#But my strong opinion is that she SHOULD have gotten violent moments and done REAL messy things

[bonefall]

Tbh I never read that far in DOTC but I heard so much about star flower from fandom that now hearing about it directly from you I feel so cheated. I was promised a femme fatale.. tho in hindsight considering how much these writers hate women I probably shouldn't have gotten my hopes up

I WISH we got a femme fatale. It would have been incredibly cathartic for her to make herself alluring to Clear Sky, turning his worst traits against him and getting both power and revenge. For Thunder to bond to her over it, reaching the conclusion in the end that they both had terrible parents that they need to reject.

but, knowing the Erins, they would have just had Clear Sky kill her violently and gratuitously for ever tricking him. Like how he gouged Willow Tail's eyes out. So... I guess we were doomed either way.

Anyway im cooking

[olivemeister]

OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

[ververa]

Unspoken Words

A/N: Alright, so first things first, story time. I had this idea... I wasn’t going to write it, because whenever I write for Ellie Staple I get carried away. If you know, you know (if you don’t, just read Asylum) Anyways I spent a whole night telling my best friend all about it. And in the end I had to write it for the sake of my own peace. And I did. I wrote it, but then I was resistant to post it, because I feel like it’s kinda dark. But again my best friend told me how proud she is of me for accomplishing it and other shit like that (yes, I’m a sucker for such things) and then @misssmephisto​ shared her opinion and they both convinced me to post it. So, many thanks to them both!!! It’s been a while since I wrote for my baby Ellie Staple and I almost forgot how much I like it.

As for you, petals, I hope you’ll enjoy it! Please, let me know what you think about this one <3 

Dr Ellie Staple x fem!reader

Word count: ~4000

Warnings: mention of death I guess

The day she thought everything ended was actually only the beginning. The very beginning of real struggle she wasn't prepared for. The struggle she didn't expect. The danger she wasn't aware of. Of course, she knew what kind of consequences the failure could bring. Yet she hadn’t considered failure an option. It had never happened before. The Organization never lost, not until the last mission. Her mission.

Ellie's hands were clenched on the steering wheel. She sighed looking at the files of documents on the passenger seat, before her gaze shifted to her reflection in the rearview mirror. She had been sitting in her car for over 30 minutes, doing nothing, but looking blankly at the passersby. How did it come to that? When did things go wrong? How could she not realize it earlier? How could she be so oblivious? So blind? So stupid? 

She was the one in charge. The boss, the coordinator of the operation. She was supposed to know it. She should have overseen it. Outsmart them. But she had not. She hadn’t, because she hadn’t been fully focused on her job. She had allowed herself to be distracted. She displayed a weakness and now was going to suffer the consequences. The damage was done. She knew the price. It was high. Too high at that point, yet it hadn’t occurred to her earlier. Not when she had gotten the offer to join the Organization, not when she signed the papers, not even when she had to give up on her own life. Until the very end she believed it was all worth it. But was it for real?

Ellie kept going over her papers, recalling everything she had done and replaying it in her mind. Every little detail. Minute by minute. Second by second. Over and over again. Trying to find the answers she needed so badly. Trying to figure out when she failed. When she made a mistake.

Each of her reports and research papers was impeccable. She remembered almost every word, the tiniest detail of each research, but it didn't mean a thing anymore. Not now, that the Organization was revealed. There was nothing left for her and as it turned out, she regretted only one thing. Just one. Her biggest regret - you. 

Ellie never knew the realization of loss could be so violent. But it was. And the fact she didn’t have enough time to fix it hurt even more.

She wanted to get everything right. And the great idea of saving the world, the way of thinking she subscribed to - it seemed right. Though as the mission failed nothing seemed right anymore. At first Ellie was outraged, but that feeling subsided very soon. Sooner than she would like it to. Her rage gradually faded, turning into fear. She was terrified, especially that she knew exactly what was going to happen. And that… that was something her studies hadn’t prepared her for. Nothing could have prepared her for that. Nothing and no one could make her ready for death. 

A part of her considered it a natural process, a natural course of events. After all no one could choose what would stay and what would fade away. But maybe she could? Not completely, but to some extent.

Her job had always been the priority. Ellie had always put it first. She always listened to her brain, never allowed herself to get carried away, never allowed her true feelings to display. Not until you. Her work might have been a priority, but you were everything in between. You were her thoughts. The space in her bed. Warm coffee in the morning. Quick kisses on the forehead. The warmth that she was coming back to every evening. The relief to her exhausted mind. The feeling she couldn't get enough off. The light of each day. You were her heart. But then you turned into her regret. Her biggest loss. The one mistake she wanted to fix. The only thing she needed to resolve before it was too late.

But what was she supposed to say? Ellie couldn’t find the answer to that question and she had less and less time. She needed some resolution. Some revelation. Someone to cure her from the grief. To bring her some relief. She desired just one more touch. One more taste of that heavenly, devouring rush. A vision of the start and the end. Just a little bit of you. That’s why she came, though she didn’t have enough courage to actually knock at your door. 

But there you were - watching. Observing her. As you did for the past week.

"If the mission fails, kill the target" that was the order. But how could you kill the woman you used to call yours. The one and only who got to your heart and owned it. The one you'd take the bullet for, rather than pulling the trigger.

She took your heart with her that day. The day you two parted. And ever since you felt dead again. Numb, deprived of feelings, unable to separate the good and the bad. The line between the two had always been rather thin and blurry for you. That’s how they made you. Everything you knew was manufactured, fake. Everything, but Ellie. Everything, but what the two of you used to have. That feeling. The sensation. The only real emotion you knew. The only good thing in your life. 

Everyone had always treated you as a monster, a heartless creature. Their perfect killing machine, programmed to destroy. To bring nothing, but chaos. The one to make peoples' biggest fears come out. Their perfect toy to play with anytime. Their weapon. Nothing more, nothing less. But not for Ellie.

Ellie was different. She might have worked with them, for them, but she wasn't like them. She was compassionate. She was good. Not flawless, but definitely not evil. Maybe lost. Maybe confused. But not evil. No, not her. She wasn't bad. Not your Ellie. 

But was she still yours? Could you still call her your Ellie? You weren't sure of it. At that point you weren't sure of anything. The only thing you knew was that you couldn't do it. No power could make you pull the trigger. Nothing and no one could force you to do it. And that, the inability of following your order made you think that maybe, just maybe there still was another way. An escape. A solution that was yet to be found. The chances were slim to none, but you were a fighter. You were strong, resilient. Brilliant. Incredibly intelligent and completely focused. That's why you were so efficient. But that was only half of what you really were. What made you truly dangerous was the fact you were fearless. How could you ever be scared, when you were what they called fear. You made people scared and they had a good reason for it. You realized it. You hated it.

~~~

"What kind of superhero are you?" she asked you once when you were in her office

Ellie observed you. Carefully, warily. She registered every move. As if trying to figure you out. After all, it wasn't usual that patients came to her willingly, seeking help. None of them was aware of the fact they needed it. Was it possible then that you actually were?

"I'm not" you answered after a long pause, your voice was calm, clear and loud, but calm

The redhead looked into your eyes. Her stare was piercing, but she couldn't find anything behind your big, wide open eyes. How could she ever find anything in them when all they filled you with was nothingness in the first place.

"Who are you then?"

"A nobody"

Her eyes squinted, as she tried to come up with the right words. You appeared to be the most complex case she had ever encountered. And yet she was far from being scared. Ellie had never got scared of the unknown. The only thing she felt was curiosity and the need to explore. And that's what she did.

~~~

It had been almost a year since your ways parted. Breaking up wasn't something questionable. You were prepared for it. You knew it would happen eventually. The only thing you hadn't expected was that you'd miss her. You weren't supposed to feel - the same as you weren't supposed to fall. But you did and nothing was the same anymore. You happened to find love where it wasn't supposed to be. You found love in her and there was no talking sense to you.

Now the only option you had was to stand and fight. To protect your heart. To protect her, in hope she'd still want you. In hope she'd open her arms for you the way she used to. You wanted her to choose you, again. But you wanted her to choose you willingly and not for fear. You wanted her to want you the way she had wanted you back then. Because even under those circumstances, she had a choice. She always did. You always allowed her to decide and it wasn't going to be any different this time.

~~~

The thing that made your relationship work was that none of you asked questions. It was an unspoken rule that the two of you had. You never asked about Ellie's work and she never asked about yours. The moment you crossed the threshold of the apartment your work stopped existing. Stepping in you were leaving everything else behind. Your work and problems stayed outside. There were only the two of you. No questions, no doubts, no explanations, no complications. Only you and Ellie living an ostensibly normal life. None of you ever had a problem with that. It seemed to be what you both needed - a hint of normality. Or rather the illusion of it.

That's how it was. And it was good. At least you thought so. You were both rather content with the way your relationship worked. Though even the strongest feelings, the greatest love couldn't be built on the cornerstone made of lies and understatements. You knew it. You ignored it. Was it easier that way? No. But it was safer. 

And so you didn't ask and neither did Ellie.

You didn't ask even when she was spending whole nights at her clinic. You didn't ask even when she disappeared for a few days. Work. That was the only answer and you got it. You understood it and accepted it, because it was the same with you.

Ellie didn't ask what had happened when you came back with a black eye. She didn't ask any questions even when your whole body was bruised, when you were all sore, when you hurt to the point you could barely move - because something on the way to accomplishing your order had gone wrong. She never asked. She knew she couldn't, because then you would ask too.

And so you both remained silent. Choosing oblivion over the truth. Opting for sweet, little lies. Deciding to live in your illusionary, safe world that the two of you built inside the walls of your apartment.

~~~

Ellie took a deep breath as she got out of the car. Finally making up her mind, gathering what was left of her courage to face you. She moved towards the entrance of the building. Slowly, cautiously, pressing her briefcase to her chest, looking over her shoulder every so often, as if waiting for something or someone. She looked tired. Tired and worried, petrified you would dare to say. Ellie never displayed that kind of feeling. She always held everything inside, just like you did. But at that point it wasn’t possible for her. She tried, she truly did, but you knew she was on the verge of breaking down. She knew what was going to happen and so did you. It was inevitable. She was aware of it and that was scaring her. She didn’t realize you were there. She couldn’t know it. The same as she couldn’t know it was inevitable for most, but not for her. Not until you were alive. Not until she was under your protection.

Ellie hoped to remain inconspicuous as she entered the hotel lobby. She knew it was your new home. She hoped to find you there and that’s what she was focused on at that moment. But it was until she noticed the man in a long, black coat following her. And then she noticed another man - dressed in a military green coat. He stood over the corner, trying to pretend he wasn’t watching her. But Ellie wasn’t stupid. She knew better. She was preparing to run, hoping she’d make it to you in time, when she felt a hand on her lower back.

Her eyes widened. There was only one person in the world, who would dare to hold her that way. Yet she didn’t  turn, in case she was wrong. 

“Stay cool” she heard you whisper into her ear, your warm breath tickling her cheek and just for a moment she allowed herself to close her eyes and enjoy a few seconds of comfort your touch provided. It was the relief she needed and you were there to grant it, as you always did. She never knew how you were doing this, you just seemed to know exactly when she needed you the most.

~~~

Even though Ellie loved her job and was completely dedicated to her patients, it wasn’t always easy. As a matter of fact, it never was. She often found herself getting mad over stupid, minor things only because something hadn’t gone as planned at the hospital. She was struggling. Her work started reminding a jungle rather than a specialized clinic. Her patients didn’t cooperate and began slipping out of control. She was tired and mad. She needed to be in control all the time, no matter what. 

“Good morning” you said, entering the kitchen. Ellie didn’t even look at you. She knew you said something, but was too lost in her thoughts, desperately trying to find the solution, to register and comprehend your words.

She stood at the window, observing a busy street. Her thoughts on the loop. It happened quite often - her losing the connection with reality, getting lost in her imaginary world. But that was her way of solving problems. By creating different scenarios in her head and replying them over and over again, until she found the one that worked out the way she wanted it to. You knew her habits. You knew her inside out, even the darkest corners of her mind, which she unintentionally reached pretty often. That’s when you stepped in. Somehow you just knew not only when you ought to do it, but also how to keep her grounded.

“Coffee?” you asked offering her a mug with the beverage and placing your other hand on her lower back

Ellie looked at you. She didn’t answer, just nodded and offered you a small smile. She took the mug from you and as you made sure she was holding it, you wanted to go away.

“Y/N” you stopped, when she called your name

“Yes?”

“Stay?” it came off more as a question. Ellie wasn’t the type to ask for affection or attention - you knew.

“Of course” you smiled sitting on the couch and opening your arms for her

Ellie put the coffee down on the table, before sitting in your lap. There was no place she’d rather be than in your arms.

~~~  

“C’mon, we need to go” you brought her back to the cruel reality “We’ll use the stairs instead of the elevator, for…” you hesitated, paused, trying to find the right word “...safety. Now, let’s go. Second floor. Room 46”

Ellie nodded, immediately complying to the order. You let her go first, making sure she was safe. You watched the men out of the corner of your eye. You knew the management’s decision. You knew that Ellie with all her knowledge and experience was now considered a threat. She couldn’t be controlled anymore and they had nothing to lose, so they decided to get rid of her. You knew all their motives, you knew more than they thought you did. You had expected they would send others for her, but you hadn’t really had the time to think it all over. You didn’t manage to come up with a good enough plan that would allow your both to stay safe. But you couldn’t think about it now. You had to keep going.

You locked the door, then quickly moved to curtain the windows. Ellie observed you. She still wasn’t aware of many things, but you knew she’d figure them out soon. You understood you didn’t have much time before Ellie would put two and two together. You kept moving nonetheless and Ellie kept watching you. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say or if she should say anything. You were moving fast. You opened the wardrobe, then took a white shirt and a pair of black jeans. You handed them to Ellie.

“Change!” you said, not even looking at her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t. You knew that if you do, you’d be both in even more trouble. There was no time for explanation.

Ellie looked at the white shirt, it was your favourite. She still remembered.

~~~

Ellie was sitting in the armchair. A glass of wine in one of her hands, a book in the other. Yet she paid no attention to it. She was watching you. A small smile forming on her face, as she observed your moves. You were ironing your shirt. You were doing it for the past 20 minutes. Repeating the action multiple times, because it being smoothed wasn’t enough. It had to be perfect. Perfectly smoothed. 

Ellie tilted her head to the side, so that she could have a better view of your face. You were so focused. So invested in the process as if your life depended on it. You were a perfectionist. Always so fastidious and precise. She shook her head and chuckled, as you were about to start all over again.

“Y/N, it’s the fifth time. It’s smoothed already. Leave it”

“It’s not good enough. It’s still wrinkled...”

“It’s not” Ellie put her book and the glass of wine down “Let me help you” she said stopping next to you, waiting for your permission

You looked at her, unsure of what to do. You didn’t like others touching your things. She knew it.

“C’mon, Y/N, it’s just a shirt”

“It’s my favourite” you admitted, shyly, as if you were ashamed

Ellie smiled. Her hand moved to your cheek and gently caressed it.

“I’ll be careful then” she said, kissing your forehead

~~~

As she stood there, now dressed in your clothes, taking in your scent - that she missed so much, it suddenly hit her that she had never tried to figure out why you were that way. She had never wondered where all your excessive habits came from. And she knew for a fact there had to be a good reason, a serious cause of them, but it wasn’t the right time to ask. There was no time to ask. And she wasn’t sure if she still had the right to demand any answers.

At that point you were both on the edge of basically everything. Though you couldn’t think of your past, not now, when your present was so screwed up. There was no time for questions and explanations. They wouldn’t change anything anyways.

Deep inside you both knew you’d have to talk about it. To have that kind of conversation you both dreaded of so much. The one full of questions to which you would have to provide answers, whether you liked it or not. Regardless of how ugly the truth was.  But it wasn’t the time. It wasn’t the right time and place. For now you and your wellbeing were hanging on mutual trust. The moment of truth would come in time. You knew it. You agreed on that the second your eyes met, as you both stood in the middle of the room. It was another unspoken agreement. Another deal you two made. But at that moment you didn’t need words to understand each other. There was only one thing on your mind - to make it through.

“You’ll be fine” you said, not sure if you were talking to Ellie or to yourself. She nodded.

“We’ll be fine” she said, carefully reaching for your hand. 

That was another feature of your relationship. You never spoke too much. You never truly allowed yourselves to be completely open with each other. You couldn’t. But you still were close. Granting each other comfort. A hint of understanding and sympathy. That’s why you always held each other - whether it was holding hands, resting your hand on her lower back or her placing her hand on your thigh. The simple gestures were your own way of communicating, of releasing unspoken words, of telling each other “I’m here” “I care” “You’re not alone”. It was as simple and complicated as that.

There was a lot happening at once. A lot to face. A lot to deal with. Though you knew for sure that as long as they didn’t separate you, you two would be fine. You knew you would manage to find a way. To resolve the situation. After all, it was only the beginning.

Tag list: @midnight-lestrange​, @natasha-danvers​, @stopkillinglilyrabe​, @welshdragonrawr​, @saucy-sapphic​, @yang12e​, @xixxiixx​

[inlovewithbuddyaurinko]

Vesbud First Meeting

“Aurinko. You’ve got something of mine. I’d like it back. How about you toss it here and we forget this ever happened, besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not nice to steal from the less fortunate?.”

Everyone knows and loves a meet-cute, but our favorite space lesbian moms had a meet-violent. For femslash February, an elaboration of the scene described in Vespa’s wedding vows with some of the author's artistic license thrown in.

co-written with @chobiwolf​

It had been a rough day for Vespa after a rough couple years. She’d managed to get a good steal in and had enough of a score in her pocket to drink the next two nights away without any concerns. It beat the previous few months of staying out of the way of any law authorities, it definitely beat being thrown in prison, only to be released by that...she shook her head, she couldn’t get caught up in dreaming about that near-magical laugh that would creep into the corners of her mind at any moment she wasn’t otherwise occupied.

The bar was nice, nicer than Vespa had any right to, but it was the only place that had a transport lift and at the moment, Vespa was out of any mode of transportation sturdier than a hijacked hovercycle. The number of people packed into the room, the walls practically shaking with the beat of the music being blasted over the hidden speakers hid the gangly woman easily out of the way in a corner to avoid judgemental glares of patrons dripping in the finest of venusian silks and velvets.

Buddy Aurinko thought she'd find her mark here, or a drink at the very least. Even though it had been years since the prison break, Buddy spotted her the moment she walked into the bar. Vespa Ilkay looked the same. It was like years of crime and a hard life hadn't done a thing to knock her down. This was a whipcord of a woman with a shock of razor cut green hair. She may have been huddled over a drink but she radiated fierceness. That quality was exactly what Buddy was here for. That... or a large sum of money and a drink with a cute girl. This was really win-win for her.

She slid into the seat beside Vespa, a drink in hand already. "Can I buy your next round, darling?"

Vespa jumped, face heating up when she realized that someone had managed to sneak up from behind, her hand going to a knife at her side before she laid eyes on the most beautiful woman in the whole damn galaxy. That same woman placed a tentative hand on the arm that had started to shift back to what was, undoubtedly, a knife.

“Oh uh, you don’t have to do that, I can pay my own way even if I don’t look like it.” was the stuttered reply, flicking her eyes over the frankly impressive form sitting next to her. “But I wouldn’t be opposed if you were to join me?”

"No, no, I won't hear of it, and I never repeat myself so don't make me ask again." Her demeanor was not overly friendly. But she angled herself towards the woman in a way that put their shoulders close enough to feel the heat coming off of eachother. "Why, I'm of the opinion that a dashing woman such as yourself should never have to buy herself a drink again." With her smile and the near panic in Vespa’s eyes, Buddy realized she would have to try and smooth things over quickly to prevent a bolt from the bar.

"So what do you say to one round? Your drink looks a bit more like salad than alcohol and I happen to know a few good options around here." She did a once over of the bar seemingly opening herself to a blindspot and making her appear a bit more genuine, though most of what she said was exactly the truth. Oh the trouble she could cause with this one… "Bartender!" A grizzled person who looked like they had less compassion than a swarm of rangian mosquitoes took her order, "Yes, and two of those please, one extra strong for the lucky lady. Oh, and in case it’s not clear: mine should be the strong one since I do seem to be a very lucky lady." She winked at Vespa.

Vespa should’ve kept a higher guard up. She shouldn’t have so readily allowed this woman to completely disarm her, but boy, this woman, this woman was the prettiest, fastest talking, most vivacious human she had never seen. The blush never quite left her face.

"So what brings you to this fine establishment?” Buddy gestured a bit vaguely to their surroundings.

Vespa’s hand didn’t quite leave her knife, but her shoulders lost the tension that had been carried there since she first sat down hours ago. She wouldn’t consider herself one for romance, but this woman....this woman could convince her that maybe a little wouldn’t be too bad. She’d never gotten a drink bought for herself before, and stared with eyes wide in surprise. “Uh just, you know, a place to hang around. What about you? You look like you belong here more than I do. Like I should be watching you in a stream, not, not have you next to me here.”

A bright laugh bubbled out of Buddy. She had never been a stranger to compliments, but she turned quickly to grab their drinks as a distraction from the slight heat she felt flush in her cheeks.

"Here we are! And who knows maybe I am on some stream somewhere," she smiled knowing it was likely Neptune's most wanted or something to that effect, "but I've certainly found this place just as cozy as you have.” The bar was probably the opposite of cozy, it would be listed in the dictionary with the word ostentatious.

“Perhaps even more so since there definitely wasn't a pretty girl at the bar when you came in." She put on a bit of drama, "Oh my, unless there was! Look at me: I've known you for 10 minutes and already a homewrecker. The shame of it! Well, I say shame but I can't actually find a single iota of it in me. So tell me, are you, in fact, here with someone, darling?" She paused to take in Vespa desperately trying to keep up with her manic speech. Buddy sipped from her drink to keep herself from talking more. Maybe she was a bit more nervous than normal. Marks weren't normally this— well this adorable, this dashing, this capable! That last one she was about to test.

Vespa cleared her throat, voice suddenly raspy with nerves. “No. Uh, no, just, just me here.” This woman really did talk a lot and her own head was slightly spinning. “I think I prefer the seat occupied by you instead of it being empty.” She attempted to flirt, cringing slightly at herself at how awkward it sounded. “Uh, Sorry, I didn’t catch your name. It’s gotta be as pretty as you?”

Buddy flashed a smile at her, wide and genuine at Vespa's incredibly honest way of flirting. "The name's Buddy," here she leaned in close and whispered, "and since you aren't here with anyone at the moment, would you like to be, miss…?" she trailed off hoping the other would also supply her name. By now the two of them had slid much closer and the hand she originally had on her knife arm had moved up to the woman’s far shoulder.

“Ilkay.” Vespa blurted out, cheeks tinged a deeper pink still. “Vespa Ilkay. Nice to meet you Buddy.” Her skin was covered in pinpricks where Buddy’s arm was around her, like every single nerve was standing on their head. She felt hot and hoped that she didn’t seem as nervous as she felt. Buddy was leaning in so close that it was like there were only two of them in the whole world.

"Vespa Ilkay…" Buddy knew that name, and she knew ultimately why she had come to 'run into' her, and yet here, face to face, she felt a nagging almost-girlhood crush from her 'tag along with dad to work days'. None-the-less the words slipped off her tongue like silk and she found her drink abandoned as she focused on the woman's face. All harsh, strong edges, and softening honest blush. Hair knocked loose from its gelled, spiked style by the constant shaking head and flustered denial of compliments.

She just couldn’t help herself, what was a little more distraction for one night after all? She brushed Vespa's hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. Her other hand had come to rest comfortably at the middle of Vespa's back now, trailing lazy circles with her thumbnail. "Why, darling you look positively feverish!" For emphasis she put the back of her hand on Vespa's forehead, "Hm, well I'm no doctor, but maybe another drink would cool you down? Or… maybe you want to get out of this place with me? I could show you an exciting time to be sure.”

Vespa would have passed out right then and there, Buddy's voice like a purr in her ears. She could’ve died and been perfectly happy. The hand on her back felt like it was shooting electric currents into her spine. The only way to make sure she didn’t melt into more of a mess was by running through in her head all the most easily breakable bones in the human body. She ran a hand through her hair, unable to imagine that this was real, it must be impossible, she had to be dreaming.

“I’m fine, I’ll just need a moment.” She straightened up her back, going-anywhere with Buddy sounded amazing. But no, she couldn’t. That was too much. “I’ll get out of here eventually.”

Buddy leaned back and the previous closeness had her wearing quite a dark flush herself. She felt the heat in her face and rather hoped it didn't clash with her hair. A ridiculous thought, one that made it clear that she was flustered herself, though she'd never admit it. She reeled herself in. She was a bit dismayed the rest of her night would not be spent with a companion, but the evening was not a total loss: there still was the money she was here to steal, now, there was just the matter of actually taking it.

Buddy breathed in and looked around trying to feign a bit of embarrassment, eyes cast down with a demure flutter of eyelashes. "I hope you'll forgive me for being so forward. It's not often I come across a lady like you." She looked up, making purposeful eye contact with a visibly flustered Vespa.

"Miss Vespa Ilkay, I do hope we see each other again." She leaned so far forward she saw the panic from the other that this was a kiss. It was not. Her lips brushed the other woman's cheek and she whispered, "Sooner rather than later if you can." She did then press a chaste kiss to Vespa's jawline as she slid out of her seat leaving a hint of brilliant red in her wake. The close contact made it easy to slip the card from Vespa's pocket into her own hand. She stood up fully and cleared her throat. "I do believe I may need to go to the powder room though, so... dear?" She turned Vespa's face to her own delicately, "Do take care of yourself."

Buddy went to the restroom of the bar that she knew had a broken window and a solid escape plan. She had left behind merely one thing besides the lipstick on Vespa's face. One thing in the form of a note written on a napkin. It would probably take Vespa a while to notice it if she noticed it at all. But it read as follows:

Wonderful doing business, darling. Sorry those drinks ended up being so expensive for you. But I did not lie to you, I do want to see you again…. If you can catch me.

--Buddy Aurinko

Vespa Ilkay was love struck. There was no other way to put it. She sat with her drink in her hands, once again staring down at the countertop, but this time, with a fond little smile on her face.

She was convinced that never before had anyone captured any heart so quickly as Buddy had wormed her way into her brain. There wasn’t anything more Vespa wanted than to drag her off to that damn washroom she said she was headed and kiss their brains out against the door, an activity she hadn’t felt motivated to do with anyone before. She looked down at her hand where it had dabbed at the mark on her cheek, a perfect mirror of Buddy’s lips in the palm of her hand. The red lipstick seemed to glow against her own skin.

20 minutes later and the bartender was glaring at her and making snarky comments about buy another or get the fuck out.

Vespa wasn’t particularly looking forward to going to find some dark corner to fall asleep in, but if it had to be done it had to be done. She reached into her pocket for her score to pay for all her drinks and she froze. It was gone. All of it. All that was left was a damn note. She cursed aloud. Scanning over the note, she then cursed her dumb heart for stupidly skipping a beat, dammit, even Buddy’s damn handwriting was gorgeous. Thankfully, there were just enough creds to pay for both their fucking drinks stuffed into her boot she could use. It now meant though that she would have no safety net if something were to go wrong, or even another way off the planet.

She stormed out of the bar, figuring that damn woman couldn’t have gotten far. She went towards the more crowded, better lit part of town. Aurinko clearly knew what she was doing. And someone as fabulous as her could blend in among a crowd more easily than in the dark and shadows. Finally, after what felt like forever of running, she spotted a shock of bright red hair at the opposite end of the street and started to push people out of her way as she was running towards her.

Meanwhile, Buddy slipped through the crowds like a fish through water. She flipped the card a few times in her hands before pocketing it in a holster on her thigh. Sure she turned a few heads here and there but she knew how to disappear when she wanted. Right now she was a bit careless though, having just wooed a pretty lady and gotten the score of the decade, and with barely any work on her part.

Suddenly, she heard a disturbance behind her and glanced back to see that same vivid green hair poke out through the crowd as Vespa not so much ran as plowed her way through the crowd. Buddy smirked, my this one did catch on fast didn't she? Buddy broke into a sprint and rounded a corner into an abandoned alleyway. She only stopped there briefly to remove her heels to make her tracks harder to follow as she crossed through to another backstreet.

The alley Buddy disappeared down of course connected to another side street that Vespa cursed out everyone who had ever worked on it from their first to last breaths of their lives. Her thick boots kept her from completely falling over as she made the sharp turns necessary and though she lost easy sight of the red hair that she had before, she managed to spy it again part way down the next street. “AURINKO!” She shouted off after Buddy, heads turning to look at what the commotion was. A sober Vespa would not have brought so much attention to herself, or to her target. A sober Vespa could slide between people and shadows with not so much as a whisper of clothing brushing against each other. Knives could disappear into backs before the glint of steel was seen, bodies would hit the floor, dead from poison before taste was processed by the tongue. But now, Vespa Ilkay was on a manhunt, willing to slash and burn in a fight against Buddy Aurinko. So,it was normally not a very good thing to draw attention to oneself if you were trying to stay unnoticed, but she wasn’t letting her get away with her score and only way off this miserable planet.

Buddy smiled to herself as she turned another sharp corner into an alley that would take her up a side fire escape and up out of Vespa's reach. But when she got there the stairs were out of sight. A quick glance around showed her their charred remains clinging half-heartedly to the building's side above her. She heard Vespa yell her name and knew she had no time to escape.

“Shit."

Profanity did not become her and she certainly would refrain more were she in anyone's company, but as it was she had no one around to hear her… Thank goodness for that. Though that would not be the case soon. She didn't have a blaster on her and she really would rather not use that on Vespa anyway, so she drew her knife from one of her many thigh holsters and readied herself for a fight.

Turning the corner, Vespa skidded to a stop, knife drawn already and barely caught herself from falling over from the sudden cease of movement when she saw Buddy trapped there at the end of the alley. She grinned, the expression dark and proud, teeth looking more like razors. This was a woman who had fought through blood and liked it.

“Aurinko. You’ve got something of mine. I’d like it back. How about you toss it here and we forget this ever happened.” Buddy looked to be illuminated from the shaft of light spilling over the buildings around her, making her hair look like flames. She still looked strong and steadfast, Vespa knew that this fight wouldn’t be as easy as it may have appeared to be, and only one of them would be walking out of that alley. And Vespa was willing to place money that it was going to be herself.

"I'm afraid that won't be happening today, darling." Buddy flashed a grin of her own, winsome and daring. She took the opportunity then to throw her heels at the woman who not only held an impressive dagger but was glaring them at her as well. Vespa rushed at her. Despite the small space, Buddy was able to parry and roll to her left, deftly avoiding the attack. This was certainly the most fun she had had in years.

The heels were certainly a clever ruse, but Vespa ducked them, internally tsk-ing that they were going to get scratched, Buddy didn’t seem like the kind of person to do that to her clothes, not that Vespa cared, of course.

The run at Buddy still left Vespa with her back to the entrance, she wasn’t born yesterday of course. But she couldn’t help but admire how cleanly Buddy dodged her knife. Nothing that could be considered aggressive was being done yet, they were still circling, feeling the other out.

“Those are my creds, not yours.Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not nice to steal from the less fortunate?” She made another quick swipe at Buddy’s bust line which forced her to take a hop back, though still with plenty of room between them.

Buddy laughed breathlessly at the exhilaration of their fight. They were both so evenly matched that it was more dance than confrontation. She hadn’t felt like this since the day she ruined her fathers prison, just because she could. The day she had first seen Vespa Ilkay.

In her distraction, Vespa got the drop on Buddy and tackled her. Getting the wind knocked out of her chest stunned Buddy enough that when she regained her concentration a split second later, Vespa’s very sharp blade was at her throat, and she felt a small trickle of blood run down the nape of her neck. She still had a hand on her own knife though, and she angled the blade up towards the woman on top of her. She couldn't help but start laughing again, breathless, overtaken, and evenly matched. She looked into the woman’s eyes above her as she tapped the blade to her abdomen.

Vespa was about ready to drive the knife through her, not enough to kill her, someone so beautiful didn’t deserve that. But it was just so she could take her creds and go, but that laugh. It floored her.

She knew that laugh. That was the laugh that saved her. The fiery shock of red hair she only managed to get a glimpse of when she ran.

The starstruck woman didn’t even notice the knife running along her side, a dangerous position she would never allow anyone to get her into in any other situation. The thin blade lightly skimming over her shirt next to her skin sent shivers down her spine. Just, Buddy’s eyes. They were like pools she could get lost in.

It was the most unattractive, ungraceful thing that. Just-just staring down at the woman beneath her, mouth agape. “You-you were the one at the prison. You saved me.” Vespa collapsed one side to roll off of Buddy, still staring at her in shock, unable to process what just happened.

Buddy breathed a sigh of relief as Vespa rolled off of her, and they both lay there on the dusty ground of the alleyway, staring at an alien sky.

“I suppose I was, and I did.” Her voice was nostalgic and drawn out.

She pulled the card with Vespa’s score stored in it from her hoster and held it up above them, an outlined rectangle dangling from elegant fingers standing out against the artificial atmosphere, “Well, we seem to be doing all right for ourselves solo, but don’t you think we’d be better as a pair?” She smirked. Buddy turned her head to face the other woman and smiled at her, no wit, no false charm, but completely genuine and a little vulnerable.

Vespa’s heart still sounded like it was beating in her ears, dazed. Her eyes flitted to the card held in the air above them. She could just reach out and take it, but she didn’t want to, it was like it would break the dream she was in. A minute passed, no sound was heard but their still heavy breathing and the faint sounds of people talking, a car driving by, the headlights casting shadows down the alley. “So?” Buddy asked again, “How about that offer to get out of this boring old dump with me?”

Vespa squeezed her eyes shut, making sure she wasn’t dreaming for the second time that night when her brain caught up to her ears. “Yeah. Yeah that sounds— that sounds great.” Vespa’s eyes opened and she turned her head to look back at Buddy. Somehow, Buddy looked even more radiant than before. Just so hopeful and full of life, like with her, the two of them had the entire universe at their fingertips. “I think a partner in crime could be good.”

[mystery-deer]

Missing Out (b99, fic)

Raymond walked languidly through a seemingly endless field of wheat, bending the plants with a stick he’d picked up somewhere along the way. He was going somewhere and that was all he needed to know.

After what seemed to be hours he stopped, made lazy by the summer heat and lulled to tire by the pleasant sameness of everything surrounding him. Endless wheat, endless blue sky, endless sun caressing his skin.

He sat down and listened as someone began to hum, soft and familiar. He closed his eyes, opening them only when he felt the sun being blocked from him. He squinted up at the boy in front of him, redheaded and serious. He broke into a smile when he met Raymond’s eyes and Raymond smiled back, holding out his hands which were taken immediately as Kevin pulled him up into an embrace.

Have you ever played that game before? You know the one, the girls on the playground gathered round in circles. Mystic and wise despite how you might have jeered. Did you want to join them? Did you want to know? I won’t blame you. I wouldn’t blame you for anything. You know the one, the girls on the playground chanted; Pick a number Pick a color Pick a number Pick a color Pick a number Pick a color You live in a House With your Husband And you have Half a child (laughter) And you work as A -

No no no we didn’t have that kind of game. The girls at my school weren’t mystics, they were creatures of fact and reason like me. They would flock to the corners of the schoolyard and play jump rope. And though you may have jeered you admired their ability to look so free between the violent turning of the plastic. Did you want to join them? Did you think you would fall? Were you afraid to be called a- You know the one, the girls on the playground screamed; Strawberry shortcake cream on top! Tell me the name of my sweet heart! Is it, R A Y M O N -

Raymond woke up in the way he always did, all at once. It was a cloudy day and for a moment he was disconcerted by this, sure it had been sunny a few moments ago, before he was slotted completely back into reality.

It had been an odd dream.

“Oh, you’re finally awake.” Kevin said, peering into the bedroom, fully dressed and carrying a box. “I was beginning to consider waking you up, like a schoolchild.” He teased. Raymond rubbed his eyes and squinted at the alarm clock on their bedside table. Good lord, 7:30 am!

“You would have been remiss not to have done so!” He exclaimed, immediately getting out of bed and heading to the bathroom.

“Were you experiencing any difficulty sleeping last night? It isn’t like you to lie in so long.” Kevin remarked thoughtfully, swiftly removing and replacing their pillowcases with an intensity that told Raymond he’d been eager to for the majority of the morning.

“No…” He paused to brush his teeth as Kevin continued to replace towels and sheets, evidently the box was full of them.

“Well I had a dream, it wasn’t disturbing. I can’t remember the specifics. Something about…” He tried to latch onto anything from earlier but could only remember the vague feeling of warmth and Kevin.

“You were in it.” He settled on. “Why are you replacing all our linens?”

“It’s the beginning of summer, I thought they could do with some brightening up.” Kevin explained, holding up the corner of their duvet. “And this is much too heavy, a spring blanket will be absolutely suffocating when the weather turns.”

Raymond had no strong opinions on spring vs summer blankets but Kevin’s attention to detail was enamoring. ‘And,’ he thought as he ran a brush through his neatly buzzed hair ‘He might wear that lovely blue shirt that brings out his eyes now that the weather’s warmer.’

“Did you make breakfast yet?” He asked, exiting the bathroom and heading for the closet. “Not yet, should I?” Kevin called, already off down the hall. “No, I’ll prepare my own.”

When Raymond was a boy he had visited a relative’s farm. They had no animals but in the summer there was an explosion of carefully lined colors, bounty as far as the eye could see. He and Debbie would be set loose, told to “Go play outside” and she’d immediately be tugging at his hand, stepping on his shoes as she begged him to play Marco Polo.

“That’s a water game.” He’d say, observing a full tomato. “For the pool.” “Nuh-uh, it’s fine as long as you can’t see each other!” She'd insist.

And he’d acquiesce out of annoyance or fear that she’d run back inside crying that he was mean to her and he’d get the older brother speech.

He remembered a tiny thrill shooting through him as he crept around the crops, listening for his sister’s barely concealed giggles and shouts of surprise as they nearly collided. He remembered the childish idea of magic that seemed to be in the air when he opened his eyes somewhere different than where he started from.

Kevin liked his strawberries with a small bit of honey. This was to Raymond, a sickening amount of sweetness. “If the strawberry isn’t sweet enough on its own it’s a bad strawberry.” He’d say every time he found Kevin sitting out front, eyes half-lidded, indulging.

Sometimes this led to a playful argument and sometimes Kevin would simply smile and Raymond’s heart would lighten when gently assured of the knowledge that he was loved.

“Did you ever go apple picking as a child?” He asked Kevin over breakfast. Raymond was drinking a smoothie and Kevin was eating jam on toast.

“Not really.” He said after some deliberation. “At least, I don’t remember it. I was more of an ‘indoor child’ as my mother called me.” He laughed softly. “When I did go outside to play my father would open the window and yell ‘Dear God, he’s escaped!’”

Raymond pictured Kevin as a child, rolling his eyes and shoving his nose in a book when he heard his father call.

He felt...uneasy.

“What has you in such a nostalgic mood?” Kevin asked, wiping his face and clearing his plate. Raymond continued to sip his smoothie.

“I don’t know.” He admitted.

Raymond remembered so many days, all lined up in boxes, slightly differing but at their core the same.

Quietly studying his notes and praying the teacher would make it back to the classroom before the group of girls who were giggling and going table to table made their way to him and asked him if he liked any of them.

Changing so fast into his P.E uniform that the other boys began to remark on it and having to come up with something that wasn’t; ‘I’m so afraid that something will click if my gaze lingers anywhere, I’m so afraid that you will realize something about me and I will be confronted with the same thing and it’ll destroy me.’ He chose to declare his love for gym. “Ha, is that your boyfriend?” One of the boys laughed and he couldn’t remember what he’d said in response over the beating of his heart.

Retreating to the bathroom when one of his co-workers invited him out to a bachelor party. He looked past the color of his skin but balked at homosexuality; Had told him once. “The guys who give you shit about the black thing are fucking morons Ray.” Had told him once, “Don’t you look cute with those bug eyes on.” when he’d come in wearing his era-appropriate glasses. Had told him once, “You look good like that.” on a stakeout, leaning in too close to be coincidental, smelling like booze and cigarettes and putting an uncertain hand on the back of Raymond’s neck.

When he’d gotten the invite Raymond had smiled and said “So you finally roped Sandra into marrying you? How much did it set you back?” and the man’s eyes had widened before they refused to meet his, ashamed. Raymond had stared and stared and stared and then found himself in the bathroom, gut coiled tight with loss and anxiety.

When wasn’t it?

He imagined Kevin running past him on the street, reporter on the beat, thinking I’mnotI’mnotI’mnotI’mnotI’mnot so hard he could almost believe it.

“It...was difficult. It was a happy childhood but…” Hours had passed and Raymond was helping Kevin in the garden, watching him pluck insects off the fruit and flowers and deposit them safely in the dirt below. His tongue was so sharp it was easy to miss how gentle his hands were.

“...Anxious.” Kevin said. “Pardon?” Kevin pulled his hat down further and reached into a rose bush to remove a stick lodged inside it like a parent might remove a splinter.

“It was an anxious kind of happiness.” “I- ah.” Raymond hissed and instinctively cradled his hand before unfurling it and assessing the damage. Not much, just a small pinprick from one of the thorns.

“Are you alright?”

As Kevin took his hand he pictured a smaller Kevin with a smaller him, inspecting the cut. He pictured Kevin with a gaze so heavy it stilled him, calmed him. They had both played doctor as children - the real kind. Raymond had practiced with his stuffed animals and Kevin would write out notes and prescriptions to his brother.

Something welled inside him.

“Do you ever feel that you wish we had met earlier in our lives?” He blurted out, mildly surprising his husband. He had gotten a pocket first aid and was finishing up his ministrations, wrapping a band-aid around Raymond’s finger.

“Sometimes. Is that what’s been on your mind all day?” “Yes.” Raymond said, glad to be able to pinpoint it. “I just...can’t help feeling that perhaps we missed out on something.”

Kevin made a low noise of consideration. “I’m happy I met you when I did.” Raymond sighed in equal parts frustration and fondness. Kevin, ever rational. His lack of imagination was one of the most charming things about him.

“I can’t imagine anything better than how we met. I was granted the privilege of falling in love with your voice, your mind, and finally your body.” He continued, hands still cradling Raymond’s despite the cut having been attended to.

Raymond didn’t reply, breathing. He remembered Kevin being drunk when they were young and dating, they'd parked Gertie somewhere and his then-boyfriend was leaning half out of it. "I fell in love with you three times Raymond." he'd said, pulling himself back in and cupping his face. "What's more romantic then that?" He had assumed he was speaking nonsense at the time.

“Would you like to hear the stupidest thing I did as a child?” Raymond blinked, nodding. He was confused but comforted by Kevin’s apparent confidence.

“My father took me and my brother on a fishing trip and, tiring of waiting for the fish to bite, I threw the pole god knows where and tried to grab the fish myself.”

“Oh no.”

“Indeed. I ended up falling face first from the boat and nearly drowned. However, when I was dragged back on I found that a small fish had become trapped in my pocket.”

“How fortunate.”

“Yes. Of course my father was furious and my brother was beside himself, as I had accidentally hit him in the head with the pole, but I was over the moon. I was sent to bed without dinner and grounded for a week and never invited out fishing again but in my mind I had accomplished my goal of catching a fish.”

“...That’s a wonderful story Kevin." He paused. "I’m afraid I’m at a loss for how that connects to our previous topic of conversation.”

“Just because you weren’t there for those events doesn’t mean you can’t know them Raymond.” He clarified, kissing his husband’s hand before going back to gardening.

Raymond blinked again before breaking into a grin and nodding to himself. “Yes...I see!” He exclaimed, a rush of joy running through him.

The rest of the day was spent sporadically telling stories back and forth; The time Raymond kicked a dentist (“Oh, please tell Martin that one.”) The time Kevin got a girl’s hair stuck in his braces (“Quite the casanova.”) The time Raymond fell off the roof of his aunt’s house (“Amazingly, nothing broke.”) The time Kevin had had an allergic reaction during a date (“He did not call me back.”)

By the time night fell Raymond went to bed with his head full of Kevin. And when he closed his eyes he dreamt again;

He was in a boat, dressed to the nines and holding a parasol to combat the sun. He offered it to Kevin, who he felt would need it more but the man just shook his head. “Watch.” He insisted gently, gesturing to the water. And he did. It was beautiful. Two lifetimes played out on the surface, Kevin and Raymond as toddlers, as children, as teenagers, as adults. They laughed and pointed and exclaimed and watched every minute of it. They didn’t miss a moment.

Fire! Fire! False Alarm! Raymond fell in Kevin’s arms! Is he gonna be the one? Yes no maybe so! Yes no maybe so! Yes no maybe so!

[glatisants]

Albion: The Legend of Arthur (Closing Thoughts)

I’m gonna start with some really general, spoiler-free notes on what I liked, what did and didn’t work, the characterization choices, and that kind of thing. Further down will a more specific discussion of the story and writing decisions and such, and that will get into more spoilery territory.

also before I get into my subjective opinions about the series, I want to say that this should be taken with a tremendous grain of salt, given that

I am probably not the best person to ask for lit recs in general, given that my favorite piece of Arthurian lit is unironically, wholeheartedly The Dream of Rhonabwy;

My standards for audio media are probably lower than most people’s—I used to listen to 1940s radio for fun and that has absolutely numbed my palate;

I’m a little biased, in that I think Owain/Ywain is sort of underrepresented in Arthurian media, and as such I get irrationally excited whenever he’s included as a character in anything, however loose that characterization may be (my caveat, though, is that I strongly dislike the real historical Owain mab Urien; I want a cool Owain/Ywain who is also very obviously fictional).

***

All in all, I liked it, but I’m not sure I liked it as an Arthurian adaptation. Something like this is kind of a departure for me—honestly, I’m not usually a fan of Arthurian adaptations that do away with the Round Table and make Arthur a 5th century warlord. Legendry, and particularly Arthurian legends, can be this very odd thing, in that it lies in this liminal space between pure mythology and, like, history fanfiction, and honestly that makes me very uncomfortable.

I get the sense that the writers’ main sources were mainly “chronicle”-type things and Welsh bardic poetry—things like Nennius, Aneirin, Taliesin, Geoffrey of Monmouth, maybe Layamon’s Brut, and possibly the Welsh Triads and the Mabinogion. When certain familiar narrative elements are stripped away—no Round Table, no Grail, no courtly love—it can be difficult to reconcile that with more traditional takes on Arthuriana. Still, it’s not like I’m an expert on adaptational integrity, and I know modern authors do weirder takes all the time. And some things—such as the sword in the stone, and the idea of a Round Table—are hinted at in a way that are tailored to the more “grounded” nature of the story, while still capturing the ideas that live behind the symbols. And magic and fantasy do enter the story, in a deeply satisfying way, even as the story is largely focused on politics and warfare.

The gritty, “realistic” setting of Dark Ages Wales can be a dealbreaker for some people; honestly, I’ve felt that way before. I did appreciate it wasn’t overly violent, and there wasn’t any rape/sexual assault—there is one scene where a character is implicitly threatened by a group of Picts (but to put it mildly, things turn out well for her), and in the final episode one character is almost forced into an unwanted political marriage, but those are the only moments I can think of. And the series as a whole ended up being more optimistic than I thought it would be. The main themes are that hope is a beacon that lights the way into the future, and that stories are powerful and immortal (a bit cheesy, perhaps, but I love that sort of thing).

Characterization Notes

Gwenhwyvar—I absolutely loved this take on Gwen; something about the way she was written just hit perfectly for me. She was incredibly clever, perceptive, and protective of her people above all else; she was serious, astute and pragmatic, but also kind and gracious. She commanded an army, and yet always approached conflicts with the priority of peace.

I’m not usually a fan of Warrior Princess Gwen because it can remove a lot of the subtlety of her character, but that problem didn’t come up here; they make a point of showing how she’s underestimated by her peers and uses this fact to her advantage in order to wield her power discreetly. But when she met for political negotiations with councils of men, they always spoke as equals, with nothing but respect for her.

Arthur—Honestly, he fell flat for me compared to the other characters, and I felt like I couldn’t get a good sense of him. Arthur can be a tricky character to write, because there’s this inherent need to make him stand out as a heroic figure, and that usually entails either seeing him eye to eye or elevating him to great heights; either he’s written as someone someone people can emotionally connect to and see in a personable way, or he is extraordinarily capable and thus untouchable. Here, I think that the pathos was largely found in characters like Anna and Owain, and that untouchable capability in Gwenhwyvar, and it seemed perfectly natural that the focus would move away from Arthur and towards them as the series progressed.

Honestly this might have been intentional—one of the points we’re left with by the end is the idea that Arthur grew to be far more than he ever could have realistically been, and that the hope he inspired was the reason he lived on in the stories, rather than who he might have been as a person.

Medraut—I found him a bit underdeveloped, and that was a shame—I really wish we’d gotten to see more of him. There were some mentions of his past friendship with Arthur, but that tension was hardly felt until they finally met in battle; I think there could have been a lot of potential there, and besides, he was a fun character. He was charismatic and affable, manipulative and petty, stuck on nursing old grudges; but he was also without friends, family or country, completely alienated and digging himself into a deeper ditch with every move he made. 

Owain—Genuinely uncertain how I feel about this characterization! He was intelligent, good-hearted, courageous, caring, and thoughtful; he was extremely likable, and I found that…a bit odd, honestly. I can’t really articulate my thoughts further than that. 

Others: Myrddin—this is the only take on Merlin I’ve ever genuinely liked. He’s such a nuisance and just beautifully weird. Aergol—I found him really interesting, and I was actually a little surprised by how much he grew on me by the end. Cynon—I found him such a tragic, miserable character, equal parts contemptible and heartbreaking. 

Room For Improvement

The pacing mostly fine, but a little bit odd in places—I felt like the final act could have used a bit more buildup.

Audio coherence could’ve been better during some of the action scenes—there were definitely a few parts where I was not totally sure what was supposed to be happening. Most of the time it didn’t bother me, but when it’s something like Arthur facing off against Medraut, that should be a dramatic high point, and I want focus and clarity; otherwise, whatever is trying to be conveyed will inevitably come across as anticlimactic.

I might’ve liked to see music used in more interesting ways, bc it can be really integral to effective sound design. There were a couple scenes where it was used really well (the leadup to the Battle of Badon, for instance), and I would’ve loved more of that.

I don’t know if this was supposed to be an intentional choice, but I could not take the Saxon characters seriously at all—they were performed in such an over-the-top way that they made me laugh more than anything else. The other characters were portrayed very well, I found the voice acting quite strong, so the sheer oddness of the Saxons stood out to me.

***

Okay spoilers below

I was all about Anna’s storyline and I think it was one of the strongest parts of the series. I loved the idea of this woman, killed unjustly for fiercely clinging to her ideals in spite of tremendous pressure, finding strength in her fallen ancestors and rising again as a powerful enchantress determined to seek revenge. It felt right for her, totally cathartic, and I was glad that she was treated so sympathetically.

I tried not to think about it too deeply, but I think I saw her as sort of a Morgan/Morgause composite; obviously the name Anna is associated with Morgause, and she’s linked with Lewdwn (aka Lot) of Gododdin, but her transformation to enchantress led her to call herself Morgan.

It was pretty clear that Owain had feelings for Arthur, but I sort of wish it was a little less implicit (fyi for people who haven’t read the other recaps, they’re the same age and not related in this). Like, I guess they were involved in a major plot point that was a pretty clear allusion to Achilles and Patroclus, and other characters kept mentioning rumors about them, but the most direct reference we got was Arthur confessing to Gwen that they had been together briefly when they were kids, and while Arthur never loved him, he had never thought to ask Owain how he felt. By the end, you kind of get the sense that Owain’s main motivation all along has been this love/loyalty, but it’s done in such a subtle way it leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the fact that there was so much in their dynamic that went unspoken just exacerbates that.

I wasn’t sure how to read the ending and especially the final line. What I’m going with—just my personal interpretation—is that both Anna and Owain are stuck somewhere between life and death, possibly in a literal way as well as a figurative one. One of the recurring themes is, like, legendry as a means of resurrection and even immortality; legends are a place between life and death, where the dead are made immortal to walk among the living. So by the end, both of them have come to see firsthand how legends are made, and have become people tied to the liminal space of legendry, and thus belong to neither world.

I say this could be in a literal way as well as a figurative one bc Anna was given new life both through a physical transformation and the stories people would tell about her, and possibly some combination of both. And I think this could apply to Owain as well—maybe when he chose to take on the mantle of Arthur, he and his bronze sword somehow joined that part of the Otherworld with Anna and Merlin, and he became the proverbial King Asleep in the Mountain. But that might be a bit of a stretch. 

***

That’s all I have to say about this. I think the combined word count of all these posts could be a full-fledged novella, so thank you for your patience and for reading!

[scrawnydutchman]

5 Comic Book Heroes I Despise

Have I made it clear that I like Superheroes on this blog yet? Because I can always make it clearer. Superheroes have been a centerpiece of my life for a long time, and honestly how could they not be? The modern day all american equivalent of Greek Myths have not only been hugely entertaining and exciting action, but they’ve also made their stay as some of the finest storytelling across multiple mediums. Some of the greatest stories of our time are within the superhero medium like Watchmen, All-Star Superman, The Killing Joke, The Death of Gwen Stacy, The Man Who Has Everything and so on. Of course the number one appeal of these stories is the heroes themselves. All the colorful characters that are arguably the most well developed in our culture, being that they have thousands of issues building themselves up. I’ve grown to love many from both DC and Marvel alike, and to a lesser extent other companies like Dark Horse. But some characters . . . some characters just continue to leave a bad impression on me for one reason or another. I don’t really mean their powers are lame, because a good writer can make even the silliest heroes badass, and I don’t mean how they look because honestly even if a design is undeniably bad it’s nothing a simple revamp can’t fix. I’m talking specifically about personality and reoccurring themes that the writers think are compelling but I just get horribly annoyed about.

Now I want to make ONE THING VERY CLEAR before we get into it. My experience with these characters comes largely from watching them on tv shows like Justice League Unlimited and Batman: Brave and the Bold and other stuff. The truth is, I’m not an avid comic book reader, so my opinion is VERY subjective and could easily be proven wrong by something demonstrated in the comics. Yeah, I’m very biased, but i might as well be honest about it. Take what I say with a grain of salt. And of course, if you like these characters, good for you. I’m a guy who thinks Superman Returns is a good movie, no need to take me so seriously. Enough stalling, let’s do this.

1. Star Girl

Yeah, you saw the intro picture so you knew this was coming. Might as well get this one out first. So my introduction to Star Girl (among many DC heroes) was Justice League Unlimited and she later received my attention in Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The above video where she teams up with Blue Beetle in BTBatB is a solid indication of why I dislike her so much. She’s a snarky, condescending, petty and honestly pretty self entitled princess who acts like she’s so much better than everyone else . . .but gets her ass kicked and needs help/saving in everything I’ve seen her in. In the above clip Mantis is ready to break her spine with one hand until BB saves her, and all she has to say in response is calling BB a knock-off (btw hypocritical much?). But honestly this doesn’t come CLOSE to topping the time in JLU where she directly disobeys Green Lanterns orders, gets her ass kicked as a result, Supergirl ends up dealing with her mess and than she gets all petty about Supergirl being popular in Japan. GOD she annoys me. I’ve never seen or heard of her doing anything cool, and in everything i see her in she contributes nothing of real substance.

2. Cyclops

So let’s talk about leader characters for a second. Leader characters can be difficult to get right in fiction because, well, to be honest leaders in real life can be a difficult person to really like. even though being bossy and over authoritative can be necessary in dire times, a lot of people take issue with that and associate people who take charge as self righteous buzzkills with no sense of fun or relatability. Because people who are evidently better than you are ALWAYS hard to relate to and thus you by default don’t really trust them. But some leaders you can’t really argue with. Captain America can be that guy (and he’s had bad moments in comics) but overall he tends more often than not to be in the right on any subject and a major part in how he leads is that he inspires good work, not insists on it. Cap is a prime example of a leader character done right. Cyclops is nothing like Cap. Why? Because not only is he a pompous self righteous asshole, unlike Cap he can’t even back up his own bravado. He insists everybody always pull it together and not do anything to jeopardize the mission but the MOMENT he loses something like, say, Jean Grey (which happens a lot, no secret about that), he has a complete mental breakdown and puts his own personal problems before everybody elses. Yes I know, he was her boyfriend and therefore the closest one to her, but the fact that he’s SO self centered he can’t even recognize how much the loss of Jean effects the rest of his team is just unbearable. Besides, considering how much he cheats on Jean throughout the comics anyway, it’s kind of a moot point that his pain is SOOO special.  And he’s SO entitled to the leadership and gets all jealous whenever another member takes charge. Asshole, you’ve proven you don’t have the emotional capacity to put your duty as leader first, why the hell would we give the position back to you? Storm for all intents and purposes is a better leader than cyclops. She takes charge whenever he’s being a fucking baby (which is a lot) and she ends up being SEVERAL times more competent. She also keeps him and Wolverine from butting heads all the time. And unlike him, she doesn’t let her personal issues get in the way of others. She’s claustrophobic, but she admits to it and doesn’t let it come before the welfare of her team. While Cyclops is self entitled to respect out the gate, Storm earns it without even asking.

Also, in terms of powers Cyclops is kind of useless when his brother Havok is around. He can control his optic blasts AND can shoot in more than one direction at once. Bottom line; Cyclops kinda sucks.

3. Captain Atom

Alright, so conceptually this guy is really cool. Nuclear man that can absorb and blast radiation? Alright, I’m down. But his execution more often than not is really either just a simple means to an end or a result of REALLY shitty decision making on his part. In the Flashpoint Paradox storyline he’s trapped and basically used as a nuke (and I’m pretty sure this isn’t the only time he’s been used like this). For a LONG time in the comics he’s been built up to be somebody who betrays the Justice League in a big grand way. In Justice League Unlimited he chooses his loyalty to the U.S. airforce over his loyalty to the Justice League and boxes Superman, despite the fact that he KNOWS CADMUS ILLEGALLY DETAINED AND TORTURED THE QUESTION FOR INFORMATION. Captain Atom: enabler of terrorist activity. How about in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies when he works for President Lex Luthor? This guy has a reputation for backing the wrong horse, don’t he? Also in Batman: TBATB he’s an arrogant douchebag who blatantly insults Batman for having no superpowers, goes through a whole story arc about what it truly means to be a hero . . and than learns absolutely nothing by the end of it. Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be comedic, but the point I’m making is that this guy just always seems to make bad decisions or straight up turn evil. Anytime I see him and he’s NOT doing that he’s doing something of no real significance. 

4. Damian Wayne

Alright, so my earlier entries I can imagine a lot of people disagree with. But I think I can get at least a LITTLE sympathy for this one. Everytime I see this punk ass piece of shit kid I wanna deck him right in his arrogant self absorbed face. Now, let me be fair. This is a very difficult type of character to make likable. For one, child characters of any personality are notorious for becoming very annoying very quickly, for different reasons each. I think it’s largely due to the amount of attention they absorb and how a great deal of the viewing audience is inherently a lot more mature and thus can’t relate to them as much. A great deal of the time they take away from the drama of the situation rather than add to it. For another, Damian is deliberately meant to be a very stuck up, unapologetic and unforgiving, relentlessly violent kid. He grew up a bastard child raised by the league of assassins under the world’s most intense martial arts training, and so as a result he’s become almost sociopathic because he just can’t understand the outside world. He has an arc where he grows to respect his father, and that’s all well and good I suppose, but for me personally it’s not enough to distract from the fact that at the end of the day it’s like a 10 year old kid being the edgy badass. If there’s a way to make the “you can’t tell me what to do DAD” character likable I haven’t figured it out yet. Also, in the Injustice universe he betrays his own father for a maniacal Superman. Fuck him.

and now for my final entry . . . . brace yourselves, this is gonna be a hard one.

5. Batman

Oh yes. You bet your ass I went there. I can hear the fanboys rallying around my building now. But honestly, the extent of how defensive people get about this character is precisely why I’ve grown such a distaste for him. Now, I should state that “despise” might be too strong a word for my feelings on Batman. Conceptually I think he’s fine. He’s had great stories, good movies, good tv shows. Conceptually he’s totally fine to me. But this is a situation where hype has not only ruined the character for me by making the expectations too high for him to reach in my view, but it’s actively impeded on DC’s storytelling. Batman is too. damn. competent. Batman has a plan for everything. Batman can beat anyone he wants to. Batman can do no wrong. You can’t criticize him because he’s the GODDAMN BATMAN. This is the mentality that’s been surrounding the character for a long time and it’s gotten pretty old. The fact that he’s done so much amazing feats renders everything supposedly relatable about him completely moot. Being a human with no superpowers doesn’t mean anything when he can accomplish things no average human could possibly do anyways. a master in every form of martial arts? knows every language known to man?? can beat every league member no matter how powerful they are?? The guy who can stop himself from being possessed by spirits??? The guy who ghosts flinch around??? THIS is the guy who’s meant to be the relatable human?? People complain about Superman being too powerful but at least he has exploitable weaknesses. Batman apparently can’t be touched. But honestly, that’s not even the worst of it. The worst part is that his competence completely ruins his whole character conflict. to summarize:

Bruce Wayne’s life was changed forever the night he lost his parents to a mugger in an alley. He became emotionally distant and pessimistic, and became obsessed with vengeance against the forces that too his loved ones from him. So he dawned the mantle of the bat to strike terror into the hearts of criminals. But as he delves more into the Bat persona he loses more and more his capacity to make human connections. He wants to make his parents proud, not realizing that his parents wanted him to have family that could provide him with happiness he so deserves. He needs to let people in and let himself be vulnerable.That’s why the Bat-family is so important. That’s why Alfred is so important. That’s why the Justice League is so important.

But when you make him so competent that he can do everything himself under the circumstances, all that does is justify his delusions. Why SHOULD he trust the league more if he can do everything himself anyway to the point where every other member is a clumsy asshole in comparison? What is the point of having such a colorful and diverse superhero team if the writers constantly insist one should be your favorite? When you make it so he never has to depend on anyone his whole arc as a character is thrown out the window. Now, Batman HAS been displayed right in the past. JLU makes him badass but not overbearing and Lego Batman is oddly enough the best cinematic Batman film in years. But recently the “Bat-God” has been the mainstream, and it’s completely gratuitous.

[minttearoom]

Nick Spencer’s Captain America is Bad, but in these ways

OK  ... I made this blog so I could dump my bad opinions on it, so call me out on this if anyone needs to.

-- This isn’t something I care about too much, but I feel like I need to start off by saying that Hydra doesn’t and shouldn’t always have a 1:1 equivalent with Nazis or the political specifics of fascism. In their first appearance, they were a generic mustache-twirling, world-domineering evil enterprise. Although that’s changed because Nazi leaders were retconned in to match the WWII backgrounds of Marvel’s heroes, it’s always been story-dependent as to whether that element really mattered. Sometimes, Madame Hydra trying to take over the world was just Madame Hydra trying to take over the world so that superheroes could have fistfights. There’s a usefulness to a generic SPECTRE-type evil organization for when comics that need a villain to punch. Although it’s important for stories and readers to criticize what that evil entails, there’s a messiness that’s involved when it comes to shared universes and different tools serving different functions in different contexts. This is an issue that mostly irks me when it comes to how the conversations about Captain America are framed, and how they’re framed solely in terms of Hydra, when there’s a little more going on there; this was especially bad after Captain America: Steve Rogers #1 came out.  *HOWEVER, this is kind of irrelevant to the rest of what I want to talk about.*

-- I’m not sure if a story about an altered-reality Captain America being evil, or even being a Nazi is off-limits. I’m not a Jonathan Chait “protect malevolent free speech” type, but I do think that you might be able to tell a somewhat meaningful (and possibly respectful) story under these conditions. I understand that WWII is highly sensitive and emotional, and I also understand the situation surrounding Captain America’s creation. However, it’s not like similar stories (or story beats) haven’t been done before -- even one drawn by Jack Kirby. I hate Nick Spencer’s Captain America for a variety of reasons, but part of the reason why is that I think you might actually be able to publish a story like this, even (or especially) in these times, and have it be salient and productive and well thought-out.

-- The problem with Nick Spencer’s Captain America goes back to the beginning of his run. From the beginning, he set out to do a run that broached extremely topical political issues, but keep his comics from making too strong of a stance in any given direction, while insisting that it did have a stance. For example: since the KOBIK/Cosmic Cube plotline, he’s been paying lip service to the idea that there needs to be a discussion about the growth of the security state and what it means to create unimaginable and invasive authority and power when you don’t know who will be in control next. ... Except whenever someone does have anything to say about it,it’s usually only a couple words, or a weak sketch of their stance. You might think this is fine, as long as the conflicts that Spencer brings up are carried through the plot to create meaning. After all, you don’t want to buy comics just to see talking heads debate politics. However, this doesn’t carry through for a few reasons!

-- The first way, most commonly seen in Sam Wilson, is that he’ll bring in some way for the critical/left-leaning position to be criticized. Though this is mostly like to preserve some sort of apolitical company line, it ultimately amounts to centrism, which is a political stance in and of itself, defined by the extremes of political climate in which you’re speaking. You see it first with Rick Jones -- he was a whistleblower hacktivist in the early issues of Captain America: Sam Wilson. The characters in Spencer’s book seem sympathetic to him when he gets caught, but Rick did BREAK THE LAW :( so his rightful course of action is to join SHIELD to help the security state keep on doing everything he despised! 

Then came the infamous issue where a Tomi Lahren-type character was inciting hate against a specific undocumented teen -- the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres. Joaquin, understandably, was about to go give her a piece of his mind, but he gets derailed by the appearance of a group of teens who obviously serve as an in-universe warning of the dangers of what he was about to do. These teens, the new Bombshells, not only spouts awkward online academia-derived lingo about safe spaces and trigger warnings but they also advocate violence against racists! They come and fight Falcon and Rage as if to, say “Look out! Don’t become like them!” 

You see it when Sam goes to stop Rage from getting in a confrontation with the AmeriCops (Spencer’s convenient robotic representations of racist police brutality). There’s no real strong reason for Rage to have not gotten into a confrontation, as the AmeriCops were ridiculously over-the-cop brutal and terrible, except for concerns about optics and (this is a recurring theme which obviously clashes with some of the issues Spencer wants to bring up) respect for authority.

You also see it when the only true far-left voice in the entire run, Flag Smasher, is the only the only one to fully articulate his issues with corporate influence over politics, the security state, and the no-fly list, and ends up being not only a violent terrorist assassin, but also (amazingly) a plant by Steve Rogers. I can’t begin to say how ridiculous that was.

-- The other way that Spencer undermines the political claims in his run is in how the villains are made overly sympathetic. So much of Captain America: Steve Rogers is about the ideological purity and clarity in Steve’s heart. He is destined to lead Hydra because he is still a great man in the way that Dr. Erskine recognized. (This bears out in the most disgusting of ways in the FCBD issue of Secret Empire, where Steve is still worthy to lift Mjolnir.) 

Steve is part of a faction of Hydra lead by some horrorterror old god/sweet old lady named Elisa who becomes Steve’s doting mother figure. She gets in close with his mother, and then dotes on Steve day and night about how he’s good and pure and destined for greatness -- and there isn’t much to undercut this as fascist BS. Elisa goes on and on, essentially dogwhistling what might as well be soliloquy about Steve’s Aryan purity and good heart, yet she never really gets a strong villain moment to underscore the idea that what she’s saying is wrong. The one truly evil thing she she was supposed to have (kill his mother offpanel) apparently never happened! She appears unharmed in later issues of CA: Steve Rogers.

-- This links into the other major problem in Spencer’s run: his depiction of Hydra. From the get-go, he plays up Hydra as not only a fascist neo-nazi organization, but specifically one that parallels modern ethnonationalist movements, all being propagated by the Red Skull. He further links Hydra to literal European nationalist militant movements by having Hydra take over Sokovia (#moviesynergy). Linking back to what I talked about at the beginning, this is all fine, so far; Spencer is making the specific choice in this story to use Hydra as an analogy for Nazism and its connection to the modern day, and this is a story that is obviously just as much about the Red Skull. EXCEPT, over the course of Spencer’s flashbacks to Steve’s altered past, we see that Steve is a member of a faction of Hydra that has always opposed not just the Red Skull, but Hydra joining the Nazis in general!

-- It’s an insanely weird choice to decode: does Spencer want to tell a story about Steve Rogers being allied with the Nazis ... or not? He certainly shows him helping the Nazis in WWII. What’s the point of saying he was secretly opposed to them and the Red Skull this whole time? What is he trying to do with Hydra?

-- For that matter, how much less fascist is Steve supposed to be? He rails out against Red Skull’s cheap inflammatory tactics, yet by the time his Secret Empire is set up, he’s already created an authoritarian state that rounds up Inhumans and puts them into camps! CAMPS!

-- There’s a lot of other, little, infinitely frustrating things. The FCBD issue explained that Wanda joining the HYDRA-vengers probably wasn’t of her own will, but having the Romani girl on the Nazi team is still unsettling, especially if they don’t end up giving her any space to react to it. Spencer’s writing is way lacking in nuance -- whereas Ales Kot gave a thoughtful look at the paranoia that must feed the drive to do crazier and crazier things in the name of security when he wrote Maria Hill in Secret Avengers, Spencer’s Maria Hill shrugs off each evil thing she does in the name of the state with a joke and a condescending comment. Spencer sucks at writing spies and spy stuff in general (there’s no reason he should have gotten two tries at Secret Avengers!), so seeing him try to handle SHIELD in general in the context of this run has been annoying. Also, ... why can Steve lift Mjolnir WHEN HE JUST HELPED KILL BUCKY, jfc.

-- Again, this is partially upsetting because some parts of this aren’t terrible. Sam Wilson is the most effortlessly diverse Captain America book ever, with somewhat decent stories about things like police brutality and immigration when they aren’t being undercut by other elements Spencer sticks in to ~balance things out. Seeing the Champions fight HYDRA in Secret Empire is also pretty unobjectionable. It’s the context and the handling that’s made this all atrocious -- even the publicity of blowing this Nazism thing up to a huge event is pretty dubious.

[thebirdinthesea]

“I was so scared of losing you, that I did”

So, this post is just an analysis of Barry’s feelings after seeing the ‘future’ and seeing Iris die and why he made the choice to propose to her to change that part of the future. And also analysis on Iris’ view and her taking off the ring.

First of all, Barry’s attitude since he saw the horrific event was ‘There’s no way this is happening’ ‘This is impossible’ and ‘I can’t let this happen’ In fact, one of the first things he said was ‘I’m not going to let her die.’

He was overly confident in the impossibility of Iris’ death because he knows, he knows deep down inside that it will destroy him. Shatter him into pieces. He knows that indeed he will never get over it, and that he doesn’t want to even consider it. But at the same time, he’s also afraid because of that. He hides his fear in his drive to by all costs, and by all means, save Iris.

1. He considers letting a villain go free.

Asking Iris a pained “Why, why not?” when she tells him he can’t stop protecting the city to save her.

2. He pushes Wally once he realizes Wally’s speed is accelerating twice as fast as his was.

3. Part of his reasoning for going to E2 was also to change events and save Iris.

4. He considers killing Grodd.

Even before this big - big mistake of proposing mostly with the hopes that it will prevent the future, rather than proposing ready to marry her (knowing it was the right time), Barry was already blind to his conscious in hopes of saving Iris.

He wasn’t thinking about anything but the idea of keeping her alive.

And in my opinion this is what really breaks Iris’ heart.

She knows that Barry loves her, and any time he asks her to marry her, he probably does want to marry her because he could marry her at any moment. But he didn’t ask because he thought ‘this is it, now’s the time’ he asked as a means to an end, a chance to keep his happiness.  

And the thing is, Iris was always more realistic about her death, but she was also afraid. Savitar mentions it, and while I would never agree with Savitar, we all know she was afraid.

She wanted to be strong for Barry. 

(As well as wanting to protect herself, as well as possibly being in denial)

She also didn’t want it to consume him, as it already has. She didn’t want it to become something that takes away his moral compass, something that makes him go insane, something that keeps him from being present, from enjoying the here and now which she desperately needed from him because she was more realistic and felt as if she could actually die, even though she trusts that everyone will try their best to save her.

And in a way, Barry’s obsession with changing the future has morphed into one not just to save Iris per say, but also to save his happiness. He said in the beginning ‘I have everything I’ve ever wanted in life right now’. And when he was in that Flashpoint, that was almost like his heaven. He had the three people he will only love the most in his entire life. Back in the real timeline, he’s experienced two of those three people be violently stripped from him.

Iris is his everything.

Her being taken from him is something that ultimately takes away his happiness. His light. His anchor.

He genuinely would do anything to prevent that from happening.

And I think Iris sees this fully when she finds out why he proposed, and it’s why she says it’s tainted because he’s obsessed with saving something he already has with him in that moment. (I also think she means if they had gotten married, it would have tainted their marriage.) He’s so frightened of losing everything, that he forgets that he has everything. She loves him. She would’ve married him, but she wouldn’t marry him just to prevent her death, she would marry him because he wanted to be married to her. And it’s not like he didn’t, but that wasn’t his first or only thought.

In a way, it was as if he was choosing his happiness over Iris. And that might not be the case completely, but it was to an extent. Nobody wants to be proposed to for a specific reasoning other than love. Other than knowing they want to marry the other person. Other than feeling the desire to be called that person’s wife or husband. And Barry had another reasoning, he just didn’t want her to die.  

Iris couldn’t take this. And neither could I. She wants him to be happy, she wants him to be her’s, but she doesn’t want him to be her’s with the constant fear that he could lose her. She doesn’t want him to be able to do anything in order to save her. She doesn’t want him to even use their love a means to save her.

I write this not to make Barry seem like a terrible person or anything, but simply to express this wasn’t something that was sudden, there was a slow build-up of Barry willing to bend his morality in order to keep Iris alive. And that part of it is to save his idea of happiness, rather than only to save Iris. What Iris wants is for him to be with her, in the present. But he’s always got his mind on the future. It’s his vice. This fear of having everything stripped away from him, it’s his greatest vice.

It’s something that makes me have some empathy for him. It’s also something that makes my heart break for Iris.

However, he can come out of this! Barry can and should learn from this. He can love and cherish Iris as his everything, and still make sure his actions are done purely out of love for her, and also based on the values they both share.