#I love the idea that Junko almost literally gets into peoples heads and that her ideology was more important than the girl herself | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

komahinasecretexchange · 4 years

Text

Title: The Sun Sets

Author: @magioftheseas

For: @bidoofgodofdestruction

Pairings/Characters: KomaHina (other characters are just mentioned but you get some dr1 kids + Matsuda)

Rating/Warnings: T+ (violence, gore, murder, despair)

Prompt: “AU where Hajime didn’t become Kamukura, but he’s still ultimate despair, and Nagito and him spend time together”

Author’s notes: I love the idea of Despair!Hinata so much so I got really excited. What a rich fountain of potential! This is how it turned out. As much as I really wanted to dig in, I didn’t want to go too far with such a dark prompt, so it’s…a respectable 3.25K word length. There’s references to a certain song throughout because I’m sorry. (It’s from the Tangled animated series.)

He wasn’t a bad person. It wasn’t his fault. Everything he did—they deserved.

All he wanted was to stand proud. All he wanted was to be important. He had tried everything, he even studied his ass off and what did that get him?

It wasn’t his fault. He’s the villain, he’s sunk down to the lowest he can go, but it’s fine. This is just what happens when people get treated the way he did.

This fucker didn’t even get a chance to beg for mercy before Hinata brought down the bat. Again. Again. Again. It’s what they got for spitting on him, and it was what they deserved.

Hinata was panting, and the helmet was getting uncomfortable. Dropping the bat, it clattered against the ground, smearing the broken concrete with the same red as the sky above. Shaking, Hinata hoisted off the unwieldy Monokuma head off his own, and he was seized with the impulse to fling that to the ground too and stomp it into bits.

He gets halfway there, but is stopped by a lilting giggle.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You’ll just hurt your foot.”

It’s true that the helmet is barely scratched. Hinata still kicks it, and it goes rolling until it smacks into the wall, right next to the fresh corpse. He doesn’t turn. He just waits until slim arms wrap about his waist and a head of fluffy white hair settles on his shoulder. A cold chain presses into his back.

“If you want to break it, you should use a metal pipe.” Komaeda Nagito giggles. “We can find another one. It’s no big deal.”

Hinata inhaled sharply.

“Is there even a point to keep wearing this stupid thing?”

“I don’t know.” Komaeda hummed. “Do you want to keep wearing it?”

He pushes Komaeda away so that he can pick up the helmet. He brushes off the dust, but doesn’t put it on, instead carrying it limply. He does look at the corpse once more, at the dark uniform that reminds him of when he had been a disposable reserve.

Well. He was still disposable even if he wasn’t a reserve anymore.

“Come on, Hinata-kun,” Komaeda cajoles cheerfully. “Let’s leave this body for the crows and go someplace nicer.”

“Guess there’s no reason not to,” Hinata muttered, pausing when Komaeda knelt down to pick up his bat. He gives an experimental swing at the air, and beams at him. Hinata’s lips simply pull into a straight line. “Let’s go, Komaeda.”

Komaeda frowned at him.

“You know I don’t answer to that anymore.”

“Komaeda Nagito,” he insisted. “We’re either going or we’re not.”

Komaeda sighed.

“I swear… I definitely spoil you way too much, Hinata-kun.”

–

It had been Enoshima Junko who opened his eyes, but the reason why he was there was because of Komaeda Nagito.

A so-called Ultimate Luck, Hinata had heard of him here and there. He was infamous even among the reserves for his creepy and condescending attitude. Komaeda would’ve been torn to literal pieces by his class if they ever got the chance, Hinata was sure of that.

As for his own feelings… They’re complicated.

Komaeda had found him among the corpses of the rest of the reserve course. Komaeda had stared down at him and wondered aloud, “Good luck? Or bad luck?”

He had knelt down, all wide-eyed curiosity.

“Hey. Can you hear me?”

Hinata had nothing else at the time. He had, in fact, been prepared to die with everyone else. But he hadn’t. Even a deity wouldn’t know why he had taken Komaeda’s hand that day. Especially when even Enoshima Junko looked disappointed he was still alive.

Komaeda is…not his only friend, per say, but probably the one he’s most used to associating with of Ultimate Despair. His madness is less overwhelming, more underlying, in the twisted edges of serene smiles and the small catches of breath between laughter. In some ways, he’s easiest to deal with.

That doesn’t mean Hinata can let his guard down. Even when lead to an open space, with dead leaves crunching under their feet and not a speck of other life in sight. This place used to be a park, going by the long rusted and crumbled heap that used to be a bench.

“Did you want to talk?”

“I just happened to stumble across you, that’s all,” Komaeda says, poking his cheek. “Are you doing okay? You’re getting a bit reckless.”

“What does that matter?”

“Hmm.” Komaeda pursed his lips. “Is this about Ikusaba-san? Aha, it’s pretty pitiful, right? Ikusaba-san really thought that hateful girl was someone she could trust. Someone she knew better than anyone else. And yet, she was so surprised when she was discarded without a second thought! Ehehe.” Komaeda clapped. “Such despair! What a fitting end to her miserable existence!”

“Matsuda had been the same way,” Hinata muttered. “Gave everything to her only to be thrown away like trash. Maybe the rest of the reserve course had the right idea.”

It’s only a matter of time before I get stomped to pieces, too.

“It wouldn’t be despairing if you died right now after all that’s happened,” Komaeda said. “Just disappointing. So, you should stay alive, Hinata-kun. Alright?”

“Fine.” It’s a half-hearted grunt of a reply, but Hinata had been facetious before. With how much spite he had, to die now would be nothing more than a shame. “It’s not about Ikusaba. I didn’t know her; why would I care about what happened to her?”

“Because under Hinata-kun’s brusque exterior lies a soft heart of gold!” Komaeda exclaimed, hands up and open.

Hinata stared at him. At the red of the sky. At the dead trees. Once again at Komaeda’s plastic smiling face.

“It’s a joke,” he chirped, that smile cracking a little before expanding. His gaze flickers between Hinata’s unimpressed gaze and the Monokuma helmet in his hands. “But you have been acting up lately. I can’t help but worry.”

An Ultimate is worried about me.

He wonders how his idiot past self would’ve felt about that. When it had been Enoshima feigning concern, she made him feel important. Significant. Valued in how tired, angry, and aggravated he was with everything. It had all been a farce, of course. Enoshima didn’t give a shit about him.

But, Komaeda was sincere to a fault. He had no need to trick him. He didn’t even need Hinata around.

Well. There was one reason Komaeda might want him around.

“Are you lonely, Komaeda?” Despite the words, Hinata’s aware of how dull his tone is. It almost sounded bored, and he can’t say what his actual feelings on the matter are. If he feels anything at all. “Do you want me to stay the night?”

Komaeda sighed at him, unimpressed.

“You’re so annoyingly defiant. Haven’t figured out your place at all.”

“I don’t have one,” Hinata reminded him coldly. “My use as a reserve dried up the second Hope’s Peak fell to despair. And any use I had as a despair was negligible to begin with. You just keep me around because you’re lonely.”

“I don’t keep you,” Komaeda huffed, playing with the chain around his own neck. “You’re not a dog, Hinata-kun.”

I’ve been told differently in the past.

“You didn’t answer my question, Komaeda.”

Komaeda turned away, nose upturned.

“And I don’t plan on answering at all.”

“Alright.” Hinata didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll stay with you, then.”

Komaeda stiffens. Red touches his cheeks, but it’s not the red of despair. The way Komaeda trembles, however, may be akin to it.

Hinata just takes his hand. Squeezes. It could even be considered a romantic gesture, but to suggest Hinata’s capable of such a thing anymore is laughable. He’s barely human at this point, worn down to nothing more than impulses and irritability. Little more than an animal, really.

Even animals seek companionship. That doesn’t necessarily mean they feel love towards that companion.

–

The two of them are huddled together for the first class trial. Komaeda watches avidly as Naegi Makoto struggles to defend himself, as Kirigiri Kyouko speaks up with her findings, as Maizono Sayaka’s plans are brought to light. Hinata does stare at Naegi’s face when he finds out, taking in the betrayal and disbelief.

“It’s his own fault for trusting so easily in this situation,” he found himself saying. “He’s just asking to be used and abused.”

“It’s still such a shame about Maizono-san,” Komaeda said. “Such a bright presence. She could’ve turned out so much better.”

“They were all tricked so easily by Enoshima in the first place,” Hinata muttered. “Even I knew she wasn’t a good person from our interactions. These idiots happily locked themselves with a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Komaeda elbows him.

“You shouldn’t be so dismissive towards your underclassmen.”

Hinata gives him a look but says nothing more. He just watches. Watches as their so-called underclassmen ‘solve’ the murder, watches as they sentence Kuwata Leon to death.

Hinata remembers that Souda had worked on every machination to be used for execution. He had been especially proud of Kuwata’s because, apparently, the two of them had been friends at one point. Hinata wasn’t surprised from watching Kuwata. Him and Souda had a lot in common.

And what did that get him?

“How unpleasant,” Komaeda sighed. “Kuwata-kun really was unfortunate.”

Komaeda almost sounds distant, and when Hinata watches him, he notes a flicker of something. Darker, curious, intent—a malicious flicker that rose to attention whenever that Naegi’s face was on screen.

“I really thought Naegi-kun would die first,” Komaeda says then, voice low. “But—I guess his own luck is not to be trifled with.”

No, Hinata thought. Maizono Sayaka just couldn’t bring herself to kill him after all the support he showed her. She settled for framing him instead.

Both lucky and unlucky, he supposed, and decided he didn’t want to think further on the matter. It didn’t matter. It didn’t. Enoshima was just going to kill all of them anyway once she made her point, and then… And then…

I guess the Future Foundation will finally crumble with them.

–

“It makes you angry, doesn’t it?”

“It drives you crazy, doesn’t it?”

“Aren’t you tired of being looked down upon? Stepped on? Being tossed aside like dirt?”

“I feel bad for you! So! I’ll let you destroy the world with me!”

He had suspected from the start that Enoshima Junko wasn’t a good person. She was grating and obnoxious, always in your face and shrill when she got annoyed. But the funny thing about being desperate is that you find yourself seeking validation even from people who get under your skin. People who drive you mad—encouraging more and more madness.

He wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same for Komaeda. If she had driven him the same way. Komaeda had claimed to hate her, passionately at that, but he shared the same fixation as everyone else.

She was too compelling to have anything but that effect. Something like that.

Although, really, Hinata knows he was just looking for excuses. He had been miserable and angry from the start, and she fueled the fire. Even if she hadn’t been there, he still…

…I’d still be trying to destroy myself.

Komaeda is sleeping comfortably on his chest. Komaeda often had nightmares and just the presence of another person was enough to keep him soothed. It’s pitiful. Seriously. Komaeda reminds him of himself and it really pisses him off.

And yet, even if he’d strangle his old self in a heartbeat, he can’t lay a hand on Komaeda. He’d have an easier time swinging a bat at Enoshima’s head. It was bizarre. It was uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with compassion or sympathy. It sure as shit had nothing to do with gratitude or obligation.

He just—doesn’t feel that way towards Komaeda specifically. He hates himself more than words can begin to convey. But he doesn’t hate Komaeda. His feelings towards Komaeda are complicated. Indifference. Apathy. Passivity. Nothing. But also…a pull. Like magnets drawn together.

Animals seeking company based purely on instinct.

Komaeda murmurs a string of nonsense, rubbing his face unconsciously into Hinata��s sternum. He smears drool. It’s disgusting, except Hinata doesn’t really care. It’s not any better or worse than being covered in someone’s blood, after all.

Tomorrow, there’ll be a new broadcast of their once underclassmen. That Naegi who Komaeda watched so intently has smartened up a little, given that he’s making some intelligent allies. Even then—Enoshima had outsmarted all of them. It’s still only a matter of time. Only a matter of time.

–

And then. That time never came.

–

“Hinata-kun? Can you hear me? Are you alright? Are you still moody? Aha. Well, it’s not like I don’t understand.”

Komaeda laughs, settling beside him like any friend would.

“Who would’ve thought? The one who took down that hateful girl was someone so, so—so normal. So unassuming. An Ultimate Lucky who wasn’t even that lucky.” Komaeda nudges him like he should be in on the joke this world has become. “Isn’t that underwhelming? Isn’t that depressing? I hated her more than anything and I never even… Naegi-kun didn’t even hate her, Hinata-kun. He still wanted her to live. He didn’t even hate her.”

“What a joke,” Hinata muttered darkly. “A total fucking nobody like that…? Seriously?”

“Seriously,” Komaeda sighed, head tilted back. “I was taken by total surprise.”

You watched him intently, though. You knew that kid. You must have felt towards him some kinda way—

And that just made Hinata angrier.

“Let’s go back to Hope’s Peak,” Komaeda chirped. “Let’s see if we can catch them.”

Let’s see if we can kill them.

“I suppose we should at least set up a proper funeral for that hateful girl and for Ikusaba-san as well,” Komaeda went on, eyes twinkling in the shadows. “Don’t you think so, too?”

Hinata doesn’t answer. Truth be told, he can’t begin to care about that. Not when he’s still fuming, still gritting his teeth, still grinding the molars to dust.

“You’ll give yourself a headache,” Komaeda scolds lightly.

Hinata bit his tongue.

“Y’know,” Komaeda goes on conversationally. “If a lackluster Ultimate Lucky is capable of that, I wonder what you’re capable of.”

In the next second, Hinata gripped him by the throat. Komaeda isn’t even startled, much less afraid. He just keeps smiling up at Hinata, curious and bright-eyed.

“Naegi-kun did have his precious classmates,” Komaeda murmurs, trailing his fingers along Hinata’s knuckles. “You don’t have anyone.”

Hinata stares at him before sighing, shaking his head as he released the other.

“I have you,” he muttered, gruff and cold.

“Oh!” Komaeda laughed. “That’s worse than nothing!”

–

Komaeda’s all kinds of chirpy and cheerful when they reach Hope’s Peak. He skitters about, excitable and nostalgic, yammering on and on about things that occurred, both on the broadcast and back when they had been in school. Hinata, for obvious reasons, had never been in the old main building, so he just listened half-heartedly as he trailed his fingers along the wall.

“And there was site of the first killing game!” Komaeda exclaims at one point. “Did you know? Hope’s Peak experimented on one of the reserves to make the Ultimate Everything.”

“I did know,” Hinata retorted. “I was one of the candidates.”

“E-Eh?! Really?! You never said that before!” Komaeda gasped. “What was it like? Was it utterly miserable and full of despair?!”

I didn’t know the full ramifications. What changed was—

“This is what’s going to happen to you,” Matsuda had snapped, smacking the desk where the files laid. “Is this really what you want?”

There were other candidates. Given how he had never been picked above others before, Hinata still wondered why Matsuda even bothered.

“Hinata-kun?”

He supposed it was for the same reason this guy bothered.

“It wasn’t really anything, Komaeda.”

Komaeda hums, even as he doesn’t hide his annoyance at being called by name.

“You cheated death twice, I suppose, considering what happened to that unfortunate little experiment. Aha, maybe you should have won the lottery instead.” He chuckles at the thought. “Aah, the thought of just dying alone on a hospital bed is so despairing! But I wouldn’t know if this is much better.”

Komaeda is faced away from him, skipping on ahead. Hinata follows without another word, all the way until they get to the stairs. The helmet weighs heavier and heavier with every step downward. Finally, they’re at the trial room. Komaeda looks around with blatant fascination. He quickened his pace to get to the bloodied mess that still stunk up the stale air about it.

Komaeda sighs oh so happily, rummaging through his case for his tools as Hinata slinks up behind him silently.

“How lucky,” he croons. “The hand is still in-tact…!”

Komaeda has a bit of trouble getting the chainsaw to start. He huffs, irritated.

“Urgh, why now…? Why when my greatest enemy is—?!”

Thwack.

Hinata didn’t hit him that hard with his bat, of course. Komaeda still dropped like a rock with a weak groan. Hinata swings down again, crushing the chainsaw to bits.

“H-Hi… Hi…”

Weakly, Komaeda tries to reach out, both for him and for the busted tool.

“W-Wh…”

“Sorry,” Hinata said, and he sets aside a device that makes Komaeda’s eyes grow hopelessly large. “Took this without asking. If you don’t forgive me, that’s fine.”

Komaeda makes a strangled sound of despair. When Hinata hoists him up, Komaeda flails in protest, screaming and clawing at his helmet until his fingernails break and blood is smeared over the dark metal. It doesn’t even slow Hinata down in carrying him out, and Komaeda can’t even stop him from detonating the bomb once they’re far enough.

–

Rather childishly, Komaeda is turned away from him, pretending he isn’t there even as he bandages up Komaeda’s fingers.

After a while, Komaeda announced, loudly and contemptuously, “My head hurts.”

“I’m surprised you’re still conscious,” Hinata remarked. “You’re hardier than you look.”

Komaeda scowled but shut his mouth firmly. It didn’t last for long.

“The others…are going to want you dead for what you did, Hinata-kun. And they’re going to blame me, too. How tremendously unfortunate.”

Hinata couldn’t care less about that. He had already figured he might as well make the world his enemy when he became the villain.

The remnants…the future foundation… It doesn’t matter who stands in my way. They’re all parasites as far as I’m concerned. Yes. Even him. We’d all be better off without any of them.

“She’s gone,” Komaeda whispered, then. His eyes fell shut. His breath hitches. “She’s really gone.”

Hinata discards his helmet once more. He scoots close, wrapping his arms around Komaeda’s shoulders and pulling him flush, back to Hinata’s chest. Komaeda stiffens as Hinata nuzzles into his hair.

You know it too, don’t you?

“Komaeda.”

“Stop,” Komaeda groaned, struggling a pitiful amount before slumping. “Don’t call me by name. Even if I did answer to it, I don’t want to hear it fall from your filthy reserve mouth.”

“Komaeda.”

You feel the same as me. We’re similar, after all.

Komaeda whines as Hinata breathes in. Hinata pulls back, turning Komaeda towards him and squeezing his shoulders.

“Komaeda,” he says, looking deeply into the other’s gaze. “Let’s destroy this world. All of it. All of it. Let’s destroy everything. Hope, despair—and the future.”

Komaeda stares back.

“Hi…nata-kun…?”

The sun sets on a new age, one without her. It’s still just as wretched, and Hinata’s as ready as he’ll ever be for it.

#komahina #komahina secret #fanfiction

71 notes · View notes

hyperfixationtimego · 3 years

Note

the three wingmen of thh; Leon (chaotic), Kyoto (lawful), and Hina (neutral)

Kyoto was 100% the reason Celeste is dating Junko, it’s canon now. She is extremely involved in seating for extracurricular activities (i.e. the tea parties), and commonly puts them together. She finds putting Taka and Mondo apart...helps them?? She has no idea why but if they’re seated far from each other, they are immediately cuddling once they leave the room.

Grey-hair and Blue-hair girls are dating, no I do not take criticism (grey hair has braids I think and protects a mob guy?? and blue hair is the mastermind ig, she has black glasses apparently) - queer eye anon

oh my god yes???

Leon and Chihiro were some very powerful masterminds behind ishimondo ngl 👀 like chihiro’s brainpower combined with kuwata’s sheer strength of will?? UNSTOPPABLE those gay bitches never stood a CHANCE

although to be fair, most of their plans DID involve using a digital lock and/or utilizing alter ego to somehow force them into an empty room and keep them locked in there until they finally confessed 💛

Leon ALSO wingmans for sayaka because they’re besties who hate each other ❤️ he’s constantly cracking jokes with her about how she should just text Mukuro that she wants to fuck, or jokingly advises her to use raunchy pick-up lines on Sakura. He’s come very close once or twice to just. Blurting out “HEY MUKURO! SAKURA! SAYAKA’S GOT A HUGE FUCKING CRUSH ON Y-” only to have the idol clamp a hand over his stupid dumbass mouth <3

it’s okay because sayaka absolutely gets her revenge when she has to wingman for him and makoto (the only reason she doesn’t completely fuck up kuwata’s chances and embarrass him is because she’s besties with Makoto, too, and knows the poor guy’s ALSO got it bad. There’s a lot of Sayaka (and literally everyone else too) having to deal with some gross oblivious loveydovey pining from these fucking dorks, so she gets her fill of teasing)

And Hina wingmanning for Sakura???? Bruh okay u have no IDEA how much serotonin platonic sakuraoi gives me simply because????? Them?????? They????? Love???????? I love them???

And basically Hina’s just the right amount of empathy/sympathy and logic!! Her main, go-to piece of advice is “just talk to them!” And - surprise - trusting her on this usually leads to having fun and making good memories with the object(s) of affection !!

She’s such a sweetheart??? And like yes ofc she doesn’t have an answer for everything, because her heart is just a lil bit bigger than her brain sometimes (ok but mood tho like no shame this is both kin and projecting) but she’s trying her best!!! As she always listens to whoever needs her at that moment and gives the best advice she can - which isn’t even limited to romantic situations!!! She’s one of the go-to students for when someone’s having, like, an everyday problem or feeling stressed because she’s so non-judgemental and soothing to be around!!!

It’s Hina appreciation hours 💛

Anyway, Kyoko-

she also (unfortunately) is forced to wingman for Makoto and Leon, which means a lot of listening to naegi ramble on about how cool and nice and interesting and pretty and blah blah blah kuwata is (don’t get Kirigiri wrong, she adores Leon, but a girl can only take so much, y’know?)

and requests for Makoto to simply......TELL LEON are almost ALWAYS refused because nope no way in hell absolutely not and so she’s like great I’m gonna go bang my head against a desk because I seriously cannot take the two of you anymore

eventually she (secretly) goes and talks to Leon, without betraying Makoto’s trust or disclosing any information she feels he would not be comfortable with, does her best to subtly hint at the fact that hey. koto’s got a crush. you should fucking ask him about it before I go completely insane. Leon doesn’t fully get the hint but does go talk to Makoto, which FINALLY prompts some goddamn CONVERSATION about it thank GOD

also sorry sorry not to ramble but I just????? an idea hit me like a gd truck and I need to talk about it because I love???? I love????? I love

sometime after all this, Kyoko gets inadvertently wrapped up in co-wingmanning with Makoto for Komaru and Toko/Jill. Except. Those three have no clue about the fact that there is any wingmanning going on.

so kyoko’s like “why are we doing this”

and makoto’s like “because she’s my sister and she’s in love and I want her to be happy!!!”

“Okay but shouldn’t they work this out on their own”

“Not if I have anything to say about it!!!”

“*Sigh.* Goddamnit.”

And then Leon eventually hears about it, as well, because of course makoto’s gonna talk abt it with his boyfriend, why wouldn’t he, and anyway kuwata’s like OH?? POG??? because he and Toko and he and Jill are friends!!!! So he’s like I’ll totally help omg Fukawa and Syo are gonna STOKED

(Makoto does not comment on the fact that Toko most likely will not, in fact, be stoked by the idea of kuwata meddling in her love life, but does at least advise his dear 0-braincell partner to be careful ❤️)

okay okay sorry I’m a simp for tokomaru and syomaru on main but anyway back to kyoko and seating charts-

YEAH ON GOD???

And poor Kirigiri already has trouble comprehending how social interaction works that this kinda shit just???? Completely breaks her?????

“Why.....do people.....react different.......like I will accommodate for it but.....I do not.....understand......”

does not fucking compute

(Also shhhhh don’t let Korekiyo know that there was something about human behavior Kirigiri didn’t understand because somehow they will materialize from the shadows to go on a softly excited special interest infodump ramble/lecture that lasts hours and hours)

But yeah???? Ironically enough, she’s honestly the only person from her class who’s able to, for the most part, figure out how Celestia’s mind works, and so she’s able to use that to her advantage when setting her up with Junko!!! (The thing with Celeste was that it sort of became a case to Kyoko!! Celeste was so Obviously different in her behavior and mannerisms than everyone else that Kirigiri basically ended up treating learning about her the same way she would treat trying to solve a crime or something similar!!)

For ishimondo she chalks it up to “absence makes the heart grow fonder???” she guesses????? seriously she has No Clue

also she doesn’t pick up on it but they DO give each other pining puppy dog eyes from across the room the whole goddamn time like they’re just [y e a r n]

And OKAY ANON???? HEY ANON????? WHERE ARE YOU HIDING THE FUCKING GALAXY BRAIN JUICE???? HELLO???????

I. how is it possible to not know the games and yet,,,,,,,conjure up a concept so incredible????? Pekomugi,,,,,,,,,my g o d

Ok ok ok ok ok hold on hold on lemme gather my thoughts because holy fuck

FIRST OF ALL, Tsumugi is a GIANT nerd, so the thought of having a SWORD GF???? A GIRLFRIEND WHO IS A SWORDSMAN???? HOLY FUCK?????? she can live out her wildest samurai anime fantasies,,,,,,,because she quite literally has a swordswoman girlfriend who would protect her with her sword oh my g o d

SECOND OF ALL, Tsumugi also????? fucking loves sitting in on Peko’s training sessions to watch her beautiful incredible wonderful darling partner spar??? and use badass techniques and strategies???? Literally Tsumugi is always blown away??

and she ALWAYS comes and barrels into Peko to give her a gigantic hug and shower her with kisses once training’s over!!!! And Peko doesn’t understand because

“I am hot and sweaty. I am currently very gross, why are you kissing me,”

“No!!! You’re stunning and perfect and charming!!!! You make me swoon!!! Oh, dear knight, hold me in your sweet embrace....”

meanwhile peko’s just like babe pls let me go take a shower

and okay final thing I promise, but....Peko is absolutely astonished by Tsumugi’s cosplay abilities???? Like with a lot of her works, Peko can hardly even believe that that’s her gd girlfriend????? Like sweet JESUS her datemate is damn good at makeup and disguising herself and whatnot

“cosplay is an art and you have perfected it,” like catch tsumugi fuckinf crying

16 notes · View notes

linkspooky · 5 years

Text

Thanks for the tags @jeanandthedreamofhorses

Rules:

Name your top 10 favorite characters from 10 different fandoms and then tag 10 people.

I’m gonna tag @kenkamishiro @inumaqi @bloodycarnations @kaibutsushidousha @desmondneedshisscalpel @harostar @cirrocumulus-cloud @coromoor @sir-argues-a-lot (list your top 10 buff dudes conspic)

Hello my name is link and my faves for each series can be divided into two strict categories, white haired bastards, and black haired bastards. Blonde is just white haired bastard LITE. Herre are ten of my favorite bastards.

1. Kumagawa Misogi - Medaka Box

My favorite character of all time, Kumagawa Misogi is a fantastic character because he embodies every bad victim stereotype. He’s aggressive, he lashes out, he blames other people for his problems, he has a bad attitude, he’s pessimistic, he’s ugly, he’s mean. He has every single character trait that people traditionally consider bad, and yet underneath it all he’s still a good guy. By playing the bad victim (which is intentional act on his part because Kumagawa is very self aware especially of his own flaws and weaknesses), he makes the point that all victims even the ugliest ones are still human underneath.

Like the reason Kumagawa is a bad person isn’t because he’s selfish, or because he doesn’t care about other people’s pain. He cares. He cares way too much, to the point where his emotions are so deeply ingrained in him and so illogical that he almost always acts on those feelings above everything else. At his heart he’s a person who wants to save others, especially those who are weaker and those who have been abused, but it always manifests in the most negative ways and his good intentions always go wrong.

Yet through all of that we see Kumagawa continues living, and that’s the most important part of his character, even as the worst person ever, even completely useless, even as a disaster for everyone around you, you have to keep living and keep struggling to be better. Kumagawa finds identity in being a loser, and he comes to accept himself the way he is because that’s the only way for him to move forward. Not only that but Kumagawa is clever and genuinely subversive, not only is he capable of outwitting people because he’s so good at bluffs, lies, and he’s just so used to surviving every situation that his brain is stuck in permanent survival mode, but he also subverts the whole ‘weak character has to become stronger to protect the people around them’ trope. Because, Kumagawa is still weak but that never stops him from helping others. He never thinks becoming strong is the solution, and his character development is him leaving the mindset that it would be better if he was the one hurting others rather than being hurt by them.

2. Enoshima Junko - Dangan Ronpa my favorite Junko is not actually her appearance at the end of DR1, or in DR3, or in DR2 as alter ego though all three of those are fanastic and fun to watch. My favorite reading of Junko is how she’s represented in Dangan Ronpa Zero, as this like, girl who has this incredibly overactive brain who literally makes a plan where she lobotomizes herself because the only way to stop herself from getting bored is to erase her own memory so she constantly forgets everything, and even THAT DOESN’T WORK.

I’m not saying Junko is a tragic character in any way, but the fact that she can never escape her own head no matter how desperately she tries is what makes her interesting. Even her obsession with despair fails her in the end, because she was getting too bored of a world that was exactly what she wanted, pure chaos. If you read her that way there’s a lot of interesting subtext with her character and her actions.

The best part about Junko is she’s not what is considered a fictional psychopath in a traditional sense, she actually has the ability to make connections with people and genuinely care about them. However, with Junko that just means you’re going to be worse off then if she did not care about you at all. Junko’s motivations are so simple, she really is just trying to enjoy the life everybody else does, but she can’t because her brain is a supercomputer. And she’s trying to feel something about the world, or create some meaning about the world, some reason to continue living in it and she’s willing to break the world and all her toys to accomplish that.

3. Dazai Osamu - Bungou Stray Dogs No Longer Human, and The Rising Sun two of Dazai’s works are in my top ten favorite books of all time. Bungou Stray Dogs understands the writings of Dazai when they personify him in this character.

What makes Dazai so fantastic a character is that he’s genuinely mentally ill and traumatized, especially from the way he acts he’s been suicidal since he was a teen and a person is not born that way. Yet, at the same time he’s also a bad person. Which is a fantastic bit of nuance. He’s not bad because he’s mentally ill, he’s bad because he runs away from responsibility, he abused Akutagawa as a way of venting his feelings for the port mafia then completely abandoned him, he doesn’t trust people and goes out of his way to manipulate and control his own allies.

Dazai struggles the most with seeing people as people, and part of this is for what I call Junko Reasons when a character is smarter than everybody around them and therefore, can read them to a certain extent that they become predictable and boring and cannot relate to them in any way. Part of this however is also Dazai’s own fear of loss, which makes him want to control everything.

Rather than an adult, he’s more like a child that’s far too smart for his own good. He is smart enough to predict and control situations far in advance, and yet he’s so emotionally vulnerable that just the idea of experiencing loss itself makes him scared to ever be emotionally invested in anybody. And Dazai will spout philosophy all day to make it seem like he’s simply too smart to have friends, but his one sincere friend was just an average person that became his friend because he treated Dazai like a normal human which is what Dazai wants ultimately. The human failure wants to be human and his story is his slow journey to that state.

4. Shigaraki Tomura - My Hero Academia Horrible. Terrible. Baby. Infant. Shigaraki Tomura is a character I have loved since his introduction. Just like Kumagawa he’s a character always violently lashing out at the society around him. Also like Kumagawa, he’s always taking in victims of trauma around him who aren’t ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ victims and giving them an outlet and genuine friends.

Shigaraki Tomura has scars that reach deep under his skin all the way to his bones. One of the most interesting things about his character is how much of a subversion he is from the way he’s originally presented. All Might reacts to Shigaraki like he’s a psychopathic manchild who does not care about a thing and destroys things for no reason. That is also what All for One raised him to be, someone who exists to be a symbol of destruction and fear and nothing else.

Yet, we eventually learn why he is this way and how little sympathy the hero system has for a victim like Shigaraki. He’s a man-child because he was literally raised in All for One’s basement, only for the purpose of becoming a villain and nothing else. He’s deeply angry at heroes because he knows deep down none of them would save him, he’s a bad victim, and only the good looking victims get saved.

Despite having every reason to turn into a heartless symbol of destruction, Shigaraki is very, obviously, not. He’s trying desperately to be All for One, but he can’t be that person, because Shigaraki cares about people too much. He wants validation, he wants freedom, and he wants the same for the people under his protection and that keeps him human and stops him from turning into the monster he was raised to be.

5. Norman - The Promised Neverland so the exact opposite of a villain who cannot help but be good, we have Norman an undeniably good person who chose to become a villain instead because otherwise he was powerless and that was the only means of accomplishing his high ideals.

Norman is the smartest of the gracefield children, and admired by both Ray and Emma and yet in spite of all of this, his self esteem is incredibly low. He has always put Emma on a pedestal and declared her a good person, and himself the bad person. Due to that he has almost no dreams of his own, and desires almost nothing for himself, putting absolutely everything into making the ideal world that Emma envisioned come true.

Norman regularly denies that he is a human being, a common trend on this list, because to be human is to be fallable and make mistakes. He puts far too much pressure on his shoulders, and that turns sensitive, kindly Norman, into a card carrying manipulator that plays high risks games with people’s lives in order to get the best result. He is at the same time, an angel someone wanting to martyr himself for heavenly ideals, and a devil someone who wants to commit evil so Emma’s hands can stay clean and Norman is so complex because he’s simultaneously both at once.

6. Orihara Izaya - Durarara!! Sometimes you just grow up and become an Izaya stan, and you reflect back and regret every single choice you made in life. Orihara Izaya is interesting not because he’s a card carrying mastermind, but because he pretends to be.

Izaya’s image as someone who can manipulate all of Ikebukuro is something that far outstrips who he is as a person, which is just a very sensitive and lonely child. Izaya is basically too sensitive to love anybody as an individual, or even be an individual himself, so he denies the personhood of all of humanity and instead decides to love humanity. Because accepting everything about humanity and being happy no matter what the result is easier for him than having to deal with individual hardships. He basically wants to become an observer to everybody, and wants to no longer have a body, or be a person, or have to have feelings that aren’t a bemused smirk.

Izaya is however, extremely transparent in his actions to the point where several characters can see through him. It’s interesting to have a mastermind-type character whose actually not that much of a mastermind, but still because everybody sees them as one things generally go their way. Izaya is great at lying, bluffing, and playing speed chess but he never really has the city in his palms as much as he claims.

Another interesting quality about him is how complex he thinks and all these little rules he sets up for himself. Basically his only friend is Shinra because, Shinra is guaranteed never to love Izaya because he already has Celty, and yet at the same time Izaya also gets mad that 1) Shinra will always choose Celty over him and 2) Shinra is too detached to love anyone as a person. Even though, he also envies that detachment because Izaya is too sensitive basically to live. In short Izaya is petty. Petty, petty, petty, petty, petty, and he has to follow his own petty little rules to the letter.

7. Takizawa Seidou - Tokyo Ghoul: Re he starts as a lovable, but repressed bastard who has all this resentment for his life, and the people around them, and constantly blames them and takes it out on them. Overall though, he’s someone you can see turning into a better person if he just grew up a little.

Then instead of getting better, he gets way worse and hits absolute rock bottom. All of the ugly emotions that Seidou was repressing come to the surface and he turns into a monster who makes other people suffer to take out his long held resentments about the world. Not only that but all of the flaws he shows as a ghoul were there to begin with, he always had an inferiority complex, he always resented others, he always lashed out, it was just they were brought to the surface instead of being repressed.

Seidou however after hitting rock bottom gains awareness, and also the realization that even after he’s crossed the point of no return a long time ago, he can still continue to live and do improve himself. Not only that but it’s his resposnbility to improve himself for the sake of the others around him.

One of my favorite parts about his character is he used to be an example of how great Ishida was at not playing Good Victim Bad Victim because Seidou is introduced to us as this monster who went insane because he was ‘weaker’ than Amon who stayed righteous despite being ghoulified. Until we learn that actually, Seidou went insane because he took a chainsaw to the face, and Amon was just saved by other people and never endured the same, and therefore never even attempted to come to terms with himself as a ghoul either.

One of my reasons for liking bastards is because they are all objectively terrible, but most of them also have such a deep sense of self understanding so that the ones who have positive arcs, actually feel like they’re very honest about who they are as a person and grow from there. They just genuinely accept who they are and live as who they are not in denial about anything. Rather than following a narrative blindly laid out for them they break free and create their own.

8. Kiryu Yoshiya - The World Ends With You If there is a death game for some reason I always end up liking the mastermind the most. Kiryu Joshua is this child, who is just, too smart, too creative, too much for the world. When he’s pretending to be human that just turns him into a pretentious tool. When he’s the demigod of Shibuya, that means he might destroy the entire city because the people aren’t growing in the way he wants them too.

Joshua is very unique because he��s basically the closest to what I call a “Junko Enoshima for Hope” he places people in terrible death game like circumstances, and shows little empathy at all for the ones who lose, but at the same time his intention is to give a second chance for people who have died, and also to steer people in the right direction.

In a meta sense Joshua will basically force you to have character development. The fact that he sees himself as the author in other people’s stories means he has to control everything. It’s a unique character trait to have a god complex when you are a literal god.

Despite his good intentions, he’s also very flawed especially in the way he treats people around him, even the ones he likes like Neku and Sanae. He enjoys pushing their buttons, and pushing them to their limits far too much, and makes attempts to control them like any other piece on the board. Joshua is also, suicidally depressed and a lot of his musings about the world in general are some of the most tragic but insightful thoughts I’ve ever read. The fact that Joshua changes his mind at the end, is basically just as impactful as watching someone give life another chance when they wanted to die, because for Joshua, Shibuya is his life.

9. Jack Vessalius - Pandora Hearts it’s another mastermind yay. The fun thing about Jack is unlike most of these characters who are like, halfway broken, Jack is just this extremely broken person whose far beyond the point of no return. Not only that but he’s not interested in living as a person anymore anyway, even if he were given the chance to come back.

Jack has worn masks his entire life, to the point where it’s made him an incredibly selfish person who is never genuine in any situation. A child who has told lies all of his life. At the same time Jack is not the one who got himself started on this path, he’s a victim to the cruel and uncaring ways of the nobility, as a bastard being raised with his mother destroying any sense of identity he had by only seeing his father in him. Jack is in a way for them, a reckoning.

Except Jack does not care about any of that, because his entire goal is to go to extremes, and make the most convoluted plan in history, because he wants to find a reason for himself to keep living. When the person he was using as a reason to live dies, he decides to destroy the world for basically no reason at all, because the act of trying to destroy the world gives him something to do and a reason to keep on living.

Jack needs to find identity in something, otherwise he’s entirely empty on the inside and he’s exactly the tool the nobility raised him to be. Which is why he ends up doing all of these things for basically no reason, because that is his reason. He wants to feel things like a person. He wants to desire things like a person. He wants to know who he is, and what he wants. And yet, he’s also so terribly afraid of being a person that he does not let anybody get close to being able to understand him.

In the end one person accepting Jack as a person in spite of all of his lies, and saying they were happy to meet him is enough for Jack to give up all of his plans and instead offer his body up to others.

10. Accelerator - A Certain Magical Index Accelerator is such a fave for me that I will literally go out of my way to read a series that I’m not even a fan of because Accelerator is in it.

What I like about accelerator is he is pretty much past the point of no return, and he knows he’s never going to be forgiven for what he’s done and yet that doesn’t stop him. He’s not doing this for atonement. He killed 10,000 sisters and he’s going to save the other 10,000 that are remaining. And he knows he should have done that from the start, but it’s too late to take back a single thing he did.

Accelerator is just this fantastically messy character. He plays the villain, but secretly nobody desires more for heroes and justice to exist in this world than Accelerator himself. We see him finally motivated to help others, because even if he’s a bastard, and will always be a bad person marked for what he’s done, that’s no excuse not to do something when somebody innocent needs help in front of you.

He’s also, genuinely traumatized, and also genuinely disabled. He goes from this untouachable character to like, someone who is very desperate, with a very fragile sense of ego whose constantly reliving his trauma and having flashbacks in the middle of fights. Accelerator is so genuinely plagued with guilt for what he’s done it almost destroys him several times. And he’s never going to stop feeling that way. He’s never going to stop being broken. And still he fights.

11. Jacopo Bearzatti - House in Fata Morgana I know this is cheating but sssh, I wanted to talk about Jacopo. He’s the best bastard on this list because he’s not even a bastard.

Jacopo is someone who breaks himself into fragments because he’s not good enough. He’s always born in an incredibly low position in life, and is always trying to make something worthwhile of himself. He views himself as a person lower than dirt, whose only good quality is how hard he can work. One of them is going to break, either the world, or Jacopo himself.

Jacopo’s heart is either made of stone or glass and it’s impossible to tell from an outsider’s perspective, because he’s able to commit himself to doing incredibly heartless things, but at the same time Jacopo is far too kind and emotional and it’s something that destroys him over and over again. Jacopo is someone who always takes far too much responsibility, which means he will forgive other people who have betrayed him, see the humanity in his friends when they turn knives against him, but because of that he ends up being hurt over and over again. Jacopo kills his own heart not because he’s unkind, but because he’s too kind and empathic, and it’s something that will literally get him killed unchecked.

However, the amount of responsibility that Jacopo takes is ultimately what turns his character from a tragic downfall to a redeeming one, because reincarnation Jacopo is willing to take responsibility for two lifetimes worth of mistakes that were not even his. Ultimately Jacopo does genuinely want to do right by the people around him, which means if they do not want him he would force himself to let go because it’s not just about his atonement but the victim’s feelings as well, but if they wanted him he would spend the rest of his life working for the sake of both of them. Jacopo’s realization at the end of this story, because I want to see it too. Is one of the most touching things I’ve read in all of literature.

Honorable Mentions: Reiner - Attack on Titan, Akechi Goro - Persona Five, Subaru Natsuki - Re: Zero, Emiya Shirou - Fate Stay Night, Kaworu Nagisa - Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ryoji Mochizuki - Persona 3, ii-chan -Zaregoto, Squall Leonhar - (FF8)

#spooky speaks #kumagawa misogi #enoshima junko #osamu dazai #takizawa seidou #shigaraki tomura #orihara izaya #norman tpn #accelerator #jack vessalius #joshua kiryu #top ten list

79 notes · View notes

thedevillord-writes · 5 years

Text

Pandora - Leave

"You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves"

-Rachel Ward

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead."

He had no idea what she was about to throw at him, though the only thing Yosuke cared about at the moment was the fact that she spoke. He was worried, and those who knew him well would laugh in his face if he told them he was worried about someone else. In fact, Yosuke wanted to laugh at himself. He never thought the day when he took care of someone else would ever arrive.

"Have you ever loved someone?"

Haruka's question was unexpected, so much so that it took Yosuke a little while before it registered. It should not be a tough question, not for anyone else at least. Yet, he was finding it hard to answer truthfully. Did he ever love someone? Yosuke would like to say no, but something deep in his guts was telling him to say yes. Her face popped up in his mind instantly though Yosuke was hesitant. He was young back then, did he even know what love was? Did he know what love was even now?

Waiting for Yosuke's answer, Haruka could not help but notice how quiet he went. She did not mean much by the question itself, simply wanting some clarity from his answer. She had been denying her own feelings for Eisuke for a long time, so suppressed that she did not know when these feelings started to develop in the first place. She had no idea how Yosuke's answer would help her think but seeing the way he was reacting did; his answer was written on his face. How his eyebrows knitted together because he was trying to make sense of his own feelings. Did that count as love? Did this count as love? Seeing how human he was being relieved her somehow.

"You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"I did," Yosuke nodded, looking at her with a smile. "I did a long time ago. I'm not sure if you would consider it love, and I sure as hell did not back then. But looking back, the things I did was probably because I loved her."

"Is it the pianist?"

"Now you're just prying."

Yosuke looked away, breaking eye contact. Even without a degree in psychology, she knew he was avoiding her. He knew he was being obvious, but he could not risk Haruka reading him any further. She was too observant for her own good; a good quality in a secretary but absolutely terrible to find in a friend. There were many things that Yosuke kept buried deep down, he was not about to let them surface just from one look.

"You asked me before if I finally came to terms with the fact that I've fallen in love with Mr. Ichinomiya," Haruka said softly, looking down at her hand. "I avoided your question back then but...I have an answer now. I'm in love with him. I love Mr. Ichinomiya so much that it hurts. But I stand by what I said before, that we don't belong together. And this," she raised her hand to show him her wound, "this is proof that we don't belong together. That pain is all that comes out of it."

"You remind me of her."

"Who? The pianist?"

"The girl I was in love with." Yosuke stopped himself before he said anything else. He let his guard down. Whether or not she intentionally did it, this woman somehow went around and found another way to dig into his past. Still, he would not be revealing too much. "You two are very similar. Both of you came from broken families, grew up in tough environments, yet you still looked at the world and see the good. But you only see the good in others, you don't see it in yourself. Correction, you never see good happening to you."

As she expected, Yosuke's words were clarifying. Growing up the way she did, it was hard to believe that anything fortunate would ever happen to her. Landing the job as Eisuke's secretary was the only moment in life in which she would consider herself lucky. Even so, she kept telling herself that she had used up an entire lifetime of luck just to get the job and anything else fortunate was no longer hers to have. Was that why she kept rejecting the idea of a relationship with Eisuke? Because she was not 'lucky' enough to have him? Or was it just an excuse for her to feel sorry for herself as with everything else?

Putting his hand on her head, Yosuke gave her a smile as he cleared away the first aid kit. Talking to her had him realising why he was so attracted to Haruka in the first place. He was not interested in her per se, but rather, she reminded him of her. All these years, Yosuke buried memories of her deep down as he did with anything else that could possibly hurt him. Each time he became determined to forget her completely, he ended up searching for updates on her instead. Then he met Haruka who, despite the vastly different background, uncannily resembled her in every way personality wise. That was the true reason why he was so willing to play along with Haruka, so determined to form some sort of relationship, and helping her in ways he never helped others when she needed it.

"There's a guest room just down the hall on your right," Yosuke pointed. "I'm guessing you wouldn't want to go home after all that happened. You're more than welcome to stay the night but please do not snoop around. Although, I wouldn't mind if you snooped into my room."

"And here I am, thinking what a good man you really are until you ruined it."

~.~

He made a mistake. A huge mistake.

Eisuke's empire did not come easy. He worked for years just to come up with a plan for the hotel itself. Then, he had to fight to have a casino built. Everything he had was possible because Haruka was there by his side, working all those late nights together. And while she was the one who typed up proposal after proposal, Haruka was not the one who fought for the bill to be passed so he could have his casino. It was men like Junko's father, politicians those proposals went to. Politicians he had to butter up at events. It did not matter how much he hated it, they were the ones he needed to please. Which meant pleasing people like Junko whose father was one of those politicians.

"Could I stay with you tonight, Eisuke?" Junko asked, snaking her arm around his though Eisuke was quick to pull away. "If my father saw the state I'm in now, he would be asking questions and we don't want that. I'm sure your secretary didn't mean to hurt me."

Anger was quick to boil over when Eisuke turned and grabbed Junko by the neck, slamming her against the wall. Thank goodness they were alone in the basement parking, though he was aware of the security cameras all around them. He could not care less at this point. He knew. She knew. Almost everyone knew that Haruka was not the culprit in the incident. But no one dared to say a word for the same reason why Eisuke was not with Haruka right now: they were afraid of her father. He was too, if he was being honest, but he could take it no longer.

"You and I both know that Haruka was no in fault," Eisuke said, his tone was quiet but harsh. He squeezed tighter and Junko let out a muffled squeal, clawing at his hand for him to let go. He wanted to. He wanted to, so very badly, to squeeze the literal life out of her. "If you touch her again, you will regret it. If anything happens to Haruka, whether it's your fault or not, I will be coming for you. Do you understand?"

"Y-yes..."

Watching as her face was slowly drained of colours, Eisuke eventually let her go. Junko dropped to the ground and gasped for air, glaring up at him. He turned and walked away without so much of a second look at her, going to his car. Eisuke knew what he just did was essentially suicide. It was always recommended to make friends with politicians, not enemies. Those days were gone. He lived his early years as a young adult afraid of people like the Inoue's. He had watched his own father kissing up to them, even Akira. He was, however, at a position of power himself.

Getting into his car, Eisuke paused for a moment. He let out a huge sigh, closing his eyes and leaned back in his seat. It was true that he no longer needed Junko's father on his side but it was never a good idea to make an enemy. Now he had to be on guard and put time aside to deal with him if the politician ever decided to cause him trouble. Was it worth it? Was Haruka worth all this trouble?

With only one thought in mind, he started driving off. There was only one place in mind where he wanted to be right now but it was not home. Home meant nothing to him; it was always just a place to sleep or simply another office. In recent years though, he realised that he was looking forward to getting home after events because it meant he would see Haruka the next day. Home started to mean something to him. Home was where she was.

Arriving at the apartment complex, Eisuke parked the car by the roadside and got out. He walked up the stairs to Haruka's studio apartment, pressing the doorbell and waited for her to open the door. Five minutes went by and still the door was closed. He pressed the doorbell once more and waited another five minutes with no response. He stepped to the side and looked over the railing to see the lights off inside the apartment. Was she not home? Where else would she go if not home with that injury of hers?

Despite waiting for the next half an hour by the door, Haruka never returned. He did not leave, however. He went back to his car and got in but instead of starting the engine, he sat waiting. She had to come home, if not now, some time later.

But she never did.

He was not sure when he fell asleep but when he woke again, it was already morning. Getting out of his car and putting his suit jacket on, he went up the stairs again and pressed the doorbell. This time, the door opened. The person on the other side, however, was not someone he expected. Instead of Haruka, he was greeted by the last person he thought he would ever see. Standing right in front of him with a bag in his hand was Yosuke.

"What are you doing here?" Eisuke asked.

"Packing for Haruka," Yosuke smiled, raising the bag at the same time. "She stayed over at mine."

Haruka never came home?

Looking over Yosuke's shoulder, Eisuke was trying to see if his secretary was home though the irritating man stepped to the side at the same time and blocked his view. The tension between the two men was unbelievably high and neither of them was backing down. There was still a lot that Eisuke did not know about Yosuke though he did know one thing: he was close with Haruka somehow.

"Have you got everything, Yosuke-kun?"

"Yes, I have. Thank you so much for helping out, Tsubaki-san."

Another voice came from inside the apartment and an elderly woman came walking out. "Oh, well who is this?" Eisuke had never seen the woman before. She seemed to know Yosuke quite well, however, and being in the apartment meant she knew Haruka somehow. It only added to Eisuke's inexplicable hatred toward Yosuke. There was a part of Haruka's life that he knew nothing about, that he was not a part of. But Yosuke was.

Coming to that realisation, Eisuke finally understood why he did not like Yosuke. It was not because he was another man in Haruka's life; that played an extremely small part. It was the fact that with Yosuke's appearance, it was brought to light that Eisuke knew nothing about his secretary. The woman who knew everything there was to know about Eisuke, down to the most private details about his lifestyle and history. The same woman who would know exactly what was on his mind with just a simple hand movement. However, as it turned out, Eisuke was just a small part of her life and he had nothing to do with the rest.

"That's Haruka's boss," Yosuke whispered.

"Ah..." Tsubaki mumbled, looking at Eisuke with displeased eyes. "The one who works my precious Haruka-chan to death."

Whoever the woman was to Haruka, she certainly did not like Eisuke. She was as over the moon as Haruka was when she came running home one day, telling Tsubaki that she finally found a job. A good paying job too. They celebrated that night, eating all of Haruka's favourite food and watched her favourite movies until they fell asleep on the sofa together. The next day, Tsubaki took her shopping and bought her a new set of clothes so she could look decent at work. Haruka treated her to an expensive lunch and paid off all her rent with her first pay. Tsubaki never felt more proud of her.

Then it was only heartbreak from there.

She used to see Haruka almost every night for dinner and slowly, it became a few nights per week, one night a week, and eventually they did not see each other until the day Haruka came to pay for her rent. The times Tsubaki did see her, the young woman would always be too tired and looked as if she would collapse any second though she always insisted she was fine. Despite never meeting him, Tsubaki started to despise Eisuke since.

"Well, I've got to go," Yosuke said, giving the woman a hug before looking to Eisuke though he did not say anything as he walked past the man. Caught by the elbow, Yosuke frowned a little and was prepared for some violence though he was pleasantly surprised what came from Eisuke instead.

"You didn't take her to the hospital, did you?"

"She said no hospital, so I didn't."

"If anything happens to her-"

"Nothing will happen to Haruka. Not while she's under my care."

Pushing Eisuke's hand off his elbow, Yosuke left. There was nothing Eisuke could do either, except letting him go. He wanted to punch Yosuke's smug face but that was not going to bring Haruka back. It would not help his image with Tsubaki either. If she was happier elsewhere, then perhaps he should let her be.

With a polite bow to Tsubaki, Eisuke left too and went back to his car. This time, he started the engine and drove off, going back to the hotel. He was not letting Haruka go, not completely anyway. If she needed the time to be away, he would gladly allow her that time alone. He came to terms with her wanting a six months leave, surely he could too with this. He would wait for her to come back patiently. She was the only person in this world he was willing to wait for. Little did he know what was waiting for him back home.

~.~

Yumi pulled the door open slightly, peeking in. She kept eyeing the desk, specifically a letter sitting on top of all the files Eisuke left on the desk. Eisuke had not been back all night, neither was he here in the morning, which meant he had not seen the letter. Since her boss had not returned, this was the only time she could sneak in and retrieve the letter before he saw it. There was, however, one thing hanging in her mind.

It was not a set rule but rather, an advice that Haruka passed onto Yumi. If Eisuke was not present, it would be smart on her side if she did not enter his office. This was to protect herself in case of trouble. If anything were to go missing from his office, Yumi could say with confidence that she had not been in his office when he was absent. She was debating, however, whether or not it was worth the risk in order to destroy the letter.

When Haruka came that morning to drop it off, Yumi was caught off guard. She was certain that Eisuke had no knowledge of the letter, nor would he have wanted to see the letter at all. After eight years of having Haruka by his side, there was no way he would accept that envelope even without looking at the letter inside.

"What are you doing?"

"Mr. Ichinomiya!"

Startled, Yumi closed the door and pressed her back against it, turning to see Eisuke standing behind her. Her eyes were wide like a prey's, while Eisuke was glaring at her like a predator. Haruka reassured her that she would get used to the intimidating glares sooner or later. Yumi, on the other hand, felt as if she would never be used to it. Every time she looked him in the eyes, she felt small and threatened, too afraid to object.

"What's the schedule today?" Eisuke asked, opening the door.

"Um...You have a meeting after lunch. Mr. Nakano's secretary sent over a proposal, if there's no problem then you could sign and send back."

As she spoke, following behind Eisuke, Yumi had her eyes on the envelope. When Eisuke was taking his suit jacket off, Yumi took the chance and grabbed the letter but she was not fast enough. With one finger, Eisuke pressed down on the envelope. Beating herself internally, Yumi let go of the letter. Opening the letter, Eisuke only read the first line when he tore the letter up.

"What the hell is this?"

"Haruka-san came in this morning and she put it on your desk. I've tried convincing her but she said this is the only way."

"Only way?"

"I don't understand what she meant..."

Dear Mr. Ichinomiya Eisuke,

Please accept this letter as a notice of my resignation from my position as your secretary, effective immediately.

Unfortunately my personal issues are affecting my ability to work, and after careful consideration, it would be best for both of us if I resign from my position.

It has been a pleasure working for you and under Ichinomiya Group over the last eight years. I am grateful for the opportunities you gave me and everything that I learnt from the job. I am more than happy to aide with the transition of my position to Miss Miyazawa Yumi, although I am confident that she is competent enough as of now.

Once again, it had been a pleasure working for you and I wish you all the best.

Sincerely,

Matsuoka Haruka

#pdr ch14 #kissed by the baddest bidder #kbtbb #kings of paradise #kop #eisuke ichinomiya #yosuke sagara #voltage inc #i am finally updating after a million years #please forgive my procrastinating ass

30 notes · View notes

commentaryvorg · 4 years

Text

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.3

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time as we properly began chapter 6’s investigation, the Hope’s Peak book in Kokichi’s lab was obviously planted and had nothing to do with him, a random kid in one of Shuichi’s fake flashbacks was delightfully relevant to Kaito’s issues, Kokichi’s room was a mess in both a literal and a narrative sense, his motive video at least gave some insight into how he could have been sometimes not a dick and had some vague semblance of actual friendship, Himiko was clearly thinking of Kaito as she declared herself Shuichi’s sidekick, it must have sucked to be Rantaro just before his memories were erased, and another fake flashback happened to show just how amazing Kaito was at hiding his illness.

We’ve finished investigating Rantaro’s lab, and Himiko has now left to go check Rantaro’s dorm room for the other part of his Survivor Perk that he mentioned in the video. (This is the same oversight the writers made with Kokichi’s dorm room in that nobody should be capable of entering it without Keebo blowing up the door. And while Monokuma could potentially have forgotten to lock Kokichi’s door in all the confusion of case 5, Rantaro’s door has been very explicitly locked since the end of chapter 1.)

Shuichi is about to go and head to the library next, since Keebo can blow open the hidden door for him, but before he can, Tsumugi shows up to tell him to come and see something in Kaito’s lab instead. Possibly she’s trying to distract him in the hopes that he’ll never have time to get around to the library, but it’s probably mostly just that she really wants him to see some totally relevant evidence that totally isn’t a red herring. It is very telling that the thing Tsumugi helps you investigate in this chapter is the one thing that’s related to the in-universe story about the Gofer Project and the spaceship, while everything that everyone else helps you find is related to the real truth of the situation that proves that story false – that Kokichi wasn’t a Remnant of Despair, Rantaro’s previous killing game, etc.

(It’s rather misleading that they describe Kaito’s lab as being on the sixth floor, when we’re currently on the fifth floor and so you’d think that the way there would be to go up. But nope, the only way to Kaito’s lab is all the way back down to the first floor and then up the spiral staircase behind that one door. Of course Kaito’s lab just had to be special, that dork.)

(I also messed up dealing with an Exisal that was in the way. While obviously the Exisals here won’t actually kill Shuichi if you don’t call Keebo to get rid of them quickly enough, they do have an animation which implies Shuichi gets picked up and thrown backwards into the nearest wall, which is neat. So, uh, that happened a couple of times here. Sorry, Shuichi.)

As soon as we enter the cold sleep room that’s been blown open behind Kaito’s lab, there’s another flashback, and it’s… everyone we care about! Well, sort of. This never really happened and is just Tsumugi’s fanfiction of how they would have interacted while meeting each other and preparing to go into cold sleep, but at least she gets them in-character. Or maybe it’s just some kind of simulation based on the data about their personalities in the Flashback Light computer. …Not that it’s super hard to get them right in this context, because this isn’t a very complex conversation and so they’re mostly just displaying their most recognisable character traits.

This is supposedly everyone meeting for the first time, which is the only point at which it actually matters that they were apparently all in different classes at Hope’s Peak, making that a very unnecessary plot point of the previous Flashback Light. Even if they were in different classes, though, wouldn’t each Gofer Project member have sought out the other ones after hearing they’re in the project together, to get to know them better? They’d especially want to talk to that one guy who’s already an astronaut; surely he’d have some interesting thoughts on this situation and would be able to tell them what it’d be like on a spaceship.

Kaito: “But y’know, it’s a man’s dream to leave Earth behind and travel across the stars!”

Oh, Kaito, of course it is. Mostly just for the kind of man that you are, though. Curiosity!

(grrr I know this isn’t really Kaito and is just a display of some of his most obvious character traits, but I miss him.)

There’s all kinds of stuff here reminding us of old character interactions – Maki jabbing at Kaito even before they were friends, Kaito reacting to being called an idiot, Kokichi being a dick to Keebo (you know, that thing that made him so lovable), Kiyo hinting at being a fucking serial killer (ditto), which, to at least some extent, really does bring back fond memories of when everyone was alive and things weren’t so bleak. There’s also lots of Kaede, being her adorable optimistic self!

Kaede: “We’re friends from here on out.”

Kokichi: “Hmm… Even though you just met us and you don’t even know what we’re like?”

They even managed to fit Kokichi’s trust issues in there.

Kaito: “No matter how many times we fight, we smile in the end… That’s what true friendship is.”

I would say this is also Kaito being good, but… I’m not completely sure that this is something the real him would have said, actually. It sounds a bit too simplistically waxing-lyrical-about-friendship with nothing distinctively Kaito about it. Especially when you consider the fact that Kaito very rarely referred to Shuichi and Maki as his friends because he was so hung up on the whole hero-and-sidekick thing.

But regardless, because this at least seems on the surface to be the characters we know and (mostly) love, this is the one flashback which actually does inspire hope for us in the audience too! And it probably gives more hope to Shuichi than any of the others did, because this one is based on the people who were real and he genuinely cared about instead of only feeling like he cared about them in the first place through fake memories. These are the people he’s already said are his source of hope, and it’s almost like he’s seeing them all again.

While every character in the flashback had at least one line, most of them didn’t have much more than one or two, except for Kaede and Kaito, who had the most. I wonder if this is just because they would be the two most talkative while meeting a new group of people and trying to encourage them all to get along, or whether it’s because we’re seeing a version of this scene which is tailored to Shuichi specifically and therefore puts the most emphasis on the people he cared about the most (and, for example, Himiko’s version gave Tenko and Angie more lines).

Flashback over, the reason Tsumugi really brought us here, of course, is a document about the Gofer Project participants that just happens to be here (why would this have even been left in the cold sleep room of all places?). Specifically, she wants us to see the part of it that claims Kaede had a twin sister.

Tsumugi: “It said her sister was adopted by a relative and they barely had any contact, but…”

This serves as a convenient excuse for why Kaede never mentioned having a twin. If they didn’t live together, this twin would be functionally more like a cousin to her and not a significant enough part of her life for Kaede to be likely to bring her up unless she was specifically asked about extended family.

But, really? I don’t think Kaede even had a twin at all. Obviously, technically her entire family wasn’t real and was all fake backstory, but I mean in the sense of Kaede thinking she had a twin and remembering that as something about herself. I don’t think she did. This is a desperate last-minute red herring of Tsumugi’s that goes nowhere; if she’d had this idea in mind from before Kaede’s creation then you’d think she’d have gone somewhere with it and made it into an actual thing.

Tsumugi: “I’m still a little worried. Because Junko Enoshima also had a twin sister.”

Shuichi: “Ah, true, but…”

Tsumugi: “On top of that, Junko used her twin sister to run her killing game from behind the scenes. I mean… it’s probably just a coincidence, but I thought I should mention it to you, Shuichi.”

For her supposedly thinking it’s probably nothing, she sure is pressing this point that Junko was the same as if she’s trying to get him to think this isn’t nothing, now, isn’t she.

Shuichi: (This is the first time I’m hearing that Kaede has a twin. But is that… relevant? It doesn’t really matter, does it?)

But Shuichi knows exactly what the fuck is up. This is not remotely relevant, and the fact that Junko had a twin doesn’t change that. The only actual relevance this has is to hint towards the real mastermind’s identity, since Tsumugi was so insistent about telling us this.

As some bonus dialogue, Tsumugi wonders where Maki and Himiko are.

Shuichi: “Maki is in Kokichi’s room at the dorms.”

Tsumugi: “Kokichi’s dorm room? Why’s she there?”

Heh, Tsumugi looks slightly worried at this, almost as if she’s afraid they might have seen Kokichi’s motive video and realised he wasn’t a Remnant of Despair at all.

Next, Shuichi and Tsumugi head to the library together and find Maki already there.

Maki: “…I knew you would come here.”

Maki’s smiling as she says this! She’s friends enough with Shuichi that she’s come to understand him pretty well, and she’s happy about that fact!

Huh, I’m pretty sure that if you ever came back to the library at any point during earlier chapters past 1, the books Kaede set up had been put back to the mess they were in before. But in this scene, they’re still organised. Guess that’s another minor oversight.

Maki: “I found a design that worried me a little. It was drawn with *too* much detail…”

If you think about it, Kokichi shouldn’t have needed to draw such a detailed blueprint in order for it to be something Miu could make. Miu is the inventor; she should be able to take someone’s idea of “I want a thing that can do this” and figure out the blueprints and how to build it herself. The writers could have had Maki identify a relevant design simply from the fact that it seems actually buildable and potentially useful compared to all his other childish ideas, without the blueprint needing to be detailed.

This blueprint was for the Bugvac, which Maki then grabbed a finished prototype of from Miu’s lab. Despite it being a prototype, it has apparently already been used a few times, which begs the question of how much Kokichi knew about this. If he was the one who used it, he should have known he wouldn’t be able to see these “tiny bugs” for himself and should in theory have gone to Gonta to ask if he could see them. It’s quite possible this did happen, and Kokichi was able to confirm how Monokuma’s surveillance worked and be sure an Electrobomb would knock out the cameras. (Of course, if so, he still never told anyone else about this because lol what is being helpful, that might compromise his plan.) Or it’s possible he just never got around to this – maybe this was the last thing Miu built, and by the time Kokichi realised it was finished, Miu and Gonta were already dead thanks to him, good job Kokichi.

Himiko then also shows up, but is hesitant to say what she found in Rantaro’s room.

Himiko: “If I say I didn’t find anything, you’re gonna decide I’m useless, aren’t you…? I-I won’t let that happen…”

Aww, don’t worry, Himiko, you’re still a good sidekick. Someone had to search Rantaro’s room to confirm there’s nothing in there, and that’s still a useful clue in itself! I do like this little bit in this chapter of Himiko wanting to be useful. After seeing so many others try so hard to make a difference, she must have realised she hasn’t really contributed much herself, and she wants that to change!

Himiko: “You’ve got guts to label me, the legendary mage, useless!”

This is… perhaps a little bit Kaito of her? It’s not quite exactly like him, because Kaito would never pull out his Luminary of the Stars line when confronted with how useless he felt (he was probably aware how empty and desperate that’d sound), but he did often try and act like he was a much better investigator than he definitely knew he was and what do you mean he’s useless. Himiko having started to feel useless and wanting to be more help in investigations without knowing how is, after all, rather Kaito of her too.

(Why yes, I am also going to be finding every excuse possible to bring up Kaito in this chapter even when the game isn’t directly referencing him, and you can’t stop me here either.)

Himiko: “Maybe… the mastermind is hiding behind this hidden door?”

Maki: “Then, if we kill them… we can end this killing game…”

Shuichi: “No, I told you, we can’t kill them. If you do that, we’d be the same—”

Listen to Shuichi, Maki Roll! And remember what happened the last time you tried to kill the mastermind! It’s so sad that this is still her ingrained go-to method for solving any problem that doesn’t have an easy solution.

Maki: “…You don’t have to tell me. I’m not going to kill… I’m just going to get revenge. It’s weird… Sometimes, you’re just like him, you know?”

But she’s fighting against that ingrained instinct! She is learning from what Kaito taught her! And even though anyone would not want their friend to kill someone, Maki associates that sentiment with Kaito in particular because he was always so adamant about saving her from ever killing again.

I also like the way she just says “him”, because she knows Shuichi will know exactly who she’s talking about. He’s still so important to them.

Maki: “I’ll go in first… I’m the only one who can fight if anything happens.”

And she’s realising that she can fight to protect people! She wasn’t able to use her skills to protect Kaito in the end, but at least she still can for the rest of her friends!

Motherkuma: “Puhuhu… You found me. Or rather, you just found a place that you were meant to find.”

Sort of. Motherkuma definitely didn’t plan for things to enter “endgame” mode just yet, but since Keebo’s gone rogue and there’s nothing he can do about that, I suppose he does now want to give them hints that’ll help them figure out the mastermind so that the story can be entertaining.

Motherkuma explains that he’s the machine that can make spare Monokumas, and everyone thinks it’s too convenient that he’s just admitting this, which I suppose is a reasonable excuse for why they all then try and get him to prove it.

Shuichi: “Could you do that right now?”

Tsumugi: “Yeah! Try and make a new Monokuma!”

Tsumugi is the first one to directly ask, before Motherkuma has brought up the word “birth”. Because of this, it doesn’t seem so out of place that she doesn’t use that word.

Motherkuma: “I can’t birth a Monokuma for someone who doesn’t love me.” […]

Himiko: “Whatever, just give birth to a Monokuma!”

Motherkuma: “No! I won’t do it! I’m not gonna birth one for someone I don’t like just cuz they tell me to!”

Maki: “…Hurry up and give birth to a Monokuma.”

Motherkuma: “…”

Shuichi: “…Are you listening? We said to give birth to a new Monokuma.”

And then once Motherkuma uses the word, everyone else who asks phrases it that way. Which honestly is still pretty forced – that’s not the usual way you’d describe a robot making a copy of itself – but it’s at least somewhat reasonable why they all used that word when Tsumugi did not. And of course Tsumugi doesn’t chip in on this sudden train of people awkwardly saying “birth”, because she’s totally already asked him to do that, right?

I say this is awkwardly forced that everyone says “birth” like this, but even so, I absolutely did not catch the significance of this at all, even after Motherkuma later explained that the word “birth” was important. If Tsumugi had only asked after everyone else had said “birth” and had not used that word, it would probably have stuck out, but because she went beforehand, it’s genuinely pretty innocuous even if everyone else using the word seems a bit odd.

Tsumugi: “I wonder if the thing about the spares… was a lie after all.”

Shuichi: (A lie, huh… But why lie about that? There has to be some motivation to lie…)

Obviously it’s not at all a lie. But even if it was a lie and Motherkuma couldn’t make spares (and there was always just the one spare Monokuma lying around for that one time at the beginning I guess?), lying about it would make perfect sense. The supposed Monokuma-making machine was exactly why Kaede ended up “killing” Rantaro, and keeping up that lie even now would help prevent Shuichi from figuring out it was all just a trap.

Survivor Perk Monopad: Your best chance of exposing them is when Monokuma needs a spare. At that time, the mastermind will go to the library’s hidden room.

Yep. Rantaro was very much lured there by the mastermind so that (hopefully) Kaede would kill him.

Survivor Perk Monopad: To prove this hint is accurate, I will predict something. The first thing you will remember is the Ultimate Hunt.

Still not sure how that was supposed to be any proof of credibility at all (especially since the plan was to get Rantaro killed before that Flashback Light even happened). Maybe it was purely to get Rantaro to mention it and make himself sound even more suspicious and end up feeling even less safe trusting anyone, which is exactly what happened.

Survivor Perk Monopad: Only share this information with people who you know you can trust. How you determine that will mean your life or your death.

And they definitely didn’t want Rantaro to go trusting anyone enough to tell them about his plan in case that prevented Kaede from accidentally killing him. So here’s another part that’s trying to make Rantaro super paranoid.

Survivor Perk Monopad: —Rantaro Amami

Yeah, no, it wasn’t written by Rantaro’s past self at all. This whole thing is simply a note, so there’s no proof it was really from him, and everything in it is designed to get Rantaro killed off in exactly the way that it happened.

Shuichi wonders about the blood on the Monopad, and Maki offers to go retrieve the relevant photo of Rantaro from Kokichi’s room since he was such a convenient mysterious hoarder.

Shuichi: “Maki… be careful, okay? Keebo and the Exisals are fighting—”

Maki: “Hey, who do you think I am?” [she smiles] “…Do you want to die?”

[Maki runs off]

Shuichi: “…I’ve finally reached the point where I can tell that was a joke.”

They are friends! It’s not just that Shuichi can tell she’s joking now, but also that Maki’s become better at showing when she’s joking. I also just like Shuichi worrying about her – of course he already knows she can protect herself and she doesn’t actually need to remind him, but he still worries just a little bit about her getting hurt anyway because she’s his friend!

Shuichi: (Inspecting it closely, I can see several pink fibers stuck to the surface of the shot.) “They’re pink…” (Wait! That means, this shot…) [he winces] “…” (…I understand. I know how to pin down the mastermind of this killing game…)

Shuichi obviously can’t directly voice what he just figured out because the players need a game to play, but regardless, I do like this moment of him realising that… Oh. Oh, shit, Kaede didn’t actually kill Rantaro, that’s awful… but at least he can use that fact to end this game and finally fulfil her wish.

Shuichi has one last flashback, about when Monokuma woke him up from cold sleep to taunt him before wiping his memories.

Monokuma: “Although we’re meeting for the first time, you already know me… Puhuhu… Well, of course you know. I’m famous, after all.”

While Monokuma goes on to clarify that this is because everyone watched the Hope’s Peak killing game, these lines here happen to amusingly line up perfectly well with the real truth. He could have said these exact lines to pregame Shuichi, hypothetically.

Monokuma: “The bonds of trust you’ve forged, your disgusting promises of friendship… All that’s gonna go bye-bye when the killing game starts!”

Yeah, there’s definitely not going to be any bonds of trust or promises of friendship whatsoever in this killing game, right? Hah. This is supposed to make them sad about losing those bonds, but really they forged better bonds after the killing game started than they had in that one supposed brief conversation beforehand. (It was stupid of Tsumugi to write that they were in different classes and didn’t know each other; that just makes this backstory seem even more irrelevant.)

Shuichi: “What…? Wh-Why are you doing this…?”

Monokuma: “There’s no point in asking me questions. You’re gonna forget everything, anyway.”

Shuichi: “Who’s behind this!? Who *are* you!? Junko Enoshima is dead—”

Monokuma: “Like I said, there’s no point. You’ll just forget that, too.”

Since he’s going to forget this, Monokuma should have no reason not to explain himself anyway only to taunt him that he’ll just forget it all. But he doesn’t, because the only actual reason this exchange exists is as something Shuichi will “remember”, and they didn’t want to give him any meaningful information in it. Or rather, since there is no meaningful information in a backstory that’s all lies, Tsumugi probably hadn’t even figured out the exact supposed reason for this killing game in the context of the Hope’s Peak universe at all, so it was easier to just be vague.

Monokuma: “I’m gonna use this light, then I’m gonna shove you all into lockers while you’re unconscious…”

So apparently everybody was in lockers at the beginning. But there aren’t sixteen lockers in this school. Damn it, this game and its thing of how any part of the story that you the player don’t need to interact with simply doesn’t exist as part of the game world.

Himiko volunteers to stay behind in the hidden room to look for more clues, since she still feels that she hasn’t been particularly useful yet.

Himiko: “With my skills, I’ll catch the dastardly Monokuma and the mastermind!”

Shuichi: “…I understand. Then I’ll leave it to you, Himiko.”

Himiko: “What? W-Wait, really? Are you seriously going to leave it to me? All by myself?”

Aww. She’s not used to people actually believing in her and giving her this much responsibility! She was talking herself up like the great mage she totally is, but she doesn’t really think she’s that good at helping at all.

Himiko: “Since you believe in me, I need to give it my all… I’ll find the clue, even if it uses up every last drop of my magic and kills me!”

Tsumugi: “D-Don’t say such unlucky things…”

Himiko: “I’m just letting you know how determined I am. You guys should believe in me and go on ahead.”

Shuichi: “Thank you. That really makes me feel better, Himiko.”

She’s being a performer! She’s saying things she doesn’t quite mean in order to give people a certain impression of her and influence their mood to be more positive and optimistic! Kaito’s shoes were very big shoes, but Himiko’s doing the best job she can at filling them.

(Himiko Yumeno, Luminary of Magic. She’s trying, at least.)

Shuichi: “We need to split up and check all the labs one more time. If we missed a clue in any of them… it would most likely be *that* one.”

We never find out which lab Shuichi is thinking about here. The only other lab I can think of that’d have anything relevant in it would be his own, thanks to all fifty-two of those very telling murder case files in there, but Shuichi never gets to have another look at that.

As soon as Shuichi and Tsumugi leave the hidden room, Keebo’s fight with an Exisal accidentally blows up the entrance, leaving Himiko trapped inside behind a pile of rubble.

Shuichi: “…Let’s use the Exisal.”

Keebo: “What?”

Tsumugi: “Use the Exisal…? How? We don’t have any more of Miu’s inventions, and the Monokubs are in the Exisals—”

We should technically still have four charged Electrohammers lying somewhere near the entrance of the hangar and could run to get those. The story kind of conveniently pretended they stopped existing last chapter as soon as everyone saw the body in the press.

(We would also have an Electrobomb and the Exisal remote if only a certain someone who is under that press had ever cared about actually helping us, of course.)

Tsumugi: “Himiko is the Ultimate Magician… I bet she’ll use her magic to find a clue in that room that’s just plain amazing.”

I wonder if Tsumugi is actually worried that she will. After all, Himiko’s talent should make her very good at finding secret mechanisms and hidden passageways.

Keebo: “I can’t keep evading the Exisals’ attacks beyond that time limit. If we don’t settle this soon, I’ll be destroyed.”

This is the actual reason why Keebo gave us this arbitrary time limit, even though it’s still pretty flimsy that he’d apparently know exactly how long he could keep it up for.

(Oh, hey, Keebo sure would be able to keep it up longer and give us longer to investigate if someone had given us the goddamn Exisal remote, now, wouldn’t he???)

Tsumugi: “I don’t know if I can get to all of them, but I’ll do what I can! I’ll see you later!”

So Tsumugi is in fact going to go check all of the labs for extra clues. Supposedly. Obviously she very deliberately never goes to Shuichi’s lab and points out the very relevant clues in there. She’s not going to bring back anything of note from any of the labs at all, because of course she wouldn’t want to do that.

This part here is a window of time in which it is possible that Tsumugi could in fact have gone to her own lab and used the sets in there and her ridiculous cosplay-shapeshifter skills to fake the audition videos that she’ll show us in the trial. I acknowledge that possibility, but I don’t believe that’s what happened. We’ll get to that when we see the videos.

---

[Next post]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 6 #deadly life #commentary

8 notes · View notes

taizi · 5 years

Text

put your empty hands in mine

chapter seven: hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather

natsume yuujinchou pairing: kitanishinatsu word count: 2002 summary: Kitamoto and Nishimura are soulmates, to absolutely no one’s surprise. But they’re also soulmates with a very shy boy who lives somewhere far away, who writes to them in tiny, careful letters right before bed, who apologizes when the mimicry of bruises pop up on their arms and backs because of him. And that’s a surprise to a lot of people. read on ao3

With Nyanko-sensei around to keep an eye on things, Takashi’s life quiets down. Comparatively, anyway.

Nyanko-sensei can fly! Satoru finds on his palm on a school morning, the familiar orange letters rushed and excited. We went up so high I could see the whole city!

How did that little cat carry you? Atsushi asks before Satoru can reach for his pen and demand to know why he didn’t take them flying.

His true form is big, Takashi writes. Really big.

Tsuji is giving them a dirty look for writing notes during social studies, but he has no idea how interesting talking to Takashi is. Satoru pretends not to notice Tsuji’s pointed look at his workbook and instead scrawls a quick, How big?

Draw him! Atsushi adds.

Takashi must be in class, too, because the drawing comes along in bits at a time like he’s trying to avoid getting caught. Satoru’s elbow is propped up on his desk, chin tucked into his hand, so it’s easy to smother the grin on his face that grows a little more with each glance he takes at his arm. Across the room, Atsushi’s mouth wobbles as he tries to keep a straight face.

Takashi is no artist. The creature that painstakingly appears is something between a dog and a woolly sheep, with lots of curly fur and a long wispy tail. It has whiskers and a weird mark on its forehead.

Satoru is tracing this onto his notebook and keeping it forever.

The next time Takashi comes to Hitoyoshi, Shibata is with him. It’s been most of a year since that ill-advised phone call, and by now they’re comfortably joined at the hip. Satoru is jealous Shibata and Takashi are so close, but he’s not going to begrudge his shy soulmate any little scrap of happiness he can find. It’s good he has a friend back home.

And Shibata’s alright, he supposes grudgingly. Nyanko-sensei must approve of him if he’s still around.

“Shibata’s soulmate is someone named Tanuma Kaname,” Takashi says. Satoru and Atsushi are visiting him, this time, and they’re all sitting in Shibata’s kitchen while his mom makes lunch and cheerfully eavesdrops on their conversation. “Do you know anyone by that name?”

“There’s no Tanuma in our class,” Satoru says. He glances at Shibata’s arms, and the writing that peeks out from under his rolled-up sleeves. He feels the last bit of dislike fade away when Shibata rubs his soulmate’s handwriting with a careful finger, like he’s not even aware he’s doing it. “We can ask around when we get home, though.”

“Would you?” Takashi asks brightly. “Thanks, Satchan!”

While Satoru is trying to work a flush off his face, Atsushi asks Shibata, “Have you met him before?”

“We talk on the phone sometimes,” Shibata says slowly.

There’s something kind of vulnerable about him now. It is sort of a personal thing to talk about, and that’s probably why his mom is listening closely, ready to jump in if the conversation takes an uncomfortable turn. But Shibata glances at Takashi, like he’s borrowing extra nerve, and Takashi’s smile seems to settle him.

“Kaname’s really sick, is all,” he tells them. “He’s not up for traveling around, and he has-- “

He glances back at his mother for help. She reminds him gently, “An anxiety disorder.”

“Right,” Shibata says. “He has anxiety, and sometimes he works himself up over even little things, and our parents are worried he might get really stressed out when he meets me and make himself even sicker and-- I don’t want that.” His voice is small now. “So I can wait.”

Ugh. Stupid jerk, making it impossible for Satoru not to like him. He thinks of that day all those years ago, of realizing Takashi was out there somewhere and not even knowing what he looked like. He thinks of Shibata stealing Takashi’s phone to make sure his soulmates were real people, and wonders how much of it was just to be mean and how much of it was some strange, backwards hope.

Satoru reaches across the table, nearly upsetting their cups, and punches Shibata on the arm.

“He won’t be sick forever. I bet he’s probably trying to get better as quick as he can just so he can see your stupid face.”

Shibata blinks at him, and a smile darts across his face, and then he scowls mightily just for show. “I must really look pathetic if Nishimura is giving me advice.”

Atsushi and Takashi roll their eyes in sync, and Shibata’s mother sighs when the inevitable bickering picks up, and Nyanko-sensei pointedly settles in Takashi’s lap like the whole conversation is putting him to sleep, but Satoru thinks they all look kind of happy.

When they’re thirteen, Takashi moves again.

He stayed put for almost three years, the longest he’s ever stayed anywhere since his papa died, and he was happy. But his guardians’ children have outgrown the room they’re sharing, and there’s no space for Takashi in their home anymore.

In the privacy of his own mind, where his brother can’t give him a disappointed look for it, Satoru hates them.

It’s harder for Takashi to leave than it’s ever been; he’s never had a friend to leave behind before. According to Nyanko-sensei later on, Shibata swore up and down that they’d stay best friends no matter where Takashi ended up, and hugged him for so long he almost missed his bus, and made him promise to call his soulmates because he could tell Takashi wasn’t okay.

It’s been so long since Satoru’s had to listen to him crying on the phone that it hurts, this bone-deep ache. The afternoon sun was warm on his skin just a moment ago, but now it feels like he’s been plunged into an icy river. Atsushi says, “It’s okay, Okashi. You’ll see him again, I promise. It’s okay.”

“I never see anyone again,” Takashi sobs. “Everyone goes away and I never see them again.”

“You saw us again,” Atsushi counters. His eyes are shiny like he’s about to cry but his voice is as firm as it’s ever been. “You see us all the time. We haven’t gone away, and neither will Shibata. We all love you, and we won’t leave you.”

Kiyoshi isn’t there when Satoru goes home that night. He bursts into the kitchen expecting the noise to be his brother, but it’s mom, home early from her long shift at work. She takes one look at him, eyes all red and puffy, face wet with tears, and puts down whatever she was about to cook for dinner. Later on, he’ll wonder if Auntie called her and told her to come home.

“Come here, baby,” mom says, and he’s all grown up at thirteen years old, but he flies around the table and buries himself in the safety of her arms anyway. She holds him, and only holds him tighter when he starts to cry again.

And even that isn’t fair. Not really. Not when Takashi doesn’t have a mom to hold him when he cries.

But if there’s one thing Takashi is good at, it’s starting over.

“There’s a girl in my class,” he murmurs over the phone, a week after the move. “She’s really nice. I flinched at a yokai outside before sensei could scare it away, and my classmates started to whisper, but she came over and sat right beside me. She said if they’re gonna talk about me, they have to talk about her, too.”

“I like her,” Atsushi says decisively, pouncing on any good news Takashi has to give them. “What’s her name?”

“Ogata.” Takashi’s voice dips a little into something bashful and pleased. “But she told me to call her Yuriko.”

And so the next time they all meet, their group has gotten bigger.

“It’s nice to meet you!” Ogata says brightly, arm-in-arm with another girl their age. “This is Junko, my girlfriend. And we’re soulmates, too, but she would have been my girlfriend anyway.”

Junko shares a commiserating look of exhaustion with Takashi, who returns it simultaneously, and Satoru can’t help but grin. He’s made friends here, Satoru thinks. He’ll be okay, just like Atsushi said.

Nyanko-sensei, in a rare show of affection, hops down from Takashi’s shoulder and circles around to Atsushi instead. He paws at the leg of his pants.

“What? I don’t want to carry you, you’re heavy,” Atsushi says, bewildered. But the lucky cat just starts yowling, and heads up and down the sidewalk start to turn, so Atsushi stoops quickly to pick him up.

“You’re literally the worst cat in the world,” Shibata tells him succinctly. Since the girls are here, and Takashi doesn’t know them well enough to trust them with his secret yet, Nyanko-sensei can’t respond with anything more than a narrow-eyed glare. Shibata’s smug smile says he knows this perfectly well.

It’s a fun afternoon. They all exchange contact information, and Ogata says they should start a group chat, and Satoru laughs so hard he has to lean against Junko for support when he sees what she’s called it.

“‘The Natsume Protection Squad’?” Takashi’s face turns bright red. Even his cat is snickering at him. “I don’t like that name. Change it?”

“Nope, it’s perfect,” Shibata says, screenshotting it for posterity. “We’re keeping it like this forever.”

They spend the night at Junko’s house because her family is away. All of them know better than to ask why they can’t sleep over at the place where Takashi’s staying, and they keep him occupied with ordering food and picking out movies to rent. In that silent understanding, their friendship inches toward something unbreakable.

“You’re never really around town much anymore,” Tsuji remarks near the end of the school year. “When we have days off, I mean. You and Kitamoto are always gone.”

“Takashi can’t come visit us right now,” Satoru says, digging his gym clothes out of his bag once the girls have gone to change in another room. “It’s easier for us to go to him.”

“Maybe he should try to go to high school here,” Tsuji says. “I wonder if he’d be able to commute, or if someone around here could sponsor him or something.”

Tugging off his shirt, Satoru’s muffled “maybe” gets lost somewhere around the collar. It’s nice to think about, but he thinks if that were possible then Auntie would have brought it up by now. He may be an idiot, but even he knows better than to get Takashi’s hopes up about something that can’t be done.

There’s a loud noise, like a chair clattering to the floor, and by the time he gets his head free of his shirt and glances up, the whole room is staring at him. He stares back, a little self-conscious, and then Atsushi is shoving past the other boys with stark horror in his eyes.

“Satchan,” he says, like it’s all he knows how to say. Satoru follows his stricken gaze to his own stomach.

And he feels like he’s about to be sick.

His whole middle is purple, from the front of his stomach around to the side, a plum color so dark Satoru thinks he could sink his fingers into it like ink. There’s more marks along his chest, down his arms. He lifts a hand, and settles it there against the deepest part of the bruise. Tsuji makes a wounded noise and an aborted gesture, like he wants to stop Satoru from touching it and hurting himself.

“It’s not mine,” Satoru says numbly. He doesn’t recognize his own voice. “Acchan-- “

“Oh, no,” Atsushi whispers, “no, no, please.”

Adachi yells at their classmates for staring, and Tsuji orders someone to go and get the teacher. Everything sounds faraway and underwater, and the room is colder than it should be even when someone settles a jacket around his shoulders. Satoru stares down at his hands, past all the ugly marks and bruises, to the cheerful orange writing that he can barely make out anymore.

Takashi.

#natsume yuujinchou #natsuyuu #kitanishinatsu #nishimura satoru #kitamoto atsushi #natsume takashi #ogata yuriko #shibata katsumi #nyanko sensei #tsuji #my writing #natsuyuu fic #empty hands #tw for severe injury of a child in this chapter :(

55 notes · View notes

ryouverua · 5 years

Text

The Final Lab

.......... is really, really weird.

just what I’d expect from someone who may or may not have set up the love key system tbh

Is it weird to consider this the Mastermind’s Lab? .... Maybe?

Oh. Oh, that’s what you meant. Also, damn - does it spread out as far across as the AV room too?

Sure they are. Yup. They’re definitely here. Oh, hiding? ....... I don’t know if I’d go that far.

OH THE MUSIC CHANGE

I did think it was weird that the music hadn’t changed when we walked in there!

.... this is so oddly conspicuous.

OH IS THAT WHERE THAT THING FROM THE JUNKO-SCENE WAS THIS WHOLE TIME

Wait, what? We were supposed to find this room???

.......

The, uh. The what now.

I... guess there’s no denying that this is connected to the old games then. Btw, totally random, but I like that little ‘tinny’ filter they have on Monokuma’s voice. It’s a nice touch.

- says Sweetcheeks, to the giant Monokuma head

I mean, I know he means ‘are you the Monokuma that’s been in charge of everything this whole time or are you a separate entity’ but it just sounds kinda funny that’s all. 8′D

Anyway, it confirms that but goes on -

.... IS THIS YOUR WAY OF TRYING TO DIVERT MY ATTENTION FROM THAT WHOLE ‘WE HAVE TO PROTECT OUR REAL MOTHER’ FROM CHAPTER 4. 8/ I’M NOT BUYING THAT THIS IS THE MOTHER YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT.

Though with that said, uh, what’s with the sudden ‘maternal’ imagery???

I wonder if the Monokubs were made there too... they’re separate from Monokuma, but they were obviously replaced. Also, that... doesn’t... look like a machine that could make new Monokuma, but I’m going to choose to believe this for now only because it’s something that was brought up in Chapter 1 too. I can’t think of a reason why this could be untrue...

That’s a good point. I mean, unless there’s a hidden area behind there that have pre-made Monokumas that just need to be activated or something? That would make more sense...

“Duh-doi.”

That’s true. This is... weird. I’m just - I’m just getting a weird vibe in general.

WHY WOULD YOU ASK HIM TO DO THAT WHEN THERE IS LITERALLY A ‘MONOKUMA ET ALL VS STUDENTS’ WAR RIGHT NOW

S T O P

ASDL;KFJASDF okay I actually laughed

also thank god, honestly

oh god it has a good point

DUDE DON’T SAY IT LIKE THAT THAT’S WEIRD

What is happening right now are we trying to call his bluff but what if it isn’t a bluff WHAT IF IT ISN’T A BLUFF -

GUYS PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT THAT’S REALLY CREEPY

But at the same time, why would it lie now? What if the deadline had come way back in Chapter 1 and there wasn’t any firepower to back it up? There... had to have been a way to back up that threat. .... Right? Right? oh god please don’t say Kaede killed for nothing -

“THIS IS WHY WE KEEP GETTING BLOWN UP BY K1-B0, SHUICHI!”

Wait, what? That’s a Monopad? I couldn’t tell from the original angle. ..... A Monopad with blood on it??? And is that a handprint....

WHAT

W H A T

Wait, I’m trying to remember... didn’t he have a Monopad on him when he died? We talked about this already, right? So he started the game with two? hey rantaro why does monokuma let you have two monopads -

ahaha lol bye necklace!perk theory

.... Wait, if it has his handprint on it, isn’t that the one he was holding in the picture?

WHAT HE GETS AN ENHANCED MAP THAT’S CHEATI - oh I guess that’s part of the perk. But still. Still.....

.... Man this would have been so helpful to have from the beginning. 8′/

But there it is - the reason Rantaro knew the exact location of the library door. It was literally laid out for him. The mastermind really did lure him there...

Oh my god this literally spells out what memory he’ll learn next. The mastermind’s moves. Literally everything that would perfectly position him to the perfect spot - this almost seems like it was designed that way! To prey on his paranoia from his missing memories! This wasn’t a hint, this was a fucking set-up from the start!

.... And yet, it was written by him. But it had to have been approved by the mastermind, right? Or at the very least, the mastermind knew about it...

HONESTLY I FEEL LIKE HE WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF WITHOUT IT

Man, past!Rantaro screwed over future!Rantaro really well.

I’m so fired up at how unfair this all was for him ffff he was set up to fail under the guise of it being a perk what the hell, he wasn’t even given a fighting chance at all - ?!

JUSTICE!!! JUSTICE FOR RANTARO!!!!

.... I-I mean, I have no idea who it could belong to.

Oh, he knows. He 100% knows. This is him just living by ‘measure twice, cut once’, a proverb I wholeheartedly subscribe to btw.

And she knows it too.

MAN literally the moment anything Kokichi-related comes up she is up and running to it. It’s a shame she hasn’t been able to shake that ‘KILL THE MASTERMIND!!!’ attitude that caused all the problems in the first place, but at least she seems incredibly determined to make it up to Kokichi’s memory personally...? 8′D or am I reading too much into it again

insert laugh track

INTROVERT BUDDIES :D

I’m sorry WHAT -

what - ?!

It’s just... laying here? In the trash, with nothing else? Another thing we’re supposed to find???

Is that from Kaede’s sweater?

This... is a continuation of the set-up? Just, just leaving this shotput ball here like Kaede just ~has~ to be lurking around here - ??

It... has to be Tsumugi. Between her ‘finding’ the cold room, Kaede’s profile, Kaede’s ‘twin’, just leaving Rantaro’s Monopad out here for us to find, Motherkuma handing out convenient clues and ‘evidence’ of her living in here... it’s all too convenient?

... No, this is a set-up. She’s trying to set up Kaede as the mastermind. And she even had Kaede’s clothes at one point, didn’t she??? For the cospox scene? Did - did Shuichi just realize it was Tsumugi too, then?

...

omg I just remembered Tsumugi being incredibly pissed at Rantaro when he basically made her third-wheel in the nailpolishing scene that was totally going to be the Kaemugi Magnum Opus and telling him to, what was it? ‘Backflip into a landmine and die?’ shinjaeba - it was right there. it was the first comparison I made in my head. I should’ve known in that moment.

That is so darkly hilarious in hindsight, though I still wonder how she knew to count on Kaede’s plan. What if Shuichi hadn’t found the door? Wait, if the Survivor’s Perk ended up here after Kaede’s trap was triggered, does that mean she darted out and nabbed the Survivor’s Perk afterwards??? But... how did she get past everyone in the first place......... Maybe with Monokuma lying in wait in this room, then? If she had an extra in here and Rantaro had opened the door anyway, it would be easy enough... maybe...???

I HAVE A LOT OF QUESTIONS...

oh Tsumugi is encouraging me to continue looking around too

YOU LEFT MORE CLUES TO POINT A FINGER AT THE THEORETICAL MASTERMIND!KAEDE, DIDN’T YOU

So as long as you were quick enough, you could dart in and out of the room via the automatic door to... say... grab a Survivor’s Perk. Got it.

So you mean... it might not matter if you happened to put the receipt signed tape dust on the reader if the mastermind had already gotten in the room, so there’s potentially a chance that it was accessed if Shuichi’s timing/luck was bad?

H-Himiko plz

C-Can we also talk about how while Mother Monokuma is confirming that this is the ‘Remnants of Despair’ room, Tsumugi is the one that keeps pushing for that comparison... she’s, uh, way too hyped about them. I’m just sayin’.

“Well, they are now - oh, crap. Uh. Um. Just. Forget I said that.”

“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SAY ‘NO’ WE PRACTICED THIS - I MEAN -”

I know the context is inaccurate but seeing Tsumugi sweating like this right here is making me lol - and I think I can stop saying ‘assuming I’m right’, because... I’m... starting to feel pretty confident tbh.

I feel like Motherkuma’s attitude is a bit different than Monokuma’s? Or am I just imagining things? It seems a lot more relaxed about the mysteries of everything than the other one, and certainly the Monokubs. They literally almost blew the students up for trying to get in here!

IT HAS TO BE LOOPING, THERE’S NO WAY YOU COULD SAY THAT IF IT WASN’T LOOPING IN SOME FASHION

Because it would have to end if there were only two people left, but clearly it wouldn’t if there was! And Rantaro is proof that it didn’t end with him, either!

The question is, why is it looping????

HOW MANY MORE CAN THERE BE

oh god they really are getting faster i barely captured anything from this

WAIT WHERE IS EVERYONE ELSE

So... Monokuma is still a recognized figure.

It would have been before Shuichi’s time though, yeah? And of course it would have been recorded as a significant event. I was curious so I looked up what our real life ‘most watched’ events in TV history were and they’re mostly positive, tbh - but not all of them. There were some significant funerals. Anything planned, basically.

'Like they usually do?!’ Okay, they are seriously emphasizing the ‘this game is looping’ angle here - and apparently Shuichi should be aware of this fact? Monokuma’s explaining it all, but it sounds like it’s more of a recap than anything!

He recaps it conveniently for us:

Gofer Project, the state of the world, that they’re the last survivors, their promise to be friends...

Was it like this with the original class? It looks like Shuichi was the last one to be woken up, too. I wonder if that’s significant...?

Wait, but hadn’t they not met each other before this? Or I guess they just forgot their ‘first’ meeting and that was enough...

“Well tbh I was hoping you would monologue about your evil plans for a bit in case I conveniently remembered these memories later, but fine.”

...What a great name for the light. right right shouldn’t be giving the murder-bear props for anything, sorry -

With that said, the flashback in the helmets still bother me -unless that was supposed to be them losing their talents in the first place. .... I’m not... entirely convinced of that, though. I don’t think that image has been confirmed to be associated to the talent-loss, so I’m not going to write it off as that yet.

“That’s oddly specific and is giving me a different set of high school flashbacks - can you get rid of those memories too while you’re at it oh shIT -”

tell me you don’t see sweetcheeks getting shoved into a locker at some point in his life though

Are you sure??? Are you sure?

Again, mass-induced memories - but unlike the ones in the pod room, they didn’t seem to be triggered by anything specifically. I wonder, actually - did the others get that memory as well? Tsumugi apparently did, but -

That’s not your fault!!

aaaaaw she wants to find a clue too 8′D

LMAO you, uh, weren’t ready for the responsibility yet, huh. She wears her anxiety on her sleeve. 8′D

ATTAGIRL!!!

You’ve got this, Himiko! You don’t know this yet, but the meta is on your side! You’ll definitely find something!

Ah, the rare serious Himiko..

So, interesting. We’re splitting up again - Maki’s ahead, Himiko’s behind, and we’re still with Tsumugi. Why are all signs pointing to her so much right now??? Am I going crazy here??? I mean, she’s also the least developed out of everyone left which isn’t helping and we still haven’t seen her cosplay yet (outside of potential!Junko) so....??? So, my girl? Will we ever get to see the power of EVA foam in your capable hands?

#Shuichi Saihara #Maki Harukawa #Tsumugi Shirogane #Himiko Yumeno #K1-b0 #Keebo #Kiibo #Ryou plays drv3 #spoilers #drv3 spoilers #I'll try and answer the asks from yesterday soon just want to get this out tonight

35 notes · View notes

donnerpartyofone · 5 years

Text

21 Questions

Tagged by @getoutofmyhouse who had oddly similar answers to mine

Nickname: only the one I use here, that I gave myself--Claire Donner, which has to do with my famous love of cannibalism. Claire is my real first name, though.

Zodiac: I am so very cuspy. I was born at about a quarter to midnight on April 20, so I tend to relate to, and feel insulted by, the suppositions about Aries and Taurus equally. I’m one of those jerks who will tell you astrology is a bunch of hoo ha...and then drone on with my Many Esoteric Ideas about it, so I’ll just stop myself right here.

Height: 5’ nuthin is what I prefer to say...because saying I’m 5 and 3/4′ sounds a little like saying I’m 10 and a half years old.

Amount of sleep: It’s all fucked up. Until I got into my 30s I could, and would prefer to, sleep endlessly. Now I go to bed around 10 (depression), get up around 5 or 6 (being old), and for extra fun, I’ve developed this insomnia that often keeps me up from about 2am-5am. I try make the most of it by getting up, getting high, watching a movie or two, writing...basically just having a secret private day by myself. I’d really rather go back to just sleeping constantly though.

Last movie I saw: I saw GRETA in theaters tonight, which was ok. I guess I thought any Neil Jordan film would be headier than this, but watching Isabel Huppert just running around acting like an absolute maniac is a rare treat! My last video experience was RAW, which I put on to bother my husband right when we got home from the theater. (I think he liked it more than I originally did, to my surprise)

Last thing I googled: The correct spelling of Sylvia Likens’ last name. I’m obsessed with this type of crime where a group of people (usually a family and/or some of their friends and neighbors) fall into some kind of shared hysteria where they protractedly torture to death an acquaintance for no particular reason. Some times there’s an element of mystery as to why the victim didn’t leave while they were still able to, which suggests to me that the murdered person was just as much a victim of the groupthink as the perpetrators. Other example victims include Suzanne Capper, Vera Jo Reigle, and I think to some degree Sophie Lionnet, James Bulger, and Junko Furuta. (Also a crime they briefly discuss in the book Lords of Chaos, where several people murder a friend in their trailer, but I can’t remember it specifically enough to look up the names--the other last thing i tried to google) I keep thinking there should be a psychiatric and/or legal term for this kind of crime, but I’ve never heard one, so let me know if you got one!

Favorite musician: I have trouble with questions that involve ranking anything, so I’ll just say that right now I’m listening to a lot of old White Zombie. I didn’t know anything about their origins as an East Village noise band, and I’m fascinated by the stories about how apocalyptically miserable it was to be in that group. I’m increasingly obsessed with people who work their asses off doing something they barely even enjoy, for what must be borderline spiritual reasons.

Song stuck in my head: Nothing right this second, for which I am very grateful. There’s something awful in my brain that causes me to wake up with some maddening, babyish tune stuck in my head more often than not. It is most frequently the Ten Little Indians nursery rhyme. This is literally killing me.

Other blogs: @anhed-nia, which started as a dumping ground for long posts about mental illness, and turned into almost only movie writing. at some point there was just so much movie shit that i started to feel awkward about posting anything personal there again. i also got @getoffyrass which is a group blog, and a repository for images that make great drawing references. everyone is encouraged to post their drawings, too, although it is seldom used. i still like having it around, for when i have time to draw. my “real” drawing blog is @neveratendermoment but i don’t draw often enough anymore...

Do I get asks: i used to get tons! i really enjoy them, even the trolls to some degree. i must have seemed like more of a regular tumblr geek girl back in the day. also tumblr has just changed a lot since then. my blog was definitely a casualty of Best Stuff First, i think my follower count stopped dead forever right when that happened, and now that practically every single fucking thing on this entire site is either fandom shit or *discourse*, i really have nothing to offer tumblr anymore, anyway.

Blogs following: 1,057.

Lucky numbers: 2! Also 5.

What I’m wearing: black wool long john pants from Chrome, and a white v neck teeshirt with the words BLACK MAYONNAISE on it in black Rocky Horror font. i live near the notoriously toxic Gowanus Canal, and “black mayonnaise” is the actual term used to describe what’s on the bottom of it, by the scientists who are trying to figure out what to do with it.

Dream trip: i am really excited by travel, it’s hard to pick. i’m hopefully making a dream trip soon though: my father’s mysterious finno-swedish family is from the åland islands, and my husband and i will be planning part of our honeymoon there, whenever that happens.

Dream Job: i think about this a lot, because the older i get, the more i object to the entire concept of having to work to live. i’m into the whole universal basic income thing. i’m at this point where i can barely stand to think about capitalism in any way--like i think about how the need for money is so mortally serious that there’s a lot of physical stuff in the world that only exists because someone was scared of starving, tons of useless products and packaging and factory byproducts and all kinds of fucking straight up garbage that was only invented due to the lethality of poorness. i would rather be left totally alone forever if possible. however, if i HAD to do something and i COULD do anything, it would probably be film criticism. this fantasy takes place in a world where people care so much about what i have to say that i can make a career, not only out of movie writing, but out of only writing about the specific movies i want to write about, referring to nothing other than my personal reactions.

Favorite food: i wish the answer weren’t just “cheese”, but it probably is. also mushrooms. anything cinnamon. i’m a pretty adventurous eater though. the most important thing for me is a variety of flavors and textures.

Languages: english. i took several years of italian in junior high-high school, and did nothing with it. i taught myself to read french pretty fluently, but i would fold right up if someone tried to speak to me. i learned a bunch of swedish on duolingo, shoulda kept it up. i’ll get back to it! i really regret never learning spanish though, so i’m easily torn on what to do with my time.

Play any instruments: clarinet in junior high/high school, also alto sax which i did not enjoy at all, a little guitar. i bought a used electric bass last year that i have really been enjoying, but i feel a lot of guilt around not playing enough. so much of it is just strength training. that’s probably what i like about it, though. also i got a lot of electronic music software and midi controllers and stuff...and then i realized that it could take me months to sort through the thousands of samples i have to program this stuff, and i only got so far into it before i started to get discouraged. i need to get back to it, it’s ridiculous to let that stuff lie around. this is a rare example of me wishing i knew someone local to play with, who could speed me along on how everything works.

Favorite songs: another one of these impossible questions! anybody who is even reading this can probably guess the answers from the handful of music posts i reblog over and over and over. the other night i got all hyperactive and forced my husband to drop everything and listen to “buffalo stance” by nene cherry, which i never ever get sick of. real top contenders for favorite song might be “Stand By the Jamms” by the klf, and this recording, which has gotten me through many difficult hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8k1HsF3EvY

https://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/sunray-sonic-boom-music-for-the-dreamachine-cd/STRAWB.003CD.html

Random fact: i’m sure i’m missing out on something really funny and cool, but for now it’s just the well-known fact that i read palms.

Describe yourself as aesthetic thing: man, how do i answer this without being totally pretentious? maybe nobody can! i’m coming up with something really hard to describe but it will be worth it. the other day i watched this insane, completely unnecessary movie about lorca and salvador dali (played by robert pattinson) as gay lovers. there’s a scene in it where lorca does that “pick a hand” thing to dali, and dali picks an empty hand. of course, they’re both poor students who couldn’t be buying any gifts, so they do this obnoxious pantomime where dali pretends lorca actually gave him something--but then it turns out that lorca really DOES have something. he opens his other hand and gives dali...SOMETHING. i don’t know what! they make such a big deal out of it, but what the hell? you see it for a second in this closeup, but it’s shot from like, behind and slightly underneath, and it is just unrecognizable. it’s sort of an orange blob? it’s probably meant to be a sculpture. but, i love the idea of doing the “pick a hand” thing to somebody, and the other person is just like...hey wait a minute, what the fuck even IS this??

it reminded me of one of the most amazing things anyone ever did at my school, bard college. this genius art student who I WISH I COULD NAME TO CREDIT HER did her senior project as this like...made up product. i saw them at the senior show, hanging off a spinner rack, like you’d see next to the register in the drug store. they were called Toilet Buddies. they were these plastic, brightly colored objects that looked like toys, but they didn’t have a familiar earthly shape, and because of the title, it was IMPOSSIBLE to imagine what to do with them. so, she gets the lipstick cam from the film department, and shoots this video of herself sneaking some Toilet Buddies into Walmart. then she takes them to the register and BUYS THEM--the baffled cashier looks for them for a while, and eventually just rings them up as a general grocery or something. then in part 2, the artist TAKES THEM BACK TO THE STORE WITH THE RECEIPT AND GETS A REFUND.

so anyway, i see myself as like a fake product--something that looks just familiar enough to exit, and that appears to have a designated purpose, but it’s just kind of cheap and foreign and it becomes nightmarish to try to imagine what to do with it.

I don’t know if anyone i know will want to do this, but i tag @negativepleasure @moviesludge @former-contender @dimestoreman @thefuzzydave @darkarfs @theoddsideofme @blueruins ...um, i don’t really know who would enjoy this. the ultimate would be @garbagenacht

#long post

7 notes · View notes

the-apocryphal-one · 6 years

Text

More than a Waifu: or, an analysis on Chiaki

This was typed up for a thing over on reddit, and I decided to share it here because I already put several hours into it, no sense letting it go to waste, right? Basically, it’s an analysis on Chiaki (both of them) and why she’s an interesting and relatable character, beyond mere “waifu bait”, as she is sometimes derogatorily called.

I’m aware DR3 doesn’t have the best reputation among the fanbase, but I still think covering the Chiaki there is important for understanding AI Chiaki, and I genuinely like her. So, let’s start:

Chiaki in DR3:

We’re introduced to Chiaki Nanami in the first episode when she literally bumps into Hajime while playing her game. After a couple seconds, she mumbles that she’s okay and is ready to move on with her life when he asks if she’s playing Gala Omega. Her blank demeanor changes and she becomes super excited, talking about how it’s such a classic and asking him how many times he’s played it as she gets up in his face. At this moment, Chisa arrives to pick her up, and before she leaves, Chiaki tells Hajime she thinks having a talent isn’t a big deal—“all I have are games”, while he can “go anywhere and become anything”.

An intro should establish some character traits, and this does a good job—she’s into games, she’s got some social awkwardness issues (not noticing she’s literally walked into someone or that he’s holding his hands up when she enters his personal space), she’s kind, and she doesn’t think much of herself or her talent. She’s also got some cute, romantically-lit moments with Hajime, establishing herself as #1 love interest candidate and a potential friend/emotional support.

Over the course of DR3, she has an arc where she grows from loner to class rep (and no she did not do this in less than a day, there’s mention of multiple lunches or classes, so it took her several to put everything together), becoming the heart of Class 77 and bringing them all together. She doesn’t do this on her own, however, because she feels that she can’t make friends with games—it takes Chisa’s encouragement to get her to try, and later Chisa’s pushing and nomination for her to actually accept the class rep position. She also, as expected, becomes Hajime’s friend at Hope’s Peak, reassuring him whenever he dwells on his lack of talent. Unfortunately, she’s not able to do enough to help him, and after he gets beaten down by Juzo Sakakura in Episode 3, he goes through with the Kamukura Project, disappearing for a whole year.

Episodes 4-7 don’t show us much of Chiaki, probably because they’re very focused on first Nagito, then Junko, Ryota, and Izuru. When we do see her, she’s usually looking sad, playing a game as she waits at their old haunts. I have my grips with this section because Episode 4 should have had more focus on Class 77’s reaction to Twilight Syndrome, to say nothing of how the six-month timeskip in Episode 5 should have been an episode of itself, because that would have been a great time to show more of her leadership growth. The qualities exist, but like almost everything else, they’re brushed over. Her waiting around does, however, indicate she’s very attached to Hajime and either very patient, clingy, or both, which makes sense—her various comments in Episode 1 indicate she had no friends before HPA, and he was the first one she made.

Anyway, after Episode 7 and the Tragedy of Hope’s Peak Academy, the Reserve Course starts parading, Mikan goes missing, and to top it off, it’s raining. Nagito makes his return from his year-long suspension, telling everyone he saw Mikan on the grounds, and they all split up to look for him—Chiaki going with Nagito. They stumble across the real Ryota Mitarai and Junko Enoshima, where Nagito reveals that he plans to kill her so she can be a stepping stone for hope. Chiaki protests at the idea of killing anyone, but its all moot as Nagito spends too long on speeches and Izuru comes in and shoots him. Chiaki recognizes Izuru as Hajime, but he doesn’t recognize her, and while they’re holding gazes, Chisa comes in to rescue them! But she stays behind to cover their escape. So Chiaki half-carries Nagito back to their class, where she rallies them together to go back and save their teacher and Hajime! And here is where everything goes downhill for her, because of her.

First, let’s just start with the fact that she didn’t tell anyone where they were going, or even leave this to the authorities. We know they have cell phones, we see her using hers as a light, and we know there are police. Hell, someone should have stayed behind with Nagito, who is half-conscious and just got shot in the chest—probably Mikan since she’s the nurse. Nobody in Class 77 thinks of this, but I hold Chiaki the most accountable since she’s their leader. She was warned several times—first by Chisa herself telling her to leave, then by Peko coming in injured from her fight with Mukuro, and then by Nagito Komaeda telling them to give up (and while he says he was testing her, she has no way of knowing that at the time)—and she still charged in, without a real plan and without a way out if things went wrong. She genuinely believed they could do this, that the power of their bonds as a class would triumph and save the day like in one of her video games. So no need for planning, right? Wrong.

Her attempted rescue goes exactly as well as you’d expect—Junko outplays them, separates Chiaki from the group, traps her in a dungeon, and then brutally tortures her to death while making Class 77 watch. It’s still really sad two years later and I’m not going to cover everything she goes through, but even here she still shows her grit and determination as she struggles on through a lot of wounds to make it to the end. Which is a trap, of course, and she’s impaled several times over. With that, Junko successfully brainwashes Class 77 into despair—which is a sticky issue among the franchise, and one I’m not gonna get into more than to point out that it was a combination of the brainwashing and the death that made them Ultimate Despair; Chiaki’s death on its own wouldn’t have worked.

Izuru comes in to talk to her, at which point she starts crying as she talks about how she regrets not being able to help anyone, how she doesn’t want to die, and how she just wanted to play games with him again. After she stops moving, he then picks up her hairpin and cries too, and is seen carrying it around with him after. It’s been established multiple times in Dangan Ronpa that people who lose their memories still carry feelings; Ryoko is still in love with Yasuke, Toko and Genocider both share their feelings for Byakuya and friendship for Komaru, and both the DR and SDR2 casts reform their bonds very quickly. So Izuru retaining Hajime’s feelings for Chiaki follows the series’ trend.

That’s pretty much the end of her story, except for two things—one, her struggle, speech, and death motivate Izuru to examine hope as something that could bring unpredictability into his life, which is why he masterminds the Killing School Trip. And two, in said Killing School Trip, there’s an AI who scans the patients’ memories so it can form their ideal person. As it happens, the entire class had an ideal person in mind, leading to…

AI Chiaki:

AI Chiaki stays in the background for most of the prologue—she doesn’t make herself a huge presence, like the Imposter or Nagito. Hajime’s introduction to her is similar to her DR3 counterpart, in that she’s gaming and there are some long pauses where she doesn’t respond, but it’s also relatively different. For one, she starts to nod off near the end of the conversation, and for another she stays relatively calm all throughout it. I mention this because while she’s based off human!Chiaki, she’s not the same person as her, and has her own differences—two of them being, she falls asleep a lot (theorized to be because she’s an AI and ‘loading’, but there’s no real proof of that), and she’s far calmer and more rational. The fact they aren’t the same person is something I think needs to be emphasized, because I know there are some people who consider them the same character.

In the first chapter, she’s relatively minor, keeping to herself. The moment she first starts to stand out is at the party, where she offers to stand guard with Monomi, and after the Imposter is murdered, where she uses her knowledge of video games to suggest keeping watch at the crime scene. She’s useful throughout the trial, but her big moment comes around the time Nagito reveals himself to not be your “ally character” like you’d thought, which I think is good timing. She makes the deduction that the ‘killer’ found their way to the table using the lamp cord, which stops everyone from giving up and moves the case forward.

After this, she becomes more important during the chapters—she’s Hajime’s primary investigation partner in Chapter 2, she helps him investigate the hospital in Chapter 3, she puts together what she thinks is a map of the Funhouse in Chapter 4, she stops Hajime from going into the Final Dead Room in that same chapter, and she’s a trial-point-getter up until her death. Before I cover that, I’m going to cover something else—her personality, or why calling her a Mary Sue is just using a stupid blanket term that doesn’t even make sense—*deep breath*

AI Chiaki is strange. If you’ve heard the term ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’, she’s like that, except instead of drawing the protagonist in with her strangeness, she irritates him. She’s either falling asleep when they investigate a new area, or she’s got her head in the clouds. And when she wants people to go somewhere, like to or from the ruins in Chapter 2, she gets a little forceful about making sure they go to that place. In the first two chapters, Hajime makes several inward comments about how annoying or pushy she is. Even after he’s warmed to her, he still gets baffled by her train of thought, sometimes wondering, “what even is this conversation?” She’s also kind of childish, which makes sense since she hasn’t been alive very long—during the Chapter 3 investigation, she tries to pull a prank on Hajime by pretending she wants him to gouge his eyes out before turning on the light in a room, because it’d be embarrassing if he “saw”. It’s like something in a bad anime, and it falls flat on its face. The writing and drawings in her diary are sloppy and crude, more akin to what you’d see from a pre-schooler than a teenage girl. This quirkiness is endearing on the surface, but in-universe, it’s not.

Her Free-Time Events also show that she lacks a lot of basic knowledge about the world, like what Girls’ Day is or where milk comes from, and mentions the flaw tied back to that strangeness—she doesn’t get dating sims. Or, to be more serious, she doesn’t get people. In her words, she’s not good at games where she has to maintain relationships and guess what characters are feeling. She can be good at the latter (which I’ll mention below), but she also makes her share of misses (as mentioned above) and isn’t the greatest at knowing when to share her guesses. She’s nervous about how people will react when she does something, and feels she’s best standing on the sidelines. This is why she doesn’t take a leadership role except in trials—the Imposter tries first, so she doesn’t feel it necessary, and after he dies the group just…splinters. You’ve got Kazuichi and Nekomaru tying up Nagito, Akane running off to fight Monokuma, Fuyuhiko sulking on his own, Hiyoko bullying Mikan, they’re a mess. She’s good at games dealing with calculations, so she can handle the trials, but she doesn’t feel like she can handle her classmates, so she doesn’t try—and this ties back to her human counterpart well. Yes, human!Chiaki became class rep, but only after being pushed to by Chisa. Without that push, she would have stayed on her own, like AI Chiaki does. It’s a nice little character trait that got strengthened by the anime, in my opinion.

So she’s kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, except her strangeness isn’t what makes Hajime like and rely on her more—it’s the moments where she’s kind and sensible. Like her human counterpart, she has a strong moral compass, and whenever she displays it, that’s when Hajime’s impressed. She’s usually compassionate towards the murderers and even jerks like Hiyoko or pre-development Fuyuhiko. She’s insightful, if a bit insensitive, like when she suggests the reason Fuyuhiko lived isn’t because of luck, but because Peko deliberately sacrificed herself for him, while Fuyuhiko is in the room and feeling depressed that is Peko is dead. Surprise, surprise, being reminded that Peko died for him makes his mood take a dive and he just wants to be left alone. She also has a very firm stance on killing: it’s wrong.

Throughout the game, AI Chiaki makes declarations that she hates the murders and won’t allow it to happen, but she frequently fails to accomplish this. In Chapter 1, she stands guard, but she’s at the completely wrong area to stop a murder (and even if she were in the cabin, she probably couldn’t have stopped it anyway). In Chapter 2, she plays the game, but doesn’t get the special prize before Fuyuhiko. In Chapter 3, she tries to find a cure for the despair disease with everyone else, but a murder happens first. In Chapter 4, there’s nothing to be done except starve to death. Her efforts are either wasted or not good enough.

Chapter 5 is the first time where she really could have made a difference—the conflict of that chapter is that Nagito is seeking the Future Foundation ‘traitor’, which is her, and takes increasingly drastic measures to do so. First by blowing up the hotel, then by threatening to blow up an island, and finally by masterminding his own death to get everyone but the traitor executed. As Chiaki herself muses in the final trial, if the traitor had revealed themselves, maybe Nagito wouldn’t have gone so far…except she literally couldn’t, because it was against her programming. When she was able to earlier help, her actions weren’t enough to prevent a killing; now that her actions could have prevented it, she is unable to do them. All she can do is drop a butt-ton of hints that she’s the traitor, forcing Hajime to oust her in order to save everyone else.

And there’s the crux. For all her declarations, all her tries, she’s powerless. Her programming, her very nature, makes her powerless. She could break it enough to think that she wanted to save everyone, and that’s incredible, but she needed the others’ help to complete her sacrifice. If Hajime hadn’t gone along with her, or if her diary hadn’t been found to prove she was the traitor, would she have been able to convince them anyway? We don’t know. What we do know is that her thinking freely is a miracle, yet she was still bound by her coding.

Her execution probably highlights the differences between her and her human counterpart the best—while human!Chiaki is crying, gasping in pain, and screaming, AI Chiaki keeps a relatively blank face all throughout. She doesn’t panic or flinch when the huge tank is bearing down on her, nor when Tetris blocks are falling all around her. She tries to escape, but when she has nowhere to run, she accepts it. She goes to her death willingly and with a smile, whereas human!Chiaki had a more, well, human reaction of not wanting to die.

Finally, AI Chiaki makes an appearance to Hajime in the last trial, when he’s spiraling into despair and doubt over all the pressure being placed on him. She delivers a speech about how he’s not part of the game and can make his own future, while reassuring him that she knows he’s scared and that she will never disappear so long as they keep moving forward. She also acts more like her human counterpart here, reciting words human Chiaki told Izuru (“If you just do it, things will work out okay!”) and referencing that she knew him in the past. The scene is pretty ambiguous about whether she’s really there or just Hajime’s hallucination/memories, and I think it’s the better for it, honestly. However, some small part of her is able to help him defeat AI Junko, as shown by her declaring “no, that’s wrong!” in time with him, and she answers his thanks (after he’s gone, of course) with a declaration that she’ll always be watching them…from somewhere. It’s a poignant moment made more poignant when you compare it to last chapter; then, who and what she was—a traitor and an AI—stopped her from preventing a disaster, and it was only with Hajime’s help that she was able to successfully sacrifice herself. Here, who and what she is—Chiaki Nanami, Hajime’s emotional support/love interest/friend/potential ghost or hallucination—is what enables her to successfully prevent a disaster, and she’s able to lift Hajime up on her own.

She doesn’t show up in Side:Hope for more than a brief moment, and fun fact, it’s still ambiguous if she’s really there and if Hajime can see her or not—his dialogue is written in a way that could be construed as him talking to himself. Her brief screentime has her explaining what I explained at the beginning—that she’s an AI who took on Chiaki’s form from their memories—and that this is the future she gave her life for. She then fades away with a smile as Hajime rejoins the rest of the class.

Conclusion:

Frankly, I think there’s a lot to love about Chiaki. She’s a socially-awkward gamer, which is something a lot of us either like (being gamers) or can relate to. She has an arc about growing from that loner to someone who can be counted on. She’s a sweetheart who does her best to help her friends succeed; sometimes that isn’t enough, like DR3 Chiaki, and sometimes she needs help herself, like AI Chiaki, but she doesn’t let it stop her from still trying. There are stumbles in DR3 Chiaki’s writing, but I still believe she’s a good character, and that both she and her AI counterpart have nice relationships with Hajime and Class 77. They’re great girls, and I hope this analysis helped fans remember what we love about Chiaki beyond “she’s my waifu”.

#chiaki nanami #sdr2 #dangan ronpa 3 #meta #my meta #analysis #my eyes really hurt

44 notes · View notes

courage-a-word-of-justice · 5 years

Text

Zombieland Saga 7 - 8 | Merc Storia 6 | SSSS.Gridman 7 | Double Decker! 9 | Golden Kamuy 19

Zombieland Saga 7

As much as I worry about Junko…where’s Ai?

Parts of the OP have changed since I last paid attention to it, huh? Now there’s a segment where all the zombified (i.e. undead) versions of the girls appear. Then there’s a new bit where you see Romero looking at Kotaro, wagging his tail. Then there’s a bit with the zombie-idol girls together in an AKB48 sort of pose in a 70s-style room…I think that’s all the new stuff, really.

Come to think of it, last time the episode was Datte Sentimental Saga, this time the episode is Keredo Zombiemental Saga. Both somehow become “Because It’s [fill in blank with appropriate word] Saga”.

I’ve noticed a pattern – every idol show I watch causes me a considerable amount of stress as I worry about whether the characters will be able to deal with their problems. It’s nice that they develop their characters so much, but it’s bad for me…

I feel like hearing Miyano’s delivery over the lines “Kicky blammo!” kind of softenend the funniness factor of the line. (i.e. It was funnier when I had the volume off.) But his mouth-wide-open face is funny.

I wonder…as touching as it is to have Kotaro give this pep speech, it almost seems out of character for him. Maybe it might’ve been better to have Junko come to the realisation herself, rather than have something to grow mushrooms over? But that’s just the opinion of someone who thinks ranty Kotaro is how he is 100% of the time. I’m also fine with more sensitive Kotaro, I just wish I could’ve seen that side when he was dealing with just Sakura.

So Ai didn’t die at Saga Rock…hmm. I take my words from the previous episode back.

Truck-kun Strikes Back, this show should be called. Truck-kun Strikes Back.

I just noticed that’s the Cygames building…and Cygames is a sponsor of Zombieland Saga.

Well…we’re back with the CGI it seems. It’s not entirely bad, but could be a lot worse.

Merc Storia 6

Well…I think this Halloween special is a few weeks too late…

This stuff about carrying a rock…just make Bright Stone necklaces. That way you free up your hands!

Cosette? Like Les Miserables?!

Interestingly, in stories like this, parents always get pulled into the dreamland after their kids do (see Junkers Come Here for another example).

Tatsuhisa Suzuki? Takehito Koyasu? Man, I so didn’t pay attention to the voices this episode…

SSSS.Gridman 7

RIP Special Dog…round 2.

“I think nothing.” – See, Samurai Calibur is best boi!

Why does Alexis meeting Yuuta look like a Meeting with the Parents (y’know, one of those meeting you have with a girlfriend’s parents to see if the boyfriend is suitable for their little darling)?

This pointy thing in the air reminds me of Eva…like an Angel, y’know?

I think the pause for Vit’s reaction went a little too long…I thought my video was glitching, but reacted slightly too late to pause it.

The blood of Anti was way too orange…but I guess that’s better than having red blood which makes people puke…and gets the BPO to complain, to boot…

Update: The missile movements looked familiar…that’s because they were an Itano Circus (which is the same as the Macross Missile Massacre I believe I mentioned in a previous episode).

Update 2: I just watched the source short and there was a bit of animation copied from there! The bit where the bike rattles in its bindings!

Double Decker! 9

(something along the lines of “you’re just going to use the view hack to peep on us, right?”) - Owwch, I can feel the Apple Bieber burn from here!...But why does Sophie slur her words slightly so that they come out as “Twavis” etc….?

Randomly, Doug has a moustache! Wahaha…sorry, this isn’t very informative, huh? I only have two sets of reactions: the insightful ones which have all my knowledge behind them, or the reactive ones which don’t amount to much…

I find it interesting Kirill says “Ore ga idea ga aru”. Why? Because 1) Kirill uses “ore”, likely as a way to assert his masculinity even with his feminine-looking face and 2) there is a kanji for “idea” (teian), but he uses the katakana version, likely to indicate how young he is in comparison to (most of) the other investigators (he’s 20 remember). Or alternatively, he’s meant to be speaking English. Or both those reasons.

Well, that’s (the rollerskate getaway) a getaway I thought I’d never see in a cop show…it looks almost as if it would work better in Cardcaptor Sakura than here! (I’m laughing, but also engrossed in the show, don’t worry.)

I still can’t tell what the lyrics are to Buntline Special…but if I’m not mistaken, some of the initial lyrics are “Don’t give a s*** now”. Or…I could’ve just misheard that. We won’t know until official lyrics are out, y’know?

Oh dear, they’re going into biology territory next time! Time for my biology contact to strut their stuff! (See WordPress for more on that...the info I’m talking about is in one of the roundups.)

Golden Kamuy 19

I find it interesting that only now Sugimoto is exploring the nature of greed…both the living and the dead’s meaning of it.

As much as I find it entertaining that Koito seems to be getting flustered (in what way? *raises eyebrows*) about Tsurumi praising him…why does the 7th always seem to opt for making the skins they get into shirts? I thought that stuff was over after Edogai died and the earless twin got his ear made into a thing he wears on his head…

Monkfish.

Once again…a character I thought was “pure” (in the context of this series anyway) turns out to have been a killer since he was young. For some reason, Ogata is popular with the ladies in Japan though…I don’t quite get it myself, but hey. What can I do for stats outside my control?

Apparently the ED visual, where Asirpa listens to Sugimoto’s heartbeat, was Noda-sensei’s idea.

Zombieland Saga 8

Ooh, I’ve read enough spoilers about Lily to only want to know the portrayal of how it goes down at this point…

I just realised the onsen was called Ureshino Onsen = ureshii no onsen (happy onsen, i.e. an onsen that brings/gives happiness).

Franchouchou ad for Drive-In Tori on the TV, I see…

Even if I don’t know the lyrics of the OP all that much, I definitely know when to join in with a SA-GAAAAAAAAAAA! at the end, right? That OP’s grown on me, but it’s nowhere near my favourite.

Kyoseki Park. It literally means “giant rock park”, so that’s where the boulders come from.

Have you noticed Kotaro isn’t actually blowing into the shell and he’s verbalising the noise he thinks will come out of the shell? That’s a silly touch, but one I appreciate.

A yak…? Oh right, a yakuza!

I love the rolling sobat so much, I found it again on Reddit!

Lily actually uses the word “Pappy”, which is uncommon for Japan…they tend to use “dad”, “father” or “papa” instead.

Tiny Kotaro really sells that first eyecatch.

Nyoki is the sound effect of something popping out of the earth. It’s the same for mushrooms, y’know. I love mushrooms. (Even Tae’s going nyoki…haha!)

When the SFX went “twang”, I thought that was the end of that, but Kotaro is actually holding an instrument to make his own SFX again! Genius, man, you’re an absolute genius!

I’m sorry for laughing during a dramatic moment, but if Takeo’s face can be covered by his hand like that…he has darned Yaoi Hands! Hahaha! Okay, I’m sorry. Carry on.

I remember reading on the official site Lily died in 2011, so…more recent than Sakura. So a TV-hating man like him would be pretty obvious in a day and age like that.

Aw…I shed a tear or two for Lily, too. Update: Or 10. I’m not crying. You’re crying…

Wait, does this mean Kotaro is also a lyricist? And/or a songwriter? That is a man of many talents!...Aaaaaaaaaaand now I need a tissue box. Brb.

Oh wow, that next episode title has a lotta words! I thought it was going to be about Yuugiri, but it could be about Saki…hmm…or anyone we haven’t seen in the spotlight yet. Who knows? Only those who watch it or make it! Oh, now that I’ve watched it through, it does seem to be about Saki!

#simulcast commentary #zombieland saga #merc storia #merc storia: the apathetic boy and the girl in a bottle #double decker #double decker! doug and kirill #golden kamuy #SSSS.Gridman #Chesarka watches ZLS #Chesarka watches Merc Storia #Chesarka watches Double Decker!#Chesarka watches GK #Chesarka watches SSSS.Gridman

1 note · View note

kimmysfandomblog · 6 years

Note

Ohh, 6, 9, 11, 19 and 25. For all the games, but if it's too hard to pick, you can have one by game :p

Thank you, Serahne!!! ^ v ^

From here: https://kimmysfandomblog.tumblr.com/post/170470327942/lafumiko-hi-people-i-was-searching-for-a-good

Spoilers for V3, so these are under the cut!

6. Favorite plot twist?

DR1: Gosh, it’s a tie between Sayaka being the one killed and even planning to kill to escape the game and Naegi escaping execution!!! Bot of them realy threw me for a loop! I will say that discovering Sayaka was murdered left the greater impact, though, and was the reason I stuck to Danganronpa early on. It blew my mind at the time!

DR2: Hajime being Izuru/the “mastermind” was the most shocking thing to me! I really wasn’t expecting that??? I really came to love Hajime a lot by this point, and was feeling incredibly sorry for him already. When we were exploring the school for the last trial’s investigation and the Hope Cultivation Plan came up, I kinda figured it out. I don’t think I connected the dots completely though, ahaha. Also, just the fact that all of them were evil and responsible for spreading Despair worldwide was such a great plot twist, in my opinion!

DRAE: There weren’t many plot twists in this game, but I guess the most shocking was that Monaca was not an invalid. Like, she was pretty obviously the one running the show, and she was obsessed with Junko, but her faking being handicapped to control both her family and friends for sympathy and to get what she wanted was a genius plan on her part!

V3: I honestly didn’t like them all that much, especially Kaede not being the protag. The ending one where Tsumugi reveals everything is a lie (literally) wasn’t bad or good in my opinion. Like, I wasn’t necessarily disappointed by the ending like I thought I would be (that one was spoiled even before the game released in Japan because I couldn’t blacklist on PC and thought going through Hajime’s tag would be okay :( Damn you, dataminers!!!), I kinda just accepted that this was it. Also the trio being alive was not an exciting plot twist in the least (I love you Himiko and Maki, but your survival kinda makes me go ehhh with how the game ended). I guess that only leaves Kaito being ill and dying before his execution killed him as my favorite! I really liked how that last execution (not counting Danganronpa’s execution) was the reverse of the very first execution we see (Jin Kirigiri’s), and I already loved Kaito. It was nice that Kaito’s final goodbye was a middle finger to Danganronpa’s theme of killing the blackened with an over-the-top execution!

9. Favorite Ultimate Talent?

These are all very tough decisions…

DR1: Ultimate Biker Gang Leader! I honestly would never expect such a talent to exist, and I gotta wonder how HPA was able to gather data for that talent, hahaha. It helps that I found Mondo endearing even if he swears a bit and reacts with violence. He hast a golden heart full of regrets, and I liked his backstory! Also the talent itself is just… really cool.

DR2: Ok, so this is kinda weird, but Ultimate Lucky Student. Makoto was a totally different kind of Ultimate Lucky Student than Komaeda’s, where all-in-all he is an average guy and his luck only affects him sometimes. While that is an interesting talent, it’s not as interesting as Komaeda’s. Komaeda is probably the truest definition of Ultimate Luckster! His luck is tragic. It takes away any personal relationships and turns it into materialistic fortune. It is so powerful it warped Komaeda and his view of the world drastically. Gosh, it is very interesting and gets me wondering what could possibly happen around Komaeda because of his luck in different situations and with different people. Truly, a fascinating talent that I wouldn’t bestow on anyone!

DRAE: There were only a few people with an Ultimate Talent here, haha. I liked that Kotoko was the Ultimate Li’l Drama who actually will not perform for anyone (understandably) and the Fighter of the Group! If that counts, haha. Otherwise we only have Byakuya, Fukawa/Syo, Makoto, and Komaeda (and technically Izuru but he is on the screen for, like, 5 seconds and has every talent, so that would be boring anyways). If I had to choose between the four talents without Komaeda repeated, I think the most interesting would be Syo’s Ultimate Murderous Fiend! It’s really interesting to me that she’s a split personality of Toko. I kinda have to wonder how Toko can get exhausted easily, but Syo can slash and dash, even hurling herself several feet in the air, without breaking a sweat!

V3: It is a tie between Ultimate Anthropolgist and Ultimate Mage Magician! Unlike with the previous installments of the series, I was able to just see the talents before knowing the characters, though, so Ultimate Magician was the one that really caught my eye since I’m obsessed with Fantasy AUs, especially of the RPG kind with that class system! I’ve also always been really fasinated by Magic and magicians in general, haha. After playing the game, though, Kiyo really sold me on the Ultimate Anthropologist talent! I was a Cognitive Science major in the school within the university that focuses on the humanities, so not only am I very interested in human cognitive thinking as individuals and as a group, but I took a lot of history and some anthropology courses. I really nerded out with Kiyo and Shuichi during those FTEs! History/Folklore is truly fascinating!

11. A character you’d revive?

Alright, this is a tough one for some of these because most of the ones I liked who died died “well,” as in their story was finished and satisfying. I’d surely love to see them alive again, true, but if we are going by canon and I could only bring back one, then it almost feels cheap. Kinda like “DR3 cheap.” That makes most of these characters not my favorites, but ones i felt deserve a second chance/should have survived.

DR1: Ishimaru. He isn’t my favorite character (I’m honestly gonna place him in the “he’s ok!” range), but he clearly didn’t have any satisfying development. You can’t get FTEs from his Kiyondo form, and he dies having done very little as Kiyondo other then some inconvenience regarding Alter Ego! It would probably be super interesting to see what he would do in later chapters, and if he ever snaps out of it in the chapters after.

DR2 (assuming the DR3 anime never happened): Saionji died for nothing, let’s be real here, lol. She was just barely going to reform herself and become a better person, and then she dies, offscreen, on accident. A friend also helped me realize that we never come across her murder weapon. I think that what would have been the best solution was not having a double murder. Plus, it would make it interesting to see whether she is able to forgive Kuzuryuu at all or not, how that affects the groups trust in each other in later parts of the game (since it is really hard to get close to her since she doesn’t trust people easily), and especially her reaction to being Ultimate Despair, as well as her growth spurt.

DRAE: Chihiro’s dad Taichi. He and Yuta died for shock, but how sad would it be if he was alive and found out his son was killed? And that his son’s legacy, Alter Ego, survived? Man, what a tragedy! It would have been nice to see him tag along with Toko and Komaru to the adult’s base and maybe try to hack into devices, or slowly give upgrades to Komaru making her life a little easier. He could also join Togami and leave Towa City. He’d be an incredible asset to Future Foundation, but he would either refuse out of grief, or he’d take time to warm up to the idea, before accepting and becoming the head of any project regarding the Neo World Program/Alter Ego Chihiro, working closely with Miaya, and keeping close to those who had been Chihiro’s friends.

V3: hmmmm, this one I don’t know for sure. It’s between Hoshi, Miu, Kiibo, and… this may surprise you, but Angie as well.

*** Angie Negativity, you can skip it ***

I hate Angie, but she honestly needs the story development. She got the most abrupt ending, another offscreen death, and no resolution. Honestly speaking, if she had a better story and some form of redemption/questioning of her actions, I would like her a lot more. She just never learned that what she did was wrong, and unlike in her FTEs, telling her “no” made her stick more to her own opinion. Like, initially I didn’t like Celeste in CH3, but I actually grew to like her because she had that backstory that made her want to be more than she was, and she anyways accepted her death in the end without being spiteful and ruining the secret of Alter Ego, even giving the others a hint of where she kept him. She was leagues a better character than Angie. Angie, I was starting to kinda accept her after finishing her FTEs when I was still in CH2 (even if I hate the racial stereotypes, what with orgies, sacrifices, etc). She really made me mad when she refused to listen to anyone else and manipulated others to agree with her (I have an extremely soft spot for Himiko and Gonta, so my bias didn’t help her at all). I’ll give her that she’s really sly and a lot smarter than she tries to let on, but her cutesy personality combined with manipulation to convert to a religion, suggested by light brainwashing using her paintings (and the fact the others were converted overnight), all so that she can get whatever she wants, and then not seeing any kind of downfall: no backlash or consequences because of what she did? It makes me mad. I’m sorry. I hate her and yet, she is one of the people I’d revive, hahaha. Geez, I honestly tried to like her despite my initial feelings I would dislike her, lol.

*** End of Angie Negativity ***

Kiibo dying while the other three survived is something that rubs me the wrong way since he almost never got respect until he was destroying the school, even when he was one of the few character that were actually helpful during the trials. Honestly, if the others survived, which, given the ending, was kinda pointless, then him surviving as well wouldn’t detract from the impact. Seriously, if anyone deserved to survive, it would be him or Maki.

As for Miu, her death felt like a cop out, for some reason. I can’t explain it exactly… I know that her being killed was because they needed her to go after Kokichi, so that they could get him to trick Gonta to kill her, but it feels wrong somehow? Like there was unfinished business? She had the electrohammers, electrobombs, a remote control, and a bug catcher, her more amazing inventions, made after her death. All her upgrades to Kiibo were very useful, but not as amazing. A drone and the camera set up are really simple, too. Her working with Kokichi on these amazing inventions feels like a plothole instead of plausible. It would be really nice to see her survive since, despite being vulgar, she’s really entertaining! And I wonder how she’d react to being told she wasn’t real, nor was she actually a genius inventor.

And I can’t forget Hoshi! He died horribly for no reason. Kirumi could have bashed him in the head with a tennis racket, or against the wall or something, after she knocked him out. There was no need to pin the blame on anyone. The second trial p*ssed me off so much because it was unnecessarily convoluted and cruel for no reason and anyways made no sense. My heart truly goes out for Hoshi. He had a horrible life! He was imprisoned for killing the Mafiai, was a true hero, and I wish he could have learned that he could find something to live for.

So yeah, V3 was the hardest for me this question, hahaha. I honestly can’t choose between these four. BIG SIGH

If this was bot the answer you were hoping for and you just wanted to get a list of my faves who dued, it would go like this: Sakura, Komaeda, Taichi, and Kaito! Priority goes to Sakura since Ko lives post-canon, hahaha

19. Favorite Free Time Events

DR1: Alright, honestly I need to actually play this game myself. I’ve only seen LPs of the game, and the anime does not have FTEs. The only FTEs I recall are Sayaka’s, Chihiro’s, Ishimaru’s, Kyoko’s, Sakura’s, and Asahina’s. I don’t think I can really say which is my favorite, but I really like Sakura’s and Kyoko’s. I just… can’t remember most of their backstories ^^

DR2: DR2 had too many good FTEs. Komaeda’s are probably the ones I liked the most, though? I didn’t care much for Komaeda initially. He was an interesting character, and I didn’t hate him (I was very neutral). I felt like there was more to him, so when I played the game myself after abandoning the LP I was watching, I went after him first and it changed my mind completely! I like it when a character’s background is explained and matches consequences and actions the character makes during the main story, and DR2 did this really well for my taste. Komaeda’s helped explain everything and made him a sympathetic character and helped me to understand him. Of course, it also sparked the Koma/Hina shipping, hahaha. If I had to come up with a runner up, it would be Souda’s for a similar reason! His also ties really well to the main story, especially with not being able to finish his FTEs until like after CH4, after he is done doubting Hajime.

V3: I’m stuck between Kiyo and Maki’s. Kiyo’s had more of an impact on me, though, because it flipped my initial suspicion I would hate him. Him being fascinated with anthropology and teaching Shuichi about it made me seriously love him as a character even though I was sure at the time I would hate him since I was spoiled about the incest plot twist. Maki’s was really well explained and tied nicely to the game’s story. She is kinda like Komaeda, in a way, hahaha. She had a tragic backstory because of her talent, been through hell, lost someone very precious to her, and her talent makes her actively try to avoid people and trust them. And, like I said before, I like FTEs that help explain why a character reacts the way they do (although in her case, a small part of her FTEs do land up in the main story, so I say they were slightly less effective, but tied better to the story)

DRAE doesn’t have FTEs, but there are explained backstories of the kids, and I loved Nagisa. His was the most relatable, with all of that pressure to succeed, never feeling good enough.

25. Saddest Death

DR1: 100% Sakura’s!!! She’s a real gem of a character, and I wish Danganronpa had more female characters that were like her! Anyways, she was so interesting, and not just for how she looks or her talent, but that she was the traitor torn by family duty and her loyalty to her friends. She thought that the best way to end this killing game was by sacrificing herself so that the group would not be split. She was so selfless and loved so much, yet she was treated horribly in her last hours because Monokuma made sure to make her as disliked as possible. And then he spits on her death further by stealing her last letter and will so he could use Hina to make the trial more interesting. My heart goes out to her more than anyone in DR1.

DR2: My gut instinct was to say “Komaeda” or “Nanami”, but truth be told, CH2 wrecked me! Peko’s execution really got to me because, firstly, I never suspected her, and secondly, her backstory with Fuyuhiko and the fact she killed and died to save him made the execution 10 times worse to endure! I hadn’t seen her FTE’s all the way through the first time, but I saw most of them and while she hadn’t been a favorite, she had a cute personality! I really did like her!. What made her death worse was Fuyuhiko’s reaction and him trying to intervene. I’m getting shills remembering it ^^;

DRAE: Most probably Taichi! Though it is hard to choose between him and Yuta, Taichi’s was the one that was most tragic, because up to his dying breath he was so excited to be able to have the chance to meet his son again. I mean, even if he did survive, his son would still be dead, but somehow it just felt worse than Yuta’s since we seemed to get to know Taichi better (he worked at Towa for the company, we talked to him more and his love for his son).

V3: Another hard one, and it is between Kaede, Hoshi, and Gonta… I feel like none of these three should have died, or at least for Gonta and Hoshi, not the way that they did. Gonta’s was the one I felt the most emotional over leading up to his death because of the present feeling of how Kokichi betrayed him and the feeling of how it wasn’t even his fault, really. Kaede’s I felt the angriest at because she was 100 times a better protag than Shuichi and I loved her. It doesn’t help that her death was especially tragic and her execution was gruesome (not that Gonta’s wasn’t gruesome, but it was too weird for me to feel much). Hoshi’s I felt the saddest over during the trial because of just how not-fair this was. I don’t even hate Kirumi, I really hate the writers for the trial because of all the pointless and illogical parts of the case and how Hoshi was murdered, but I ranted enough about it.

#thank you for the ask serahne!!!#ask meme #mehere #character hate #serahne

3 notes · View notes

oumakokichi · 7 years

Note

Do you think Tsumugi was anywhere near as smart as Ouma or did she just have the advantage of blindsiding him? Even in his final moments, he didn't seem to suspect her any more than any of the others. Atleast that we get to see.

Someone asked me a somewhat similar question awhile back andput it in really good terms. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it wassomething about how if Ouma is a chessmaster (and I do think he is, given allthe evidence), then Tsumugi is an opportunist. I still think they really nailedit: opportunist is a perfect word forher.

If I had to compare how smart they both are in terms of justintellect? Ouma would probably be smarter. Considering he definitely seems tohave some variation of SHSL Analysis, his predictive and analytical abilitynearly rival Junko’s and Kamukura’s. Even taking into account the fact that hereally is genuinely childish and even klutzy sometimes, he still seems… well,like a genius.

Looking objectively at his 300-or-so page script which hadmulti-branching routes, predicted nearly all of his classmates’ behavior to aT, and was written in the span of 2 hours, he wasn’t “just smart.” That sort ofthing wouldn’t be possible for anyone unless they had some kind of talent orability that correlated to it directly. There are also the diagrams in hisroom, which he commissioned Miu to make. While Miu’s ability to actually inventthem is more than impressive, Ouma seems to be the one who actually thoughtthem up and designed them, which is absolutely astounding.

Assuming that he was a genius of some kind also explains whysometimes he seems like he has to rewind himself and put himself a few stepsback, like in Chapter 4 when he literally can’t understand why they’d think he’sthe culprit. The answer is clear to him, since he already knows the full factsabout the case, and everyone else’s remarks must’ve felt like the trial wasjust dragging on so slowly. When you’re haughty and self-confident like Ouma,feeling like the smartest person in the room means everyone else seems to begoing so slow. Sometimes he reallydoes seem taken aback before he manages to backtrack a bit and look at the casefrom their perspective, even though they’re all still stuck on the wronganswer.

By contrast, Tsumugi doesn’t seem to have these nearlysuperhuman abilities. She’s smart—verysmart, actually. But her smarts still feel within the realm of humanpossibilities, rather than her being on an entirely different level from anyoneelse. If I had to think of a character who she’s probably equal with in termsof intellect, Komaeda might be a good choice (it’s kind of hilarious that oneof her FTEs has her specifically hating on people who use fictional charactersas “stepping stones” to get famous). Both of them are incredibly smart,arguably smarter than a lot of the rest of their classmates. But they’re stillultimately human, and circumstances can and do catch them off guard prettyregularly.

Komaeda simply allows his luck to make up for the holes inhis plans, while Tsumugi doesn’t try to cover the holes in the first place. Asan opportunist, she’s capable of rewriting entirely new scenarios, or claimingcredit for things that she never actually planned in the first place. Thisallows both of them to take chances and risks in a way that characters likeOuma, Junko, and Kamukura rarely do. The former are genuine risk-takers whoknow they’re smart enough to handle themselves in the long run. The latter(particularly Ouma and Junko) might act as if they take risks, but very rarelydo. Instead they leave as little to chance as possible, relying instead ontheir own huge brains and analytical abilities.

As you said, Tsumugi’s best and strongest advantage oversomeone like Ouma was her ability to blindside him at all. And make no mistake,this ability to fly under the radar is something she’s very well aware of, justas Komaeda is aware of his own luck and the fact that it’ll typically makethings swing in his favor. She mentions it outright in her FTEs, citing exampleslike hopping a subway or going to the movies without paying for it because noone would notice her anyway. It’s no coincidence that she talks about how plain(地味)she is almost once per line of dialogue: if anything, she wants to drill intopeople’s heads exactly how unnoticeable and boring she is so that they won’treally pay her much mind.

This plainness of hers works really, really well againstsomeone like Ouma. Ouma is an intentional subversion of Junko in many ways, butit’s true that they still share certain parallels—including their need for thespotlight. Ouma wants things to be “fun” and “interesting” and “exiting” at alltimes. He hates boredom (yet another thing he has in common with characters whohave SHSL Analysis). Therefore, he tries to avoid it at all costs. Someone likeTsumugi who seems to be the embodiment ofboredom just put him off entirely. I’m not even entirely sure if he consciouslydismissed the idea that she was the ringleader, or if it was more of asubconscious aversion.

Either way, I think he was unable to close in on herspecifically because he, to some degree, was using chessboard thinking.Chessboard thinking is a type of game theory in which you try to predict youropponent’s next move(s) by putting yourself in their shoes. It has itsadvantages, but obviously it only works best if you can actually predict youropponent. Otherwise you make mistaken assumptions. And you’re always going tobe somewhat biased, as you’re thinking with your own logic, rather than theirs.

By thinking “what would I do if I were the ringleader?” Oumamade the mistake of thinking that the ringleader would act like himself. He fitthe role of “evil villain” so perfectly because he was playing a part, and heexpected the real ringleader to mostly act the same—but that assumption waswrong from the beginning. He and Tsumugi were on completely differentwavelengths the whole time, and he never, I think, predicted that theringleader could be someone so… absolutely boring.

Something I’ve always felt is ironic is that I think Oumaprobably could’ve predicted a mastermind like Junko far better than he could aringleader like Tsumugi. Kirigiri did it before him, after all, and he andKirigiri are more than paralleled on several occasions. His and Junko’s similarmindsets would make them a formidable match against each other (though it’sanyone’s guess who would actually win a debate between them, since Junko hasabsolutely no conscience while Ouma is deeply empathetic). But since he wassearching for Tsumugi all the time, he wasn’t ever able to realize what wasright in front of his face.

This really did allow her to blindside him completely, as heremarks bitterly in his talk with Momota in Chapter 5 once he’s explaining hisplan. He realizes quickly that the ringleader must’ve manipulated Maki as apawn into kickstarting the killing game into action again, but has no idea how they actually did so. Because heshut himself up in the machinery bay with no way to maneuver around the schoolor investigate for himself, he allowed holes in his defenses for the firsttime, and Tsumugi took advantage of it spectacularly.

She might not be a genius herself, but she’s plenty cunningand quick on her feet. Her ability to revise her own scenarios, and to makethese huge, sweeping claims for things with no way to prove that she didn’tactually do them, means that she can seem a lot more capable than she actuallyis. Even when she’s clearly human and fallible, and when things definitely don’tgo according to her plan (such as when Saihara stops wearing his hat, when sherealizes Momota was sick in Chapter 5, etc.) she can bounce back quick enoughthat it’s near impossible to prove she ever messed up at all.

If Ouma is absolutely brilliant, then I’d say Tsumugi is…devious. She’s more than capable of compensating for her lack of genius throughher sheer dedication to her goals, as well as the fact that she doesn’t alwaysnecessarily play fair. While Ouma was mostly right in assuming that she had tofollow the rules of the killing game because it was being broadcast, he failedto account for the fact that she already had broken the rules long before herstatus as the ringleader was exposed. As long as she can get away with it, she’sabsolutely the type of person to cheat in a game—and her plainness makes itvery hard to notice she’s cheating at all, usually.

This is just my take on it, anyway. The differences in theirway of thinking are honestly fascinating, so I really love getting to talk aboutthe both of them. Ouma is complex in his moral ambiguity and in how much healludes to the themes of the game, but Tsumugi is also complex in herhollow-ness, and how terrifyingly effective she is as an antagonist. Thank youfor giving me a chance to talk about them both!

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #tsumugi shirogane #kokichi ouma #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #zekefreek

130 notes · View notes

askthedespairkids · 7 years

Text

Promises

THIS TAKES PLACE AFTER THE PARTY

Karma: *They wander through the halls, alcohol in hand, when they come across their friend* SLY! SLYYYYYYYY!

Sly: ….Hello

Karma: *they eagerly hold out the alcohol* I brought this for you.

Sly: I don’t want it.

Karma: Lame. I’ll drink it myself then.

Sly: Aren’t you drunk enough already?

Karma: I’m not drunk in the slightest, homeslice. I’m fine. _(:3 」∠)_

Sly: I don’t think your fine but whatever. *He begins to walk past Karma*

Karma: *they quickly grab his arm and their face darkens* We’re not done yet.

Sly: What do you want?

Karma: You’ve spent a lot of time with Orochi lately. And if I know Orochi, it’s likely he let some things… slip. Whether about myself, or things I’ve done. And I can feel a hint of hostility from you. Sly… I consider us good friends. Remember our group thing? You can talk to me. Confront me. Ask me. Just stop silently judging me.

Sly: We’re good friends huh?

Karma: I like to think so.

Sly: If that’s the case, you won’t mind answering my questions now will you?

Karma: Ask away. I’ll try to be as detailed as I am able.

Sly: We’ll start simple. Why does Kamisaka call you “they” instead of she now?

Karma: I… dammit Orochi. I get he was trying to be considerate but he should have… *they sigh* Listen. Orochi and Kyoji are the only people who know what I’m about to tell you. And I probably wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t for the fact I can’t think straight. Still doesn’t mean I’m drunk. Just… you have to keep this to yourself, okay?

Sly: Fine.

Karma: From what I know, I’m intersex. Male and female. Kyoji however, seemed to think it’s something different. He said he would do an examination once we were all here. Should probably wait till he’s sober though. I told Orochi almost by accident. It just happened. I told Kyoji because he’s not only a good friend, but a doctor. Soooooo yeah. That’s about it.

Sly: You told Kamisaka by accident?

Karma: We were gonna head out to look for supplies and shit and than stuff happened with him saying I could be a boy and I thought he was onto me so I spilled it out. Listen I don’t remember all the details, alright? If you want to get so specific, the other people who knew where a few Agency doctors, my dad, probably the doctors who were there when I was born. *they pause and blush* And 203. She became… very familiar with the situation. Heh heh.

Sly: *A bit shocked* D-Did you do something sexual with this 203?

Karma: You bet! It was fucking great man.

Sly: A-Anyway….. *He looks away so he can compose himself* Second question, where did you use to go late at night when we were at the mansion?

Karma: Killing and torturing rioters.

Sly: Idiot you couldn’t say that before. I went on a entire hunt for the people killing rioters and you just come out and say it like it isn’t a big deal? Ms. Graves why would you do that to those people?

Karma: *they try to lean again the wall, slipping a bit but then regaining themselves* First off. Call me Karma. I don’t care about Japanese formalities. Now then, there are a few reasons. One was to protect you guys. Another was because I enjoyed the feeling of power I got from doing it. It was also fun. And their lives don’t matter.

Sly: I’m not calling you “Karma”. You may not care but I don’t use first names. I’m also not going to accept your answer. We didn’t need protection. I had the entire area around the mansion trapped up so we would’ve been safe. Then you go on and say it was fun? You should know not all of the rioters are doing things by choice. Does it not matter to you that you’re killing innocent people when we’re suppose to be saving the world. Are you really that power hungry or are you just insane?

Karma: I’m not either! I’m only telling you this shit because you’re my friend! And friends are understanding!

Sly: Then help me understand. How is it fun to kill and decapitate people who have no control over their actions?

Karma: I don’t know! But like I said, their past lives don’t matter anymore! And I’m in Riot Suppression. I thought I’d be out killing more of them by now! I miss doing it.

Sly: I heard that while we were out you tried to steal a helicopter. I’m not gonna let you go and kill those rioters anymore. If you want to try and kill somebody then try and kill me.

Karma: But friends don’t kill each other.

Sly: Then you’re done killing rioters.

Karma: But I- I need an outlet! It was interrogations and mild torture at the Agency, with the occasional killings during missions. And then the school was agony without it. Then the Tragedy came and I got death and torture, and now I’m stuck with nothing again! Sly you’re not understanding the situation I’m in!

Sly: Then we’ll just find you a new outlet. Killing people is not something that should be taken as an outlet. If you continue just because it’s fun and you see it as an outlet then what makes you different from a common Despair?

Karma: *just like with Hijihara, they grab Sly’s neck and proceed to choke him* YOU ARE THE SECOND PERSON TO HAVE SAID THAT! I AM NOT A FUCKING DESPAIR! DON’T YOU DARE COMPARE ME TO THOSE LOW LIFES! *after a few seconds, they see what they’re doing and let go* Shit… ~Karma

Sly: *He doesn’t say anything*

Karma: Sly… I… shit I’m sorry. Dad was fucking right. Shit. Shit I’m sorry Sly. Shit.

Sly: You know things haven’t been easy for me either. I had to lead everybody out of Hopes Peak. I had to take one of the leadership roles. I had to be the calm and collected one. I had to set up the jobs back at the mansion for everybody and I took watch over the mansion at night. I made an entirely different storage bunker and a map of the city almost all by myself. I keep the notebook of a dead girl with the letter of the person who killed her in it. I see her talk about how she used to feel about Matsuda almost everyday. Does that not sound stressful to you? You don’t see me going out taking lives and that’s literally what my job was and what I was trained my entire life to do. Then I’m given this *pulls out Ryoukos gift* which basically throws her death right back in my face but I’m still able to not indulge in that junk you keep drinking and watch over my classmates while you sit there and make out with somebody. I don’t need your sorry. I need you to stop killing rioters. That’s literally all I’m asking you to do and you can’t do that for me? I understand you need an outlet but why can’t we find another one.

Karma: At least you didn’t kill your own mother! Were locked in a dark basement for 13 years of your life! Were forced to eat your own pets! Were used as a sexual source of income for your father! Were fed what apparently are lies into your head! And then got “saved” only to live a life you didn’t want to live, and eventually have the one person you love most die before your eyes because of a dumb mistake you made! You didn’t end up relying in marijuana and alcohol just to make yourself think that maybe life was still worth living. I could go on and on! I desperately WISH that I could be calm and collected! But I haven’t lived your life, and you haven’t lived mine, so being able to tell what the other is able to handle is literally impossible! Your limit isn’t my limit! And what’s your problem with Naomi and I kissing?! She’s drunk, she doesn’t really feel anything for me! Why do you care about that in the first place?! What is your deal, Sly?!

Sly: You seem not to understand the situation we are in NOW. You think all that gives you the excuse to kill the rioters. You’re issues don’t have a thing to do with us a group right now. All you think about is yourself and how to make yourself feel better. I’m working for this group. I’m working for you but for some reason you just see it all as fun and games. You want to help but I honestly can’t think of anything you’ve done to help the group really besides kill a bunch of people without self control. Can you not see the parallels between you and a common despair. You can yell all you want but it doesn’t change a thing, if anybody in our class was to become a despair I’d bet on it being you. If not a despair, you are gonna get somebody killed and then what? You just go out and kill more and we continue the cycle on and on again. There are things you have absolutely no idea about so if your story was supposed to make me understand why you do such stupid things it failed. I tried reasoning with you but now I’m telling you. You aren’t killing anymore rioters or you’re dealing with me.

Karma: …do you hate me?

Sly: No. I’m saying this because I don’t hate you. I don’t want you to be stupid and I want to make sure everyone survives. I don’t want anybody else falling to despair.

Karma: *they’re silent for a few moments, before pulling Sly into a hug and crying*

Sly: *He’s not used to such things but he hugs them back*

Karma: *they struggle to talk between sobs* I just want everything to be okay. I want life to be how I want it to be. I want everyone in our class to have good lives and to be my friend. I want to be genuinely happy for Orochi and Junpei, and for them to be together in a world of structure and safety. I want Kyoji to realize his past mistakes don’t define him. I want Naomi to see that she’s a cool person and has a good chance at life. And I want you to be able to show how you really feel without being afraid.

Sly: That’s why I’m asking you to fight with me. So one day we can all live in that world happily. We have to get through this first though and I need your help if we’re all going to do so.

Karma: Please don’t let me fall to despair… I don’t want to be like them.

Sly: I’ll try my hardest. I promise.

Karma: I’ll try to help you too. You may not want to acknowledge it, but I can tell you’re hurting a lot inside. With your talent, I’m sure you’re a priority for Junko. She’ll do anything she can to hurt you. I don’t want you to turn to despair either. You’re my friend, and I care about you very much.

Sly: *He looks down towards his new locket* Thank you (I don’t know if I can be saved)

Karma: If you ever need to let your emotions show, you can do it around me. Okay?

Sly: Yeah, ok. I still need that promise out of you though. No more killing rioters

Karma: …I promise, unless it’s for a real good reason that would hurt more people if I didn’t act on it, that I won’t kill and or torture rioters.

Sly: Thank you

Karma: No problem, breadslice. *they let go of him* Sorry ‘bout the hug.

Sly: It’s fine.

Karma: …so what WAS your deal with Naomi and I kissing? You seemed pretty upset about it, otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up.

Sly: *He begins walking away again*

Karma: …I mean…okay. Bye friend! I hope to see you emote someday! Maybe you’ll get so good you can imitate emoticons like me! *they start talking louder* For now I’ll just drunkenly walk back to my room myself. Who KNOWS what trouble I could get into? Fareweeeeeeell!

Sly: Idiot.

#The Celebration Arc #grimokami #youngsly3 #Karma Graves #Sly #DR #submission

7 notes · View notes

thedevillord-writes · 5 years

Text

Pandora - Value

"A value is valuable when the value of value is valuable to oneself"

-Dayananda Saraswati

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The vibrating of his phone woke him up. At some point, Eisuke fell asleep waiting for Haruka to wake up while holding her hand. He straightened himself and loosened the hand holding Haruka's to reach into the inner pocket of his suit. By the time he got the phone out, the call ended. As he turned the phone on, the screen lit up to show messages from several people and many missed calls from Yumi. As the phone started buzzing again, Eisuke let out a sigh of frustration. He specifically told her to cancel all his appointments for the rest of the day, what could she be calling about?

He looked to Haruka who was still sleeping, taking the towel off her forehead and pressed the back of his hand against it. Although warm, it was significantly cooler than when he first arrived. He leaned forward and planted a kiss on her forehead before pressing the answer button.

"You better have a good reason for calling. And by good, I mean life or death."

"Why are you speaking so softly?"

Not wanting to disturb Haruka, Eisuke whispered into his phone. As if mocking him, Yumi was whispering into the phone on the other end. There were times when Eisuke questioned Haruka's decision on her replacement. Looking over his shoulder, Eisuke let out a sigh and closed his eyes. If he was patient enough to deal with Yumi for the next six months, he would get Haruka back. It did not seem like a bad deal, six months for Haruka.

"Why are you calling?" Eisuke asked, moving further away from Haruka's bed. He was speaking normally, though his volume was still hushed.

"I know you said to cancel everything, and I did. But there's someone here to see you, a Miss Inoue Junko. She refused to leave, saying that she would wait here until you come back."

"I'll be back in half an hour. Get her a cup of tea, Darjeeling."

Ending the call on Yumi, Eisuke walked over to the bed again. If it were up to him, Eisuke would stay here with Haruka for the rest of the night. If she was awake however, Haruka would be telling him to go. One of the reasons why he kept her around was because she always knew the right decision at the right time. It was one of her superpowers. Many times, she saved him from having to make the decision of which client to give up when there was a clash of time. All those times, her decision managed to keep both clients.

Against every fibre of his body, Eisuke decided to leave.

~.~

By the time she woke again, it was dark outside.

Turning her head sluggishly, Haruka let out a groan as she glanced to the clock on the wall. Despite the shock of knowing she slept most of the day, she had no energy to deal with the shock. She rolled onto her side and the towel on her forehead fell on her pillow. With a frown, she managed to push herself into a sitting position and picked up the towel. While her memory was a little fuzzy, she clearly remembered she used a fever patch instead because it was the last one and she had to go out for more. As she was recalling her day before her blackout, Yosuke's visit came to mind. Was he the one who took care of her?

At the thought of Yosuke nursing her, Haruka could not help the chuckle. The Yosuke she knew was not the type to take care of others. Or at the very least, he was not fit to take care of others. That childish personality of his would only make matters worse for his patient.

Dismissing the idea, Haruka got out of bed and stretched out her limbs and back. After eight healthy years, she had forgotten what it was like to be ill. This feeling of lethargy and disorientation was not something she missed at all. Dragging herself to the kitchen, she was pouring a glass of water when she noticed a thermos with a sticky note on it. She plucked the note from the thermos, tilting her head slightly as she read it. It seemed she was wrong about Yosuke, and the note was proof.

World's Greatest Secretary,

I know you're amazing at taking care of others but sometimes, you just have to take care of yourself.

This is chicken soup. Don't worry, I didn't make it. I just went downstairs to the convenience store and microwaved a can, ha! Anyway, when you wake, eat the soup and take your medicine.

Get well soon! I can't lose my best girl ;)

Your best guy,

Sagara Yosuke

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Well, well, well. If it isn't the world's busiest secretary."

"It's nice to see you too, Naoko."

"Come here!"

It took her a good week to fully recover from her flu; just in time for her to meet with an old friend. Naoko was a good friend of hers in high school. They were in the same class every year and were sat right next to each other. Naturally, they became close friends. Every lunch time, Naoko would sit at her desk and they would share their bento. After school, Naoko would drag her to the nearby snack shop to buy the newest sweets for her sisters. Naoko was the one who found a job for her when she desperately needed one. They kept in touch after graduation but ever since Haruka started working for Eisuke, she had no time for her friend.

As Naoko pulled her into a hug, Haruka let out a big smile and gladly returned the hug. Seeing her friend was feeling nostalgic yet at the same time, refreshing. Naoko definitely changed a lot since her school days. The cute schoolgirl with a side ponytail was no longer but instead, a woman wearing an off-shoulder blouse and long jeans with long wavy hair dyed golden brown sat opposite her. The bubbly girl was now a charming woman who was already catching the eye of several guys in the café.

"So, how did you manage to convince your boss to let you out?"

"I didn't, because I don't need his permission to be here. I took a leave."

"Just to spend time with me? Oh wow, I am so honoured."

Despite not meeting for years, the two friends hit it off almost immediately. They started by catching up for the past few years then, it was mostly reminiscing their school days together. They were giggling and whispering as if they were two teenage girls once again. This was the type of interaction Haruka missed, where she could just be herself and talk about things that someone else could relate to. Where she did not have to run around, putting out fires (figuratively and literally twice), and dealing with unreasonable individuals.

She missed being able to just sit in a café with a cup of tea and a slice of cake, not with a tablet in her hand while her phone was ringing off the hook because there were more fires for her to put out. She always knew that because of her job, she missed out on a lot in life. She was not there when Haruna's dance club won the championship. She was not there when Haruko was giving her valedictorian speech at her middle school graduation. Listening to Naoko now, she was coming to realise that she missed out on a lot more than she originally thought.

Over the eight years, there had been countless class reunions and school reunions, all of which she never attended. Several of their classmates got married, some to each other. Most of them were parents too. Naoko and Haruka seemed to be one of the few focused on their career instead.

All of a sudden, in the middle of their conversation, Naoko leaned in and grabbed Haruka's hand. The look on her face was the same one back in high school whenever she would get excited, especially when it came to Haruka's love life. Though she only found out after graduation, it seemed like Naoko had a little bet going on with most of their friends to see who Haruka would go out with in the end. She had the exact same look back then as she did now when she found out Haruka went on a date with the basketball captain.

"Don't turn around, but there is a super hot guy staring at you."

"A super hot guy? Really? We're not in high school anymore, Naoko, stop playing around."

"Oh my...! He's coming over! He's coming over!"

In her excitement, Naoko was hitting Haruka's upper arm over and over. Grabbing Naoko's hand to stop her, Haruka looked over her shoulder out of curiosity. The result, however, was more than disappointing. When she felt overworked and needed time to herself, she could take leave from work and be away from Eisuke and the other guys. But when she felt irritated and wanted to get rid of him, he was like a stubborn rash that kept coming back.

Beaming from ear to ear, Yosuke took a seat next to Haruka before looking to Naoko. "Nice to meet you, I'm Sagara Yosuke. You must be Ayasegawa Naoko." Unable to resist his charms, Naoko shook his hand with a smile to match his. "You're as pretty as Haruka said you are," he continued.

"Really? Haruka told you about me?" Naoko asked, turning to her friend. "But you never told me about your super hot boyfriend."

"He is not my boyfriend," Haruka denied. "And he is not super hot. He is a super creepy stalker."

"If I have a stalker as hot as you, I wouldn't mind being stalked."

"And I would love to stalk a woman as pretty as you."

Stuck in between the two, Haruka could not help but feel awkward. Weird was an understatement to describe the exchange between the two. She always knew Naoko was eccentric in her own ways. She would use to come up with dramatic scenarios that were good enough to be written as a romantic drama or a film. She also knew that Yosuke was no simple man. He was complicated in many ways, ridiculous and dramatic in many more. When put together, their eccentricity seemed to have amplified and Haruka just did not have the energy to deal with them.

Rolling her eyes at their conversation, Haruka interrupted by flicking at Yosuke's forehead. While she was used to his random appearances, it did not mean they were any less irritating. He was an omen; nothing good ever came out of his visits.

"First of all, creepy," Haruka said, circling the air between Naoko and Yosuke. "Secondly, I'm trying to spend some time with my friend and you are interrupting. And last but not least, please don't be friends with him. He's really just a creepy guy who has a lot of time on his hands."

"First of all, ouch. Secondly, ouch again," Yosuke grinned. "Last but not least, aren't you supposed to be nice? It's your job, isn't it?"

"I'm on leave, I'm allowed to not be nice."

Now it was Naoko's turn to feel awkward between the two. Since meeting Haruka for the very first time by the gates of their school, she had been known to be a nice person. There was a point where Naoko thought Haruka was simply acting nice for others to like her but she was proven wrong almost immediately. Even in their yearbook, Haruka was voted the kindest. Seeing the way she was acting with Yosuke now, however, she could not help but think there was some kind of connection between them that no one else could understand. Yosuke was bringing out a side of Haruka that even she herself did not know about, most likely.

It was a good thing though. Being her friend for years, Naoko knew Haruka's story. She would never let it show but Naoko knew she always hid her feelings away so others would not worry about. It was a blessing and a curse at the same time. Even after her mother's death, Haruka forced herself to put on a smile every day so everyone at school did not have to worry but Naoko knew she would cry alone in the bathroom stall. Somehow, Yosuke's presence allowed a path for Haruka's feelings to come out without even knowing herself.

"Anyway," Yosuke smiled, turning to face Naoko. The way he looked her in the eye was making her feeling shy. "I'd like to ask to borrow Haruka for the rest of the day, if that's okay. I hate to ruin your plans but there is somewhere important I need to go and Haruka needs to be there."

"You are more than welcomed to take her," Naoko smiled. "Have lots of fun, you two. Haruka needs it."

"Naoko!"

"Bye!"

Begrudgingly, Haruka went with Yosuke. She really did not have a choice because Naoko was adamant about her going with the 'super hottie'. As she got into Yosuke's car, she could not bring herself to be mad at him. She was reminded of when she was ill a week ago and Yosuke was the one who took care of her. Despite every fibre in her body yelling at her to scream at him, she could not bring herself to. She owed him a favour.

They did not speak for the entire car ride; just because she could not be mad at him did not mean that he could not be on the receiving end of a silent treatment. Arriving at a hotel, Yosuke stopped the car just outside the entrance where a valet came running down the steps and greeted Yosuke as he got out of the car. He got something out of the trunk before handing the key over and knocked on the window on her side, beckoning for her to follow. As she got out of the car, she was handed a dress bag and was directed to a bathroom upon entering the hotel.

The scenario was reminding her of Eisuke, how he would used to just bring her a dress without much explanation. And just like Eisuke, it seemed like Yosuke had an eye for dresses for her. She rarely wore purple but the dress Yosuke chose for her was pastel lavender in colour. It hugged her curves perfectly yet did not feel restricting at all. Instead of her cleavage, the dress revealed her back instead. He was considerate enough to have prepared the appropriate bra too.

"You do realise that I took a break from work to get away from all these, don't you?" Haruka asked, her arm hooked onto Yosuke's as they entered the venue together.

"But you are here as my date today," Yosuke corrected. "Just enjoy yourself."

"I highly doubt I would."

~.~

Setting down his wine glass on a random table, Eisuke let out a sigh. Such events were ones that he hated the most. Socialising was a big part of the event but it was the one thing that he despised doing. The handshaking, the smiling, and the joking as if they were old friends. It all felt as if he was kissing up to them, and Ichinomiya Eisuke did not need to kiss up to anyone. Except, he had to. A good handful of the people present were those he dealt business with. Another handful was potential clients that he had his eyes on. He had to butter them up, and be buttered up.

Just as he was about to call for Yumi, a couple entering the venue caught his eyes.

He would recognise her anywhere. That long hair of hers that did not need any professional setting yet still bounced with every step she took. The natural aura she emitted that would turn every head the second she stepped into a room. Without a doubt, it was Haruka. What was she doing here? More importantly, what was she doing here with him?

Subconsciously, his feet moved in their direction but someone caught his elbow before he even took two steps. Irritation settled on his face as he turned to see who it was. Right away, Eisuke swapped the frown for a smile. Standing before him was a tall woman, her hair curled and swept to one side neatly. Her dress was a little too tight but it did the perfect job of showing off her cleavage, which every man in their immediate vicinity was appreciating.

"Isn’t it rude to be abandoning your date, Eisuke?"

"You were in the middle of a conversation, seemed rude to disturb you, Miss Inoue."

"I've told you many times to just call me Junko."

Inoue Junko was a model. She started her career at fifteen, modelling for clothes brand but soon moved on to fashion magazines. Her first fashion show was at seventeen where she was the featured model. She starred in so many advertisements that she was known as the Ad Queen. It was almost impossible for her not be to known by anyone in Japan. Eisuke, on the other hand, knew her father better.

"If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Junko."

"Wait a minute." Grabbing Eisuke by the elbow once more, Junko followed his line of sight before letting out a smirk. "Ah, the legendary secretary. I was starting to wonder where she was. Running off to rescue her from all the creepy men?"

"Something like that."

"Before I let you go, let me ask you one thing Eisuke." Junko let go of his elbow though she stood in front of him, blocking his way. "Every other man seemed to be captivated by her. Now I understand, that as men, they tend to think with only one thing. No doubt that secretary of yours has a pretty face, I was charmed by her once too. But the Ichinomiya Eisuke that I know, is not like other men. He doesn't get captivated by a woman simply because she's beautiful and he didn't use his brain. So tell me, what's her value?"

"Her value?"

"Her value. Everyone has a value. To me, that man over there has no value because he wouldn't bring anything to my career, or my future. That man, however, is a director. Now he's valuable. So what's her value? What can she bring to your life?" Junko asked. "Let me answer that for you: nothing. A commoner like her, the answer is always nothing. She can fool others with the expensive dresses, the shoes. She can fool you with her elegance, and willingness to do anything for you. But let's face it, when it comes down to it, she's nothing."

"And what value do you stand at, Junko?"

He was mad.

He was mad, but he could not let it show. It would do him no good to lose his temper here, especially not with Junko and especially, not because of Haruka. A place as public as this, Eisuke was at a disadvantage and Junko knew it. That was why she chose to agitate him here.

"I can't be certain what value I'm worth to you, but I can tell you for sure that I'm far more valuable than she is. Don't forget how you got that casino hotel of yours. Don't forget who my father is. And I'll let you know, anything that everything that I want, I get."

#pdr ch12 #kissed by the baddest bidder #kbtbb #kings of paradise #kop #eisuke ichinomiya #yosuke sagara #voltage inc #finally it's out

24 notes · View notes