#;;musing: Yukimasa

[thecircusfreaks]

Let’s make a list of muses I’ve finished:

Date: 14-01-23

Finished muses

Circus ‘Unbelievable’

Matthias Maxwell/Tetzu Kazuma

Bruxa

Inael

Ivan

Beth Magnolia

Calm 'Sharpy' Schütz

Sherri "Cherry" Stanton

Fei Xué

Hyuso

Jules Abattre

Kowaku

Lys Magisk

Marine Lazulli

Tigre Thorsen

Yuki

Kimberly Pinkheart

Neron

Darcy Crys

Elliot

Grenn

Koloss

Nuf

Riliel

Rowan Étoile

Tsuki

Matthew Davaughn

Oberson

Feilong Xué

The Underground

‘Puppetteer’

Frederick Staut

Gösta Björn Viklund

Hiashi Hiramatsu

Lenev Kuznetsov

Negan Salvage

Jörgen Viklund

Kjell Norberg

Mai Hiramatsu

Sai Hiramatsu

Hanzo Sakai

Shunsuke Kaneta

Ben Stolly

‘Razor’

Rosalind 'Rosie' Foly

Yaach Nachtnebel

The Ether

Angelique 'Overlord' Vlaun

Red 'King' Miller

Frank 'Hammer' Marino

Francis 'Mouse 1' Webber

Ivo 'Mouse 2' de Vrij

Tommaso 'Uccello 1' Moretti

Aksel 'Uccello 2' Nielsen

Wilhelm 'Fixer' Hofer

Greyson 'Operator 1' Lowe

USE

Mark Winston

SDF

Yamashita Atushi

Takeo Inoue

Daiki Yamamoto

Renard Hall

Arlo Bates

Ligia Musa

Ela Lind

Dexter Pedersen

Law, Health & Safety

Ryu Murakami

Minato Tada

Nanase Iba

Toshiro Hanari

Riku Ouji

Caylee Reynolds

Stéphane Toussaint

Criminals

Chouji 'Choco' Iekami

Colm Culpepper

Craig Kawano

Daemon 'Deemo' Nierling

Enyo Afuru

Fionne 'Fio' Beauséjour

Genji Shūryō

Ichika Hara

Ichilu Wenn

Konstantin Titov

Marietta Dimartino

Nils Freling

Owen Katz

Paison Argyle

Ronald Heerman

‘Shinku’ 

Yukiteru Ake

Zacaria Åkesson

Entertainment & Fame

Hitoshi Saihara

Kars Sundström

Art & Culture

Luxxion 'Lux' Davies

Sports

Akano Koizumi

Isamu Ashigaka

Kojiro Toyoda

Sango Oshiro

Working class

Daichi Tanaka

Kento Gogatsu

Marito Ueno

Shoi-Ming Yè

Education

Yoko Aoki

Kwang-Sun Yun

Aimy Oshiro

Michiaki Mamiya

Takuto Nanajima

Shopping district

Makita Oshiro

Masahiko Hato

Natsuhiko Katakiri

Tatsuo Satou

Hospitality branch

Asako Mikan

Eliseo Bianchi

Fumihiro Tanaka

Howard Moore

Itou Tanaka

Kaoru Oshiro

Katashi Oda

Lovisa Kärlek

Lucas Moore

Shouji Aino

Vincent 'Vince' Davis

Xavi Alexander

Yakeru Sugasano

Yukimasa Oka

Raymond’s Café

Raymond Palmer

Henry Chesston

Amy Chòng

Cara Duvall

Mia Almeida

Kuro

Botan Shūryō

Non-humans

Timo Ricci

Winston Griffiths

CLUB DE SANG DE NUIT

Clemént

Cerise

Corentin

Eon

Etiénne

Keanu

Louis-Thomas

Lucien

Mael

Placide

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[…] out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

[yasuda-yoshiya]

Now that I think about it, what do you think The Maid thought and felt about the three men? Like I said before, I think she was jealous of them, and might’ve even subconsciously took pleasure in their misfortune, even as she sincerely wished for the WHG to find happiness with them. She does frame them as tragically flawed and as rather terrible people, like she dehumanises them and doesn’t think of them as people with agency because of the curse. Am I bothering you with all these questions?

Yeah, I think that’s probably true! Again, the game doesn’t really explicitly go into it or anything, but I do think you can certainly read a sort of jealousy into the Maid’s framing of the three men to the WHG (”these guys all suck, ditch them and stay with me instead”), even if it’s obviously very repressed. I agree that the Maid sort of dehumanises them in the same way that she dehumanises basically everyone (including herself), by turning them into tragically doomed protagonists defined by their respective fatal flaws. Framing them that way allows her to look back on them with a kind of distant pity and sympathy that probably helps to repress any more difficult emotions she might feel about her respective relationships with them, or about the WHG choosing them over her; it puts her in a position of being “above” them, in a sense. It also seemed to me that the Maid personally identified with and used parts of their stories as outlets to talk about and reflect on issues that were important to her personally, without her having to take ownership of them herself (so her complex feelings about Bestia’s attempts to retreat into a fictional narrative and escape his humanity become a casually detached sort of musing on someone else’s story - “Hmm, I wonder if you could say he really was a beast?” - rather than something that betrays anything about her own identification with him).

Going into each of the three men individually, let’s see... I think the Maid doesn’t really have any particularly strong feelings about Mell, aside from a sort of disdain for his shallowness and his lack of awareness of how fortunate and privileged he is (she makes a lot of very barbed comments to that effect in door 1, which I very much enjoyed). She does make a point of explicitly saying she sides with him over Nellie during their big fallout at the theatre, which I found interesting - I expect that’s probably mostly down to her resenting Nellie being cruel to the WHG, but I could also see Nellie’s desperate clinginess and denial of the fact that Mell doesn’t really love her hitting a sore spot for the Maid too, since it probably reminds her of the things she dislikes and represses about herself. Her telling of Mell and Nellie’s story focuses a lot on the theme of childhood happiness inevitably being lost, which obviously speaks heavily to Giselle’s issues.

Yukimasa is particularly interesting to me, because I think the Maid shows a lot of sympathy for him and seems to genuinely wish for his happiness in a way she doesn’t so much for the others; there’s a persistent undercurrent of her saying things like “I had truly hoped he could find happiness like this, but in the end...” and generally seeming very actively invested in his efforts to build a new self-contained reality with the WHG, which I think speaks to her personally identifying with what he was doing there. (Well, there’s also the fact that the Maid is the one who originally took him in and taught him to speak like a human, so she probably feels a kind of maternal affection from those days as well, even after he got increasingly messed up.) Her deliberately biasing the story towards his perspective by portraying him as a literal beast and glossing over the impact of his actions on others (Pauline and Javi’s stories were explicitly not part of the Maid’s telling, and something Michel had to hack his way into himself) was very interesting to me; she spends a lot of time musing over the question of whether he truly was a human or a beast, and asking Michel if he can understand and sympathise with Bestia’s feelings, in a way that I felt betrayed a sort of insecurity about herself as well.

As for Jacopo...well, as the Maid pretty much says herself in door 3, I think she originally regarded him as a very unlikable man but came to better understand his true nature as time went on. There’s a canon short story about them that describes them coming to a sort of understanding in the years after the WHG left; I got the impression that the Maid did get fairly invested in him in the end, though of course she’s also very well practiced at detaching from such things by that point as well. And writing this out just makes me all the more mad about how little reaction Giselle gets to have to the past versions of Yukimasa and Jacopo in door 8 despite having such interesting relationships with both of them, but for some reason they just wanted Giselle to stop being a character partway through and now we all have to deal with that, unfortunately!

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@magioffire

“& all I could hear was hunger, sainted, / stretched between the shrines of my teeth.”

— Scherezade Siobhan, from “Volver (Dame tu mano),” published in Pidgeonholes

[thecircusfreaks]

Muse pages status:

Circus ‘Unbelievable’ (completed)

Maxwell group (in progress)

McBride orphanage (in progress)

Obstbaum family (in progress)

McCarthy group (in progress)

Thompson group (in progress)

The Underground (Puppeteer, Hiashi, Mai, Sai & Razor finished)

USE (in progress)

SDF (Yamashita, Takeo, Daiki, Arlo, Ligia, Ela & Dexter finished)

Law & Safety (Nanase, Toshiro & Stéphane finished)

Criminals (completed)

Entertainment & Fame (in progress)

Art & Culture (in progress)

Sports (Akano, Isamu & Sango finished)

Business & Entrepreneurs (in progress)

Shopping district (in progress)

Education (Kwang-Sun finished)

Hospitality branch (Asako &Yukimasa finished)

Sex industry (in progress)

Raymond’s café (Raymond, Henry, Amy, Cara, Kuro & Botan finished)

Non-humans (Timo finished)

Club de Sang de Nui (finished up to Etiénne)

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@killtool

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

@killtool @guardianofyesod

From “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Beaudelaire Funeral Parade of Roses (薔薇の葬列) (1969) Dir. Matsumoto Toshio

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

The vast majority of my muses:

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]

And who will we be the next time we meet;

With our cracked cuticles and our sharp teeth? All things hidden in the mouth of the wolverine;

All things hidden and mean...

[alexandriteobscuraarchive]