hyperfixated-unicorn
finding the last unicorn
analyzing my hyperfixations (sort of)
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Endo Sensei is really born to create shoujo forced to make shonen
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HE IS SO MEAN QKBDKWKD 😭
#sxf really have great ships#also the parallel of henry x martha with twiyor and damianya#so good#sxf spoilers#spy x family
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Ruby and the Unplayed Role
(Warning: Long analysis post.)
In Chapter 115 of Oshi no Ko, as Ruby is preparing to take her turn in the interpersonal acting audition, she reflects on her relationship to acting itself – and describes it as running very deep.
And by "the whole time", she seems to mean the whole time. As Sarina, she "played the role" of a girl who faced her circumstances bravely and bore no grudge against her parents for their neglect, because rebelling against those miserable circumstances would have been futile. Upon her reincarnation, "Ai's daughter" too was a role she played, and after Ai's death, she acted as the bright, innocent, non-grieving idol that she believed Ai wanted her to grow up to be. At this point in the story, we've already seen black-starred Ruby hide her vengeful anger behind a smiling facade, but this monologue suggests broad artificiality in Sarina/Ruby's self-presentation even before her vengeance arc.
Notably, Ruby also wonders here whether Ai's bright persona was an act in the same way that hers was:
This helps set the stage for later story beats like the end of Chapter 134, where Ruby again deepens her insight into Ai by personally relating to her.
And then, as if to drive home the point about her own acting, Ruby's turn in the audition consists of her expressing raw, acute grief over Ai and Gorou's deaths...
...before putting on a bubbly mask and acting like the grief isn't real.
Later on, the scene in Chapter 123 where Ruby spills her guts to Aqua seems to elaborate on the nature of the act that she's been putting on:
Ruby has been burying all of her sadness and anger and frustration, seeking to "smile all the time" in order to be loved. She's been performing a sanitized, idealized version of herself out of fear that no one would love the real her. Just like Ai did. Which, again, gives Ruby a powerful avenue for understanding Ai.
But there's an issue with this analysis. If you look back at Ruby's behavior in the manga's early chapters – before she discovers Gorou's corpse, meets the Crow Girl, becomes vengeful and all that – you'll notice that she doesn't actually express unfailing cheer, optimism, kindness, confidence, or generally Ai-like behavior. She doesn't even seem to be trying, really. She's bright and cheerful sometimes, sure – but other times she's unapologetically not, for understandable human reasons.
For instance, there's that time in Chapter 19 when she begs Miyako to hurry in starting an idol group for her to join, openly expressing insecurity about fitting in with her celebrity peers:
Or that time in Chapter 37 when she approaches Kana to confide in her about her stage fright:
(It's hard to imagine Ai seeking out support from a groupmate like this, at least without them opening up to her first in the same conversation.)
Ruby is also not above being rude or hostile to people, even when it's against her own interests, as can be seen in her bickering with Kana in Volume 2:
And then there's Chapter 23, when Ruby gets on Aqua's case about neglecting family time in favor of LoveNow-related activities:
(This is also one of those things Sarina/Ruby does that takes on a new meaning once you learn about her relationship with her original parents.)
There are more examples of pre-vengeance Ruby expressing various negative emotions to others, but I won't belabor the point. In general, I think perceptions of pre-vengeance Ruby as acting consistently cheerful or positive come largely from exaggerating/simplifying the contrast between her and her gloomy brother, or between her and her "darker" future self. They don't reflect her actual behavior.
Now, speaking of Sarina/Ruby's relationship with her original parents, I think it makes sense that a badly neglected child like Sarina would develop a tendency to avoid behaving in any potentially unpleasant ways around her parents, implicitly hoping that they'll want to spend more time with her that way. I also think it makes sense that she would extend this strategy to other relationships, given the formative role of one's relationship with one's parents – especially in Sarina's case, due to her isolation.
Importantly, though, we don't see Sarina trying to perfectly sanitize herself in her interactions with Gorou. Indeed, they both seem quite comfortable teasing each other (in flashbacks both from earlier chapters and from more recent ones):
The fact that Sarina doesn't walk on eggshells with Gorou suggests that she's relatively secure in her relationship with him, rather than fearing that failure to get along with him flawlessly will drive him away. I think this means Ruby's characterization in the early chapters is compatible with Sarina's later-revealed backstory if we understand Sarina's relationship with Gorou as also having been formative, teaching her that she doesn't need to act perfect to be loved. I also think this interpretation helps elucidate why Gorou means so much to Sarina/Ruby: his robust, reliable love and care for her gave her a level of confidence and security in herself that she didn't have before.
Now, what about Ruby's grief over Ai's death? Don't Chapters 115 and 123 imply that to be the single most prominent feeling that pre-vengeance Ruby was burying beneath her acting? How do the early chapters portray the effect of Ai's death on Ruby? Is that portrayal compatible with 115 and 123 (interpreted the way I did earlier)?
I am again going to argue: not really, no. 115 and 123 have Ruby recall "[acting as if] overcoming my mother's death, becoming a bright and innocent idol" (115) while secretly thinking "it'd be easier if I could just forget about her" (123). They seem to portray Ruby's past coping strategy for Ai's death as avoidant in nature; she tried to avoid letting the tragedy affect her or ideally even thinking about it at all. However, the early chapters portray Ruby's coping strategy for Ai's death as distinctly un-avoidant. Allow me to explain.
Starting off, Chapter 10 shows us Ruby's behavior in the days following Ai's death. We first see her reading social media reactions to Ai's murder and expressing anger and distress at people saying she was asking for it if she had a secret relationship, while Aqua listens silently:
A while later, though, after Ai's funeral – in fact, starting in the very next panel – Ruby and Aqua have the following conversation:
This conversation is echoed in Chapter 12, after the post-prologue timeskip, when Ruby, Miyako, and Aqua talk about Ruby joining the underground idol group:
In both conversations, Ruby doesn't deny her family members' claims about the hardships of idolhood, but she expresses a desire to become an idol anyway, not wanting to let the hardships stop her. After all, Ai sparkled, and Ruby wants to be like her.
(To reiterate, by the way, pre-vengeance Ruby's desire to "be like Ai" does not seem to involve never showing any negativity in her personal life. And it's not even as if Ruby never saw any negativity from Ai to begin with; see e.g. Chapter 4.)
But what does this drive of Ruby's have to do with her grief over Ai's death? After all, Ruby has wanted to be an idol – and to be like Ai – since before she was Ruby. She didn't need Ai to die to want those things. And how would her idol ambitions even psychologically relate to processing her grief?
Well, I think we get a pretty good look at a relation between them later on, starting in Chapter 41. This chapter opens with Ruby talking in her thoughts to "Mama in heaven", telling her about developments in the twins' lives from the past few months (which also serves to fill in and recap for the reader). After the recap, Ruby reassures Ai that she's doing well, and then we get these panels:
Ruby believes that performing at a dome – the elite opportunity that Miyako in Chapter 8 told us was "everyone's fantasy" – was also Ai's fantasy. But Ai's dreams of soaring to maximum fame as an idol were dashed by her murder. And now Ruby has taken it upon herself to fulfill them in Ai's stead, giving her another major reason to pursue idolhood.
We see Ruby visiting Ai's grave again and giving her more updates a couple in-universe months later in Chapter 72. Ruby tells her about the upcoming trip to Miyazaki, Aqua having become more cheerful lately, and then:
All of this implies that Ruby has been visiting Ai's grave and connecting with her memory in this way every few months for who-knows-how-long, and she has no intention of stopping.
This is not the behavior of someone who is trying to avoid giving mental space to the death of a loved one. On the contrary, pre-vengeance Ruby repeatedly confronts herself with the concrete fact of Ai's death and responds to it with mental fight rather than flight. The dark side of the idol world may have killed Ai's body, but it hasn't killed her spirit. Ruby copes with the tragedy of Ai's death by turning it into motivation – to preserve Ai's memory, to take up her mantle, to defy the darkness to ensure that her spirit lives on.
So what should we make of these discrepancies in Ruby's characterization between the earlier and later chapters? Honestly, I'm not completely sure. Maybe there's some way in which all of this makes sense after all. Maybe something got lost in the translation from Japanese to English? Maybe some of Ruby's recollections in Chapters 115 and 123 that we've assessed are meant to apply specifically to her vengeful self, or to the times when she was making public appearances? Maybe Akasaka deliberately wrote some of those recollections to be wrong to show that Ruby's awful present mental state is distorting her memories and sense of self? It seemingly wouldn't be the only case of that happening; Ruby appears to claim in Chapter 122 that the reason she became an idol in the first place was to avenge Ai and Gorou, which we know isn't true (and which Aqua also refuses to believe).
However, I think we should also consider the possibility that Akasaka just changed his mind about how he wanted to write Ruby partway through the manga, and the discrepancies in her characterization are artifacts of that without a good in-story explanation. For instance, maybe Akasaka only nailed down the details of Ruby's role in the Movie arc relatively recently, and the things he wanted to do with her required her to be able to personally relate to Ai in ways that didn't line up with her established characterization. So Akasaka tried to reframe what he'd written before to make Ruby more similar to Ai in certain ways, without complete success.
If this hypothesis is true, then Ruby isn't one fully consistent character throughout the whole manga; we have to distinguish "Old Ruby" and "New Ruby" at a minimum. And that idea disappoints me; Ruby is one of my favorite OnK characters, and inconsistencies of this size in her character progression interfere with my ability to appreciate it as it continues into the future. I also just kinda like Old Ruby better than New Ruby; I think Old Ruby better distinguishes herself from Ai and contrasts her in an interesting way. Old Ruby (pre-vengeance) is a person who knows the feeling of loving and being loved, values living authentically, and largely succeeds at it from day to day, but is nevertheless building her life on a couple of big lies and misunderstandings. (Ai didn't dream of the dome; Ai didn't want her children to remain a secret forever; the Ai who Ruby has dedicated herself to honoring is not the real Ai.) I think a character like that is a valuable addition to a story like OnK, and I'm disappointed at the idea of Old Ruby's arc never getting a proper, non-retconning second half and conclusion.
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Yep, it's time to go back to Stardew Valley 🏡
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"okay kid, i have a doctors appointment, you can handle this big fuckoff bus, i believe in you, keys are in the ignition, this thing DOES NOT HAVE INSURANCE so DON'T GET PULLED OVER, have fun"
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I've been thinking about how fundamentally opposite the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik and Babel by RF Kuang are, thematically.
The Scholomance Series is firmly set in liberal ideals. The only way for progress to happen is through co-operation, not even by majority rule. Everyone has to be in, and no one should be left behind. Solutions that serves the comfort of the majority by sacrificing few are deemed unacceptable. Every book ends with everyone co-operating to solve the problem, despite their differences.
In the end, our hero has to cooperate with the enemies, the oppressors. And it's shown ultimately that Bad People can be compelled to the right cause for their own self-interest.
It is stubbornly hopeful and so fundamentally liberal. And I really love it for that.
On the other hand, Babel, or The Necessity of Violence's message is... right there in the title. Babel frames oppression through a lens of resistance. The students initially opted for liberal, peaceful resistance. They were not so naive as to believe the oppressors could be compelled by compassion, but they believed they could be compelled by self-interest, and was shown, to the bitter end, that they were wrong. Those in power would give up comfort, love, and self-interest to hold onto power. In the end, only violence and destruction can shock the system.
Babel never showed us the fallout. Resistance is a continuous process. We're shown hope via continued resistance rather than a neat solution. There is no peace, no rest, no respite at the end of the journey. The fight must continue.
I think these are such strong examples of how, in a work of fiction, the author choose how the work frames the way "people" works. And it chooses what kind of solution could work, and what doesn't for the story it's trying to tell.
As I'm writing this, I'm abruptly reminded of the hilarious "sing" ending of Detroit: Become Human. Some stories are tragedies, and some have happy endings, but "hope" means completely different things depending on the message the story is trying to tell.
I guess the one thing I always wonder about, after reading a story like these, is "Do you really think that's how the world works?" And, if the ideal agrees with my own. "Can you promise?"
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like okay. oh my god. What if you put a nuclear bomb inside a boy and you told it (him) that it (he) was a hero because he was so very good at killing? Because he killed all the monsters, because he was so efficient, your best weapon you had never needed to fire. And because you said he (it) was a hero everyone understood that he was a hero and he was here to save them from the things that lived in the dark, at the cost of his time and his blood and his skin and his bones, because he didn’t get hurt like other people, because he was good at killing and he liked it.
And then what if you sent him off to school, Where you knew there were two more nuclear bombs living as horrendous hungry monsters, and your bomb (the boy) looked at them and knew what he (it) was; it was a bomb, and the plan was to put all of the monsters into a box that they would never ever get out of. And there is a boy in this nuclear bomb, a boy who has always been a hero because he kills monsters at the expense of his blood and bone and time, and in this boy is a nuclear bomb which is the worst monster of all. And this bomb understands what it is and puts itself in this box. Alone with all the other monsters.
and then when you want your bomb, you have it.
and when you go looking for the boy, he’s not there.
he’s not there unless you want the boy and not the hero, because the hero has always been the bomb.
like. holy fuck but Orion Lake has so many goddamn problems. But also:
what if there was also a girl who was told she was a nuclear bomb waiting to go off? And what if she was very, very good at killing, if she tried it, but she never did, since she was a nuclear bomb and there was no middle ground? What if she was raised by someone who told her that she could be good, that she wasn’t born evil, if she could be kind? What if you took a girl who can only ever go scorched earth and told her that she didn’t have to, even if everyone else told her that her only worth was in her devastation and she KNEW it. That she was only valuable to the rich if she was willing to kill to preserve her (their) safety? What if she knew she could do it and didn’t and didn’t and didn’t until she had to kill a nuclear bomb and she Could?
and so what if this girl who knew herself to be annihilation learned to be kind?
what if this girl who could kill a nuclear bomb knew and loved the boy who was a nuclear bomb was raised to be a nuclear bomb and what if the answer to all the world’s problems was caring about each other? What if you’re already dead and you’ve been dead this whole time but if people care about you and ask you—
What if instead of dying they ask you to stay and it works?
Orion and El are on like seven different levels of enemies to lovers INCLUDING an allegorical sociopolitical one and like. holy SHIT actually
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I’m about a third of the way though the third book in the scholomance series and I’ve been rotating these two at 350 degrees in my brain for two weeks
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i just finished a deadly education and let me just say i adore el and orion. i love how they fall for each other but for the exact opposite reason of the way other ppl see them. el looks at loved for being a knightin shining armor who can do no wrong orion lake and goes. hes actually cringe and fail. i like that in a man. and orion lake looks at weapon of mass destruction knows multiple languages to roast you galadriel and goes shes actually kind of nice. she shares her food with me. i want to marry her i think. thinking abt them
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Genshin Impact | Some Funny moments in Furina's Demo
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My hyperfixation is now shifting to Genshin Impact 😭
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Kites in the Wind ☆ Happy Lantern Rite!
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Loid "Cannot be separated to his wife without missing her for even just a couple of minutes/hours" Forger
This man didn't even touched his cake since he's waiting for his wife to come back so they can eat the cake together while Anya is already devouring her piece 😂😂 It's sweet for him to have this habit that he eats when Yor eats as well. What a husband attitude. And did you see how he defended Yor's innocence in this chapter?
He always gets so defensive when it comes to Yor, since Camilla's party, he defended her in front of her coworkers, in the Eden interview when Swan badmouthed her ability as a mother, he defended her and he was genuinely upset with the way Swan embarrassed his wife, when Nightfall said that Yor's being uncooperative and she should be replaced as his wife, his tone and glare changes into a defensive demeanor. Loid always comes to her defense without missing a beat, and he wasn't calculating those reactions, he did these without the mission on his mind.
This man is already slowly falling in love with her from the very beginning and I think by the time Yor's secret would be revealed to him, not even her real identity as a killer would stop him from being with her for he's already and irrevocably down bad for her
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Do your best with WHAT Yor 😭😭😭 (even she doesn’t know!!)
Yor is sooooo cute but Loid’s expression is also adorable here~
Yaaaay I’ve been waiting for Loid to pull the “I’m A Doctor” card and do medical stuff, even if we didn’t see it in detail lol
“No one’s allowed to suspect my wife but ME, that ONE SINGULAR TIME, and NEVER AGAIN.” For The Mission™️
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i wish sxf chapter 94 was an actual multi-chapter arc but i did like how loid is like yup ik ur innocent yor! \^o^/ he didn't suspect yor even a little bit he trusts her sooo much now 😭
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A quick Twiyor sketch from the new chapter
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