#I mean the answer is obviously it was circa 2000 so the only insult was ur gay but how did it even come up. it was a mystifying age

[hanamiyama-basketball-club]

i want to know what piercings isami and smith would get, and what they would feel about them

Oh, this is an interesting one.

I have of course immediately hit a wall in that I said to handwave external reasons that someone wouldn't get a piercing; but "literally being in the military" feels like a big wall to completely ignore, or at least one that we'd be better off seeing if we can use as a ladder.

(Disclaimer: I don't know a ton about the military, but this is my question and I say rule of cool applies exactly as much as I want it to. I mostly looked up uniform requirements for the US Marines because that at least applies to one of them and probably the JSDF aren't that far off. I am calling this sufficient bc A. I'm only using it as vague guidelines anyway and B. I am too tired to attempt to understand that kind of formal rules language in Japanese and most Japanese military stuff in English has Bad Vibes.)

Smith, as we see him, doesn't really seem terribly interested in uniform regulations. I have to imagine he's gotten written up at one point or another by some exceedingly stodgy higher-up for wearing his tokusatsu t-shirts a little too close to base. (Though Ryoma didn't seem very strict about these things either, so maybe that's just what their unit is like.) So I have an easier time imagining he has a piercing and it's healed well enough that he can take it out when he needs to appear in full dress uniform. From a bit of googling, this seems like something male Marines often get away with as long as it's not like, gauges.

(Tangent: I skimmed what purported to be official regulations and apparently only female Marines are allowed to carry -- hold up google tells me as of 2019 umbrellas are now gender neutral https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/777352792/marine-corps-revises-its-umbrella-policy go woke or get soaked)

(As of recently he could have a decent amount of tattoos too so long as they weren't on his face or hands or anything. I was about to say I hope he has a secret cool Sparkaiser and then I remembered we have seen them all incredibly naked. Nevermind. Maybe it's on his dick.)

Anyway I think he got his right earlobe pierced when he was a teen because he thought it was pretty cool. Maybe this was as close as he felt like getting to rebelling, though it probably felt hollow without parents to react to it anymore. He was born late enough to have missed schoolyard taunts about the "gay ear" and oblivious enough to not realize why older or more queer-history-aware people tend to nod thoughtfully at him. He doesn't swap the earring out much, though sometimes he attaches a charm to fidget with, something geometric and dangly. Mostly he just wears a tricolor gem trio, which looks sufficiently patriotic that most people leave him alone about it but in his heart it's Sparkaiser merch.

He would maybe get something else pierced if he thought it was cool enough, but he's pretty happy as is. Maybe after he gets back from being a robot he gets something else to ground him back in his physical existence again, or something that interacts with whatever weird sensory hangovers he has from having radar and built-in wifi. Like daith piercings for migraines. I said only one though so that means I don't have to decide any specifics.

Isami is more difficult.

I have a hard time picturing him with any kind of piercing at the start of the series. This guy seems to have changed into his dress uniform to go to the bar, he has no hobbies besides weight training. We never see him in civvies until, presumably, Bravern makes him that aloha shirt; you can't convince me he owned anything like that before. I don't know what reasons would make that Isami either decide to get a piercing or do it impulsively. (Which I imagine is why you asked.)

I can imagine him as a teen doing something like what I did when I was ten: going as far as ... well piercing in Japan is usually either done at the doctor or by getting a little self-piercing doohickey (only for lobes, hopefully), so not "standing nervously outside the Claire's for half an hour and then getting scared and going home" but close enough. Maybe he did try piercing his lobe, panicked thinking of The Permanence Of It All; how it didn't make him feel as immediately different and grown up as he thought it would, it just meant he had a hole where he didn't have a hole before, and maybe he did it wrong and it will get infected. So he immediately let it heal up again. (Which it did without a trace, so it wasn't permanent, obviously; but in that moment it felt very serious, because he was and is a very serious guy.)

I'm projecting massively onto both of them. That's allowed. Isami is hard to get a grasp on and I'm still working on it. We don't know much about him as a kid besides that he didn't find heroes compelling.

But being Big Bang seems to have loosened him up a bit, and he seems to have learned to take a chance and keep moving forward even if he doesn't know what's going to happen. I can imagine that Isami getting a piercing, somewhere on their world cruise. A way to commemorate everything that happened, to mark the break between his old cautious self and the one that smiles and cries when someone might see. A sanctifying of the body changed forever by the ultimate communion with Bravern. Something with gold jewelry, probably something simple like a barbell; somewhere he can still hide it under his dress uniform if he needs to, because he is still a very serious military man, but somewhere the right person might get to see the secret passion even he didn't know he had until recently.

In other words, my brain immediately went "oh he has a Prince Albert" and I'm trying to come up with any way that could possibly be true. Maybe he wanted to surprise Smith. (It did not work he still hasn't seen it got dammnit lewis smith get your shit together) Or at least nipples, that man spends enough time shirtless all of a sudden he should at least get to show off. He can put tape over it when he goes to the gym or something it's fine