So you might want to read my other thread on White Chain: https://lemmy.world/post/3610133 . That kicked off some of my musings below.

(I’m not saying I’m right about any of this, I just think some dots are starting to connect.)

Anyway, when I was musing about White Chain having kids and who the dad might be, I had a thought my inner fanfic writer LOVES…but which I think a certain segment of KSBD fandom might hate…

Still, maybe hear me out.

Very early on, Vladok flips gender from a male ebon devil to a female blue devil. And it’s been kind of broadcast that Princess and Vigilant Gaze REALLY hit it off, and I suspect the gold-masked devil on the cover is actually a merge of Princess and Vigilant Gaze, because the profile looks like Princess’s Hair Metal Aerobics Instructor getup, but has angel-stone-colored skin and Vigilant Gaze’s blue-green eyes. I think they took a page from Aspected Chaos and realized angels and devils could merge.

So, devils flipping gender is established in canon, Princess does it pretty thoroughly and is becoming someone very different from Vladok.

So, back to Cio. The most recent pages show what seems to be an unmasked light-colored devil that has a fairly masculine outline.

And, although Allison’s on-page romance is with the femme fatale that is Cio, it’s not shown that Allison is repulsed by men. She seems to care for Zaid a lot. And, interestingly, Incubus comes to her as a male resembling David Bowie as the Goblin King from Labyrinth. There’s a certain sort of girl-geek who absolutely crushed on David Bowie like that, and if Incubus is reading dreams, coming to Allison as a male instead of as a hot girl might have been the right choice after all, despite the Cio romance.

So from in-universe clues, Allison might actually be bisexual or pan, not lesbian. Given Allison’s whole “thing” is constantly reinventing herself, being rather fluid with who/what she prefers wouldn’t be out of line with the development shown.

Cio, in the tongue-lighting-match scene lies to Allison by saying that people NEVER change. Cio clearly longs to change and is terrified that she CAN’T…which is not helped by Allison abusing her and forcing her to be what she used to be and didn’t really want to be anymore. But it’s a lie that one can’t change–I mean, we see an ANGEL change. Certainly Cio can too.

Growth, for Cio, would be completely reinventing herself, probably as a maskless devil because masks and names are assigned by humans (I also suspect Himself is a maskless devil), and Cio “returning” as a MALE might actually be what she needs to do a complete reinvention.

Of course, it would make the part of fandom that is completely horny for she-Cio lose its mind if we got he-Cio instead, but it would still work as the romance for Allison…

…plus, if we want to get REALLY out there, and take Cio’s horny comment to White Chain about “yes, please arrest me officer” (paraphrased) as a genuine flicker of interest, a male Cio could have kids with White Chain, which might be relevant if one is trying to create a myth of a type of human that has both angel and devil in them. Maybe they do this after Allison kicks the bucket, make a human baby in White Chain’s Soloman-derived human body that has both the white and black soul flame in it. (A Strong Grey flame? Strong Silver flame? A baby human Yisun? It’s funny there’s no in-universe examples of the white and black flames reuniting…)

ANYWAY. My whole point here is to say that I think Cio is probably returning, but it’s quite possibly going to be in a really, really different form, because what Cio desperately needs to learn is that she CAN reinvent herself. And if she does so, it might not be beyond the pale that she comes back as a maskless male devil instead, and Allison has to learn to love and accept the new Cio instead of bullying her into being someone she no longer wants to be just because it’s useful to Allison in a given moment.

…also, far-end-book thoughts, but if Cio does/can come back as a maskless devil, she’d make a good replacement for Himself, much as White Chain might be able to replace Metatron with her new type of human angels. 2 Michael and Metatron and Juggernaut are all painfully world-weary, and might eventually jump at a chance to be born as a reincarnating human with an angel soul instead of a reincarnating angel. Shorter life-cycles, leading to less boredom and burnout. There’s a reoccurring theme in the series that the longer you live (esp. unchanging), the more fucked-up you get, and Metatron has NEVER died and 2 Michael only died once. The people who die–Zoss–or change (Solomon David, and Allison) are seen as being Royalty, or closer to Royalty.