#NOBLE KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR HIRAGI AND HORRIBLE LITTLE BOG CREATURE BANJO

[yallstar]

I'm seated and listening to your banjo/hiragi art, I wanna know your hcs and thoughts about this ship

oh man okay look listen i am going to TRY and keep this brief because i'm still living in the delusion that these two have not completely taken over my brain. so here are my very normal thoughts about this one-off interaction between a side character with far more compelling established relationships and [checks notes] the literal masochist who he proposes a monogamous bdsm relationship to mid-fight.

so ASIDE from how needlessly sexually-charged their entire fight was (which, make no mistake, is the majority of my obsession) i am just, so COMPELLED by the potential in this dynamic. like on the one hand you have hiragi, who i'd argue is the most mature and emotionally intelligent character in the series, regularly scolding others for their social faux pas or guiding them away from bad habits. which i think is a big part of why i love how he SNAPS in his fight against banjo.

because here's this guy who is the exact opposite of hiragi - not only pushing people past their comfortable limits but not even aware enough to realize he's doing it. and hiragi is ironically the one to finally push banjo past HIS limits. that bit where banjo realizes his body is actually registering pain as PAIN and not pleasure, and tries to pause their fight? and hiragi DOESN'T LET HIM?? is SO SO GOOD AND JUICY. like that's so NOT something hiragi usually does, and we actually see that a few pages later when banjo is literally begging him to stop.

(quick aside that i'm obsessed with banjo's mental transition from "this feels so good i could die~" to "this hurts so bad, i think i'm dying" 👌👌👌)

then we get that INSANE AND ICONIC exchange of hiragi telling banjo plainly that he needs to like, negotiate his weird kink shit ahead of time and take no for an answer and accept that not everyone is going to want to go as far as he wants - AND WITH THAT IN MIND, HE SHOULD GO TO HIRAGI FOR IT. LIKE. LIKE????? Y'ALL. DID NOT SEE THAT COMING.

is it because he's still pissed about what banjo did to kaji and he wants to work out that anger? maybe. is hiragi such an upstanding guy that he's willing to martyr his time to deal with banjo as like, a kind of community service?? possibly. did he need to claim explicit singular possession over banjo's main way of experiencing pleasure??? absolutely not, but here we are!!!

if we ever see banjo again in the story i want it to be him going to hiragi to take him up on that offer. like i know that'd be WILD but also given the whole manga's themes of "no one is unforgivable" and "there's a place for everyone" i would not be entirely surprised. like just the two of them beating the shit out of each other in a 7/11 parking lot on a regularly scheduled basis and maybe hiragi starting to feel a little conflicted bc his effort to reform the guy who messed up his best friend is maybe turning into a thing he looks forward to and oops maybe umemiya was onto something about fights being conversations and haha wow wouldn't it be CRAZY if he wasn't completely disgusted by banjo after all haha ha~~~

tl;dr this is the essence of a crack ship, just pure unadulterated "they would not do that" AND YET. IN A VERY LITERAL SENSE. THEY KINDA ALREADY DID? SO LIKE WHATEVER I GUESS. PARTY ON.