i love ryomina
no but seriously. even when i’m thinking about other things that captivate my interest, i find myself coming back to them and feeling like i fell down three whole flights of staircases every time i do. they are one of my favorite pairs in media and are very special to me.
it’s the way that ryoji and minato’s lives are inevitably intertwined with each other due to the circumstances 10 years ago on the moonlight bridge. without no minato, there is no ryoji. minato as he is today is because of ryoji. they have irreparably affected each other’s lives that you cannot discuss one without bringing up the other one.
ryoji mochizuki, who is death, pharos, thanatos, nyx avatar, the man of many names and identities, is the perfect summation of p3′s messages and themes.
minato arisato, the wildcard and protagonist, who has boundless kindness in his actions despite the unfortunate cards handed to him.
the two of them complement each other and tell a beautiful story from start to finish.
minato’s personas capture this perfectly. he awakens to orpheus, who’s flames burns bright, is snuffed out by thanatos during the encounter against the arcana magician. a visual precursor of the idea that ryoji stole from the life that minato could have had.
it’s the way that over the course of the game as minato interacts with pharos, talking throughout the dark hour, forging a bond that cannot be broken, that allows ryoji to exist. minato humanizes death.
november. the bells toll, calling the appriser. and yet, it’s peaceful... quiet, and full of life. ryoji, who breaks free from death’s chains, refusing his role, is given the chance to live for a month. to make the most of the humanity that minato has given him over those ten years. and what a life he lived. ryoji’s life is a reflection of what minato’s life could have been like in another universe.
it is the way the two of them are reflections of each other. ryoji with his hair down is just like minato. they are both stubbornly committed to choosing to be kind, to love life, yet are chained down by the cards the narrative dealt them with. they finish each other’s sentences, knowing each other intimately in a way no one else does.
how is that, a boy who lived for only one month, profoundly changes the course of the narrative? he is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant. blink, and you miss it, the beautiful life that he led.
ryoji is horrified at the revelations of being the appriser. he who so desperately wished to forget that his existence was meant to bring the end to all life, was unable to escape the inevitability of death. in a non-human way, of course. he becomes remorseful. a shadow of his brief time as a human who was enamored by the small beautiful things that life had to offer.
he is swallowed by grief. grief knowing that his very existence will take away not only minato’s life, but everyone else’s. the very thing that ryoji loved- life, fundamentally went against the role he was born for- to be the harbinger of death. and unable to grapple with this sadness he believes that the best thing for minato to do is to kill him, so that SEES can live in bliss not knowing about their inevitable end.
SEES is left rattled, calling into question what the meaning of life is and what they do when faced against the inevitability of death.
and!!! minato chooses!! for ryoji to live!! even in spite of what ryoji is MEANT to embody, minato still stubbornly chooses to defy death itself! and if that’s not cool i don’t know what is!! minato wants everyone to have the chance to live!!
so he climbs. he ascends tartarus, to meet ryoji, again, who is now the nyx avatar. and i just think there’s something so so beautiful about being able to use messiah, minato’s ultimate persona, against nyx avatar.
messiah, being the fusion of orpheus and thanatos is peak ryomina to me. because ryoji and minato have established an unbreakable bond from having been entwined for 10 years, minato still has a piece of death with him, and by proxy!! ryoji is able to defy and rebel against nyx trying to bring the fall! and i think that’s fucking cool shit if you ask me!
even when all of the arcanas have been gone through, it’s still not enough to stop the fall. and yet. minato knows. in the way that ryoji was sealed in minato 10 years ago by aigis... minato becomes the great seal so that everyone can live. it comes full circle.
march rolls around. he fulfills his promise to SEES on graduation day. minato dies from exhaustion. but goddamn does his sacrifice make me weep- he’s had such, such a tiring journey. he’s been through so many things because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. but at the end of it all, he’s reunited with ryoji in death.
and i think this is why ryomina continues to evoke so much emotions for me, to this day. the relationship that they have embodies so much of persona 3′s messages and themes that it makes me feel like a microwave with nothing running in it.
p3′s message is very hopeful, for me. my favorite takeaway from it is that even if death is inevitable, appreciating the life that we were given and choosing to live as best as we can with kindness (even if we can’t feasibly do everything), is just? really nice? and you see this manifest in both ryoji and minato’s personalities and what they do for the other characters.
ryomina just feels so distinct to me, the flavor that their relationship ties back to my favorite takeaways from this game and im just!! god!! i love you minato arisato! i love you ryoji mochizuki! im so glad that i could meet them! i’m happy that they changed my life! they made me want to appreciate the connections in life even if they were fleeting! they made me!! want to pay attention to the good moments in life and cherish them!
i love ryomina so much!!! i’m so glad that these two could bring so much joy into my life! and i hope that others can have this joy too! 💛💙
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[read on ao3]
"You okay?"
Lydia has her elbows on her knees. Sitting in the waiting room of Deaton's clinic, her blue dress paradoxically bright against the bland color palette of the room, she's a contradiction unto herself. She looks tired and shaken. She looks glad to be alive. She looks unprepared to believe that being alive is going to last.
"I've been worse," is how she answers him. Then, "I've also been better."
Stiles takes the empty seat beside her.
"Feels like we're always hovering in the middle there," he offers.
Lydia nods. "Ethan and Aiden are going to be okay."
"Thank God," Stiles deadpans. "I would have been heartbroken to lose them.”
Lydia gently shoves him. "They did the right thing in the end. They're not that bad."
Stiles only hums, drumming on his knee with restless fingers. A deafening silence crowds them in. Stiles reflects on the events of the last twenty-four hours and finds them alarming when compressed into such a small time frame.
"What's on your mind?" he dares to ask, after the quiet is almost insurmountably heavy. If Deaton is still in the exam room with the twins, they're being very quiet. Suspiciously so. Something for Stiles to check on, once he's done checking on Lydia.
Lydia who is smoothing out her dress with a persistence that could be called obsessive. Every motion creates a new wrinkle, and every time, Lydia flattens it under her thumb.
"Oh, you know." Her tone is light, but her twisting fingers betray just how uneasy she is. "Thinking about how the last time I was sitting in this waiting room, you were dead for sixteen hours."
Stiles takes that one to the solar plexus, though he's not sure how else it could be taken.
"I wasn't…really dead. It was more like a long sleep. A long, icy sleep."
"You stopped breathing." Lydia stares lasers into her knees. "You didn't have a heartbeat. Deaton kept saying it was okay, that this was normal, that if something was really wrong we would know, but he was lying, I could tell. He wouldn't let us near you guys — he said he didn't want us interfering with the process." A fist forms in her lap, creasing the folds of her dress. "Sixteen hours. I didn't eat, I didn't sleep. I just sat here. Waiting. Hoping Deaton wasn't full of shit."
"And he wasn't," Stiles says, morbidly upbeat. "We came back!"
"You don't get it," Lydia says, sounding angry and scared and deeply wounded all at the same time.
Stiles frowns. If she would just look at him, maybe he could read her expression, but he can't tell what she's thinking from the set of her shoulders. "So help me get it."
Lydia breathes out, out, out, expelling air like it's a toxic gas.
"Humans have a reflex," she says in a small voice, staring through her palms. "It prevents them from drowning until the last possible second. The survival instinct is so powerful that it overpowers the breathing instinct, even when holding your breath becomes excruciatingly painful. It's called—”
"Voluntary apnea," Stiles says dumbly.
Lydia looks up at him and nods once. Her green eyes latch onto his.
"You told me once that death happens to the people around you," she says, biting her lip. "I can't imagine how it must have felt to be in that ice bath…but can you imagine how it felt to be the one holding you down?"
Stiles is too dumbstruck to answer.
"I killed you. I did that. It doesn't matter that it was temporary. I didn't know that, we didn't know that for sure. I held you in that water until you died, Stiles." Her hands tremble. "You were dead for sixteen hours because of me. I was a murderer. For sixteen hours."
"Whoa whoa whoa, hey," Stiles says. His 'Protect Lydia Martin' instinct is back online and the alarm is blaring. He grabs her hands in both of his, keeping them still and warm.
"Okay, first of all, you didn't murder me. It was consensual drowning! If anything it was more like assisted suicide." Lydia glares. "Not helping. Right. Sorry. Um, but secondly, and— and way more importantly, Lydia, yeah, maybe you temporarily killed me, but you also— you brought me back to life."
She’s unmoved, he can tell, so he shakes her gently. "Yeah. You did that. Look, anyone can kill me. I'm not even six feet of fragile bones and zero muscle mass, and my best friend's a freakin' werewolf, okay, killing me is not impressive. Bringing me back? That takes something else. Something special, and only someone who—" He tries not to stammer but his tongue sabotages him, "who cares about me enough to bring me back to life could do that, and honestly, those are in short supply, so yeah. Maybe you were a temporary murderer, but you were also a savior. My savior." He smiles weakly. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."
Lydia holds his gaze. She holds his hands, too — not passively but decisively, clutching them like a lifeline, like she's the one who's drowning. Reflecting once again on the past twenty-four hours, it occurs to Stiles that he is not the only person for whom that stretch of time has been alarming.
"That's certainly a nicer way of looking at it," she yields softly. Then she shakes her head. "But it doesn't change the fact that in order to save you, I had to kill you." Now she weaponizes that arresting stare, seaglass green pinning him to his seat. "I'm never doing that again, you understand? I can't."
"I wouldn't ask you to."
"You don't know what it was like," she murmurs — seemingly talking to herself now, more than him, anyway. "Watching you. And I couldn't do anything. I couldn't do anything but sit there."
Something niggles Stiles's brain, that feeling he gets when a few different threads braid themselves into a discernible pattern. The emotional tether. Lydia's remorse. Sixteen hours of sitting and waiting.
"Sitting there was exactly what you were supposed to do," he realizes, also half to himself. It gets her attention anyway; she frowns at his conclusion. Stiles goes on: "An emotional tether, Deaton said, someone to bring us back, I didn't really get it, how that could work, but you just said it. You all just sat there. For sixteen hours. You waited. You stayed, so I had someone to come back to. The way only a tether could do. Think about it, right? If a fisherman casts a line and then walks away from the fishing pole, it doesn't matter whether he hooks a fish because no one is there to reel it in."
"Are you comparing yourself to a fish?"
"We were underwater, I was thinking about water, it was the first metaphor that came to mind, give me a break,” Stiles says defensively. "My point is, sixteen hours is a long time. Long enough to get bored, to lose faith, to give up and walk away and pronounce us dead. But you guys didn't. You didn't."
"Deaton said—”
"You just told me you thought Deaton was full of shit. But you stayed anyway, right?" Stiles presses, looking Lydia in the eye. "You had a feeling. Or maybe you just believed. Whatever it was, you stayed. That's how you brought me back. You thought you weren't doing anything, but you were doing the most important thing." He squeezes her hands. "You were waiting for me."
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