable that suicide is the only option for escape. Then Aadara would have done her job.

(The reason that Kyle isn’t cured from his curse the moment he’s done speaking to Mick, even though he’s suicidally depressed is because he’s only temporarily hurt, and there still exist people (namely the player) would could hurt him worse if they wished to.)”
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