#I like pairing baiken with Iroha but at some point I've really got to do something with her and Ukyo

[broken-clover]

I like thinking about crossovers with guilty gear and samurai shodown because of baiken's dlc status in the latter but whenever I come back to the concept it ends up making me profoundly sad and it's basically always for one of two reasons

One is the fact that from the get-go, Samsho in part shows off its archaic setting by having a character, Ukyo, that's contracted tuberculosis, in a setting where it's more or less a guaranteed death sentence. Of course his repeated presence as a playable character means he has a bit of plot immunity and has had at least one death retconned, but still, a lot of his character relates to the fact that he's a terminally ill man who's deeply suffering from something that will, inevitably, kill him. Guilty Gear, being a futuristic setting with magic means that even if conventional treatments were potentially wiped out, TB very likely is something that's relatively trivial to cure. And I could see that being either a happy-sad or just a sad thing whether or not it's something that Baiken would be capable of fixing.

And one is the fact that, suddenly, Baiken is home. It's not the place she grew up in, she's a couple of centuries early, but the grass and dirt and rock beneath her boots belong to a place that, in her world, was literally blasted out of existence. Even if it isn't the same people and exact places she lost, she suddenly sees her own culture alive and thriving. Everything in her world that was destroyed or died off or banned is just...right there.

But at the same time, what does that mean for her sense of vengeance? The place she's mourned for decades and fashioned into a deep well of fury and will to survive is fine. It's all been undone. Even if she may or may not have come to terms with the loss, suddenly the thing you've devoted so much of your life to, used to power your will to go on, and it meant nothing. And in having her old existence handed to her on a platter, would she even fit into it anymore? Baiken the person, who she exists as now, owes so much of that to rising from the ashes of her homeland. She isn't the happy, innocent little girl she was when her home was still standing. Adult Baiken has only ever had a burnt-out husk of a home. How do you just suddenly pretend everything is fine when everything you've done has suddenly been made completely pointless?