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#do i actually fix typos or do you guys deal with it who tf knows but also im lazy and wrote this during my 30min lunchbreak
cainware · 2 years
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Something so satisfying about the idea of Jason moving out of Gotham and moving in with Kyle in NY after all the drifting from place to place, self-discovery, and the death of his best friend. (Oh lord here we go, Jay's gonna write a half-baked fic again):
It's a shitty apartment, but Kyle offers up what little space he has to give Jason a home, because God knows the man needs a place to call home now. The closest thing he had to call home in a person is dead, or a family that doesn't even really see him as a person half the time so much as a problem to be fixed or contained; Kyle doesn't expect to take that place or be anything excessively important, but he does have a couch and a few extra cups of instant noodles he can share.
And then Jason lives there. He's been there for a month, and Kyle is noticing changes. Jason isn't anything like what Kyle expected when he first met him years ago; he calm, he's quiet, he's smart. He's multidimensional, and that never really rang true until Kyle noticed Jason seemed comfortable enough to let his guard down.
Kyle also notices other changes. Such as a lack of being hounded about rent by the landlord, an increase in actual food in the apartment, and a stack of books that used to occupy the floor on an actual bookshelf. He debates asking a lot of the time, but he never finds the right way. Instead, he leaves it alone for a year.
The year rounds out. Kyle finally asks, because his entire apartment doesn't look half as bad as it did when Jason moved in. He finds Jason in the kitchen, cooking, and the whole place smells like Kyle's childhood. Spices that make his nose tickle and his mouth water fill the air, and he finds Jason leaned against the counter, scrolling through his phone with one hand and stirring the pot on the stove with the other. He's humming, a tune Kyle can't place but recognizes, somehow.
"Hey, Jay?" Kyle starts, eyeing his roommate as Jason looks up and, be still his beating heart, smiles at him.
"Oh, hey." Jason says, putting his phone down on the counter. He's giving Kyle his full attention, a gesture he usually reserves for important conversation. "I would've texted you about dinner, but y'know. I kinda just started."
"Nah, that's fine." Kyle says, waving off the statement. "I did want to talk to you, though. About uh... the apartment?" He doesn't miss the way Jason's shoulders tense, the way his jaw sets. He curses himself as he realizes how that must have sounded, knowing Jason must be expecting the worst now.
"Sure. Let me just-" Jason says, turning to knock the heat on the stove top down to low. Kyle watches him, the way his fingers just slightly falter with the knob. He's nervous.
"Its nothing bad, Jay." Kyle says quickly, and almost as if he's said some magic word, Jason visibly relaxes. His hand draws back from the stove dial slowly, and he turns to look at Kyle. "Its just... have you been paying the backrent? And... all the furniture and the food- Jay, I can't afford to pay you back."
"Whoa, whoa, slow your roll, bud! Who said anything about paying me back?" Jason asks, furrowing his eyebrows as he leans back against the counter. "Dude, you're letting me live here, and between your day job and running around doing... whatever it is Lanterns do, I don't know your life, you don't exactly make the big bucks. The least I can do is help you keep your shithole in your hands. And respectfully, after week three, if I had to eat one more cup of shrimp-flavored noodles, I was gonna murder you in your sleep."
"Jason." Kyle sighs, tucking his hands in his pockets as he eyes the floor. "Thanks, man. I've been stressing out for a year now about where in God's name I was gonna find the means to pay you back for this."
"And now you can rest easy, dreamboat. Now, do you or do you not want me to finish dinner before the game? I'm not gonna sit here and listen to you bitch about missing anything again." Jason warns, lifting the spoon out of the pot to wave at Kyle in a mock-threat.
"Right, right. Let the chef work his magic, and we all go to ved happy." Kyle laughs, holds up his hands defensively as he moves to leave the kitchen area. He pauses then, leaning into the room again to eye Jason. "Oh, and Jay?"
"Hm?" Jason doesn't look up, eyes focused on his methodical stirring. Kyle grins to himself, deciding that if Jason is so comfortable with him as to call him fucking dreamboat directly to his face, he may as well enjoy it.
"You make a great housewife, sweetheart." He ducks just as a knife flies into the wallpaper beside his head, laughing as he scrambles away from the kitchen as a flurry of yelling in the heaviest Gotham accent he's ever heard barrels out the door after him.
"I'm so poisoning your food, Rayner!"
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isuzukuretsuki · 6 years
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Welp I finished Psychedelica of the Ashen Hawk and my biggest comment is that this game has more plot holes than swiss cheese.
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*insert more shifty eye uncomfortable emojis* 
What was...... that convoluted mess of a game I just played? Like this is reaching Zero Escape level of plot holes and “wow the writer clearly has no idea what the hell they are doing”. I don’t even know where I’m gonna start breaking down the amount of issues. Lots of spoilers beneath.
My favourite order is prob Levi > Elric > Lugus > Hugh > Eiar > Aria > Tee > Lord > Olgar > Lawrence >>>> Lavan >>>>>>>>>> Francisca
For starters, this felt like less of an otome game and more of a gang bang 5p fuck pile orgy. Seriously. One moment, Eiar is making out with Lavan, the next moment, Eiar is dreaming of sleeping with Lugus and wakes up panicking because “oh no! I think I’m in love with Lugus!”. If the romance is “the heroine being passed among all the guys”, I’d rather there be no romance at all. It felt more like a fucking badly written reverse harem anime than an otome. I had this problem with PBB but boy it was not this level of bad. 
None of the characters really develop, none of the relationships really develop. Let’s not even get started on the fact that 2/4 of your love interests are your adopted brothers who are actually your blood cousins. At first I enjoyed Lugus’s enchantment with Eiar but it doesn’t develop beyond that. Why is Lugus even in love with Eiar? His feelings never felt like anything beyond captivation, and the same applied for Eiar. Why is Lavan in love with Eiar? Because he’s some gross nii-chan lusty pervert who’s in love with his adopted sister??? IDK. 
The only one who genuinely felt like he loved Eiar was Levi, and even Levi’s character was butchered with the whole “yeah I’m a serial killer who enjoys inflicting pain onto other people”. Even if you blame it on the ~magical stone~, the revelation was like a slap in the face and it was so disconnected w everything we knew of Levi. The writers clearly didn’t know if they wanted to write him as a character who’s sadistic and ruthless, or if they wanted to write him as a character who was manipulated by his mother into becoming her assassin through abuse + gaslighting. The writers aimed for both, and failed miserably at both. 
Speaking of Francisca, the fact that Francisca is an evil bitch is literally NEVER brought up lol???? Like when Levi admits that Francisca was using him as an assassin, Eiar and Lavan are shocked but.......... that’s it. Especially in Levi’s ending, the fact that there’s never a hint of acknowledgement that Francisca was abusing him is jarring to say the least. There’s never any real discussion of how Eiar and the Wolf brothers feel about Francisca after they find out what she did to Aria and Olgar. Like wow we just found out our mom is a piece of shit, let us NEVER DISCUSS THIS or have ANY heart to heart talk about this EVER. Because that will give our characters perfect closure! The fact that Eiar never returns to her real name, the name given to her by her mother, also kind of bothers me.
Francisca’s character was honestly butchered along with Levi after everything she did to Aria was revealed. "That evil slut is taking away all the men in my life!” is not a good enough motive to burn a completely innocent woman to death, sorry. Her love for her sons felt shallow and her love for Eiar felt like she was just trying to show up Aria. I can’t find any redeemable thing about her and her character just ended up being at to the bottom of the barrel along with Rika and Mejojo. The only emotion I got out of the whole dumpster fire between the parents was “wow Aria deserved so much fucking better”.
Now lets get started with all the fucking plot holes this game has. 
For starters, if the whole town is actually Psychedelica and everyone lost their memories, it makes no sense for Francisca to be the only one who remembers killing Aria, and there’s never any indication to confirm whether or not Francisca is actually aware the fact that everyone is in Psychedelica.
Speaking of Aria, that scene where Aria is shown to be slumbering in the abyss and stops the kids from completing the Kaleido Via makes no sense either. For starters, why is Aria even in the abyss? She died in the real world, so her soul should have moved onto the afterlife, or she should have been trapped in the Psychedelica town too. Actually, the fact that she isn’t trapped makes no sense. Olgar activated the Kaleido Via with a desire to see Aria again (similar to Hikage with Usagi), so it makes no sense for Aria’s soul to not be drawn to the town if the town was created through Aprus and Olgar’s collective desires.
I don’t really understand why tf Aria would want to stop the kids from completing the Kaleido Via when that’s literally the only method to free the souls of the town so they continue into the afterlife? It’d make sense for Aria to stop them if their souls would go into the abyss, but again, it’s explicitly stated that your soul will only end up in the abyss if you die in Psychedelica. And again, the fact that Aria is supposedly in the abyss makes no sense in the first place. The scene with the kids and the kaleido via was so out of place it was ridiculous. How do you not remember a scene where a shard flew into your friend’s eye and caused her to bleed everywhere?
Moving on, it’s literally never explained what the hell is up with Eiar’s red eye. It can be assumed that Eiar inherited it from Aria who really was a witch, but then that doesn’t explain why only one of Eiar’s eyes glow red and not both. 
MOVING ON, who the fuck is Hugh and literally what is his damn role in the story. Like I looove character types like him bc and I’m a huge sucker for “mysterious observer characters who act as the story’s narrator” not to mention he’s beautiful but Hugh’s origins and role remains wishy washy from start to end and his character ends up being a plot device to give 30 minute info dumps on the plot. Like, he’s the dumb dead bird that lived with Ashen Witch (whom I assume is Aria’s mother), and after he’s killed by Aprus, Ashen Witch... releases his... soul? So he becomes... a mindless traveler traveling between the different Psychedelica worlds...? I guess??? It’s implied that Hugh is the one who gave Hikage the kaleidoscope but again, how or why he did so is never explained either. I also dunno wtf is up with his ending where Eiar just magically turns into a butterfly and whooshes away with Hugh.
I still have no idea what was with that scene where he chats with Aria about the stories in the Links ending, and I definitely don’t know what was with that scene where Aria talks with Eiar and decides to name her non born child off of her (who is the same Eiar). Like what?? are dreams and timelines converging or something??? No clue.
Also. What the fuck is the deal with Lawrence and Elric??? THAT’S NEVER EXPLAINED? Like yes, I know that much that they’re Kagiha and Hikage respectively but literally wtf is Kagiha and Hikage doing in Aprus/Olgar’s Psychedelica. Lawrence clearly retains his memories as Kagiha, but Hikage never does and it’s like ??? why?? Also why is Usagi in a form of a rabbit in this world? WHO KNOWS. I was just so tired of this game that by the time I was half way done all the endings I just wanted it to be over already.
No joke, I seriously thought that PAA took place in the real world where Hikage was born and raised because of the medieval/historical setting and we’d learn more about the lore of the manor and the kaleidoscope. Honestly though, I wish it was because it prob would have made this game a million times better. If the game was split between a “wolves” and “hawks” path like BWS, it probably would have fixed some of the problems with the terrible romance.
The one good thing I will say about this game is that it’s the first otome game localization from Aksys I’ve played that didn’t give me a migraine because of no proof readers. There were some issues with wrong tenses being used but other than that it wasn't littered with typos like literally EVERY OTHER otome they’ve localized so far lmao.
Presentation wise, this game is beautiful. The sprite work is beautiful and the cgs are amazing. I loved the character designs for all the guys like A++ pretty boys. Unfortunately, the OST really lacked in comparison to PBB this time around. This game had so much potential but everything just fell apart the further and further you go and that’s what makes it even more disappointing. It’s setting and premise were a million times more interesting than PBB. Like medieval setting? Check. Feud between two clans with the heroine caught in between? Check. It had everything I loved and I was confident I was going to love it but the execution was just so terribad that I don’t love it. I can’t love it. I do love all the characters sans Lavan and Francisca though and I think they all deserved better. They deserved better writing. They deserved better development. I wish I could just rework this entire game from the ground up because that’s how frustrated I am with it lmao.
TLDR; I am very very disappointed with this game and it’s such a shame because I loved Black Butterfly to bits and pieces but this game ended up being a convoluted mess of bad and inconsistent writing. PBB had a rather weak premise with an uninteresting and incredibly cliche “all childhood friends in love w the heroine and there’s ~tragedy~!”. However, it had a very interesting and well written lore and universe while simultaneously being clean and easy to understand so it didn’t make any unnecessary loop holes for itself. PAA was the complete opposite. I enjoyed the connections this game made to the first game, but that was pretty much it. 
anyway wow that was long, this is the first time I’ve played a game where all I can do is go on a tangent about all the problems I’ve had with it. Hopefully other people enjoyed this game more than I did HAHA.
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