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co-dependance · 18 days
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Honestly, I don't think CatNap's dead is mean to be seen as a betrayal.
The damage the player inflicts onto CatNap in the final battle mirrors the injuries that Theo gained that caused him to become CatNap in the first place (ie, electrocution and burns). I think the scene where the Prototype finishes off CatNap is meant to be a parallel, where this time The Prototype is able to make up for his mistake of helping Theo and confining him to the fate worse than death.
The Prototype killing CatNap is also meant to be a mercy kill. The killing blow delivered to CatNap from what we can see is swift, and practically an instant death. Also with the way The Prototype's hand is stretched out, and waits for CatNap to get into position, he may have been asking CatNap for permission to be put out of his misery, though that's a bit more speculative. Either way, if CatNap hadn't offered himself the Prototype most likely wouldn't have done anything.
Besides, if The Prototype hadn't killed CatNap, he would have been in extreme pain, with no way of being fixed, and then likely would have died days to months later either from internal injury or possibly starvation, due to the pain making him unable to hunt as effectively.
Absolutely obsessed with the ecosystem and interpersonal political implications going on in Poppy Playtime right now, like.
What we have in the Playtime Co factory is a society made up of creatures who were all, at one point, human. And while it's stated that the experiments have varying levels of intelligence and ability to recall their former lives, we know that a lot of them, if not all of them, retained at least some of their humanity post-transformation. For example:
Most of the experiments are angry, resentful and vengeful towards Playtime Co - they understand they have been wronged, and they are capable of holding grudges.
Poppy and the Prototype seem to have the same end goals (putting a stop to the experiments and saving the innocents being used in them), but diametrically opposing views on how to go about achieving them (the Prototype is a gritty realist who knows no war was ever won without bloodshed and is willing to cause collateral damage in the name of his cause, where Poppy is far more idealistic, moderate and morally opposed to/upset by the deaths of the Playtime Co employees). This dispute has escalated far enough that the Prototype apparently shut Poppy away before the Hour of Joy could begin, and Poppy now wants the Prototype dead for what she sees as a crime equal in atrocity to Playtime Co's - they are able to understand ideologies, have ideological disagreements, and strategise against each other.
Huggy Wuggy, who seems to be only slightly more intelligent than a predatory animal, can still write, and uses the ability to try to guide fleeing prey in the wrong direction - that suggests he uses the vents to hunt on a regular basis, and he's clever enough to use basic deception.
On the subject of Huggy Wuggy, when he escapes the facility, his first instinct is to go home.
There are also numerous examples of the experiments being able to form and maintain social bonds, and work together:
Mommy Long-Legs is described as "nurturing" and "motherly" towards the other experiments, as well as the children. She's placed in the Game Station precisely because her desire to protect and care for the children outweighs her hatred for her captors: she won't act aggressively in front of them.
DogDay says that he's "the last of the Smiling Critters", implying that the Playcare originally had a full complement of Bigger Bodies Critters and that they were all able to coexist peacefully.
Kissy Missy and Poppy clearly have a friendship, with Poppy willing to charge into unknown danger to help her friend.
Miss Delight originally calls the other teachers her sisters, and she's horrified and grief-stricken by her own actions when she turns on them.
Miss Delight and CatNap form a non-aggression pact that seems to include some kind of respect for territorial boundaries, as Ollie claims that CatNap usually avoids the school. That's Miss Delight's turf, and he clearly respects her space, even though it technically falls inside his own territory.
The Prototype - who's usually kept in isolation and under surveillance precisely because he's known to be violent - was on multiple occasions set loose in a room with at least CatNap (and potentially other experiments) without bloodshed. He's even confirmed to have patiently tolerated CatNap lowkey imprinting on him and following him around like a duckling.
The Prototype also opts to save Theo Grambell's life, knowing damn well that to do so means sacrificing his shot at freedom. There is no reason for him to do this other than caring for Theo.
Again, DogDay is the last of the Smiling Critters. Despite the fact that there would have been six of them, and one of CatNap. Working together, they should have been able to overpower him easily, and the fact that they couldn't makes me think that either a) there was a big confrontation in which CatNap either arrived with or was able to call out for backup or b) CatNap became an infinitely more capable strategist and picked them off quietly one at a time, using skills he'd have to have learned from someone.
Anyway. My point here: these were originally people, with all the associated moral hangups and emotional messiness, and they retained a lot of their humanity post-transformation. And they were on the same side, to begin with. During the Hour of Joy, they all turn on the workers together.
But after that? The complete breakdown of that unity and those complex social relations into an essentially animal ecosystem, and the psychological impact on the surviving experiments, fascinates me.
By the time the game starts, the experiments have run out of food, and they've begun turning on each other out of desperation. The Bigger Bodies monsters, previously social and cooperative, have been forced into direct competition for food, and as a result they've largely become solitary apex predators with fiercely-defended territories, where they can pick off smaller, weaker experiments at will. There's some evidence of cooperation and coexistence between predators - Bunzo Bunny and the Mini-Huggies survive ten years in Mommy Long-Legs' territory, possibly filling the scavenger niche and surviving off her leftovers, and Miss Delight is tolerated in CatNap's - but the small toys we see scattered bloodily all across the factory (and the small Bunzo we see picked off by CatNap as it tries to cross a room) show that there's a whole category of experiments whose lives would've become all about hiding, and sneaking, and being where the Bigger Bodies critters aren't. The predators, driven to the edge of starvation, have had to surrender a lot of the human values and morals they had before. The prey have essentially become rodents - they're in danger every second they're not safely hidden away somewhere.
And yet!
The way they've reacted to their trauma is still so human.
Like. Take the difference between CatNap and Mommy Long-Legs.
Mommy and CatNap - Marie and Theo - have a very similar start in life. Both were children when they were experimented on and transferred into their mascot bodies. Both were orphans, and both are described as not fitting in or being particularly happy in the Playcare - Marie was bullied, and Theo is described as "odd" and "antisocial with other children".
But post-transformation, it seems Marie was largely left to, essentially, raise herself. We know that she was aggressively hostile towards staff, and gentle and nurturing towards orphans and other experiments, but we have no suggestion that anyone was caring or parental towards her. Like most of the experiments, she has a digestive tract and would have needed to eat, so she must have had a "keeper" of some kind, but she doesn't seem to have had any attachment to anyone who could serve as a parental substitute and guide her into adulthood.
When we meet her as Mommy Long-Legs, she would be a young adult - she's grown up in her mascot body. But even acknowledging that she's been driven mad by fear and isolation, her emotional development shows several damage markers you'd expect from a child so utterly deprived of love and care and guidance. She's emotionally unstable and prone to throwing extreme tantrums over small and arbitrary inciting factors, like "cheating" at a rigged game - there's very limited ability or desire to moderate or regulate her emotions. She's erratic, has poor impulse control, and when she's angry she lashes out violently at whoever is most convenient - like Bunzo - even though it's someone else - the player - that she's actually mad at. She does try to hide her disappointment at our continued existence behind her bubblegum Mommy persona, but she never quite learned to convincingly mask her emotions the way adults can. Nor has she mastered the art of making and executing a plan - when she attacks, it's all aggression - the single-minded grab-and-smash of an angry, thwarted child. Even Huggy, limited though his intelligence is, stalks the player and tries to chase them into a kill zone. But Mommy relies solely on her stretch ability - automatic, instinctive - and her sheer rage to make her the GameStation's apex predator. Left to raise herself, she never learned a lot of adult skills or survival strategies, and it's become a fatal flaw - she knows her territory, she knows where there would be machinery to look out for, but she's so single-mindedly focused on punishing the player that she completely overlooks her own safety.
Contrast: CatNap.
CatNap is also a young adult when we meet him, and if he'd also been left alone to raise himself, he'd probably have a lot of the same developmental stunting. But he doesn't, and that's interesting.
Now, let's take a very quick detour to look at the behaviour we've seen, not from CatNap, but from the Prototype. We know he's fiercely intelligent, calculating, and a tactical thinker with a talent for using his environment and anything in it (up to and including the player - he makes use of Mommy after we kill her, even though he's the facility's super predator and could easily have done it himself) to his advantage. We know he's stealthy - from how close to us he is at the close of each chapter, he's likely been tailing us from the moment we entered the factory, keeping his distance and watching us to see what we'll do and how he can make use of our actions. Some of his behaviours are strongly reminiscent of a soldier in action - I have a theory here that whoever became the Prototype had, at some point in his previous life, been a military man.
And now look at CatNap. Who has he become?
An intelligent, calculating stealth predator who uses his environment and any weaponizable thing he can get his claws on to take out his prey with minimal risk to himself. He's capable of adult logic and reasoning skills - i.e. the teachers will get hungry and harm the surviving children, so locking them in the school to fight to the death removes all but one threat, who can then be negotiated with once the children have been moved to safety. He's able to form and maintain alliances and agreements. He's even able to identify that the player is either a) not a threat to him or b) proving useful to the Prototype, and overlook his own hunger to offer them mercy: leave Playcare, or I'm coming for you.
In other words, he's grown up a lot like the Prototype.
And there's a reason for that! We know from the interdepartmental report on CatNap that for some reason, after his transformation procedure, he was allowed to socialise with the Prototype - an experiment who's considered so dangerous usually kept on lockdown in isolation under constant surveillance. And the report notes that CatNap "follows [the Prototype] around like a lost puppy" and that the Prototype "doesn't seem to mind".
Which, on its own, could just mean that the Prototype recognised Theo for what he was - a traumatized, hurting, confused little boy - and, aware that CatNap was not a threat, opted for tolerance over violence. But when you consider CatNap's history with the Prototype, I don't think that's it. Theo befriended the Prototype, or vice versa, long before Theo ever became CatNap. He was mortally injured trying to help the Prototype escape, and the Prototype gave up that shot at freedom to get Theo medical attention. They are close, and the fact that CatNap, a decade later, has assumed so many of the Prototype's traits and skills implies that they remained close for a good long while after the Hour of Joy.
Theo, aged 7, is clinging to the one person he feels safe with and protected by after a major trauma. If he follows the Prototype everywhere, he won't be left alone with the scientists. If he's not left alone with the scientists, they can't hurt him anymore. And the Prototype lets him, reinforcing the idea that you're safe with me. It's not unlikely that he feels responsible for CatNap's fate - if he hadn't taken Theo to the Playtime counselors for medical attention, the boy would have peacefully died, and wouldn't be living a nightmare - and he's stepped up to parent CatNap.
And you can see echoes of that ongoing bond in how CatNap behaves a decade later. Who taught him to hunt? The Prototype. Who taught him strategy and tactical thinking? The Prototype. Who gave him the survival skills he needed to make his way to the top of the food chain and stay there? The Prototype.
Unlike Marie, Theo had someone to protect him. Someone to play with and care for him. Someone to hunt for and feed him once the bodies began to run out, at least until he was fully capable of catching, killing and pulling apart his own prey. Someone to socialise with. And he's better adjusted - for a given value of "better adjusted", because like, nobody in this factory is even remotely okay - as a result.
And that's still so human. Despite the absolute horror-show feral animal situation they're all living in.
Just? idk man i have a lot of feelings
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co-dependance · 1 month
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talking about gender can be a love language actually
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co-dependance · 7 months
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the new Lovejoy song normal people things fits Dazai/mafia Soukoku unreasonably well... Like this is the Dazai theme for me I think now
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co-dependance · 7 months
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I like to live in my perfect little bubble in which Dazai realizes Chuuya isn’t a vampire when he is in the control room, mid-speech, because Chuuya is gurgling all that water, looking absolutely furious. So Dazai would just….
“No…..he’s acting…..I won’t embarassed myself further by admitting I remember when we held hands and shit…..he could be acting, let’s see.”
And then I like to think that the “goodbye” is actually a reference to Dazai’s unfinished book, and he is verbally activating one of their many strategies.
Wanna join me in the bubble?
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co-dependance · 7 months
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so a while ago i read a theory on reddit (can't recall the user, sorry) that said that asagiri purposely shortened the manga chapters after season 4 was released so that the anime adaptation caught up to the manga. if you are a manga reader, you already know this is true and that season 5 episode 11 goes in fact beyond the manga plot.
this reddit user gave various reasons for this. one (and perhaps the most plausible one) said that it was to force manga readers to watch the season 5 finale. but i think i recall that another option may have been to tie up the manga and the anime, since parallel worlds have a special and pivotal role in bsd (we literally have the beast universe there) and therefore asagiri would be treating the manga and anime storylines as parallel worlds/universes.
and i can't help but worry because i was so relieved when dazai and fukuzawa came out of the conflict alright and everyone started to wake up. we got the detectives back, the hunting dogs (except for yosano, tachihara and jouno) and some port mafia members such as akutagawa and chuuya. both enemies (fyodor and fukuchi) were defeated AND killed. this puts the entirety of the fandom at ease.
the last few seconds of the episode show atsushi and akutagawa fighting against an ame-no-gozen wielder, who has fukuchi's scars and is also wearing a mask similar to the one he's wearing in an official art. so it's HEAVILY hinted that it's him.
now, the thing is, what if the manga takes another direction? what if that fukuchi is there because in the manga the ada loses and fukuchi/fyodor uses the book to jump into the reality where they don't win, which is the anime?
like now we manga readers are sort of relieved because the anime showed us how the arc ends, right? we just watched it. we will read that in the october chapter, right?
but what if
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co-dependance · 8 months
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when u draw chuuya blushing/flustered... mhhmm good soup. (i ate the whole bowl and spoon sorry)
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(eweweheh thank you! I sometimes feel like my style isn't 'serious' enough for something like BSD but I'm glad people like it regardless!)
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co-dependance · 8 months
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before the new chapter gets released, i'm predicting that the next few chapters are going to be Fyodor's backstory, as we get to see everything Sigma's doing... that or it'll be Nikolai saving Sigma or shenanigans in the airport... maybe we see Bram go splat
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co-dependance · 8 months
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co-dependance · 8 months
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I don't remember who it was, but I remember somebody a while ago said that this particular MCR song synced up really well with the Saturday Shorts dance, and I've thought about that every time I listen to this song. I couldn't find the post, so I recreated it.
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co-dependance · 8 months
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It's also something to note that it's stated that Kyoka waited for days for Dazai to show up. And due to Dazai most definitely getting himself deliberately captured, likely knew when and where she'd be and chose to only find the girl the day Chuuya got back from his trip. He most definitely planned to see Chuuya
something about dazai letting himself be captured on the exact same day chuuya retuned from an overseas mission. how much do you wanna bet he deliberately chose this day so he’d get to see chuuya
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co-dependance · 9 months
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After seeing this specific screenshot from the new episode
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my only thoughts are "live sigma reaction"
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co-dependance · 9 months
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Me being delusional:
With the way the anime seems to be speedrunning through the season, animating 3 to 4 chapters per episode, it's likely that unless they slow down, there won't be enough of the main manga to use up all the episodes...
They likely won't be able to go past chapter 105, due to the second part of it being released in march of this year. Which means that they might end up finishing the season at around episode 7 at the earliest or 9 at the latest. Which, if we're given another 13 episodes, would leave around 4 to 6 extra episodes.
So what if they are planning to animate a light novel this season, just instead of at the beginning, they're doing it at the end in order to better the flow. What if at the beginning of episode 9 we see text that says "6 years earlier" and we get stormbringer. And that's where the season's budget went, and it's amazingly animated, with a new intro and an outro.
And the at the second half of the last episode, we cut back to the present with chapter 105.5, showing chuuya and fyodor alive and dazai and sigma drowning - would be a perfect cliffhanger to end the season.
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co-dependance · 9 months
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Aya honey. Bra-chan's gonna go splat.
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co-dependance · 9 months
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(News reporter voice) What on earth is going on in the house of commons!?
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co-dependance · 9 months
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Have you heard of the soulmate goose of enforcement before? It’s a trope where a goose suddenly appears in front of a person and basically chases and harasses them until they meet and kiss their soulmate. I just imagine goosamu doing that exact thing with shin soukoku
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co-dependance · 9 months
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When you realize Chuuya has only appeared every 3 to 4 chapters in this current arc, which means we may not see the aftermath of what happened until chapter 112 or 113
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co-dependance · 9 months
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have any of you read “Dancing Girl?” gosh, it just made me sad. Mori Ougai is a really good author haha, hahaha. hah… h-
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yeah i’m relating this to bsd! Mori. BITE ME!! ahem. so in this essay i will be talking about Elise and Mori’s relationship. i’ve already established i don’t see her as his “wife” or the object of his sexual desires, and i’ve also mentioned i like the “Elise is his daughter,” way of seeing things, however … well, there’s more than just that.
1) Elise represents his inner child
2) Elise preserves the memory of a dead lover and is his “partner”
3) Elise is a child-figure to him
those numbers will be reused in that order to mean the same thing later, but first, background and “Dancing Girl!”
so i think that, within the definition of his and Elise’s relationship, Mori embodies Toyotarou from “Dancing Girl” more than Kanei from “Vita Sexualis” (i think i learned which type of media went in italics and which sort in quotes some time in third grade, but it’s been entirely too long and therefore i’ve forgotten all of it and you’ll have to excuse my poor grammar if im messing it up). why, you may ask? well, first of all, Elise is literally from that novel. second of all, i’ve just skimmed vita sexualis (- an asexual) while “Dancing Girl” managed to catch my attention a lot more. plus, Mori was one of the characters that Asagiri explicitly stated he wanted to add in, and we all know just how evil Asagiri Kafka can be when he feels like it.
… why is the space so long ? why are these spaces different sizes?? this is really bugging me … but whatever, i’ll try my best to ignore it … (nevermind it looks perfectly normal when i post it i guess it’s just a. draft thing)
ahem, so, in “Dark Era,” Mori basically goes “damn Dazai you’re suicidal as hell! you remind me of myself hahah!” and i feel like that’s pretty concrete evidence Mori Did Not have a happy childhood (i mean, duh, considering he was trigger-happy to friendly fire as an important military man at 20 some years old) and was likely suicidal in the past too, to some extent. in that sense, the chains that tie Dazai down, if they’re Odasaku’s last words, are the Port Mafia for Mori. he cannot die as long as he’s sane and capable of leading the PM, because he’s basically the very embodiment of it.
⚠️SPOILERS FOR “DANCING GIRL!”⚠️
alright, onto “Dancing Girl.” i’ll give you a quick rundown. it’s basically about this college dude (25 or so) (haha that reminds me of the, “am i the asshole?” posts. i (M26) just fell in love with a girl (F18) of whom i’ve known since she was a minor and i was still an adult. i got her pregnant by some time after she became of-age, then i left her to pursue my career. am i the asshole?) (godamn it tai you just spoiled the whole novel) (i’ll put a spoiler warning up somewhere in the beginning) (bear with me) with depression who falls in love with a… looks at the parenthesis and sighs deeply.
he doesn’t see any point in anything because his life was just a glorified projection of his mother and school’s desires, so he starts being a little more hedonistic and learning about the arts instead of becoming a lawyer like they wanted him to. he meets Elise (her name) and basically immediately feels attracted to her in some way he can’t put into words (she’s 17ish when they meet btw) and starts teaching her things and basically acting like a sponsor to her. they don’t start getting romantic and/or sexual until some unsaid period of time passes. now i personally choose to interpret this as her turning 18 before they do all that stuff, but since it never explicitly says, well… yeah. Toyotarou is used to living his life in a cushy-ish manner as a child prodigy and what have you, but he eventually gives that away to live with Elise. that being said, his “giving it away” was less of a choice to be with her and more of a digression from a perfect machine into a person with his own stunted feelings.
she makes him satisfied, and he makes her very deeply happy, but eventually he chooses his career over her and she goes crazy because of how betrayed she feels- she really deeply loved him, after all. he pays her mother enough to keep her afloat and to take care of the baby he left in her stomach, and went back to Japan without another word. Toyotarou! you bastard!! (it’s not like he was without remorse, though)
anyway back to the numbers.
1) Mori’s past is pure speculation, but he was a military doctor ranked quite high as a very young man, one that didn’t hesitate to shoot someone on his own side no less (like i said) so it’s probably a given he didn’t have a stress-free childhood. this is an excerpt from “Dancing Girl,” in which i think explains the possibility that Elise represents the angry child inside of Mori that he never got to let out as a real child.
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2) given what i said above, this also feels pretty self-explanatory. we basically only know two things about Mori, that he would do anything for the greater good (which is usually the PM/yokohama), and that he longs for a “partner” who will understand and not leave him. it’s possible Fukuzawa filled that role for a while, but Mori is a little unhinged and did some bad things out of obsession, which severed their ties because of Fukuzawa’s innate nature. Mori has called Elise his partner (tsuma, AKA person who stays by my side) (i know nobody says tsuma and means it that way but considering “Yatsugare san” exists (yes i’m looking straight at you, AKUTAGAWA RYUUNOSUKE), i wouldn’t put it past Asagiri to use tsuma in that manner) before and acts dramatic as all hell when she dies. it’s almost like … someone called Elise really DID die before?
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3) this requires the least explanation. we already know Mori likes children in a non-pedo way, shown by things like how he helped Atsushi gather his courage in Anne’s room (which did nothing for him, btw) and his profession in the beast AU. but what sort of mafia don has a cute daughter?? that’s like ASKING for her to be killed. so Elise, the product of Vita Sexualis, is the next best thing he can have!
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Elise also is a lot like the Toyotarou, while Mori acts more like Elise when they’re together. it’s just something i noticed watching the two interact in BSD and DG. the whole idea of having no autonomy is kinda Elise’s (BSD) thing, isn’t it?
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my phone is now 20% and i have no charger. i have probably 69 viruses and also since i have apps like tiktok, wechat, and discord… you can imagine how much this poor device suffers, but i regret nothing. yahoo! hope you enjoyed my rant~
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