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our worst moments don't make us monsters.

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Those ones

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Am I something to be treasured, or destroyed, or pushed aside?

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something something Michiru can't do anything because it would help release Emiri from under ASU-NAROs thumb

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a second magma event has occurred

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Shin's eye color varies quite a bit. Here's a comic about that

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Kills 99.9% of all germs

Prints

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take responsibility

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the not so perfect captain

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Girl failed the med school exam like 8 times I dont think she'd do all too well when faced with the burnt crisp of her captain

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YTTD Commission for @shslcheshirecat 🐈🐕

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Finally did that redraw of Dona’s family from this post I’ve been meaning to do. So much happier with the designs now :-]

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take responsibility.

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hey raz isnt it fun to have a foil? isnt it fun to see what would happen to you too in the worst case scenario? isnt this labirynth of teeth and unresolved issues so fun??

+ timelapse video under the cut

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I think it's about time out favourite junior agents go on their very own psychic missions.

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Listen. Swansea is great; he's a well-written character and I like him a lot. But it's weird to me how much fan content I see about him that seems to make him out to be a lot nicer than he's actually shown to be in the game, and nowhere is this more obvious than in how people depict his relationship with Anya.

I've seen other people address the whole "If Anya had told Swansea what happened he'd have killed Jimmy" thing (she did. he didn't.) but there's a larger issue where people act like Swansea cared a lot more about Anya and was a lot closer with her than is actually the case in canon. And sure, the game leaves a lot of room for differing interpretations of things and imaginings of what could have happened offscreen, but I've seen so many people act like this idea of Swansea and Anya being close is something actually depicted in canon which. It very much is not.

Like okay. Let's talk about this. What does the game itself actually show us about Anya and Swansea's relationship?

Well, we don't see much of their dynamic before the crash aside from them just being coworkers with some level of familiarity with each other. They do stand together at the birthday party, and Anya playfully tells Curly that “Swansea really likes that cake. Don’t tell anyone,” to which Swansea only "hmph"s in response. From this we can gather that the two of them are friendly enough that Anya feels comfortable teasing him. Even so, she certainly isn't an exception to his characteristic harshness and brutal honesty — take an interaction later in the same scene, where a distressed Anya says she has no savings and asks if Pony Express can really fire them like this and Swansea, not cruelly but certainly bluntly, tells her that Pony Express going under has been a long time coming.

Of more importance, perhaps, is the game's first "2 months after the crash" segment, where we are first introduced to both of them — and where the game makes it quite apparent just how little Swansea respects Anya. The very first scene, in fact, features Swansea interrupting Anya and mocking her when she tries to explain why opening the cargo hold is a good idea. Later, when talking to Jimmy, Swansea calls Anya "our so-called nurse" and says that "it's in one ear and out the other" when talking about how she nearly got injured on the broken vent. And if you get the code scanner before talking to her Swansea will tell you to get her before opening the cargo hold but specifically with the justification that "even she couldn't make the situation worse with her presence." None of this is really uncharacteristic of Swansea, given he talks about Daisuke in much the same way, but it's not something that can just be swept under the rug — and yet, seemingly, everyone does. I hardly ever see anyone even mention Swansea insulting her here.

Of course, none of these scenes are where the idea that Swansea and Anya are particularly close comes from. No, that idea comes from a single scene: "3 months after", when Jimmy finds the two of them talking in the cockpit at night. We only see the end of this conversation, where Anya, apparently crying, is saying “No. I understand completely. If that’s how it has to be—���

The game never reveals exactly what the two of them were talking about; the two main theories I've seen are that Swansea was telling her that he was saving the cryopod for Daisuke or that she had told Swansea that Jimmy assaulted her and Swansea was saying she'd just have to put up with being around him for the time being. Personally, I think the latter is much more likely, but either way, the end result is the same: regardless of how much Swansea cares about Anya, her well-being is not his first priority.

We never see any follow-up on this conversation; if Anya and Swansea meet up behind Jimmy's back at any other point, we don't see it or hear it referenced. "4 months after" offers no interaction between the two of them at all, with Swansea busy dancing drunkenly while Anya, on the other side of the lounge, tells Jimmy about the extra medicine cabinet. "5 months after", Anya commits suicide in Medical while Swansea sits drunk and oblivious in front of Utility. The only reference to Anya and Swansea's conversation — and the closest we get to a confirmation of what it was about — comes after Daisuke's death, when Jimmy uses "telling Anya who knows what" as a sign of shady behavior from Swansea, and Swansea agrees that he did talk to Anya, "but it was her telling me all sorts of things instead, wasn't it?", the implication being that she told Swansea about Jimmy raping her.

This line is interesting. Swansea is referencing what Jimmy did to Anya here, and implicitly condemning him for it, and yet... well, Anya's already dead. Swansea isn't doing anything for her, really; he doesn't seem particularly emotional or angry about it, either. All it really is, when it comes down to it, is a spiteful jab at Jimmy — just Swansea, still angry over Daisuke's death, trying to get under Jimmy's skin.

We never see Swansea react to Anya's death. This isn't surprising; we aren't shown what happened when Daisuke got the door to Medical open, and afterwards Swansea is understandably preoccupied with Daisuke's fatal injuries. The first thing Swansea says about Anya after her death is the line about her telling him things. And, well... here's the problem.

That line? Is also the last thing Swansea says about Anya.

He never mentions her again. That one line, the one that doesn't even mention her death, the one that seems more about getting at Jimmy than mourning her — that's the last we hear of her from Swansea. And maybe he does care, maybe her death is just as much a catalyst for him trying to kill Jimmy as Daisuke's is. But he never says anything about her. He doesn't mention her in his death scene. Sure, that last portion of the game is largely filtered through Jimmy's mind, his disregard for Anya keeping her out of focus, but Swansea's death — a moment of sharp, simple clarity in which Swansea says all the things Jimmy doesn't want to hear — doesn't have that excuse. Swansea doesn't say a thing about her, because in the end, he's not focused on her either.

So that's what we have. They don't seem to be that close, before or after the crash, though they theoretically could be. Anya telling him specifically about what Jimmy did could be considered a notable show of trust, but then again she could have just wanted to tell someone and considered him her best option, and in any case if she was hoping for him to do anything about it, he didn't. And despite a large portion of the fandom believing it to be the case, there isn't actually anything indicating that he told Anya about the cryo pod — if anything, his assertion that it was Anya who told him things rather than the other way around is evidence against it. Technically, anything's possible — Swansea could have comforted Anya when she told him about Jimmy, he could have offered her the cryo pod, he could have grieved her just as much as Daisuke — but looking at what the game itself presents, the picture it paints is far different from the one typically seen in the fandom.

We don't know what's going on in Swansea's head. We don't know what happens in the time between the moments the game shows us. But what the game does show us is this: Swansea repeatedly is disrespectful and rude to or about Anya; Swansea doesn't do anything after she tells him what Jimmy did to her; Swansea doesn't have any real reaction to Anya's death. Does he care about her? Probably. I'd like to believe so. But she's not the one he decides to kill Jimmy over, she's not the one he has regrets for in his dying moments, she's not the one he's saving the cryo pod for.

Maybe Swansea cares about Anya, but she's not his first priority. And isn't that sort of the point? This is what the game has been showing us the whole time: Anya is no one's first priority, except her own.