#Though funnily enough if you can *pretend* to be a real person that changes things...

[centrally-unplanned]

I might be a bit of a weirdo in this regard so I am a bit biased, but I think a fundamental problem AI Companion Apps like lets say Friend.com are going to have in "replacing socializing" is that socialization is instrumental and that instrumentality lies in the real. The ad copy for this product and so many of its various clones is a normal-looking everyman just chatting with their companion, making comments about the weather or how their hiking is going, etc. Treating it like a friend and talking to it like a friend does.

The rub there is that not many people do those behaviors for the reasons presented. They are treated as somehow "inherently" enjoyable, that you just love talking to ~something~ about the weather and anything that can pantomime the right responses is going to do it for you. That isn't how it works for most people; the point is the other person. The words themselves, divorced from the speaker being a breathing human you have a relationship with, are not very interesting. Instead it is about building rapport, signalling care, a human-connected daily ritual. Sometimes it is positive, but it is negative sometimes too! You put up with Kyle's 18th story about his dog's health woes because, look, it's boring as shit, but Kyle needs to rant about it and if this is the price of admission to his amazing saturday brunch parties you are going to pay up.

Even interesting-in-their-own-right convos are normally not like wow, you taught me some amazing new fact; it is hearing your friend's interesting take or experiences. There is this whole structural undercurrent here, this person is admirable or kind or you have a lot of history with them or they are really hot and so their words are contextualized into an emotional experience of connection or curiosity or wanting to impress them and a million other things around that structure.

When you shed all of that, when it is an AI that you know is just programmed to listen, that you can turn off at will, that you can just override and ask it for directions or to switch over to spotify or to sext you catgirl pics, there isn't anything left. These conversations are useless - what is the point? Why would I tell my phone how tired I am? Those are empty words, I am immediately bored and will flip over to YouTube instead.

Obviously there are niche applications. Porn and its adjacencies of course, where the fiction is the point. Specifics like a daily journal that interacts with you a bit? Sure, that would work for some. One-offs and curiosities of course, "Siri+" because that is a functional tool. But none of these are the same thing.

Now there are already, and have been for years, successful apps like Replika or Character.AI. The people on those clearly seem to enjoy talking to a digital friend, right? And I agree with you, humans are diverse, for some people this stuff works. Now for many, even possibly the majority depending on how you count it, these things are just the above categories though; a porn bot, a curiosity, a "man look how far AI has come" exploration. But I agree there are users who truly treat these tools as their friend or partner

And I have looked at the conversations those people have with their friend or partner. And...look. These tools suck. They do not, in any way, believably mimic a human conversation. By design they do not, endlessly accommodating and affirming, with shallow personalities and infinite flexibility. They are not friends, they are boxes to stuff inputs into and get validations out of, no human conversation works this way. Some people want that, no worries. Some people need that, maybe, I get it. But most people don't. These conversations would, if treated as an actual companion to most people, be incredibly cringe. They are not a sign that AI friends for everyone are right around the corner, if only we boost the specs. They are a niche product for a certain kind of person that does not mass scale at all.

You can sell people the "illusion" of a friend, even a nearly perfect one, and it might sell - as the stage show it is. Like a video game, something you explore, experience, and discard. Because it's not a person; I can just drop it if I want and it won't feel anything. That is what makes it an illusion and not magic; it is a trick that I see through over time. And making whatever implementation of Claude your little bluetooth-on-a-necklace runs have 10% higher fidelity or "able to pass the Turing Test" isn't going to change that. Maybe it will work as a product - video games sell after all. But it won't be a social revolution.

Then again these Friend.com guys apparently spent 2/3rds of their seed money on buying the web domain for Friend so they might have other problems to worry about.

[crazyexdirkfriend]

Hello brainiac. Its me. Here to marvel and indulge in your wonderfully written thoughts again. Opinions on the Hope aspect, and, if you havent mentioned it before, what's your aspect/class?

Brainiac made me laugh out loud for a while there because funnily enough, I'm a sylph of light. Annoying know-it-all, fountain of useless knowledge, and loves telling people about it whether they want to know or not. I'm self aware about it though which is half the battle.

You did ask though so I'm home free! And thank u thank u I'm glad you enjoy my Thoughts. I do need to brush up on my classpect knowledege in general but my opinions on Hope as an aspect basically boil down to:

hope, synonyms: faith, belief. opposing rage on our jungian-esque wheel of aspects.

How this manifests is ultimately up to the class as well, whether it's active or passive, how the aspect is ultimately used by a person, or imposes upon a person. I won't pretend to know very much about Eridan or Cronus in general, but my opinions on *pages* basically run on 1. pages can't gain their full potential until they "hit rock bottom" or "lose their aspect." and 2. pages are, at their full potential, an extremely powerful class but 3. pages are generally not a very active class.

so Jake only *actively* uses hope when all hope is lost (Dirk about to die by Caliborn's hand) or is being passively puppeted as a weapon by aranea. Jake however, may *passively* be using hope without ever acknowledging it or actively engaging with it, hell while probably deliberately covering his ears and going lalala powers, what powers.

I think Jake passively using his powers relies on that synonym concept: faith and belief. because pages are one of the most powerful classes, I believe to a degree Jake can passively change reality based on what he believes or has faith in. People treat Jake worse when he's already beating himself up, even if they have to real reason to do so- but Jake believes they do.

(side note: it's my opinion that Hope doesn't work on Dirk in this way, as Dirk is defined-largely through the Heart aspect- as unmalleable, and universally consistent. Jake cannot change Dirk's reality, Jake can't change Dirk's Heart)

Active hope powers I believe rely a little on "inversion theory" (if I'm remembering the term correctly from someone else's meta). I don't recall what inversion theory as a strict concept is, but I believe active hope powers often manifest as rage. Eridan's hope powers sure seem (from what little I pay attention to them) to be fueled by rage. Jake's attack on Caliborn during the claymation is described as a "temper tantrum."

(I think Jake has an interesting relationship with rage, and what he is and isn't allowed be angry at and when he is and isn't allowed show anger. Most of his anger is directed at Hal, who he believes doesn't have feelings anyway and treats as a "proxy Dirk," because he presumably, by and large, can *not* blow up at Dirk. Or Jane, or Roxy)

Also, while "if you believe in something hard enough, it makes it just a little less fake," is very much a page thing, I think it's doubly a Hope thing. At least for a Page of Hope

(End note, I think the classes we get for hope in HS are so diverse (bard, prince, page) that it's hard to get a read on the aspect in action bc a page and a prince are hugely different in presentation. This is largely analysis from me, a turbo Jake fan and someone who skipped chunks of act 5 on my first read. I barely know who Eridan is. So take it with a pinch of salt!)

[jiminrings]

would you (III)

pairing: jimin x y/n

wordcount: 6k

And when you look at him with the same hint of bleariness in your eyes, and his shoulder feels the brunt of your tentative squeeze and sees the lightest of smiles on your lips —

Jimin knows everything that he needs to know.

or the one in which love isn’t one-sided anymore, jimin realizes his feelings, and yearning for you is what keeps him awake.

would you by pink sweats

part one | part two | part three

Both oddly yet unsurprisingly, Jungkook’s become a constant in your life.

For starters, both of you were lonely and needed someone, even if it’s by the sidelines. The equivalent of white noise and an extra pillow to put by your side so you’d feel surrounded.

Funnily enough, Jungkook’s as good as a mainstay in your life as you are with him, providing company and warmth with no question. It’s as if he’s always been your friend and you never met each other in such desperate measures.

Given that, sure, maybe you and Jungkook don’t fuck each other as often and it’s only occasional now at this point, but the conversation stays and lasts. It’s the routine of him pounding into you as he talks shit about the pressure he feels fron rival companies that aren’t even worth his time, and you talking about how thankful you are that he’s accepted you into his company and that you can’t be any more pumped to start.

That’s his cue to (very nicely) threaten you to shutting up if you still want to cum, and him talking in between broken grunts that you’ve earned the job both for your credentials and skills and of course the potential — not some dumb luck of having him as the CEO of the very company you’re chasing after, being friends with benefits with to the title of best friend.

To put it simply, Jungkook’s your platonic boyfriend of some sort. The both of you are dead sure that you don’t like each other in that way, and that soon enough, the two of you swear to flush out the libido so you’d stop hooking up.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that he’d stop cracking “that’s what you said” jokes and you teasing him about his whining.

The two of you are so compatible that it makes you forget about your dynamics with Jimin and how you’re even more compatible with him. His name’s only thrown around carelessly for good measure and not for drunk half-sobs from yourself.

It’s why Jungkook’s forcibly sat down on your floor as he eats his chicken wings, banned from the couch because you swear on his life that he’d regret his whole existence once he stains it. He has absolutely no choice but to pout and sit on your rug you haven’t vacuumed in awhile when he could easily buy you a new and better one if he does stain it.

You’re too engrossed over a movie because you don’t want to listen to Jungkook and his surprisingly strong moral compass, him already knowing that you’re deflecting this altogether so you could attempt to avoid the inevitable.

“Ignoring Jimin doesn’t mean you’ve moved on from him — do you know that?”

More than he’d likely admit, maybe Jungkook does have a taste for the emotions and the dramatics. He’s always been more in tune with it, but it had no place in the real world. Instead he gets his fill and spends almost all of it with the people he’s comfortable with — his family and a select amount of friends.

You’re the closest thing in real life he could ever relate to a reality show (although you always deny that your life is as eventful as it is), and Seokjin’s running to replace you in your spot because he always seem to get him even though they bicker the most, always smiling with his hyung because maybe, just maybe, Jungkook likes being taken care of.

Of course he’s observant. He wants to know you emotionally because knowing you physically so well doesn’t exactly coincide with the fact that you’re moving away from that phase in your relationship per se. He should absolutely know what’s with you furrowing your brows outside of the bedroom, know what’s tinkering with his best friend’s mind and not only relate it to when he hits your sweet spot from down under.

As soft as he sounds in contrast to his obvious demeanor from being in such a place of authority and growing up with everyone’s eyes on him, Jungkook’s grown to take care of you. It’s massive growth in his part for the past month because he learned that maybe he shouldn’t really take all of his life alone. Maybe he needs someone.

He’s not rushing for marriage and to be honest, if only the two of you weren’t platonic and you weren’t the farthest thing from being in his likes in that way, that would be the only time he’d look at you beyond as a friend. Companionship doesn’t need to equate to romantic relationships and that’s perhaps one of the many things he’d been lacking.

You like Jungkook as an addition to your life. You’re no stranger to strikingly-handsome best friends — Taehyung and Seokjin and of course Jimin are the living proof, but only the last part is who you’re unsure of.

And maybe yes, maybe Jungkook’s right. Maybe you can’t always avoid Jimin forever but you know that but you’d die on that hill because you can’t see yourself caving soon. Missing him yet not wanting to see him are the things you juggle with.

“Either side with me or you can get out of my apartment.”

He sputters when you slap his hand away and take his portion for yourself and audibly complains of how come you can sit on your couch and he can’t, forgetting that it’s your apartment and your couch that he’s talking about.

You’re also forgetting that he’s your boss, your superior, and your CEO. Although it becomes official by Monday, you come to your sense and sheepishly hand him half of it back.

You’ve quit the bartender gig but that doesn’t stop you from dropping in to work sometimes. Because maybe Jaehyun misses you a little that he pretends not to see when you sneak in a drink or two free of charge, and Seokjin misses you and his pride nowadays doesn’t deny him from saying that he misses you.

Jungkook kinda panics at that because not only does he not want to go home to his massive penthouse by himself where he can eat all that he wants on his couch, but he also needs the company and watching a crappy movie with you would give him a good night’s sleep.

“Look, look! All I’m saying is, from dude to dude or whatever, is that anyone could see how much he misses you.”

It’s your turn to slightly panic and you don’t know what to take from that, visibly caught in a daze as Jungkook takes the sweet time to slither from the floor to the couch.

He’d know that actually, because two weeks ago when he came over after a long tiring day and he just wants to be buried in you, Jimin just happens to aiming for you door too.

Jimin was second-guessing the whole day whether he should come over to your apartment unannounced and how you’d take it, but once the urge to visit overpowers, he certainly didn’t expect this guy.

He didn’t come empty-handed and there’s an outrageously tiny boquet he’s sure that you’d like because you found them obscene and adorable right inside his backpack. He doesn’t have the slightest clue inside his mind why you haven’t been yourself lately, or maybe it’s just because he refuses to believe it as it is.

Jimin’s cocky at first and that’s what Jungkook can clearly see, not resisting the amused scoff leaving him at the aura this other dude gives off.

“You two fucking?”

Jungkook laughs at that, both because he’s taken in surprise and also because it’s the clear answer.

“You wanna know?”

Actually, he’s starting to realize that maybe fucking you isn’t the only thing he’d like to do. You honestly seem pretty cool for a person, and he wants to befriend you! You’re level-headed as far as he knows, and the argument that’s flowing in his head is clearly different from the one in Jimin’s.

The older boy’s visibly frustrated, pinching his nosebridge as he tries to be civil.

“Look, I don’t know-...”

To put it simply, Jungkook has the knack of messing with people from time to time. Now may not exactly be the best time for it but he still takes the opportunity, ignoring the way Jimin’s gaze at him burns him down enough.

“I’m down for almost everything. Though I’d have to ask if Y/N’s game for a threesome or-“

“God, no! I-...”

Jimin resists the urge to bite back a snarky remark, opting to crack his knuckles using the same hands as he wants to be as level-headed with this as much as possible.

Namjoon coming out of his own apartment would be very convenient right now to diffuse the tension even if he’d feel it himself, yet your blue-haired neighbor doesn’t come out any time soon and neither will any of them back down.

He’s still a reasonable distance away from Jungkook who’s still standing in from your door, staying there because this whole scenario intrigues him that he figures that his desperations could wait a few more minute.

“Has she been eating properly? Sleeping? Still working?”

That’s a surprise.

Jungkook’s pleasantly taken aback with Jimin’s sentiments when it comes to you, a gentle smile on his face that maybe he’s not as bad as he thought of him.

Granted that yeah, he’s not the one who harbors unrequited love for him unlike you, but from what he can observe does he think that sometime along the way — of you going out of your way to get out of Jimin’s, is his change of heart

“Mhmm. I think. I don’t exactly live here.”

That’s all the silent reassurance he needs that you and him aren’t a thing, the relief in his heart unexplainable because the last time he checked, friends aren’t supposed to be this relieved for the other’s lack of a partner. It’s almost as if Jimin wished and prayed that Jungkook wasn’t your boyfriend.

“Cool.”

“Nice.”

He has his hands on his pockets as he twitches where he stands, Jungkook’s eyebrows raised because he knows all too well when someone’s hesitant to leave.

Jimin thinks it’s for the better if he retreats for now even if it pains him, planning to come back another day in better circumstances. Pondering about it, maybe this is a good thing. Keep his thoughts organized and his mind running, then try not to think about what’s probably going to happen as soon as Jungkook enters your door.

“Bye, Jungkook.”

This whole encounter truly cracks him up, finding it amusing as he leans against your door just to prof further.

“Searching me up? Dropped by the company? Don’t tell me you bought the latest magazine with my face on it.”

Jimin scoffs and he could tell that the both of them have atleast loosened up to each other and he doesn’t feel the urge to throw him down the floor like what he learned. But scoffing doesn’t take him away from the fact that yeah, okay, maybe he did exactly what Jungkook implied.

“Not like I wanted to spend my money on an overpriced issue. ‘Course I need to look out for Y/N.”

He pleasantly hums as he brings out his phone, about to text you to suddenly open your door right now with no questions asked. “That’s not your job.”

“And it’s yours?”

He shrugs at the condescending tone Jimin gives him, taking note to tell you about this interaction sooner than later.

“Never said it was mine.”

Jungkook backspaces his text until it’s blank, wanting to type a new one yet he stops in his tracks just to listen.

“Well then good. Because it’s mine.”

Jimin sounds so sure despite the ruffling his backpack gives when he readjusts it on his shoulder, swiping underneath his eye that he’s done out of habit and effectively taking out the last bit of eyeliner since he went here straight from a shoot.

You never actually said it was his, but he feels this obligation; this pull.

It’s a commitment he’s given himself, suddenly whispering to himself when all he’s done in the past minutes was to be accusatory with his sharp voice.

“It’s always been mine.”

bar this weekend? it’s also jin’s birthday soon and i’ve got some free shirts from this shoot that’s his size

we can put both our names on the card, i won’t tell :D

then split a sundae and some brownies, my treat!!

i’ll crash at ur place tho i still have a sweater or two left there

Jimin sighs to himself, making the makeup artist for a second that she’s the reason why he’s so huffy and the dabbing of the sponge to his cheeks don’t do anything to make the situation better.

He’s sighing, not because he’s run out of pride. Not because he used to find double-texting an ultra desperate move. Not because he now doesn’t spend a second longer thinking to send a message. No. He’s sighing because he feels that you’re so out of his grasp.

He can’t do anything about it currently, now that he’s in a shoot the director had to beg him to be in because in the past week, all that Jimin’s done is deny one offer after the other.

Normally he’d feel ecstatic that he’s becoming even more in-demand, but in truth, none of that matters when you’re the only one he’d be eager to have a meeting with. He’d take you over a designer shoot anytime without skipping a heartbeat, even if that means Yoongi, his agent, lose his shit over before curling up into a ball.

He’s booked yet he lets the chances slip from his fingers. Nothing could be any more important than you.

He’s hanging on by an insistent line of desperation actually, taking the time to skim through his phone’s camera roll and his Instagram archives to look for you, put you on his story, and leave people wondering.

If he was lucky enough then you’d add it to yours, and if he wasn’t then he’d be faced with nothing and a hundred other reactions that didn’t come from you, a full day left to soak in the pain that he doesn’t have your undivided attention.

Jimin knows that this was wrong -- knows that it’s selfish of him and his approach isn’t always the best, but he’s piss-poor clueless. His moral compass is clouded and just by you distancing yourself away from him is enough to drive him over the edge.

He’s so lost in you consuming his thoughts that sometimes he gets lucky, the frustration of trying to get where he went wrong and you went cold sets a distant and steely look on his face and it’s exactly what the photographer needed for the shoot.

You only feel half-sorry when your phone dings with multiple texts again from Jimin in the middle of trying on work outfits for your first day, despite your cold resolve that you want to keep up; and additionally, despite Jungkook’s insistence that you should wear the grey pencil skirt because it would be the perfect last outfit the two of you get to fuck each other in, and apparently, it should be in his office.

He’s unbearable, but he’s not half-bad you suppose.

It takes one beat, two beats before you will yourself to type out a reply, a little hitch in your breath and you’re not entirely sure if it’s just misplaced nervousness or because your high-waisted pencil skirt is literally too constricting and pencil-y for its own kind.

wish i could :(( would go to the bar at the weekend but i already promised another friend and he’s planned it weeks before

You already know that it’d be impossible and Jimin will most likely turn down the invitation altogether, even if what you said this time is entirely true.

Taehyung’s finally finished his studies abroad and he’s coming home at last, having already set up living arrangements and even interior designs months before he even got a ticket back home. One of the many plans he’s made was the both of you to go back to Jaehyun’s bar that was the witness to every miniscule thing (whether to celebrate or destress) back in college. And of course, since Tae exists that he has to be treated like royalty after having studied oh so long abroad, you’d have to treat and indulge him of course!

Those went along the lines of him saying he wanted to go to the aquarium, and then him pretending he didn’t plant that idea in your head, then breaking character for a brief second to tell you that you should surprise him with the tickets. 

great! he can tag along with us then

Jimin replies as soon as he got ahold of his phone the moment yet-another mundane shoot ended, not even an hour from when you last sent in your text that has him breathing sharply. 

It’s not a mistake with how he worded it, because after all, nobody could be anymore compatible with you, right? Jimin sometimes feels like he knows you more than he knows himself, and he could only assume that you think the same.

He’s not exactly pleased and he wouldn’t say that he’s a little hurt knowing it just wouldn’t be the two of you together nor you cancelling said plans with this other guy he’s highly suspicious of, even more suspicious than he could get with free shipping on a non-holiday.

Whatever it is you subject him to, it’s okay.

It’s okay.

Jimin would take whatever he can get.

“Promise me you’d behave.”

It’s an empty warning that goes through Taehyung, still grinning as he completely disregards what you’ve just said and leans to squeeze in your face once again.

He’s missed you — he truly did! Random things would remind him of you all throughout his time abroad, and the way he brought home souvenirs and goodies for you is all-telling. Well for one, he did bring home a plastic bag to you that he claims is filled with the air of where he stayed, but you’re still doubting if he’s just blown to it with his own breath. There’s the license plates and the mugs, and the more endearing ones were blankets and custom shirts he’s managed to snag for you.

The familiarity home brings gets him drunk and unsurprisingly, he’s already managed to befriend Jin despite knowing each other for less than an hour.

Tae just had to compliment Jin on his earrings, and he just had to squeal in delight because apparently you were too slow to notice them.

The two of you were already here in the bar an hour early before what Jimin said, and you decided on that with the reasoning that maybe you needed to be a little bit more intoxicated upon meeting him again after quite some time.

“It’s not like I bite. You told me we were similar or something like that.”

Taehyung finds it nice that you did get a best friend while he was away, because he’s the same with Hoseok who he’s also met and they just automatically clicked that they were roommates in the next week. He’s keen on you branching out, but he’s not exactly sure what to feel that he just had to be a little similar to this friend of yours.

He’s still your original, first, best close friend that no one can take the throne of.

“That is my point, Tae. The two of you are competitive over things and you haven’t even met each other yet.”

He hums at that, once again ignoring what you’ve just said as he pokes and pokes on your cheek.

Maybe it’s your bad luck, but you just have this pattern of having really handsome guys and only have them turn out as friends because neither have the feelings, and maybe you’ve also been so affection-starved that you think Taehyung poking your cheeks is domestic.

“Hmmm,” he hums indifferently, this time in a tune and even runs his thumb on your cheek incessantly, “what moisturizer do you use?”

It’s your turn to ignore him this time, having to physically shake Taehyung by the shoulder so he’d get to focus and won’t be in a trance with your moisturized cheeks that he likes attacking.

“Need to tell you some things,” his attention’s piqued yet he doesn’t jump into conclusions, his shoulder a very warm crevice that you surely missed which is why you’re immediately burying yourself into, not wanting to look him in the eye.

“I know there’s a lot of things.”

What Taehyung didn’t tell you is that he had some people then and there to after you, from some friends and to some family he sent every once in awhile and he simply couldn’t believe that you thought they were all coincidences and you just happened to bump to his mother in the grocery even if she lived in the next city.

“Tell me the most important ones in a single sentence. I’ll ask and we can catch up with everything later.”

He has a hunch on what said things could be but he doesn’t say a word, not sure if he already wants to precede wanting to know if you really do prefer cheese popcorn over butter and what would his reaction be if you-

“I just wanna tell you that Jisoo’s in town, I’m in love — used to, I think — with Jimin, and the two of them are together.”

Oh.

Taehyung stares off into the distance, his gaze into nothingness unrelenting are you’re actually nervous if you’ve broken him already.

Five beats, six beats, and Tae blinks. He’s finished trying to tie all the ends of your statement altogether and surprisingly, made peace with what he says a few seconds later.

“Doesn’t matter. Moved on long ago.”

Taehyung smiles but the rigidness of it isn’t his facial structure, but rather the slightest of pain behind it, an unexplainable glaze on his eyes that he blinks soon enough.

“W-well me too! I moved on too!”

His sudden confession, if it was even the truth in the first place, suddenly makes you do the same that it reminds him of an eager puppy he’s always wanted to get.

He snorts at that but doesn’t question the validity of what you’ve just said. Taehyung’s always known that you’re a bit fragile and he lets it pass — you atleast need something sembling control over your life.

“To let you know, I even sleep with-...”

“Oh my god, Y/N-...”

You’ve grown but you never really strayed, always wanting to prove something that you didn’t care about obviously giving too much information and crossing boundaries.

He’s giving you noogies and you let him, the tipsy lull of the shots that Jaehyun gave you taking its course.

Jimin’s more nervous than excited to stroll into the place, hands in his pockets that effectively crease his pants but he doesn’t mind.

It doesn’t take another second longer to find you even with your back turned to him, quickly weaving in between the sea of people to get to you. He’s probably gotten a curse or two, but none of those matter.

“Hey!” Jimin patters as soon as he sees the back of your head, taking you into a massive bear hug from behind you widen your eyes on.

He’s unbelievably gotten warmer than before, and you would’ve lost yourself if he didn’t squeeze you in earnest and if Taehyung didn’t take a once-over of him.

“Hi,” it’s the only one you could muster, two pats on his arm that you’d only reserve as a silent sign for him to let go and he knows that, but doesn’t take notice.

Taehyung’s the one that breaks it, a cold stare on Jimin that he only returns as icy.

“Park Jimin. Y/N’s best friend.”

You have no time to purse your lips over that, because Tae raises his eyebrows at it as if he’s either challenged or surprised, but he offers his hand nonetheless, noticing how much bigger his hand his that he instinctively squeezes it a little tighter like how he’d do with you.

And if Jimin is hurt, he doesn’t show it.

“Kim Taehyung. Y/N’s best friend since high school.”

That one’s something Jimin didn’t expect, head tilting to analyze if this Kim guy is actually serious and if he was, then how come you never told him?

His jaw clenches for a second, a forced smile on his lips that he’s practiced for his career day and night.

Not that it matters.

Taehyung and Jimin engage in conversation by themselves, and you don’t pay attention enough to know that their “conversation” is just them trying to boast, the other to be condescending, and trying to one-up each other in their knowledge about you.

“Bet you don’t even know Y/N’s favorite fruit.”

“What, as a child or the one she likes now? Better yet, do you even know the fruits that she hates?”

“Hmm, you mean practically almost everything? Nice try. Bet you don’t know how in second semester, she-“

“Took a tutoring class with Min Yoongi? The other intelligent dude that she used to have as a sworn enemy? Christ, it’s not like you even try.”

Your attention span has long been faded, instead turning your focus to Seokjin who hasn’t moved from his spot for washing the glasses for five minutes because he’s eavesdropping at the conversation, and he is certainly entertained.

“Are we getting wasted for your birthday?”

Jin has to blink away the sleepiness from his eyes that has since been disappearing ever since he dropped in to listen to the bickering, promising to himself that he should be well-rested and not have three hours of sleep for the days that you’re gonna come over the bar and have two best friends fighting over for a title they’ve made up themselves.

“Might be. Although I’m not inviting any of those two that look like they’re gonna claw each other debating what’s your favorite drink.”

Jin feels like a breath of fresh air, and in another tipsy haze, if only he had feelings for you and vice versa, he’d totally be your boyfriend by now.

You admire him but not in that way.

He fascinates you because you’ve figured that Jin’s always been more than well-off from the start. No one in their right mind would come to work in Gucci mules and in a Rolex wristwatch for their bartending job.

He’s explained it to you a couple of months back. Just so happens that Seokjin’s actually a heir to his dad’s company, and he just got this job to humble himself. Perhaps he’s the one born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had too much control, that he’s taken it upon himself to put him down a couple of notches.

That explains to how Jin just takes whatever schedule he can get and doesn’t complain, or to how him and Jungkook have always seemed familiar with each other and had too much in common, contributing factors were that he was Jungkook’s senior in business school and that they were born in the same elite circle. Also to how Jin applied to Jaehyun, and the guy must have found it ridiculous considering they both have the same situations, and immediately hired him right away.

Jin’s just always been there in a way, from how he’d offer you atleast half of his salary when you’re in a tight spot, to talking it out with Jaehyun when you insisted on coming to work with half a mind and a handful of cramps.

“You’re the best.”

That came out of nowhere, and so did the sudden poking of your finger to Seokjin’s bread smile, but he takes it.

Meanwhile, that’s gotten Jimin’s attention.

He’s been on edge and having Taehyung, who oddly seems similar to him, is insulting that he wants to deck him with his rings.

He doesn’t like feeling second. Doesn’t like feeling second to something he knew he’d be the first at, and the concept of not being the first meaning that you’re last makes him frown.

The thoughts consuming his mind are just too noisy to let go, taking advantage when Tae’s by the bathroom and Jin’s flagged down by a customer.

“Y’close with Taehyung?”

Jimin whispers as if it’s too shameful to be said aloud, and he thinks that it is, but you only roll your eyes at him playfully and it gets him in a deeper frown because you were only taking this lightly.

“I have other friends too, y’know.”

Yeah, he’s forgotten about that. And if he pretends hard enough, he could be the only one.

There’s no time to dwell on it, not when he’s already drowned in it too deep. He wants nothing but to be selfish and it’s a thought so massive that his ego seemed superficial.

“Jimin, you need to know something.”

There’s a light tap on his forearm but he was already long alert before that, his eyes widening with how you’re looking at him.

You’re looking at him like you used to and for some reason, he’s excited. He’s jittery and nervous at the same time, and he doesn’t know what for, but he wants you to say it.

“Y-yeah? What is it?”

His mind flashes back to when you confessed to him when you were drunk, and he thinks you’ve forgotten it. He’s forgotten about it too, actually. But the situation was so similar again but this time he wasn’t cowering from it nor laughing at your face.

This time he’s the one who’s nervous and hopeful, the tips of his fingers trembling as he looks deep into your eyes.

“Taehyung’s ex is Jisoo, alright? He already knows about the two of you. Just thought you needed the transparency.”

Your stern statement withers into a mumble at the end, Jimin’s stare so intense that it makes you cower.

Instantly, you think that he looks dejected because he’s already known for the start and the truth you’ve just dropped on him confirmed it.

Jimin’s absolutely crestfallen because it’s the furthest thing he’s ever expected for you to say, feeling your hand give him some consolation pats on his back.

One inhale, one exhale. Maybe the gnawing feeling of emptiness he’s feeling would be gone tomorrow, now that you’ve sprung an unknown truth of his current girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend happening to be your friend.

But that’s not the case.

“Yup. Needed that.”

It’s okay for Jimin to look for you.

It’s okay for him to only hum when Jisoo hugs him and buries her face in his chest. It’s not as warm as yours when you embrace him, and the scent that stays on his shirt isn’t of you. She doesn’t nudge her nose on the middle of his chest, and poke at his sternum and ask him to stop getting ripped.

It’s okay for him to only smile when she kisses him when used to giggle and actually love it. He’s never kissed you but he wonders everyday, and you’d probably taste as sweet as you look. If he ever did kiss you, you’d be his only fixation he can’t stop drinking out of.

It’s okay for Jimin to only smile when Jisoo tells him that she loves him, and if he ever does say it, there’s no I preceding the reiteration.

He’s not sure whether she means it or it’s out of habit, something developed when he said it so often and out of the blue. Even then, he can’t feel the saccharine feeling of being drunk in love anymore. Atleast Jimin knows that whenever you told him you loved him, you did actually mean it.

This is okay.

It’s okay for him to buy your perfume and spray it on his pillow, and if he closes his eyes hard enough, he could think that the comforter enveloping him is your warmth instead.

Jimin’s lost and he lets himself to be.

It’s okay to fall out of love with Jisoo.

Jimin from three months ago wouldn’t have thought that it was possible. In fact, he thought that it was the most impossible thing underneath the sun and he often confesses it to the moon, because he’s never fallen as hard.

Jimin from two months ago thought that he’s at his happiest, and everything that’s been happening ever since he’s laid his eyes on Jisoo is serendipity.

Jimin from a month ago thought that he was rotting from within. He felt as if he’s the most frustrated he’s ever been and it got him wondering whether his hair is actually dyed grey or if it’s from his stress.

Jimin now, is someone that has never been hurt before as he’s hurting now.

He finds himself in this same godforsaken bar he’s grown to both hate and love, and the start and end of what seems to be the things that make and break him as a person.

It’s clear as day when under the simultaneously soft and harsh lighting, that maybe Jisoo’s never been his.

No one between the two of them actually made the initiative to break up with the other, but it seemed like words weren’t needed.

She’s perhaps always belonged to Taehyung who has the tightest of grips on her waist. There’s no grinding, no libido. Embracing each other in the middle of a crowd tells him everything he needs to know.

Jisoo’s slipped away from Jimin’s grasp and into Taehyung’s who’ll she will always come back to. Tae never wavers and he’s holding onto her as if she’s his lifeline, and that wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

Jimin’s girlfriend is slipping away from him but it’s not what pains him.

Jimin’s eyes are bleary, and he’s unsure whether it’s because he’s drunk or because he’s crying. Whatever it was, it’s not because of Jisoo — it’d never been her.

He rests his head on your shoulder and you let him. He feels so defenseless and looks shattered that you don’t question him nonetheless, a magnanimous feeling of pity rolling from every circle you rub to his back.

“You’re really beautiful.”

He says it out of the blue as if it’s a confirmed thought, looking up at you in stride.

“Don’t say things like that,” you could only murmur as you try to look for a bottle of water within your reach, sooner or later having to haul Jimin home.

He doesn’t have a slightest clue why you’d dismiss it, but he persists as he always does.

“I’m really lucky to know you,” it’s an irrevocable fact with how he says it, making you think for a second if he’s actually sober and could come home by himself. That’s not any of his worries, because this time his mind works as fast as his mouth does. “But I think I’m the luckiest if I can have you.”

As Jimin comes to realize, it’s not Jisoo that he should’ve fallen for. He got burned as fast as he crashed, and it was love like that he’s always tried seeking.

It’s the easy short-lived warmth he got from a candle, but never the hard yet lasting warmth he got from a fireplace.

Your love for him was built steadily over the years and never all at once. It was from a spark to a fire in the making you took the chance being burnt from, and how long it was built meant no match to how short it was extinguished.

“Am I too late?”

Jimin’s as vulnerable as he can get that he doesn’t realize he’s already crying and it’s not drunken blues anymore.

He loves you so much and it takes an avalanche to make him realize that every moment with you shined.

His heart’s a muscle and he couldn’t believe that he’s only realized now that you’re it’s one true memory, having trained to be with you so much that no one could quite compare all along.

You don’t need anything to be the light; you don’t need to do anything to be the center of attention. It’s always been you yet he’s dismissed the thought that maybe it was just the bias of having known you.

But now, it’s about who he would and wouldn’t be if not for you.

Jimin can’t live without even the concept of you.

“If I told you that I’m falling for you, what would you do?”

And when you look at him with the same hint of bleariness in your eyes, and his shoulder feels the brunt of your tentative squeeze and sees the lightest of smiles on your lips —

Jimin knows everything that he needs to know.

[lady-plantagenet]

What are your top ten novels about the Wars of the Roses? And why?

I think it’s obvious by the length how enthusiastic I was to answer this ask xx thank you for asking me and giving me also an opportunity to make a masterlist of some sorts of all my reviews xx. But you know? I speak like quite the expert but in reality I’ve read very little histfic about TWOTR because I just newly got back into this hobby (about a year ago) and have little time in general so tbh the last three books on this list I do not personally care for but since I’ve read so little novels of this kind they are here nonetheless hhh (so please people, give me no angry asks asking me why I am endorsing PG, I’m not).

1. The Last of the Barons by Lord Edward Lytton-Bulwer

This is quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read in my life. The gap between these books and the rest is a chasm the size of the world and I wpuld genuinely reccomend this book as an actual piece of literature to anyone, not just TWOTR fanatics. It is written in 1840, in quite old timey lingo and it centres around Richard Neville 16th Earl of Warwick, but in the true tradition of a real classic it is more than just a character drama, it astutely showcases the purpose of Warwick and what he did in the context of his wider world and doesn’t just chalk it up to personal greed. There is also this fascinating subplot about courtship, science and such. Hell, you even get this eccentric ‘natural philosopher’ guy called Adam Warner who tries to make something like a steam engine and gets employed as an alchemist by Jacquetta and Edward IV.

From a historical standpoint it is quite biased as the author himself was a politician (and an actual baron) and tbh I don’t completely agree with his interpretation of history and I can see some of the Victorian inluences slip in, but some of his takes are very refreshing and he clearly consulted the primary sources. I am much interested in his philosophy and life outlook though and while I don’t think his Warwick is the Warwick, I think he (Lytton-Bulwer) understood him like no other novelist could. As for the writing style... here’s an excerpt of a good reads review that I agree with and tells you all you need to know:

“Of course, such a style of writing no longer exists. The language used is essentially foreign to us. But the nobility, the pride of this story work their ways into your bones, your heart. You will yearn for honor once you have left it.“

Basically, go type it into google and see what I mean. You don’t even need to purchase this book it’s all online at the first click on Gutenberg.

Nevertheless, I’ve posted excerpts of it here, here and here =)

2. The King’s Grey Mare by Rosemary Hawley Jarman

This book (unlike the latter) has zero actual historical value. Actually, it sort of does in the way that it hilights certain real events that most people are unaware of when it comes to its protagonist: Elizabeth Woodville, eg the whole Cooke tapestry affair and the whole Desmond affair. Both things which I still stand on the fence about (if you don’t know what I’m talking about send em another ask or pm me). But like, it isn’t political, philosophical or such in any way like the first book, yet you still feel like you are *there* in the 15th century - by the time I finished reading it my heart was wrung dry and I kind of fell into a down for a couple of days because I just wanted to feel the magic again. If anyone would ask me I would give this 5 stars because it perfectly achieved what it set out to do (I can’t expect all books to go above and beyond like #1), it made me feel for the characters who were super complex, was accurate historically and even when it wasn’t it made sense, it got very creative with its themes (which I like to see because I am not interested in reading the exact same story over and over again) and the prose was absolutely magical and brought all the depth to this novel. I’ve read classics with less flowing and poignant prose, yes actual classics!

This book also switches POVs quite a lot (basically it headhops because it’s written in omniscient- but whatever, rules are meant to be broken), so you’ll get to see many of your faves in there, Edward IV, Margaret of Anjou and Grace Plantagenet feature quite heavily. One thing that disappointed me is that it wasn’t really Edward IV/Elizabeth Woodville (at the time I bought it for that), she never really likes him and his love for her kind of wanes towards the end. If you’re not too bothered about that then I say go buy it.

3. The Daisy and the Bear by K L Clark

I put this here because we are already going into shakier territory when it comes to this list. This is kind of the last *really* good, truly five star one. It is a long spoof about TWOTR but god it’s smart! Yet, It does not take itself seriously and has Margaret of Anjou/Warwick the Kingmaker as a crackship and centrepiece and had me in stitches the whole time. I’ve written a long detailed review for it here.

4. Death be Pardoner to Me by Dorothy Davies

This is a novel about George Duke of Clarence. Quite possibly the only novel ever written about him in existence and boy is it a trip - the author claims to have channelled him (she’s a medium). I’ve written a detailed review for it here. I read this last spring and my views have unfortunately changed, the thing is, I’ve come to find out through my research that this was quite possibly a hoax as there are some indisputable inaccuracies (Ankarette Twynyho’s age, the details of Isabel’s death - we *know* she did not die from childbirth, Isabel did not reunite with him after Tewksbury 1471, but right before Christmas 1470). It’s also quite Richardian (the author admitted) and she could have *had* me had she not chose to divulge it in the foreword. Nevertheless, I still like this book because it did get to me at certain points and it’s good quality as a novel, I remember shedding a tear at one point even which is extremely rare for me but I think that says more about my sentiment for the subject matter than the book itself.

5. We Speak no Treason by Rosemary Hawley Jarman (not yet finished, so ranking may vary)

I haven’t finished it yet, so I’ll leave it here for now. This book is a Richardian book about Richard III, but I can’t get enough of this author, I haven’t found anyone to replace her with. The prose is magnificent as usual and I must confess that I’m happy that this book is told through the POVs of three OCs and not Richard, he remains rather elusive and tbf I find the three OCs very interesting and at this point I’m more interested in their stories than anything else. Of course, Richard III is still a fairly prominent part of this novel (even when he doesn’t appear) and it has led to me getting annoyed quite a bit. Given who I am I fumed massively at that one aside that Clarence and Edward have bastards whereas Richard isn’t like that... like are you serious?? At one point the author reassociated the Games and Playes Chesse book to Richard when it was in reality dedicated to Clarence and I got even more annoyed. Leave the poor figure something ma’am? Whatever, as a book about three medieval commoners it’s fantastic and that’s what I pretend it is.

6. Wife to the Kingmaker by Sandra Wilson

Nothing more to add than what I wrote in my (super-long) detailed review on here. This is the case because I read it very recently. This is a novel about Anne Beauchamp 16th Countess of Warwick, it’s ranked higher than Sunne because though it’s less accurate it’s got panache.

7. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon K Penman

I feel very strongly about this Richard III book and what it represents. I wrote a long detailed review about it on here and a follow-up post on the discussion is here ft my awesome mutual @beardofkamenev ‘s insights also thrown into the mix. Xx

8. The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

This is a step higher than the other two because this book pretty much changed my life. The thing is, I read it translated into my own language by an extremely talented translator and I was also only about 11/12 years old so it was all very impressive to me then. This book about Elizabeth Woodville effectively introduced me to the TWOTR; an interest that has never really left me these past ten years (though at one point (ages 14-19) it was quite wane). It’s not a good book by any standard (I was quite shocked when picking it up at a bookstore, I had found that when read in the original language it lost all its magic), but I owe a lot to it and some people who now endlessly discourse about how bad PG is need to recognise their debt of gratitude and be a bit more respectful, I think. That is of course unless you came into this era via different media, but you got to admit that a massive part of us got to this place through TWQ, though we outgrew it.

10. The Red Queen and The Kingmaker’s Daughter by Philippa Gregory

Exact same commentary as above, just objectively not good books. Flat characterisation, misunderstanding of the era, historical innacuracies which don’t add anything, lack of nuance in prose which often dances too close to *gasp* YA prose *shudders*. But these are lower because I don’t owe them a debt of gratitude as I do TWQ. Funnily enough, they are still better than the series.

[kitkatopinions]

Roman for the character ask? XD

`Plushie, I love you for sending me this because I was excitedly telling you that I hoped someone sent me this.

I’ve been writing non-published fan fics (with plushchrome/why-i-hate-rwby-now) and we usually ‘split’ the writing by dividing who writes for what character. Our first RWBY fan fic featured Survived!Torchwick drifting towards a redemption arc, and I was writing for him. And almost every single RWBY fan fiction I’ve written since has featured Roman because I love writing for him so much. So this one is going to be good because I’ve worked with this character for literally years now. (Some of my headcanoned stuff doesn’t fit with canon, but oh well.)

My top three ships for the character

Roman/Glynda. Their only on-screen almost interaction was their fight in ep 1 in which Roman acted annoyed at the sight of her and got Cinder to fight her instead of him, but boy golly could these two have one tension fueled ‘once in a dream’ sort of romance. Roman/Neo is something I don’t personally ship, but I do like the concept and every time I see concept art of it, my heart melts a little. Funnily enough, I also like the concept of Roman/Oz, but only as ‘Roman always used to tease him by flirting with him.’ (Honorable mention to two OCs who’d take the slots under Glynda if they existed. XD)

My three least favorite ships for the character

Roman/Cinder is a massive no, considering she’s the one who got him into the whole big mess in the first place and then essentially left him for dead. I mean, it’s clear Roman’s into her and they could have divorced couples energy, but boy howdy, this would be toxic in the not fun way. Pass. Roman/Tyrian is something I just don’t vibe with, I feel like Roman has enough street smarts to not instigate or tolerate any romantic vibes with Tyrian. XD Also Junior/Roman. This is apparently called Crimedads? Roman’s the only crimedad I need, I don’t want anything to do with Junior or his disgusting behavior or his stupid looking club.

My biggest criticism for the character

I feel like my biggest criticism is actually the way he’s been used (or rather, not used) after his death. I feel like it was a mistake to wait to bring Neo back until the sixth season, and to not really delve into her backstory and not paying much attention to Neo’s growth. It makes her feel like less of a character and, by extension, makes Roman’s death feel like a weaker motivation for it and makes it matter less to the audience. RWBY’s attempts to be a ‘slow burn’ often leave a lot to be desired, and Roman as a motivation for Neo is no exception to that.

My favorite thing about the character

He was the perfect villain for the first three seasons. He was more of a comic book villain than something we were supposed to take really seriously. He was a real threat, but he was also fun, colorful, he had a great voice actor, some slight sympathetic vibes, but still an obviously selfish, obviously bad guy that - like Watts - it doesn’t feel wrong or complicated to hate or love or love to hate him. His comic book villain vibes still had a little more under the surface, which was perfect for the looser, kids-fighting-monsters fun romp with deeper stuff under the surface. That’s why a part of me doesn’t mind the fact that Roman died, even though I think he could’ve been used after volume 3. They would’ve had to change some of Roman in order to fit in with the new more serious, in-depth storyline, and it might’ve taken some of the charm away from his character.

A headcanon I have about them

Buckle up, because I can’t pick just one. Roman came from a long line of Huntsman and Huntresses and it was a family tradition thing, but he actually really wanted to be a Huntsman for many of the same reasons Ruby had wanted to be one, even past family tradition. Roman’s Hunter parents died when he was young, and he was raised mostly by his aunt and uncle in Mistral, though his family tradition was to attend Beacon, so that’s where he went to school. His aunt and uncle (also Hunters) died while he was attending Beacon in his second year. He had a versatile skillset and was really into weapons construction and strategy, but didn’t apply himself very well in school and never went on to the two vs two rounds in the Vytal Tournament. He started experiencing depression during his time in school, which only started getting worse after he (for messy reasons that I can’t take the time to explain here,) was basically forced to run away with Neo (five years younger than him) during his last year of Beacon, dropping out and living on the streets and starting a life of crime in his increasingly desperate attempts to support her and take care of her. Eventually, he stopped working for criminal masterminds who he always had problems with and thought didn’t do good enough jobs and became one himself. And this one doesn’t line up with canon, but in my fan fictions, I always wrote Roman to have a passive ‘survival’ semblance that triggered when his parents died, that keeps him alive even in really bad circumstances (and even after getting eaten by a Grimm, in the fic. XD) His semblance kept him alive, but it also slowly shifted his moral code to accommodate what he needed to do to survive, and would block out grief sometimes (for instance, he never fully grieved his parents.) Obviously, this doesn’t fit with the canon where he does die in that Grimm, but boy howdy, it made him such a good character to write for in fan fictions.

What I would change about them if I was making a re-write

I know I said that I was glad that the writers killed him, but I might not do that tbh. If I was making a re-write, it’d be more for me than anything else, and I think if Roman had survived, it could be really good and fun. For one thing, he had a connection and some element of personal tension to Ruby and Blake and Neo had some of that with Yang, and that’s something that was lacking later. Roman and Neo could’ve been used to introduce Salem’s castle, faction, etc, and they could’ve been really good as unsure, out of their depth villains that start influencing Mercury and Emerald a bit more as well. But I don’t think I’d go whole hog on any redemption arc and use Roman and Neo as more gray, wild card type characters who are against Salem and have a line of what they think is wrong, but are still dangerous and violent and selfish themselves. 

What I I think of their character allusion and what (if anything) I would change about it

Roman’s character allusion to Romeo Candlewick is relatively loose. You can twist Roman into fitting it, as Candlewick wastes his time in idleness until he’s transformed into a jack-ass and then dies of exhaustion. But I definitely think that they mostly leaned into Disney inspired gimmicks like his red hair, hat, and cigar smoking. And more than that, I agree that he’s more based off of the Fox / Honest John Foulfellow, the deceptive conman who tries to trick Pinocchio in the book by pretending to be lame and attempting to kill him, only to wind up really becoming lame and impoverished and hungry. In the Disney version, he’s a more comical conman who expresses some hesitance on tricking kids into going to Pleasure Island and is being threatened into it, but had no problems with other cut throat villainy with no concern over how it affects Pinocchio. He uses a cane (but doesn’t fake a limp,) and his line delivery and body language is kind of close to Roman. Although this is yet another allusion that’s more based on Disney than the original, I think, I tend to not mind this one so much.

[whatapunk]

Endings: Chapter 4

I’m sure everyone has forgotten about this by now but... I finally finished the fourth chapter I’ve been working on for over a month. I think I stressed over this chapter because I brought in some old Legends canon and that just made me overthink all. the. things. Anywho, maybe someone out there will enjoy it because even though I may take forever to update I’m really enjoying writing it! Especially now that I’ve started to explain my OC and get all the things in my head down on paper... 

Title: Endings

Fandom: Star Wars Rebels

Relationship: Kanan Jarrus/Hera Syndulla; Kanan Jarrus/female OC

Rating: m for the profanity, possibly for non-explicit intimacy later

Word Count: 3410

Previous Chapters: Ch. 1 / Ch. 2/ Ch. 3

16 years prior

Aboard CT-900 freighter, Exuberance

Kanan Jarrus hadn’t felt this way since he was on Kaller. He’d been chased by his old clone squadron for years since Order 66, but he’d never been discovered by an outsider before. Now, as he stood in the hallway of a ship in the middle of hyperspace, he pressed his forehead to the cold metal wall beside him. Sweat prickled on his neck and his head felt a little light. Knowing someone else knew he was a jedi hadn’t just scared him- it terrified him. 

Kanan took a deep breath and calmed himself, calling upon his meditation experience from when he was a jedi, funnily enough. He breathed again.

“Alright, lad?” a voice startled him out of his trance. 

Kanan straightened himself and tried hard to pretend he hadn’t just been leaning on the wall. The pilot, Mack, eyed him quizzically. 

“Kid?” 

At that, Kanan frowned, though he could feel his mind drained of all fight at the moment.

“Don’t call me that,” he said quietly and walked past the ship pilot and into the galley. 

Mack, who had better things to do than talk to one of his non-crew passengers (let alone a teenage one), pulled greasy work gloves from his hands and yelled down a shaft in the floor that led to the cargo bay. 

“Hey Rhia, don’t take too long moving those stacks- we’re starving up here!” Mack was smiling and laughing at his own joke, though Kanan could tell by the tone that Mack generally being obnoxious was his idea of joking. Kanan saw a skinny metal tool of some kind hurl itself up out of the hole in the floor, narrowly missing Mack’s face as he bent over the opening. Kanan smirked.

Mack strolled off down to his quarters and left Kanan alone in the galley. A few seconds later, Kanan heard a very loud crash in the cargo bay below, followed by a woman swearing even louder.

“Dank farrik!” Rhia yelled, exasperated. 

Kanan really wasn’t in the mood to be helpful, especially not toward Rhia. She’d been perfectly nice the entire time Kanan had been aboard Exuberance, but now she knew him. He replayed his last conversation, moments ago, with her over in his mind and felt ice in his gut. No, she’d manage on her own down there. 

Just as Kanan stood up to go to his own quarters, a couple more smaller crashes happened below. He rolled his eyes at himself, knowing he was a sucker for lending a quick hand, even if it was someone he’d hoped to never speak to again. 

Determined (disdainfully) to lend a hand, Kanan climbed down the ladder to the bay. Turning to face the expected mess, he was all but dumbstruck at what he didn’t expect to see. Rhia, nearly turned completely away from Kanan, was in the middle of tying her hair more securely back in place. Kanan was mesmerized. 

He’d noticed Rhia had vibrant, deep red hair the moment he’d seen her- anyone would. But she kept it up, tightly wound in a way that had hidden just how long it was. Not only that, but it didn’t look so, well, alien as it did all hanging loosely, catching the lights. It was long, hiding her entire back, and wavy, especially near the ends. Kanan’s mouth hung open and he couldn’t decide if he was seeing it sparkle or not. He’d been assuming she was just a fellow human, but looking at her now, he wasn’t so sure. She finished wrapping it up and caught a glimpse of him in the corner of her eye. She clearly thought about speaking but then hesitated, wondering how long he’d been standing there.

“Wow,” Kanan heard himself, unfortunately, utter. Rhia rolled her eyes, but revealed a small smile.

“That’s charming,” she said wryly. 

“Your hair, I’ve- I’ve neve seen anything like it,” he said, finally able to string some words together. Rhia’s smile faltered.

“Yeah, it’s genetic,” was all she offered before she went back to organizing the mess around her. When Kanan didn’t move, she started to get a little irritated. 

“What do you want, Kanan?” she asked, a little nastier than she meant to be. It seemed to bring him back to reality.

“I was just uh… I heard the crashes and thought you might need help,” he said feebly. Rhia softened at this. She also noted he refused to meet her eyes, a difference, she noted, that was new. New for the new dynamic that now surrounded and suffocated both of them: Kanan, a jedi outcast, and Rhia, the woman who’d found him out. 

“Oh,” she started, “well then thank you. Can you pick up the stacks over there while I get these?” she pointed and Kanan nodded, turning away silently, and began picking up the scattered cargo. 

Rhia went back to her own mess, but paused to watch him. He’d come all the way down here to help, but clearly not because of her. They’d been getting along so well it was hard for Rhia to remember that she had found him absolutely intolerable when she’d first met him. She’d only outed him for the good of her crew and to make sure that his identity didn’t bring them all down. She had absolutely no intentions of revealing the jedi to anyone and had promised that she would make up something else to tell the crew once they dropped them off at a far more remote location than Kanan and Janus had originally paid them for. But still, here it was, a chasm between the two of them, only instead of them both being on either side, Rhia stood at the top holding a rope from which Kanan dangled in the abyss below. Or at least that’s how it felt to him.

She knew what she had to do, the only thing that would ease the boy’s mind. 

“I’m a Morellian,” she said simply, eyes on her work. Kanan stopped and looked at her.

“What?”

“My species. We all have the hair.” 

Kanan’s brain finally caught up to what she was saying. Before seeing her hair, he’d never questioned her species and had been assuming, wrongly, that she was a human. Every other facet of her appearance led him to believe she was human, though now as his eyes were drawn again to her hair, he realized it made sense why he’d never encountered such a thing before. 

“Morellian? I’ve... never heard of them.”

“Well, they’re mostly a legend now, not something most people even hear about. I’ve not seen another like me since I was young,” she said, a more solemn edge to her tone. 

“Where are you from?” Kanan asked, interested in both the subject and changing it slightly.

“Morellia,” she started, letting out a little laugh at what sounded so obvious. “It’s a small planet out beyond the outer rim,” she explained. “I haven’t been there since I was young either.” 

“What happened to them?” Kanan asked before he had really thought about it.

“The last full clan of them was killed about 70 years ago,” she said, not looking at him. “There haven’t been Morellians on Morellia since.”

Kanan dropped the subject he now felt bad for asking about. He’d planned not to say another word and just finish helping her in silence when suddenly a thought occurred to him.

“Wait,” he began, “you said you’d been there- that you’d seen other Morellians when you were young. But that’d make you…” he trailed off, realizing the math and scrutinizing her carefully. She smirked. 

“We also live for a long time,” she explained. 

“So when you told me earlier that you were too old for me…” he said, questioning. 

“I’m 136.”

“Oh,” Kanan was suddenly lost for words. She certainly did look older than him, but not that old. He said the only thing he could think of. “Well, you look great.” 

Rhia laughed, genuinely. She was still very unsure of this kid, especially given his past, but he had a natural charm that she could tell he was in the midst of fine tuning. She was a person who generally liked the quiet and she liked being quiet; naturally, she also liked quiet people, or, even better- few to no people. But she already seemed to like being around this kid, even if she hadn’t at first. It was why she had started this conversation in the first place.

“Even before my species became so rare, we were sort of hunted," she began, a little out of nowhere. "I mean, in the right market, to the right buyer, especially now, a Morellian slave, or even just enough of our hair, could set up a person with wealth for life,” she said as casually as if she was telling him what was for dinner. She slid a hoverpad under a stack of crates and activated it, pushing it neatly into a corner. 

Kanan had stopped working and stared at her, brow furrowed and mouth slightly open. He was just about to ask her why she was telling him this when she continued.

“Maybe even more than something as rare as a jedi.”

Kanan felt his shoulders relax, having been more tensed up than he’d even realized. For the first time since Rhia had told him she knew of his identity, his mind stopped racing and he stepped out of fight-or-flight mode. She still didn’t look back at him, and no more words were said while they cleaned up the rest of the crates in the bay. The silence wasn’t awkward or tense though, and Kanan enjoyed it and felt real gratitude, a feeling that was few and far between for him these days. She’d put him back on the same level as herself, or really, put herself on his level. She didn’t have to at all, but she’d given up what he figured was probably her biggest secret to him; she reset the dynamic between them, just to put him at ease. Upon this realization, Kanan felt something else that had eluded him greatly in the last few years: trust.

***

Present Day

Kanan guided the twi’lek down the hall, battling to keep himself in a straight line so that he could guide her to do the same. Hera was all giggles.

“Kanan, I like her,” she said for the third time since they’d left Rhia in the galley. Kanan chuckled.

“Yes, she’s a very nice person,” he replied again, reaching a hand out to steady himself against the wall as Hera’s balance faltered. 

“I can definitely see why you guys dated,” she said, her voice slightly too loud.

“We didn’t exactly date,” Kanan interjected. He worried he came off as too defensive.

“Sorry,” Hera started, rolling her eyes playfully. “I can tell why you guys slept together frequently,” she said casually. Kanan chuckled but felt himself blush ever so slightly. 

Hera had never met a girl from Kanan’s past before, mostly because none of them lasted long enough for him to really even remember properly. He’d had a steady string of nothing steady for a long time in his late teens and early twenties, and Hera knew that much. She didn’t care, and Kanan could tell she meant that. So now, it felt weird to him for her to know not only who Rhia was, but to actually meet her as well. Kanan had never mentioned her to Hera. 

“And her hair is so red!” Hera announced, shaking Kanan out of his thoughts. “I’ve never seen hair like that, have you?”

“I’ve not-”

“I mean she’s gorgeous anyway,” Hera cut him off, “but she has such a striking… head!” Kanan laughed and Hera frowned at him.

“Don’t you laugh at me, Kanan Jarrus. You know I don’t drink much,” she said, putting a finger in his face. He pulled it gently down and held her hand. 

“I know, I haven’t had this much to drink in years I think.”

“You don’t sound drunk,” she said. They walked through their hangar doors and the Ghost appeared, parked before them. “How do I sound so much drunker than you? I didn’t even drink that much!” Hera’s volume increased again and Kanan softly shushed her, laughing. 

“I don’t know, but I promise you I’m only holding it together to impress you,” Kanan said, only half joking. He did seem to be slightly more sober than Hera, but truthfully he couldn’t feel his face. 

Kanan led Hera up Ghost’s ramp, both of them trying to keep their giggles as quiet as they could, for fear of bothering Zeb, Sabine, or Ezra. Finally, they made it to Hera’s quarters and he guided her to her bunk, laying her down and pulling off her boots. By the time he was finished, Hera’s eyes were drooping so low that for a moment he couldn’t tell if she was still awake. She smiled and curled her legs up closer to her chest, rolling to her side. 

“Kanan… I like her,” she said again, a whisper that faded into the final sigh she released before sleep took hold. Kanan smiled and kissed her forehead before he left, as silently as his stumbling could be. 

For a moment he’d considered going to his own quarters and letting the drunken fog behind his eyes lull him to sleep. But something else pressed on his mind, willing itself and his feet forward. He felt both an intense longing and a swollen mass of guilt inside his chest. The longing brought him back into the bay, back down the hallway, and back to a galley that still had a light on. The guilt had begun wrapping tendrils around his heart, his lungs- whatever was pounding in his chest. But the pounding slowed those tendrils down, shook some of them off, and Kanan’s foggy mind was in no position to follow anything except straight, concentrated feeling.

Nearly running into him, Rhia gasped at Kanan’s sudden appearance in the doorway. 

“Fuck, Kanan, you know it’s late and quiet and no one’s around, right?” Rhia asked, catching her breath. Kanan laughed at her, more than he usually would have. Rhia laughed it off, but readjusted her grip on the shoulder strap of her bag and flipped the light off, clear signs that she was on her way out. 

“I needed to use your fresher,” Kanan said, making an obvious effort to enunciate over his slurs. Rhia raised an eyebrow.

“You don’t have a fresher on your ship?” she asked, skeptical. 

“Zeb’s… showering,” he said, not so smoothly. “You know… fur,” he added, as if it was clarifying. Rhia nodded, but slowly. 

“Ah, well, sure. I’m down here,” she said, pointing and exiting the galley to her right. Her pulse, which had been so pleasantly dropped for the evening, suddenly quickened, and that plus the alcohol started to make her queasy. She walked quickly so it would feel like there was a breeze. Even so, it was a short walk before they’d arrived. 

Rhia punched in her code and the door slid past them almost silently. Inside, there was a dull wall light that glowed a sunset-colored orange that bathed things in just the right amount of light to see where everything was. To save energy and to encourage regular sleeping patterns, the light remained this color until 0500, when it would begin to brighten to a bold white. This was the first time Rhia found herself wishing she could override such things.

Rhia knew why he’d asked to come in. Even if he really did have to use the fresher, the point was still just to be inside, away from anything and anyone. She could now feel her heart rate increasing more every second it seemed, and all it did was make her angry with herself, which made it worse. 

“It’s there,” she said softly and pointed to the door on the left, the other one being a small closet. 

Once he’d closed the door behind him Rhia felt her shoulders fall as she breathed out loudly, unaware that she’d been holding back. She sat down on her bed to untie her boots, thinking desperately about what she was going to say- what she was going to have to say. When she heard the flush she stood up quickly, worried about how it would look to him if he came out and she was sitting on the bed. She turned to her dresser, where she began rifling through her sock drawer when Kanan came out of the fresher. She took a quiet but deep breath.

“I know why you’re here, Kanan,” she said evenly.

“Why I am here- like on this ship? Or like here, here?” he asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice. He was at the part of the night where everything that comes out of his mouth is somehow a joke. Every statement had a natural lift in tone at the end, as if it were a punchline. She wanted to roll her eyes because it both drove her insane and, for some reason, greatly affected the strength of her knees. She had to stay serious though; she did not want to be that kind of person. 

“Kanan,” and she turned to face him. “I know why you’re here. I shouldn’t- we shouldn’t have had so much to drink. I know why you wanted to come in here, but I just can’t,” she said, the last words coming out with more exasperation than she’d meant to show. He was barely listening.

“You don’t know why I’m here, Rhia,” he said calmly, that tranquil smile glued to his face.

“Kanan I know what you want- it just-”

“You really don’t.” “Kanan-” she started, her voice beginning to raise. His voice, unchanging this whole time, cut her off.

“Can I see your hair?” he asked, the drunkenness of the words and the way he said them enveloping her in something that felt so wholesome. Her hands, which she’d begun to raise in an exhausted gesture, fell to her sides, her arms suddenly feeling so heavy.

Kanan looked at her and even in the fogginess of his inebriated brain he knew he’d remember what she looked like when everything about her suddenly softened. Rhia paused. Her mouth fell open just slightly, but instead of speaking she simply offered him a shaky but honest head nod. She gave him the smallest smile before she turned back around to face her dresser and her hands went up into the knot of hair she kept piled on top of her head. 

Kanan watched her remove a few pins first, silently placing them on top of her dresser, and slowly strands and chunks of hair began to fall away. Once she was done with those, she worked her fingers beneath the bun, finding the ends of her hair and unwinding what seemed to be an endless ponytail. This wasn’t the first time Kanan had watched her do this, and it was every bit as mesmerizing as he remembered. Even in the dull orange light, it glimmered, reminding him of the way a grassy hill seems to shimmer in the wind.

Rhia undid the final tie and it all came cascading down her shoulders, throwing a fiery halo around her in every direction as she turned back around to face him. She ran her fingers through it a bit, feeling the relief of the tension off of her scalp. 

Kanan watched as the sunset-colored ceiling lamp made her shine like something that had been detonated. The slightest motion of her head threw ripples of metallic colors from root to tip, and Kanan tried to look at every inch of it at once, not wanting to miss such an amazing opportunity. Rhia was pleasantly attractive to most people and would be with or without hair. But with this hair, long and untamed as it was now, even in this artificial light, she looked positively divine. If she’d claimed now, in this moment, that she was some mythical goddess, there wasn’t a soul in the galaxy who wouldn’t believe her, let alone Kanan. He knew she wasn’t though, and that knowledge just made him like her more. She was just Rhia- beautiful Rhia. 

She met his eyes as they took a break from roaming around her head. He swallowed. 

“Oh, kriff.”

[in-tua-deep]

Excuse! You cannot just say this: (there’s a heartbreaking moment where Five thinks that because Ben had Klaus back he’s going to kick Five out which they both hug it out over), and then not elaborate.

(ben saves the day au: post one, post two)

here’s the thing: Ben knows how to handle Five. Sort of. 

Funnily enough dealing with 58-year-old Five in a 13-year-old body is actually remarkably similar to dealing with actually-13-year-old Five, not that Ben would ever say as much within Five’s hearing because he quite likes being alive, thanks. 

The thing is, despite what some of their other siblings would say, Five is not selfish. If he even thinks something is for his sake, then he runs the other way or puffs up like a kitten trying to be intimidating. Five rarely does anything with himself in mind, as much as that breaks Ben’s heart.

So Ben tells Five that he was lonely with no human company. He tells Five that he likes cooking and that it’s nice to have someone else to cook for. He tells Five he doesn’t have anyone else to argue over physics in the morning while brushing his teeth. He tells Five he missed reading nights and having someone to pester about the characters in whatever series he’s currently consuming.

So Ben probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the impending disaster that starts brewing when Klaus pops up like an impossibility and moves in with them.

(He’s still surprised though, because he thought he’d shown that he loves Five. That he wants Five around. But Five walks around like he’s expecting his family to drop him like a hot coal, like he’s expecting to be hated and thrown out and abandoned. 

One day, in the future, they’ll have a fight over this. They’ll yell and scream and there will be tears and then when Ben has Five bundled up in his arms in the fiercest hug possible he’ll ask Five why.

Ben doesn’t actually know who the Handler is, or even if she’s still alive, but she better hope she never crosses paths with vengeful big brother Ben.)

Ben knows that Five is fifty eight. He knows Five spent something like four decades surviving in an apocalypse with his only company a mannequin he treats like a real person. He knows Five ate cockroaches and almost starved to death a dozen times. He knows Five was scooped up and told his escape was conditional. He knows Five was an assassin, that his brother killed countless people in his quest to finally get home and save his family.

Five is broken, with jagged edges and wary eyes. 

They’d been making progress. They’d been making progress. And Ben will never regret Klaus showing up, Klaus being alive, and getting that second chance. But he does wish that Klaus showing up hadn’t caused a backslide with Five.

(Ironically, Klaus is much less fragile than Five. He’s been dead for something like thirteen years, following his siblings around and dipping into the afterlife to pester God before dipping out again. 

Turns out ghosts aren’t interested in other ghosts, only people who are alive who can see them. Klaus got a reprieve, got a breather, and got sober. He hated not being able to talk to his siblings, hated that they grieved him, longed to touch them, to hug them - but even dead he still had powers. Such as being able to slip between lingering and the afterlife.

When he was tired and exhausted and hurting, he’d slip into the afterlife and argue his case for being alive again with a little girl who was getting really tired of Klaus being able to find her no matter where she was. He’d go hang out with a squad of Vietnam soldiers who were achingly young for having died such violent deaths. They’d all ruffle Klaus’s hair and regale him with war stories before he goes back to shadowing his siblings.

Klaus knows he should be grateful that God finally listened to him, finally restored him, finally let him touch his siblings and speak to them and tell them how much he loves them and didn’t blame them and - 

He just wishes he could have had both his family and his friends. 

It’s not fair.)

Ben is distracted, because Klaus is back and it’s so unexpected and there’s so much to do to prepare. Of course Klaus is staying with them, because Ben says so and because he loves Klaus.

Except to Five it looks like he’s being replaced. Which is silly, because Five is their brother, too, right? Except out of the two children who vanished and miraculously came back, Klaus is clearly the better option. He’s older, he smiles more, he makes Ben laugh. Everyone seems to tear up and draw Klaus into a hug and babble at him that they were so glad he was back, that he was alive. 

(Five can’t help but remember that only Ben and Vanya had seemed to miss him. The others all had lukewarm reactions to his return, didn’t seem to really care. No one cried because he came back. 

Admittedly, no one witnessed his ‘death’ - for all they knew he’d just run away. All but Vanya - and Five - had witnessed Klaus’s death, bloody and terrible and traumatizing. They’d held grief in their chests, blamed themselves where they never had for Five. It made sense. 

It didn’t make the uneasy feeling in Five’s stomach any less strong.)

Five hates the fact that he’s jealous. Hates it because he’s also glad Klaus is back, he also gripped Klaus’s elbow tight and wouldn’t let go for hours when he’d first woken up to realize that yes, Klaus was there and alive. Five loves Klaus like everyone loves Klaus - Klaus is exceptionally easy to love.

(Five is not.)

So Klaus comes back, and suddenly Five realizes that all of those reasons Ben gave Five to justify Five coming to live with him? Klaus can fulfill all of those. Five isn’t needed. So he starts to withdraw, and Ben doesn’t notice because he’s distracted.

And it all finally comes to a head with Five packing his things (just a few changes of clothes, his toothbrush, as much food as he can stuff in there from his hoard stash, and Dolores) and heading out to hike to Vanya’s place. Because logically if he’s being replaced with Ben, he needs somewhere else to stay and Vanya is the only other sibling who he can think who he would want to house him.

(If Vanya won’t take him, that’s fine. He spent decades in the apocalypse - spending five on the streets until he’s officially ‘old enough’ to get his own place is nothing. But he’s going to leave before he can be kicked out, because he’s not sure he could take that rejection.)

Except when he finally arrives, Vanya is on the phone and looking frantic and when she sets eyes on him her body sways with relief. “It’s okay,” She says into the phone, voice shaking just slightly, “He’s here. He just walked in the door. Yeah. Of course. I’ll see you in a minute.”

She hangs up the phone and turns fully to Five who is standing there looking confused as she puts her hands on her hips and takes a deep breath. “What,” She says, pausing to take another deep breath, “Do you think you are doing.”

Five shifts, his grip on Dolores tightening. He’s a grown ass man and Vanya’s tone shouldn’t be making him feel like a scolded child. “I need - you said when I went to live with Ben that if it didn’t work out I could stay with you.”

“I did say that, yes.” Vanya says, nodding without her eyes leaving Five’s face. 

Five shifts again, “I’m? Cashing in?”

“Why - you know what? Don’t answer that.” Vanya pinches the bridge of her nose and takes another deep breath. “Go sit on the couch, Five. I’m going to make us some tea before Ben arrives.”

“Ben’s at work.” Five says slowly as he shuffles in the direction of the couch. 

“He was.” Vanya clarifies, “Until Klaus called him saying that he couldn’t find you anywhere and that you’d vanished while he was taking a nap and that Dolores was gone.”

Five looks down at Dolores in his grip, suddenly feeling a little guilty and not quite knowing why. “He didn’t have to leave work. I made it here okay.”

“That’s not the point, Five.” Vanya says, voice sharp and cold. It makes Five flinch slightly. But before he can even ask, she’s turning on her heel and opening cabinets to pull down some cups and the kettle. She clearly considers the conversation over, and even though Five bristles at being treated like a child he also doesn’t want to hear Vanya use that tone again, so. 

Silence falls between them until there’s loud footsteps in the hall and the door is being flung open and there’s Ben, in scrubs and gasping in air like he’s just run a marathon. His eyes find Five and he’s breathing “Thank god” as he strides forward and grabs Five and - 

Pulls Five into a crushing hug. 

“I was so worried.” Ben whispers where his face is pressed against Five’s hair, arms strong and firm and warm. Without his permission, Five’s eyes start tearing up and he doesn’t even know why. 

(It has something to do with the fact that he hadn’t really thought that Ben would care that he’d left. He had Klaus now, after all - and Klaus was a much better brother than Five was.)

And then Ben withdraws (Five pretends he doesn’t mourn the loss) and holds Five at arms length, “What were you thinking!” He exclaims, “You can’t just run off like that!”

And Five’s knees go weak, and suddenly he comprehends why exactly Vanya is angry and why Ben was worried. He’d vanished again, like he had back then. He hadn’t even thought about it - he’d known that he was just on his way to Vanya’s house after all. He’d known he wasn’t vanishing. But his family clearly hadn’t known. 

“I wasn’t running off.” Five says, because it’s important they know that. Vanya leaned against a counter with a cup of tea looking unimpressed. “I wasn’t. I was just coming to Vanya’s. I should’ve left a note or something I just - ” Thought Ben wouldn’t care.

Ben takes in the bag, takes in Dolores, looks over his shoulder at a grim looking Vanya and then back to Five. “Why were you coming to Vanya’s?” He asks, looking soft and wounded all at once. He’s already put the pieces together, but he wants to hear it from Five.

“It’s okay.” Five assures Ben, “I get it, don’t worry. Klaus is - he’s a kid and I’m not. He needs you. It’s okay, I don’t mind moving out. It’s fine.”

“Five,” Ben chokes out, and there are tears in his eyes and Five can’t help the panic that goes through him because he can’t handle people crying. He made Ben cry, he’s the worst person in the world. “Five, why on earth would you move out?”

Five hesitates. “You don’t need me anymore. You have Klaus to keep you company.”

“Of course I need you.” Ben says, like he can’t imagine why Five would think anything else. “Five, just because I want Klaus around doesn’t mean I don’t want you around. It doesn’t work like that. Love isn’t - it isn’t some kind of pie that gets divided between everyone, and loving Klaus doesn’t mean I love you any less. I love both of you.”

“Oh.” There really isn’t much Five can say to that, is there? He can’t help the stinging behind his eyes and the tears that are suddenly spilling down his cheeks as something shatters in his chest, like ice breaking as spring comes. 

Ben reels Five back in for a firm hug, and Five winds his arms around Ben and clutches at him like if he lets go Ben will disappear. 

“Come home, Five.” Ben breathes, soft and pleading, “Please.”

“Okay,” Five sobs against Ben’s shirt, “Okay.”

[taexual]

HOLIC - 38 | jb x reader

pairing: Im Jaebum x Reader

genre: enemies to lovers au | roommate au

warnings: mostly angst

words: 4.3k

disclaimer: i do not own the gif, please let me know if it belongs to you, so i can give proper credit

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The ride back home was quiet. This time, the road wasn’t quite as empty – and it was daytime – so Jaebum didn’t need you to keep him awake, which worked out in your favor because, while his mind was buzzing with joy, yours was foggy with dread and you wouldn’t have been able to hold a conversation even if you’d tried. So, instead, you tried to sleep but the wheels inside of your mind would not stop turning and you ended up spending nearly the entire ride back home half-laying on the passenger seat, clutching your knees to your chest – however big of a safety hazard that was – until you couldn’t feel your legs anymore.

If Jaebum minded your lack of talking, he didn’t show it and instead continued to hum along whichever song played on the radio. The sound was soothing but your heart still sunk whenever your mind gave you a reality check, crudely reminding you that you wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of your life in this car where nothing ever seemed to go wrong – and if it did go wrong, like the time you’d gotten lost, is till found a way to work out for the better. Eventually, you’d be back in your apartment. You’d have to make a decision about your future. You’d have to find enough strength to fight your fear and decide if you preferred to watch Jaebum’s career take off on the sidelines, or if you wanted to achieve success at the same time as him.

Funnily enough, the more your mind tortured you, the faster the drive turned out to be, and Jaebum was suddenly pulling into the parking lot of your building as one of his hands came to rest on your leg.

“We’re here,” he whispered gently, unsure if you were awake. “Should I keep the engine running so you can continue to nap here? Because, no offense, but I’m not carrying you all these flights of stairs with our elevator not working—”

“I’m awake,” you spoke, your voice groggy. You glared at him once you opened your eyes. “You’re a real romantic.”

Jaebum grinned. “So I’ve been told. You feeling alright?”

“Sure,” you replied with a sigh, momentarily forgetting the front you’ve been putting up ever since you left Jiho’s gallery. “Just tired.”

Now that the original excitement of the moment he’d received the good news from Jackson had passed, Jaebum’s usual perception was back and he could tell right away that you weren’t being completely honest – for one, you didn’t look him in the eye and, what’s more, your eyebrows were crinkled as though you’d spent the entire six-hour ride back home attempting to apply Einstein’s theory of relativity to some kind of astrophysical realms far beyond his imagination; also, your eyes were red even though you’d kept them closed all this time – but he decided not to push because, even though it was obvious that you were keeping something from him, he could also see that you’d meant it when you said you were tired.

“Okay,” he said, undoing his seatbelt and then helping you undo yours. “Let’s go home and sleep there.”

Sleeping, however, was not what you did once you were back in the apartment. Your mind was still hazy with doubts and uncertainty about your future – by all means, you did look like you needed to sleep for, at least, a week to recover from this trip – but Jaebum was extremely alert as he kept checking his phone every three seconds, only allowing himself to yawn when he was sure that he had no new notifications. You knew exactly why he was fidgeting so much.

“Go,” you told him after you’d changed into sweats and saw him still very much immersed in his phone in the kitchen. “Jackson is probably waiting for you.”

“He isn’t,” Jaebum replied with a sigh, putting his phone down on the island in front of him. “He hasn’t been replying to me since we got back to the city.”

“That’s just twenty minutes, then,” you said, watching him take a deep breath and then, very ceremoniously start pacing around the kitchen island.

“Yeah. Plenty of time for him to occupy himself with something else. Something more exciting than… this,” Jaebum gestured his hands around vaguely.

You shook your head. “What could he possibly find more exciting that his best friend’s big break?”

“Jackson? Anything once the initial excitement dies off,” Jaebum replied. “I mean, he’s one of my closest friends, but, I swear, the guy has the attention span of a squirrel. He’s probably off at some party already, his phone long forgotten.”

For a moment, you could not understand why your heart seemed to perk up at the mention of a party. And then you were struck with the bitter recollection of the conversation Jaebum had had on his phone at the convenience store of the gas station last night.

You squinted your eyes, asking carefully, “does Jackson know Cassie?”

“Cass—why?” Jaebum stopped moving. He realized the answer to his own question a second later. “Oh. No. I-I mean, he does. They were friends, too. Well, sort of. But no. He’s not there. T-that party is on a whole different level for us now. Even for Jackson.”

“Right,” you said, swallowing. The party didn’t seem like such a huge deal when you were hundreds of kilometers away from it but now that you were back in the city – and Jaebum’s friend was suddenly MIA – you were starting to grow more worried about it. “Maybe the sound of his phone is off. Or maybe he’s doing something important. I’m sure he’ll get back to you soon.”

Jaebum nodded, allowing your words to comfort him because he could still recognize the traces of exhaustion on your face. “You should go get some sleep.”

“How can I sleep when you’re this close to filing a missing person’s report on Jackson?” you teased, hoping that the playful jab will take the attention off of the evergrowing pile of anxiety on your shoulders. You were probably slouching already, the weight of your worries getting too much.

“Sure, make fun of me,” Jaebum said, finally sitting down on a stool nearby and then – seemingly inconscpicuously – nodding his head towards the stool opposite him, across the island. Your designated spot. “I’d really lose my mind if you weren’t here. Oh—I realize how selfish that sounds now that I’ve said it—”

“No,” you cut him off, sitting down. “I like to be useful. Talk to me about what you want your first album to be like. Distract yourself from waiting.”

What you were really hoping for – in a way that certainly was selfish – wasn’t just for Jaebum to momentarily forget that Jackson was ignoring him – although that would surely be beneficial for your poor neighbors downstairs who have had to listen to your creaking floorboards make noise non-stop since you’ve returned to the apartment – but also for yourself to forget the stupid party that Jaebum’s ex-girlfriend was essentially throwing for him, and the stupid interview at the gallery where Jiho’s stupid face showed up with his stupid offer that your stupid life depended on.

The whole situation you were in was stupid but then Jaebum sighed with a shake of his head and you saw the first glints of smile on his face, and, suddenly, the weight on your shoulders got lighter. That was his specialty, you’ve learned – Jaebum was the only person able to teleport you into a different reality, leaving your anxiety behind, with just one smile.

“I’m not sure if it’s going to work,” he said then, but the same yearning smile was still on his face, “since I would, basically, still be talking about the very thing I’m supposed to distract myself from.”

“Yeah, but you’d be looking at it from a different perspective,” you disagreed. “Hopeful instead of desperate. So, come on. Tell me. Are you going to return to your rapper roots, maybe include some diss tracks?”

Jaebum laughed, shaking his head. “No. The only song remotely close to a diss track that might make it to the album is “Don’t Touch Me.””

“Hey, that’s a start!” you clapped your hands supportively and Jaebum laughed. Finally. “Have you thought of any titles? First name usually works well for debut albums – I can just see it on the shelf at our local grocery store, “Im Jaebum by Im Jaebum: buy one get one free.””

He was laughing again. “Are you saying my albums will sell so bad, they’ll have to put it on sale to get rid of the remaining copies?”

“No, I’m predicting that you’ll be releasing new albums so fast, the salespeople will have no choice but to put them on discount or else every music section at every store will only feature your works,” you replied. “Although, now that I think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad. Imagine all the money you’ll make.”

“I’m not in it for the money,” he reminded you.

“No, I know that. But, still, imagine,” you said and then added teasingly, “maybe you’ll even earn enough to pay me back for enduring you for so long.”

“Hey!” Jaebum shot back, “this was going so well and you just had to ruin everything.”

“I can’t keep stroking your ego,” you explained, “God knows it’s already big enough.”

“Oh, big enough,” he repeated, his mind suddenly elsewhere. “I see. What else is big about me, I wonder?”

You squinted your eyes, reading through him but refusing to give him the satisfaction.

“Hmm,” you pretended to think, leaning on your elbows. “I can’t seem to come up with anything else, to be honest. That must be it.”

Jaebum watched you for a moment, his own eyes narrow and glistening. Then, he shook his head and warned you with a dead-serious expression, “you’re going to get it one of these days.”

“Oh, exciting,” you said. “What am I going to get?”

“You—” the buzzing of his phone interrupted what was undoubtedly going to be a very witty response and Jaebum lunged to pick the device up from where he’d left it before he sat down.

You watched him read the message and then turn to face you with wide eyes.

“It’s Jackson,” he said. “He wants to meet me and discuss everything in person.”

“Well, go, then!” you said, waving your hand in the direction of the front door of the apartment. You weren’t sure if Jaebum really needed your encouragement – he did, actually – because he looked like his mind was already in Jackson’s studio even if his body was still here. “Let me know how it goes when you’re back.”

“I will,” he said, not forgetting to kiss you before darting for the door – and then backing up again one more time. “I want to take you with me. But you need to get some proper sleep. Your eyes are bloodshot.”

You hadn’t realized your eyes were red but, as soon as he’d mentioned it, you started to feel the stinging sensation behind your eyelids every time you blinked. Your eyes must have been unusually dry and yet you were so preoccupied with your mind, you’d completely ignored the physical signals your body was sending.

“I’ll be waiting for you here,” you said, your smile letting him know how much you appreciated him wanting you to come with. “Don’t take too long, though, or I’ll fall asleep.”

“Never,” he promised and, after nodding his head in the general direction of your—or his; it was hard to tell —bedroom, he disappeared into the hallway.

You only dared to release the breath you’d been holding when you heard the front door close. Debating what you should do – stay in the kitchen and stare at the empty living room area ahead, or return to your room and stare at the walls of your empty bedroom instead – you toyed with the corner of the countertop of the kitchen island. Now that you were alone in the apartment, everything you’d kept inside was suddenly rushing to the surface and you realized you weren’t going to be able to keep sitting still for much longer.

You needed something to occupy yourself with, so you went to take a shower and purposefully played loud music to drown out your thoughts. It helped for the first few songs – because you could sing along under your breath – but then your playlist decided to introduce you to some new – melancholic, of course – music you’ve never listened to before and, immediately, you found yourself standing in the shower, with your head down, the water pouring on your hair and sliding down your shoulders in nervous dribbles. It would have looked comically dramatic had you been watching yourself from afar.

Once you managed to clear your head by turning the knobs until the water was scalding hot and your skin was rapidly reddening, you finally started to feel less like you were outside of your own body. The steam in the shower cabin made it difficult to breathe, however, so you didn’t stay in the cabin for too long. 

The damp warmth inside of the bathroom itself, as well as the fogged up glass door of the shower and the mirror above the sink reminded you too much of Jaebum’s car on the night before your interview, and you felt your mind drift back to the trip whether you liked it or not. There really wasn’t much that could distract you from it.

After you stepped out of the shower and wrapped your hair in a towel, throwing a robe on your body, you opened the door of the bathroom to let some cold air in, and then leaned against the sink with your hip, grabbing your phone to pause the music.

You needed silence as you braced yourself for what you were about to do.

You hadn’t really taken the shower to come up with a definite decision, regarding Jiho’s proposal. The decision what to do had come to you even before you entered the shower – although, truthfully, being closed up in a small space, surrounded by water and steam, did work as a great stimulant for your mind – and if you had to pinpoint the exact moment that triggered you to reach a decision, you’d say it was the sound of the door closing as Jaebum walked out to meet up with Jackson, a lengthy discussion about his future awaiting him.

You wanted to close that door, too. You wanted that future, too.

And, as you typed the text message on your phone, you figured that maybe you didn’t need to make the ultimate decision right now. Agreeing to a meeting with Jiho when he’s back here in the city would only mean you’re giving him another chance to convince you to do this but you weren’t going to give him a guarantee you’d say yes. You thought Jiho was smart enough to realize that himself but he probably also expected you to be smart enough to understand that this was your last chance.

If you had him adjust his schedule to make some time for seeing you and then ended up saying no, he wouldn’t offer again. 

Depending on which angle you looked at this from, it could be both good and bad. Good because you didn’t want to associate yourself with Jiho anyway and, surely, his pride wouldn’t allow him to pursue you professionally – or in any other way, to be honest – any further. But also bad because this was your only opportunity to have an exhibition of your own.

Then, just as you started to think that you might have to find a different way to get yourself known in the photography world because Jiho didn’t answer your text for, at least, twenty minutes – so this was what Jaebum must have felt like in your kitchen earlier – he finally got back to you.

And he wanted to know if you were free to meet him for lunch this Tuesday.

Exhaling slowly, you left the bathroom and headed to your bedroom instead. Jiho was, apparently, still visiting the city every Tuesday, and that felt like an overwhelming reminder of all the Tuesdays you’d already spent seeing him or avoiding to see him. The bathroom suddenly felt like it was too public to agree to meet up with him again. You felt like you needed to be all by yourself as you texted him back – as if you were doing something that you’d have been embarrassed if caught – but you couldn’t find that privacy in your bedroom, either.

Since crawling inside of yourself, hiding in the deepest pit of your soul, and pressing the dreadful “O” and “K” on your keyboard wasn’t possible, you sat down on your bed, straightened your position, fruitlessly tried to convince yourself that you weren’t doing anything wrong, and then agreed to spend the rest of the weekend dreading the upcoming Tuesday.

Jaebum returned home a few hours later when you were still in your bedroom, sitting in the corner of your bed closest to the wall, your hoodie snug around your body, the hood hiding your hair and providing the perfect acoustics for the music in your earphones. You’d tried to sleep – the sitting position obviously wasn’t the smartest choice but every time you lied down and relaxed your mind, you kept imagining the argument you’d get into with Jaebum after you would tell him about Jiho, so you chose to remain seated – so the music wasn’t very loud and that was why Jaebum didn’t scare you when he entered your bedroom, his bright smile illuminating your room.

You unhooked the straps of your hood from below your chin and took the hood off, followed by the earphones.

“Did it go well?” you asked pointlessly as you clocked the bottle of champagne in his hands. The golden bottle of MOËT complimented his million-dollar smile very nicely. “It better, because that thing in your hand costs more than the most expensive pair of shoes I own.”

Jaebum laughed, sitting on your bed next to you and throwing his shoulders back as he took a deep breath, sorting his thoughts and placing the bottle of champagne on the floor next to your bed.

“Jackson agreed on a meeting with the agency,” he announced. Just as your eyes widened in surprise and your hands already extended to engulf him in a congratulatory hug, he added, “this Tuesday.”

Your heart seemed to drop to your very toes as you paused, your mind nearly going into overdrive as it reached a dreadful conclusion: you were seeing Jiho this Tuesday as well, and that meant you and Jaebum only had three days left before the familiar and comfortable road of your lives would lead you to enter the dangerous, unknown woods ahead. You weren’t sure if those woods were truly there or if they were just a mirage – a figment of your overactive, overly ambitious imagination – but now you were halfway there, and if they weren’t actually real, they surely felt like they were.

Either way,  both of your lives were changing this Tuesday.

“That’s so soon,” you pointed out, only allowing yourself half a moment of shock before throwing your arms around his neck and feeling his chest rumble as he laughed in relief – he’d noticed the apprehension in your eyes – hugging you back. “I’m so happy for you. You’ve worked so hard.”

“So have you,” he whispered into your hair. His voice was elated and you knew immediately that you couldn’t tell him about Jiho and risk staining the pure—beautiful—shade of joy on his face. “Can you believe how far we’ve come?”

You couldn’t. Everything stopped feeling real when you’d left your apartment yesterday. It was as if you got into Jaebum’s car to drive to the gallery and ended up driving right into a different reality instead. It may not have snowed ash here but your current state of mind felt just as inescapable as Silent Hill.

“For what it’s worth coming from me,” you said, “I’m proud of you.”

Jaebum pulled away. “What do you mean? It’s worth everything coming from you. You’re the person I’m most excited and most afraid to play my music to.”

“Well, I was always proud of you,” you said, afraid to sound awkward but plunging ahead anyway because your heart had started to beat too loud for you to hear your thoughts and form coherent sentences. “It just feels like it’d be more meaningful if the people who never expected much from you were the ones saying these words—”

“Fuck those people,” he cut you off with a swift shake of his head. “I’m not doing this to make them proud. I don’t care what they think about me now. I care what my friends think, the ones who have always been there for me. I care what my mom thinks; she was the first one who read my lyrics even though I wasn’t ready for her to read them yet. But I care what you think most of all because, although “Don’t Touch Me” is out there for everyone to listen, you’re the only one who knows what it’s really about.”

Before you and Jaebum had come clean about your feelings to each other – even if it was as vague as possible because you two lived off of all that wasn’t spoken out loud – you had speculated and doubted if his heart beat the same way yours did. You’d completely disregarded every instance when Jaebum excluded you from everyone else in his life, proving that he had feelings for you even when you thought that wasn’t possible, because none of it seemed believable and, instead, everything seemed too good to be true.

The most prominent instance proving that he never hated you as much as he may have lead you to believe at the beginning of your relationship, was his confession about Suji. He’d told you that you were one of the few – one of the two – people who knew this many details about his relationship with her.

“Mark knows,” you said out loud, after a few prolonged moments of silence.

“Mark knows about Suji,” Jaebum clarified, “he literally saw me go through that relationship. Jackson saw me write about it. But you saw me survive it. Not just that, y-you—you survived it with me,” he looked down, tracing the floral pattern of your bedsheet with the tip of his index finger. “So, yeah, Mark does know, I guess. And Jackson figured out plenty, too. Jinyoung and the others – they’ve caught glimpses. They understand what I’m singing about in that song, it’s not hard to figure that out. But you’re the only one who knows the meaning of every word of the song. You know it so well, really, it’s as if you wrote it yourself. And, in fact, the song probably wouldn’t have been much different if you had written it because, by the time Suji resurfaced, it wasn’t just my life she had reappeared in. It—it was our life.”

You swallowed with great difficulty, recalling his previous confession about the precise moment when he’d started to have feelings for you. You knew nothing of these feelings when you saw Suji for the first time in the kitchen right outside of your bedroom. You didn’t know that the gorgeous girl, fitting right in at your apartment as if she was the one living here, would turn out to be the central figure of both of your lives. You didn’t know that, fueled by your mutual hatred for her, you and him would, bit by bit, come to terms with your budding feelings for each other until one day, you’d be sitting on your bed, holding one another in your arms, a bottle of champagne awaiting you as you celebrated another milestone together.

But you knew it all now. Even though you and Jaebum were as far from an actual relationship as two people could be at that time, Suji didn’t just show up to wreak havoc for him because he wasn’t hers to control. He wasn’t alone anymore. He hadn’t been alone since you walked out of your bedroom on your first night here, expecting to see your female roommate return home from her errands, and, by a hilarious coincidence, seeing the missing piece of your soul instead.

“What do you want me to do?” you asked.

Jaebum blinked, caught off guard. “Excuse me?”

“I—it sounds like you’re saying all of that because you want to get something from me,” you explained lamely, your cheeks suddenly hot.

He laughed. “What? No. I’m just say—okay, I do want something from you.”

“What is it? Careful, though. I’d give you anything and, at this point, I’m afraid I can’t tell the right from wrong,” you said, unsure if you were swearing to do so much for him because you were so grateful for all that he had told you or because you felt guilty about the things you hadn’t told him. “So please don’t ask me to kill for you because I will.”

“No. I don’t want much,” he shook his head, chuckling still. There was a heaviness in his chest – the same kind that always gathered there whenever he remembered his earlier life or whenever he allowed himself to imagine how different everything would have been if he hadn’t met you. “I just want you to be with me through whatever the hell we’re about to get ourselves into and then after.”

You took his hand into yours and nodded, tasting blood inside of your mouth as you promised, “I’m with you.”

   chapter directory

[commentaryvorg]

Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Bonus 1 - Back Routes

My usual spoiler warning for the main commentary doesn’t really apply here since the back routes are content that most people would usually only see after finishing the main game. But on the extremely unlikely off-chance that someone was going for all the back routes in their first-time playthrough and for some reason wanted to read commentary on them as they went along, this commentary is still not recommended, as I do sometimes mention things from later on in some of the trials.

So, the back routes. For those who don’t know, because the game is pretty vague about them so I imagine a lot of people might not: these are alternative routes you can take in trials by using specific lies in certain debates where you’re canonically supposed to just use the truth. There’s two in almost every trial, except for only one in trial 1, and none at all in trial 6, making nine in total for me to go over here. The alternative events always re-converge with the canon stream of events pretty quickly, so they don’t affect that much, and most of them are pretty silly and pointless, as we’ll see.

I personally first saw the back routes just by finding a Youtube video with all of them in, so I never had to go through the no-doubt frustrating process of trying to figure out where they are. The one indication there is, which is ridiculously subtle unless someone tells you about it, is that the music for the debates in which you can lie is a different piece called “Discussion – PERJURY”, a title you wouldn’t know about on your own without checking the soundtrack. This piece happens to be exactly the same as the usual “Discussion – BREAK” piece, except it also has the vocal bits that go something like “break down the door o’clock” (that’s always what it sounded like to me, anyway), whereas the regular one doesn’t have that. Since those vocals were always in the debate BGM from the first two DR games, it’s quite easy to not even notice there’s anything significant about them being there in this game. And, of course, even if you are listening out for that and have pinpointed which debates you need to lie in, there’s still no hint as to what the possible lie is. I do not envy anyone who’s attempted to find these back routes entirely on their own.

Trial 1, Back Route 1

This first back route is in the second half of the trial, after Shuichi has become the protagonist, in the debate in which everyone’s trying to figure out how the shot put ball could have got all the way from the opening of the vent onto Rantaro’s head. You’re supposed to point out that it could have rolled along the books that Kaede stacked up, but also…

Kaede:  “Hey, Shuichi… Don’t lose sight of the truth.”

…Kaede says this, right at the end of the debate, and there’s a weak spot on it. If you turn the “Library Vent” bullet into a lie, it becomes “Blocked Vent”, and you can fire it at this.

Shuichi:  (Kaede… I’m sorry. I’m not strong enough for this! I can’t make you the culprit!)

It’s almost strange to see this, having recently been in chapters 5 and 6 with a strong heroic Shuichi who could bravely face any kind of painful truth. But here we are back at the beginning, and it is quite believable that the Shuichi in chapter 1 might just have lost his nerve and not been able to do this.

Shuichi:  “W-Well, actually… Maybe the shot didn’t pass through the vent…”

Kiyo:  “Did you not just tell us that the shot traveled through the vent?”

Shuichi:  “That’s true, but… I just remembered, the library’s vent was closed.”

Ryoma:  “The vent… was closed?”

Shuichi:  “… So I think… my deduction might be wrong.”

Shuichi’s voice sounds awkward and nervous as he tells his lie here, but it’s fairly plausible that that nervousness comes from his realisation that his deduction was wrong (because of his lack of confidence in his abilities), rather than from the knowledge that he’s running away from the truth.

Kaede:  “Shuichi?”

Shuichi:  “…”

Kaede:  “I see…”

Kaede immediately sees through him and realises what he’s doing, of course, and she’s not going to let him do that.

Kaede:  “Shuichi, we both investigated the vent. But you misunderstood something.”

Shuichi:  “…What?”

Kaede:  “I closed the vent grate while we were investigating, but it was open before.”

But, adorably, the way Kaede clears this up is not by informing the whole class that Shuichi just lied to protect her because he can’t face the truth. Instead, she tells her own lie that makes it seem like Shuichi was simply misinformed, so she can get things back on track without discrediting Shuichi or hurting him any more than necessary. 

Shuichi:  “No… That’s a lie!”

Kaede:  “It’s not a lie. But depending on your deduction… it could become a lie.”

Shuichi:  “…Ah!”

What Kaede says is a bit odd, since any statement is either a lie or it isn’t and it’s not going to suddenly change. But I suppose what she’s really saying is that the class’s perception of whether or not she’s lying will change depending on whether Shuichi admits that he just lied. She’s making it clear to Shuichi that she knows he just lied and he knows she just lied, without the rest of the class ever having to be aware that either of them did.

Kaede:  “Shuichi, please, answer the question. How did the shot reach Rantaro? You know the answer. You just heard it during the debate.”

And then, like all back routes do, things start to reconverge with how the trial should have gone. It’s lovely though that in this instance it comes from Kaede’s continued efforts to encourage Shuichi to face the truth and use his detective skills that she believes in.

Shuichi:  (Why am I hesitating…? Am I really going to turn back now? At a time like this? I’m sure Kaede wants to run away… But she’s still here… she trusts me to do this! I need to answer. I need to grant her wish. I need to solve this mystery!)

And Shuichi manages to find his strength again, thanks to Kaede’s encouragement and seeing how brave she’s being. After these lines, he explains exactly what he should have done after the debate and things reconverge completely.

I also enjoy that here’s another little moment of Shuichi being perfectly aware that Kaede’s scared but then using that to inspire him to be strong in the face of his own fear. Heroes that are struggling can be more inspiring than otherwise!

This is my favourite of all of the back routes! It makes a lot of in-character sense at this point that Shuichi might do this, because it’s all about his issues of wanting to run away from the truth causing him to momentarily falter even after having decided to accuse Kaede. This is the one back route that I can actually see potentially having canonically happened.

I say this about this one because, uh, most of the rest of them aren’t going to be nearly this good at all. Oh boy.

Trial 2, Back Route 1

This one’s right at the very beginning, in the first debate. They’re talking about Himiko’s magic trick, but this debate isn’t even supposed to be about figuring out the trick, it’s supposed to be about telling Kokichi he’s wrong when he pretends to believe Ryoma was eaten alive. However…

Himiko:  “The Underwater Escape was no trick! It was magic!”

…there is also an agree spot here, and if you turn “Water Tank Trick” into a lie, it becomes “Magic Water Tank”, and you can agree with Himiko that it totally was magic.

Shuichi:  “Maybe Himiko is right… The Underwater Escape might be real magic. Because from what I’ve seen, there is no trick or gimmick in that tank!”

Why, Shuichi. Why on earth do you think this is a worthwhile thing to lie about. Nothing in this entire back route gives any indication as to why Shuichi would think this is necessary.

Himiko:  “Nyeh!?”

The best part of this one, in a very silly way, has to be how utterly fucking surprised Himiko is to hear him say this. If nothing else does, this proves that she’s not actually deluded and knows full well her magic isn’t really magic.

Himiko:  “Y-Yeah, see? Shuichi agrees… There’s no trick. It’s magic…”

Yes, definitely, if the Ultimate Detective agrees then that’s even more proof that she’s a real mage!!! (she is so confused why is he doing this)

Tenko:  “Wait up, Shuichi! Why are you trying to white-knight your way into Himiko’s heart!?”

Like that’s not what you’re doing all the time, Tenko.

Shuichi:  (That… certainly was not my intention…)

Then what the fuck was, Shuichi!?

A couple of people suggest that if Himiko’s trick really was magic then doesn’t that make it more likely that she did kill Ryoma?

Himiko:  “N-No, wait… Ryoma couldn’t have been killed by the piranhas… Cuz the piranhas I used in my show were special. They only eat dead flesh.”

This reads every bit like a desperate lie she’s trying to tell to get the suspicion off her. Apparently she didn’t even bother reading the Monokuma File to find a much simpler way to prove Ryoma wasn’t killed by the piranhas.

Tenko:  “Are you just pretending to be nice to Himiko so she’ll tell us the truth!?”

Shuichi:  “Ah, no, that’s not it…” (But… Himiko’s information was useful. Ryoma was not killed by the piranhas.)

Something you already knew, Shuichi, because you read the Monokuma File and are not an idiot, so Himiko’s “information”, if it was even true, wasn’t actually useful at all. If Shuichi really did tell this lie in an attempt to get some kind of information out of Himiko, then it was the most ridiculously pointless endeavour ever. Maybe he was actually trying to surprise her into admitting it wasn’t magic and explaining the trick? I don’t know.

Things shortly reconverge back to Shuichi explaining why Ryoma wasn’t eaten alive… and funnily enough, when we get to the next debate in which we actually discuss Himiko’s trick, everybody’s going to have conveniently forgotten the fact that Shuichi previously claimed the tank had no gimmick to it at all.

Trial 2, Back Route 2

This next one’s in the second half of the trial, just after Shuichi has accused Kirumi of being the culprit and needs to explain why. You’re supposed to point out that she had the chance to set things up in the gym in the five minutes she spent in there alone. And you’d think that Shuichi would already be aware of this, since this should be why he chose to accuse her in the first place.

Kirumi:  “An alibi for nighttime? I believe most of us do not have one.”

But if you turn “Alibis for Yesterday” into a lie, it becomes, for some reason, “My Alibi For Nighttime”. Upon firing it at this statement, Shuichi is about to tell a ridiculously elaborate lie. Hold tight.

He claims that after the training he totally did with Kaito that night (remember his other, canonical lie), he went back to his dorm but couldn’t sleep and was awake for the whole night. And during the night, he heard the sound of someone leaving their dorm, and then later returning.

Shuichi:  “But… I didn’t hear the sound of someone going down the stairs. Which must mean that whoever left has a room on the 1st floor.”

…

Shuichi:  “Because preparing the ropeway required time to be spent in the gym… it’s extremely likely that the culprit helped set up the magic show. In short… Himiko, Angie, Kaito, or Kirumi.”

Maki:  “I see… So among those four, the only one with a room on the 1st floor of the dorms is…”

Shuichi:  “Yes. Only Kirumi.”

What the actual fuck. This is admittedly very clever, but it’s a huge stretch to think that Shuichi was able to come up with this on the spot. For one thing, I’m amazed he’s actually managed to memorise everyone’s dorm room placements (and apparently so has Maki) when they’ve only been there a few days. I’d certainly only pay attention to my own room and probably my immediate neighbours. Ultimate Detective super-memory, maybe, I guess. But then there’s the part where, while trying to think of a way to incriminate Kirumi, it somehow comes to Shuichi’s mind that she’s the only one of the possible suspects with a dorm room on the first floor, and therefore that he can use that in a lie? Why on earth would he think of that, of all things?

And if the actual reason to accuse Kirumi isn’t something he’s realised, then Shuichi should not even be sure she did it at this point, in which case telling a huge elaborate lie to incriminate her is incredibly risky, because what if she really didn’t do it?

Shuichi’s also missing a few potential suspects. Keebo also helped set up the magic show; Maki did not but has no alibi between 9 and 10 and could have done it then; and Miu also has a weak enough alibi that she could potentially have snuck into the gym for the five minutes necessary to set it up between 9 and 10. Keebo and Maki are on the second floor of the dorms. Miu is not. It still could technically be Miu, if we’re believing Shuichi’s lie here!

It is quite something to realise that the placement of all the characters’ rooms in the dorms were apparently decided almost entirely for the sake of this one non-canon alternative route. (I should also point out that despite more than a year of obsessing over this game, I still had to check these dorm placements that I just mentioned. It’s ridiculous that Shuichi knew these off the top of his head after only a few days.)

And I’ve no idea how a player is supposed to be able to figure out this back route through anything but wild trial-and-error. You can check what Lie Bullet is made from each Truth Bullet, although to do so you then have to fire it, which you lose health for doing (unless you have Kokichi’s skill equipped). I suppose firing “My Alibi For Nighttime” at the claim that most people don’t have an alibi for nighttime kind of makes sense, but Shuichi supposedly proving his own alibi is not necessary and not even what actually happens here. Players must be very confused when he suddenly goes off on this tangent which is nothing like what they would have been expecting from this.

Kokichi:  “Hmm, you heard a sound, huh? Well, I hear a load of BS.”

Kokichi’s not wrong to call out Shuichi’s bullshit… but honestly, this was quite a plausible lie, simply because it’s so implausible to think that Shuichi could have come up with this as a lie. If he actually heard Kirumi leave and re-enter her room, then it makes sense he’d have then been able to narrow down that it could only be her based on her room being on the first floor. But the idea that he somehow managed to figure this concept out backwards without having actually heard anything is far harder to believe.

Kokichi:  “But unfortunately for you, Kirumi… Your time’s up. We already know you’re the only one capable of setting all this up. Riiiight, Shuichi?”

Shuichi:  (…Well, that was an unexpected assist.)

And this is how we reconverge. So apparently Shuichi did already know to point out that Kirumi is the only one who had the five minutes alone in the gym to make the preparations (so much for his claim that it could have been anyone who was in the gym even though the rest of them were never alone in there). In which case, whyyyyy on earth do this ridiculously elaborate detour instead???

Plus, here’s Kokichi making it clear that he knew that just as well himself, but of course he didn’t point it out any earlier than this because lol what is being helpful, that’s boring.

Trial 3, Back Route 1

This one’s in the first half, in the debate where it’s being argued that Keebo could have snuck in under the seance room’s floor using his flashlight function to see. You’re supposed to refute Kiyo’s claim that the culprit used a light at all because any light would have been seen through the hole in the floor. But doing that is honestly a little bit confusing and unintuitive, because the rest of the debate is more about specifically Keebo's flashlight and it seems more like you should be focusing on that in particular. Because of this, I’ve actually seen one blind LPer trigger this back route by accident because they were so confused about what to do here.

Miu:  “Keebo could’ve used that function to get under the floor…”

Turning the “Keebo’s Flashlight Function” bullet into a lie gets you “Flashlight Drawbacks”. The LPer I mentioned thought this simply meant the fact that it’s really bright and would have been seen through the gaps, so they fired it here and were very confused by the notion that this was even supposed to be a lie in the first place. But oh boy, it is. Here we go.

Shuichi:  (It’s hard to believe that Keebo is the culprit in this case. It’s even harder to believe that this trial isn’t being manipulated by someone… So even if I have to lie… I need to defend Keebo!)

It’s pretty ridiculous that Shuichi hasn’t figured out the obvious way to prove Keebo’s innocence without lying. And then it’s also odd that despite having no proof, he still believes Keebo isn’t the culprit. It comes across like the kind of belief he has in Kaito, but he’s not particularly close friends with Keebo in that same way, so it’s just very out of nowhere. This is the flimsiest justification for this silly detour.

Shuichi:  “It’s so bright, even Keebo can’t see when it’s turned on!”

And so this is his lie, because apparently “it’s so bright that people would have seen it through the goddamn hole in the floor” did not occur to him first.

Miu:  “…Wait, what!? There’s no way a genius like me would make that kinda rookie mistake!”

It’s honestly pretty remarkable that Keebo’s flashlight doesn’t have that drawback, since it’s in his eyes, which are indeed what he sees out of as trial 6 confirms for us. One would expect that to just massively overload the light sensors that they’d be right next to.

Gonta:  “But… you make mistakes a lot… A whole lot…”

Oh, Gonta. You and your straightforward honesty.

(And then Miu is terrible and the less said about that the better.)

Shuichi:  (Come on, Keebo… Please, play along!)

Keebo:  “Um…”

Shuichi:  (Keebo!)

Keebo:  “Uh, um… Well, uh…”

It is pretty cute how Keebo doesn’t want to call out Shuichi’s lie but is also super uncomfortable about going along with it. Keebo is one of very few characters in this game who never lies about anything.

Keebo:  “I’m so sorry! I just don’t remember! Really, I’m sorry!” [he shines his flashlight]

…I say that, but this here has to be a lie, because he was standing with his flashlight on for the whole second half of the investigation and would definitely have remembered not being able to see for all that time. Still, he’d rather tell an inconsequential lie about not remembering than either call out Shuichi for lying to protect him or go along with Shuichi’s much bigger lie that it really does blind him.

Kaito:  “Aagh! We get it already! Just turn it off! We’re gonna go blind!”

Remember me noting during the trial itself that it’s Kaito in particular who complains about Keebo’s flashlight, suggesting he’s extra light-sensitive right now due to his illness? Still a thing here.

And a few lines later…

Keebo:  “Shuichi, I’m so sorry!” [he shines his flashlight again]

Kaito:  “Damn! That is seriously bright!”

It is still Kaito who reacts. He does this all four times Keebo shines his flashlight in this trial, if you count this back route along with the canon parts. Yep, I’m certain that’s a thing.

Maki:  “Wouldn’t the light have shined through the gaps of the floorboard if it had been that bright?”

And then Maki is the one to save us from this dumbness that we’ve ended up on. Thank you, Maki.

Trial 3, Back Route 2

This one’s just after the intermission, when they’ve figured out that the seesaw trick required cutting the crosspiece beforehand, and so Kiyo is arguing that Himiko did it because she’s the one who picked the room. You’re supposed to prove that the other rooms were trapped too, but instead…

Tsumugi:  “What if someone steered her into picking that room?”

…you can turn “The Caged Child” into “Caged Dog Village” and fire it at the agree spot in this statement. This is an odd one; “Caged Dog Village” is simply the name of the book that describes the Caged Child seance and therefore basically refers to the same information. This is not actually a lie.

Shuichi:  (If implicating Himiko was the plan, then disrupting that plan might teach us something. For that reason… I have to lie!)

Do you, Shuichi? The game is trying to insist that this totally counts as a regular back route which arbitrarily must involve lying, but he’s not about to lie here.

Shuichi:  “I believe Himiko was being set up. Himiko only picked that room because Kiyo wanted it as dark as possible.”

This a perfectly valid point which doesn’t get made in the canon trial. Before picking specifically the middle room, Himiko was also the one to suggest using one of the empty rooms in the first place – but she did so after Kiyo said it needed to be dark. Obviously Kiyo knew that those rooms were the only rooms available that fit the criteria for the seance and deliberately let her suggest it instead of himself.

None of this is a lie, and it didn’t even really need the “lie” bullet of “Caged Dog Village” for this, when The Caged Child truth bullet also mentions how it needs to be dark. Alternative routes to debates shouldn’t necessarily need to involve lying! (This is also another one which must have required some frustrating trial-and-error for players to find on their own.)

Keebo:  “The culprit gambled on the middle room being picked through coincidence? That seems highly improbable.”

Shuichi:  (Ah, that is true… The culprit wouldn’t have left that to chance.)

And now we’re back right where we started this debate, because even if it can be explained why Himiko picked one of the three empty rooms, this doesn’t prove that the culprit steered her into picking specifically the middle one (because he didn’t).

Himiko:  “… No more… I told you… it’s too much of a pain. Just do the voting or whatever.”

There’s also a little more of Himiko having given up here, since Shuichi is not doing a good enough job of defending her with this to inspire her out of this mindset.

Kokichi:  “I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter which room Himiko chose…”

Shuichi:  “What do you mean?”

Kokichi:  “It’s getting kinda boring, so I’ll explain. She didn’t choose the middle by coincidence. Each room was the same to begin with.”

It makes sense that Kokichi’s the one to get us back on track, because he’s the one who discovered the other rooms were trapped. Of course, he could have told everyone that in the first place, but nope, he’s only pointing it out here because Shuichi’s being slow on the uptake and it’s looking possible that they might actually vote for Himiko and get everyone killed if he doesn’t step in. It is quite amusing how frustrated he sounds by this. Ugh, what do you mean he’s got no choice but to be helpful for once. The least helpful person even when he is actually being helpful, as always.

Trial 4, Back Route 1

This one’s in the very first debate, in which Kokichi’s arguing that Kaito poisoned Miu.

Kokichi:  “That’s when you poisoned her, right, Kaito?”

You’re supposed to fire the “Small Bottle of Poison” at this statement to prove that Miu couldn’t have been killed with that poison. But you can also lie with that bullet to turn it into “Small Antidote Bottle” and fire it here.

Shuichi:  “And it’s much too early to decide that Kaito is the culprit.”

Kokichi:  “But whyyyyyyy? I think it’s already too late. You guys are taking so long to realise that people can kill others in a snap…”

Oh my god, Kokichi, you are the most broken record ever even in non-canon alternative scenarios.

Shuichi:  (I know Kokichi hasn’t forgotten about that. He’s just pretending. Alright, Kokichi, I’ll play your game. If you’re going to lie, I will too.)

At least for this back route, Shuichi isn’t being inexplicably stupid and failing to realise the correct way forward. He knows it, but he’s just trying to give Kokichi a taste of his own medicine.

Shuichi:  “Have you forgotten? The bottle we found at the scene was an antidote, not a poison. It’s not like Miu could have been killed by an antidote.”

This is a pretty pathetically obvious lie, but the point isn’t to have anyone believe it, it’s to (attempt to) push Kokichi into admitting the truth about the poison and that he already knows the culprit isn’t Kaito. Which can sometimes be the point behind some of Kokichi’s pathetically obvious lies. The ones that aren’t just for the hell of it, at least.

Shuichi:  “…Is this *fun* for you, messing with the trial?”

Kokichi:  “Hm? Well, I mean, this is where it gets fun for both me and the culprit.”

Of course he’s doing it just for fun, Shuichi, you barely need to ask that.

Also, please recall that Kokichi believes right now that Gonta remembers being the culprit, and yet he has the gall to imply in earshot of Gonta that he’d ever be having fun with this. What a dick.

Kokichi:  “…So, what’s this talk about an antidote? We’ll just say you misunderstood the whole thing, Shuichi. We all know you wouldn’t lie.”

Shuichi:  “O-Of course. I’m sorry, I was just misremembering.”

It’s pretty disappointing and anticlimactic that Shuichi just backs down on this. Him telling this lie in the first place was supposed to be to show Kokichi how frustrating his own obvious lies are and try to get him to reveal his hand. Kokichi would never suddenly back down with an “oops sorry I was just mistaken” (Kokichi is never wrong about anything, after all), so if Shuichi really wants to commit to this bit, he shouldn’t either!

I suppose the fact that he does just goes to show that Shuichi doesn’t have it in him to be as much of an asshole liar as Kokichi, funnily enough. Which is why I’m still not super fond of this back route, even though it’s less stupid than the ones in trials 2 and 3 – while it’s neat that Shuichi tries to use Kokichi’s tactics against him, it’s not really in his character to do that when it’s not necessary. That’s too underhanded for Shuichi.

Shuichi:  (I can’t let Kokichi continue this line of questioning. It will implicate Kaito.)

Kokichi already has implicated Kaito. Wasn’t the point of this whole lie supposed to be to get him to reveal the truth of the poison and unimplicate Kaito? But even then, it’s very unclear how Shuichi thought lying that the poison bottle was an antidote bottle would do that – Kokichi’s just going to retort “no, it was poison, duh” and never need to explain the part where it was a type of poison that couldn’t have killed Miu. This whole escapade of Shuichi’s was a pretty silly idea on many levels.

Shuichi:  “But Kokichi, you’re misremembering as well. You were the one who told us about the warnings on the label. If you remember what was on that label, you’ll see that your argument is flawed.”

Kokichi:  “What warnings? Was there something like that on the label?”

Shuichi:  (Is he still pretending not to know…?)

And ultimately, he never gets Kokichi to admit he was lying about it. He even actively claimed that Kokichi just misremembered, despite knowing that’s not the case! If revealing that Kokichi was lying was your goal, Shuichi, why would you not at least try to point that out to everyone, even if he’d inevitably deny it.

Trial 4, Back Route 2

This one’s just after the intermission, in the debate where they’re discussing what was used to slide Miu’s body off the roof, featuring what would normally be Kaito Refutation #3.

Kaito:  “There was nothing like that around, though!”

But instead of refuting Kaito with the actual truth, you can also turn “Signboard Used as a Bridge” into “Signboard Used as a Sign” and fire it here.

Shuichi:  “There was something the culprit could have used to slide the body! The signboard!”

Kaito:  “The signboard!?”

While the purpose of this lie is, again, about Kokichi, it makes me uncomfortable that this one involves Shuichi lying to Kaito. Kaito’s having enough inferiority issues at this point in this trial already without Shuichi just using him as a springboard to play some pointless game of liar chess with Kokichi.

Maki points out that the signboard was already being used as a bridge and therefore couldn’t have been a sled.

Shuichi:  (Maki is right, it couldn’t have been that exact signboard. However… He knows exactly how it was done. That’s why I need to bait him out with this lie!)

Again, Shuichi is attempting to get Kokichi to reveal that he already knows all the answers to this case by pushing him into it with his own lie. So he goes on to claim that there was actually a second signboard lying next to where he found the first one to use as a bridge. (During the Virtual World trip, the game made a point of how Shuichi went alone to fetch that signboard in the first place, which it turns out was entirely for the purpose of this back route, so that nobody else would be able to prove this is a lie.)

Himiko:  “But then why did Miu say there was only one signboard?”

Shuichi: “Uh… To mislead us; she was planning a crime, after all.”

This is rather flimsy and indicative that he’s lying. She would still need a reason related to her planned crime to want to lie about this. In fact, there being a second signboard there would have ruined Miu’s plan of throwing away the bridge, so really she should have deleted any extra potential bridges beforehand and that proves Shuichi’s lying about this.

Kokichi:  “Puhu… Puhuhuhuhu…!”

This, of all things, is Kokichi’s initial reaction. I guess since we’re in the second half of trial 4, it’s approaching the point where he’s going to be pretending he’s super evil for the purpose of convincing them all he’s the mastermind, and that’s why he’s acting like Monokuma here?

Kokichi:  “Ah-hahahaha! Oh my god! That lie was sooo cringy! Stop, my stomach hurts! Wooow! Shuichi is lying on purpose! Are you trying to spice up the class trial, too?”

And this time, Kokichi explicitly calls Shuichi out on the lie. This is the first time he’s done that for any of Shuichi’s lies, back route or canon, since this is just a little before Shuichi’s actual canon lie in this trial which Kokichi will also call him out on.

It’s a little strange that he reacts to this lie of Shuichi’s so differently than how he reacts to the upcoming one, just finding it hilariously pathetic rather than being furious about it. Perhaps that’s just because the upcoming one gets used much more directly against him, to prove that he went to the crime scene, whereas this one doesn’t “ruin his fun” and in fact makes things more entertaining for him.

Shuichi:  “Kokichi… I was the only one who went and got the signboard. Only I saw them. So why do you think I’m lying?”

Kokichi:  “Because I know. I know the culprit… and the whole trick.”

And, I guess props to Shuichi, because this time he actually succeeded in getting Kokichi to admit this. This is possibly because Kokichi is so close to the point where he’s planning to reveal the culprit anyway that he doesn’t see the harm in giving everyone a little teaser of that. (I should also point out that, were Kokichi really going for the mercy kill, it would be better for him to not admit to knowing anything at all here.)

Kaito:  “Wh-What!?”

I like how Kaito is the first one to react to that. At this point in the trial it’s pretty clear that he’s noticed Kokichi already knows a bunch of stuff he’s infuriatingly not telling anyone, so this is probably less him being surprised at that and more just being bewildered that Kokichi is suddenly admitting it.

Kokichi:  “Nee-heehee… I couuuld tell you, but I think we should save the best for last.”

He still wants to draw it out, just like he’s been doing this entire trial, to make it as ~fun~ as possible, because he is still twistedly desperately trying to have fun with his murderous assholery. And he’s trying to make it as cruel as possible too, so that they’ll all believe he’s totally evil and therefore totally the mastermind.

Kokichi:  “Even if I told you, would you guys really believe a liar like me?”

Yeah, he knows that people are going to put up resistance to the idea once he does accuse Gonta, just because it’s him saying it. But he also knows that Shuichi will face things objectively and prove it for him anyway once he gets to that point.

Kokichi:  “That doesn’t mean *all* of Shuichi’s deductions are lies, y’know.”

Oh, really, Kokichi? But I thought that if one person lies about one thing then they’re instantly a horrible backstabber and you can’t trust them about anything, and so everything they say might as well be considered a lie? Yeah, too bad for Kokichi that narrative doesn’t work here where he still needs Shuichi to be credible in order for him to prove to everyone that Gonta did it.

So admittedly, these two back routes for trial 4 are much less ridiculous and more pointed than the ones from trials 2 and 3, and while the first one awkwardly doesn’t go anywhere, this one actually does. But I’m still not hugely fond of them and don’t like to think they’d be canon, simply because it’s not like Shuichi to use underhanded tactics like this unless he really feels it’s necessary.

These lies are also more underhanded than the canon lie later in this trial, because that one straightforwardly “proves” that Kokichi went to the roof, whereas these two are all about trying to manipulate Kokichi into admitting something that Shuichi’s lie itself doesn’t actually prove (which might also be why Kokichi is so amused by this lie when that’s not at all how he reacts to the upcoming one). That’s worse than anything Shuichi does canonically. This is Shuichi stooping to Kokichi’s level even more than he does in canon, not because he has to but just because he can. He’s better than that.

Trial 5, Back Route 1

This back route is almost my favourite one. Almost. And then it isn’t.

This is the first debate after Exisal Kokichi appears and shows everyone the video, in which you’re supposed to argue that Kaito’s cause of death couldn’t have been the hydraulic press because of the safety function.

Himiko:  “Kaito got crushed to death.”

But instead of firing the safety function at this, you can turn the “Murder Video” bullet into “Survival Video” and fire it here.

Shuichi:  “I still… don’t believe it. Is that video real?”

Because Shuichi doesn’t want to accept Kaito’s death, even when it’s staring him in the face, of course!

Shuichi:  “It could have been edited to make it *look* like Kaito was killed by the press.”

Exisal Kaito:  “Damn right!”

[the Exisal leaps over into Kaito’s spot]

Exisal Kaito:  “There’s no way this Luminary of the Stars would die that easily!”

I love that this makes Kaito be himself again for a moment. Of course he’s too invincible and too luminary and too Kaito to die that easily! That’s exactly what Shuichi’s believing right now!

(And it’s exactly what Kaito hasn’t truly believed about himself in a while. But since he’s playing an overexaggerated version of himself that Kokichi might act out, and since he’s talking about how he totally wouldn’t ever die, that’s a reason to pretend like he’s the Luminary of the Stars, even though he doesn’t truly feel he deserves that title any more.)

Tsumugi:  “K-Kaito again!?”

[the Exisal leaps back to Kokichi’s spot]

Exisal Kokichi:  “Would you have liked it better if it turned out like that? Ah-haha, you wish!”

But Kaito can’t actually stick with that for more than a brief second, no matter how much he must have liked the excuse to pretend he really is invincible, because he’s here to convince Shuichi that he’s dead. I don’t think this brief switch to his own voice was actually scripted, for the same reasons I argued back in the main commentary that Kaito starting out as himself at first wasn’t scripted. Kokichi would have preferred it if they never heard both voices and therefore never even considered the possibility that the Kokichi voice could be faked.

Nonetheless, Kaito’s doing a good job of ad-libbing Kokichi’s behaviour after he switches back, because of course Kokichi would enjoy rubbing Shuichi’s denial and irrational belief in Kaito’s invincibility in his face. The delivery of the “you wish” is especially dickish, and I am forever impressed at Kaito being able to do this kind of thing.

Shuichi:  (Ah!)

Shuichi is not happy at being toyed with like this.

Exisal Kokichi:  “Like I said, that footage isn’t edited at all. It recorded the event completely as is. Kaito was crushed! His bones went crunch, and his organs went squish!”

Yikes. This part at least is very definitely scripted, and, again, it is incredible that Kaito can act this out and make himself say these words. He manages to sound genuinely gleeful about the gruesome part, even though that is actually what he did to Kokichi while he was still alive. Aaaaaa, Kaito. I bet he was very, very glad in the canon version of events that he never had to recite this bit of the script.

Himiko:  *huuurp*… “I remembered the video… And all my bittersweet memories of him…”

Himiko still seems to be reasonably upset about Kaito’s death!

Tsumugi:  “Hold those memories within you… or they’ll just escape as sour vomit.”

Meanwhile Tsumugi sure seems to give absolutely no fucks that Kaito was horribly killed, does she.

Shuichi:  “But we all know Kokichi loves to lie. And that he’s a Remnant of Despair. That leads me to believe there’s something he’s not telling us about that video. I don’t think that video showed the murder at all! All we saw was a living body!”

Questioning the validity of the video is quite a reasonable thing to do at this point, even despite all of Exisal Kokichi’s insistence that it couldn’t have been edited. But it’s still very unlikely that this’d ever actually cut the trial short, because without knowing why Kokichi would fake the video, which we don’t figure out until we learn that Monokuma doesn’t know what happened, there’s no reason to be certain that it even was faked at all. Trying to figure out how it could have been faked at that point is just trying to solve a puzzle that might not even have a solution.

Exisal Kokichi:  “Nee-heehee… I don’t blame you for not believing it. It’s hard to believe a smug idiot like Kaito got squished like a bug, right?”

Says Kaito. Still very scripted, still delightful that Kaito is forcing himself to say all these things designed to taunt and hurt Shuichi and make himself sound pathetic and worthless. He is doing whatever it takes to get Shuichi to drop this.

Exisal Kokichi:  “But your lie won’t work here, Shuichi. No, what you said isn’t even a lie! It’s just wishful thinking!”

And of course Kokichi in the script, having predicted the possibility of Shuichi desperately trying to deny Kaito’s death even after seeing the video, would still want to make it seem all about lies despite knowing full well that Shuichi reacting like this wouldn’t (shouldn’t) have anything to do with lying at all. Kaito can’t enjoy dismissing Shuichi’s wishful thinking like it’s meaningless to hope for something better, especially when he knows that Shuichi’s right to. Wishful thinking is believing that the impossible is possible!

Shuichi:  “…” (You’re wrong, Kokichi. My emotional reaction is the lie. I put on this act to get what I want from you. I know that these class trials demand that someone dies. I’m prepared for that.)

And then, this back route, which was being really delightful, just goes and shoots itself in the foot and completely invalidates itself. What the fuck do you mean Shuichi was only pretending to desperately want Kaito to be alive?

If Shuichi has accepted the fact that someone’s dead, and is also sure that he’s talking to Kokichi, that means he’s already accepted that Kaito is dead. This is straight-up contradicted by canon, in which Shuichi only properly accepts that Kaito is dead just before the Debate Scrum, which is still a while from now. Acting like he’s totally already accepted it here completely compromises Shuichi’s emotional progression for the first part of this trial, which is one of the most fun parts!

(There was even that one bit right here where Shuichi went (Ah!) in his inner monologue, which is an internal reaction that wouldn’t be part of this hypothetical lie and sure implies that his emotional reaction really was genuine, but nah, that was never a thing, right.)

And the only reason they did this, probably? Because back routes must totally always involve lies of some kind. As if you couldn’t possibly have an interesting alternate route in a debate that doesn’t require lying (even though the second back route in trial 3 actually did not contain a lie at all). I bet the writers came up with this fun idea of Shuichi trying to deny the video, and then went “wait, shit, that’s not actually a lie; we need to make it a lie somehow otherwise it can’t be a back route”. No, you don’t!!! This is, again, making Shuichi far too underhanded and manipulative for his character, especially given the desperate state of mind he is canonically supposed to be in at this point in the trial. Gah. This is so disappointing.

Honestly, I’d have been tempted to actually include this back route in my main coverage of trial 5 if it hadn’t been for this. If they’d actually made this about more of Shuichi’s desperate denial like it should have been, with bonus Kaito briefly being his totally-invincible self and then reciting some painfully cruel scripted lines that he must have hated to say, it’d have been a delightful addition and there’d have been very little reason for me not to include it!

Also, if they’d made this back route be actually about Shuichi’s denial, it would also have been amusingly similar to the hypothetical alternate route I proposed in the main commentary, in which Shuichi could have picked up on Exisal Kokichi’s comment about his singular wound to desperately try and tell himself it was Kaito in there after all. That one wouldn’t have involved lying either, and wouldn’t have needed to to still be interesting! (That part came later on, just after the Debate Scrum in which he accepted Kaito’s death, but then it’d have been a brief lapse in Shuichi’s resolve to accept the truth, kind of like trial 1’s back route.)

Shuichi:  (My intuition is telling me there’s something wrong with that video. It was shot for a reason.)

Shuichi should be perfectly allowed to have his detective’s intuition tell him this while also having his Shuichi Saihara side desperately want to deny the video just because he can’t bear the thought of losing Kaito. They shouldn’t have to randomly erase Shuichi’s emotional side here to justify this alternative route.

Shuichi:  (Is there a hint in what Kokichi has said? Some key to the mystery?)

There is not, because nearly everything Exisal Kokichi said in response to this was very clearly scripted, and Kokichi would have carefully made sure that none of it would give any hints as to what’s really going on in the video or why he shot it. All he did was reiterate that the footage wasn’t edited, and then distract from the topic with lots of taunting about Kaito’s death and Shuichi’s denial.

Maki:  “Isn’t this enough? Kokichi is the culprit. He brought the evidence and even confessed to the murder.”

But Shuichi doesn’t get more time to think about this, because Maki is very quick to insist that Kokichi did it, so that she can get him killed.

Shuichi:  “That doesn’t make sense! Not even Kokichi would do something that stupid!”

I am amused by how Shuichi’s wording implies that he thinks Kokichi is usually rather stupid, even if not this much so. That’s not quite what he really means… but Kokichi was rather stupid about this plan in multiple ways.

Tsumugi:  “Is common sense going to work here? On the Remnants of Despair, I mean.”

Tsumugi is still trying to remind everyone that this is definitely all about Remnants of Despair, even though them writing off Kokichi’s strange actions because of that would likely lead to them not finding the real truth and getting her game into trouble. (Kaito must be already getting very confused about what these Remnants of Despair are in this turn of events.)

Then Keebo is the one to get us back on track, because apparently when Shuichi mentioned earlier that the video could have just showed a living body, Keebo ran a mental search on the word “living” and got a “hit” of the press’s safety function. Which is an odd way to recall a relevant fact like that. This is Keebo being less human-seeming than usual, if he had to consciously run a search instead of just remembering it like a regular person would. Especially since he himself had such a personal beef with the safety function earlier.

Trial 5, Back Route 2

This is a little later on but still before the intermission, after Shuichi has figured out that a third party entered the hangar using an Exisal and is trying to prove how that was possible. You’re supposed to point out that someone used an Electrohammer to hijack one, but instead…

Maki:  “…so getting inside one would’ve been impossible.”

…you can turn “Hatch’s Electronic Lock” (which refers to the locks on the Exisals’ cockpits) into “Unlocked Hatch” and fire it here.

Shuichi:  “While investigating the Exisals, I noticed that they have no locks on their cockpit hatches.”

But Shuichi, if you really did notice that while investigating them, then why didn’t you try opening the red one that was there in the hangar? In fact, why doesn’t Maki just leap over there right now to open the cockpit and murder Kokichi to death like she’s been wanting to this whole time?

Shuichi:  “It should have been possible to get into the cockpit, providing they could reach it.”

Maki:  “But that’s reckless, absurd, and useless… Jump inside a moving Exisal? That’s not really possible.”

Shuichi:  “No, I think it is. You would need to be quick, agile, athletic and stealthy… I can think of at least one person who fits that description.”

Shuichi is presumably making a point of how only Maki could be capable of jumping into a moving Exisal to try and make her defend herself by saying they were locked, which would be admitting she knew about the locks and therefore incriminating herself.

Maki:  “…What? Are you implying that it’s m—”

Exisal Kokichi:  “Oooh, I see! And since he’s a robot, he could have some robo-communication function!”

Aaa, Kaito! We’re entirely in ad-lib territory here, so this is him defending Maki by changing the subject to Kokichi’s usual robophobic dickery! The real Kokichi would be much happier using this opportunity to be more of a dick to Maki, not Keebo, and rub in how much of an evil stealthy murderous assassin she is.

…Of course, Kaito knows Maki did this and wants Shuichi to figure it out. So perhaps this is because he’s not particularly thrilled at the underhanded way Shuichi is going about this, because of course he knows Shuichi’s lying about the lock on the Exisal.

Keebo:  “As I’ve said, my speed, agility, and strength are equal to that of a human, if not weaker!” […]

Tsumugi:  “The selling point of being a robot is being good in combat, but… poor Keebo…”

Insert some of my usual grumbling about Keebo never using his goddamn weapons until chapter 6 for no adequately-justified reason here.

Maki:  “Stop this pointless conversation, Shuichi. If you want to say something, say it already.”

Maki can clearly tell Shuichi is up to something and is quite understandably annoyed at him beating around the bush like this.

Shuichi:  “As the Ultimate Assassin, you would be able to jump into that Exisal, correct?”

Maki:  “…Impossible. If I could do that, I would’ve turned the Exisal into scrap on the first day.”

Shuichi:  “Maybe. Unless you were hiding your true potential, in which case…”

Heh, the image of Maki using her badass assassin powers to even assassinate the Exisals and singlehandedly save everyone at once is a fun image. And she may well have been deliberately hiding her true potential to begin with since she didn’t want anyone to know she was an assassin at first – but she’d have had no reason not to come chapter 3.

Maki:  “…Do you really suspect me that much?”

Shuichi:  “No, actually. I’m trying to find a way to prove that you *couldn’t* be the intruder.”

What Shuichi is saying sounds like something that could be true because he doesn’t want to suspect his friend… but he’s lying. He’s saying this to try and make Maki admit that she knew about the lock and prove she’s the intruder, because he does suspect her the most. This is very uncomfortably underhanded and manipulative of him

And this works – Maki goes on to explain that there’s a lock on the cockpits, meaning she couldn’t have got inside.

Shuichi:  (…You just made something very clear to me, Maki. You do know something after all, and you’re hiding it from me!)

And you’re hiding your intentions for this conversation and lying to her, so really right now you’re both being as bad as each other, Shuichi! This back route is in a similar vein to the ones in trial 4, in which Shuichi lies to try and coax information out of someone whom he knows is hiding something from him. It was one thing when that person was Kokichi and Shuichi was essentially just turning his own tactics against him. But this is Shuichi being deceptive and manipulative towards his friend, even if it is a friend who’s hiding something from him, and that makes me even more uncomfortable.

Shuichi:  “How do you know there’s an electronic lock on the Exisal’s hatch?”

Maki:  “… …Because I checked it during the investigation.”

Shuichi:  “That can’t be true. I’m the only person Monokuma told about those locks.”

Maki:  “…Just you? I see. If that’s the case… Then you lied just to confirm if I knew about the electronic lock.”

I’m glad that Maki realises he did that and calls him out on that.

Shuichi:  “…Yes, I did, and I’m sorry.”

If you’re sorry then you should have just not done it in the first place, Shuichi! It’s perfectly possible to force her to admit the truth just by proving she had to have done it by talking about her used Electrohammer – which gets her to pretty quickly concede that she’s the third party – so why would you bother using this underhanded manipulative method on your friend when you don’t have to!?

Maki:  “When Monokuma explained it to you, I just happened to overhear it. That’s all.”

Shuichi:  “You’re lying, Maki. You know about the locks because you’ve been inside one of the cockpits.”

Maki:  “So annoying… Do you want to die? You’re the one who’s lying!”

Both of you have been lying and being dicks to each other right now! But only one of you is doing it because you’re broken and manipulated into feeling like it’s necessary, and that one is not Shuichi!

I’m also quite sad that Kaito does not try and step in at any point to break this up, like he did that one time in canon for a similar argument between Shuichi and Maki. Kaito must hate seeing the two of them lashing out at each other like this, Shuichi using unnecessarily dickish tactics and Maki hiding the fact that she thinks she killed him for reasons he still doesn’t understand. Exisal Kokichi only gets that one earlier line about Keebo in this whole back route, and it’s another thing that’s disappointing to me about this one.

Shuichi:  (It looks like… she’s never going to admit it on her own. There’s something important that she’s protecting by keeping her mouth shut.)

At least Shuichi believes that if Maki is being so stubborn about this, it must be because she’s protecting something. The actual truth is a lot more painful than that.

Shuichi:  (In that case, I have to keep pushing.)

You could try doing that by using the truth and actually proving she did it instead of this manipulative bullshit, Shuichi. If she’s stubborn enough that she’s never going to admit it without proof, then just prove it already.

Himiko is the one to save us and get us back on track this time, with a brief surprising interlude in which she seems like she’s not going to say her magic could have unlocked an Exisal… but then she says her magic would have been an option alongside an Electrohammer after all.

Once it reconverges, Shuichi is suddenly talking again about a mysterious “third party”, like he wasn’t just making a huge point about how Maki in particular knew more about the Exisals than she should and is already very clearly the third party in question. These back routes don’t always reconverge very smoothly.

So, yes. It’s interesting to see some alternative possibilities, but almost all of these back routes do not deserve to be considered canon or even ambiguously canon. Either they involve Shuichi being way dumber than normal and overlooking the correct option for no particular reason, or they involve Shuichi being far more dickishly underhanded and manipulative than he should be. The only potentially worthwhile ones are the ones about Shuichi running away from the truth, which is only one and a half of them. That first one in trial five frustrates me so much – it was this close to being absolutely delightful, and then they ruined it! Aaargh.

[digitalbounce-digitalsound]

My in-depth analysis of why I left the Kpop fandom.

Please be aware, this may touch on sensitive topics.

As most of my  followers may know, I have been in the Kpop fandom for many years (Since 2006 to be exact) which means I have seen a lot, A LOT, of shit. I have had nearly my entire life controlled by Kpop and by about 2010 I completely moved away from more normal music.

Since I started secondary school I was bullied for my taste in music, I never thought anything of it because as I still believe, music is music and nothing is wrong with safe creative influence and inspiration. But the thing was, this music, this fandom had me so deluded and so removed from myself that I didn't see it was destroying me, inside and out.

After I was in the fandom for around 4 years, I was getting more and more obsessed with kpop, keeping track of the idols, watching their MV's obsessively, hoarding albums and putting up high defences for when someone made fun of them. Up until 2019 when I dropped the fandom completely, I managed to spend over £4000 on Kpop merch, be it albums, clothing, food, concerts. It was bad and a huge waste of money.

The Kpop fandom is a toxic place to be with people constantly pushing you to like certain groups, with battles around which fandom is better, which group is better between fans. Fans will discriminate against you for the way you look, the way you dress. If you don’t meet their standards they will find a way to push you away. They are all entitled and many think that stalking and giving idols zero personal space is perfectly acceptable.

Kpop music has no real meaning to it and is completely lacking when it comes down to personal messages (Bar the ones that have been self-written by the idols themselves) Kpop is just as bland and emotionless as the people that listen to it as the fans attach meanings to the songs where there are none. They don’t see that all of the music is extremely generic about money, women, men, being in a relationship and looking perfect. It is extremely sexist, concreted in gender binaries that make quite literally no sense and don’t have any soul behind them.

I guarantee that many if not all the idols that don’t write their own material, hate their songs with a passion but have to put up a plastic perfect mask to hide it. There have been so many horrible things that happen inside the genre that fans just ignore. Pretend don’t happen and it is horrible.

Because of Kpop I ended up becoming disgusted with myself, Kpop made me see flaws that weren't there, it made me want to look "Just like my idols". The impossibly thin, obviously unhealthy idols, and I did, gaining body dysmorphia and an eating disorder to boot. It led to me becoming extremely unhealthy, I would barely eat and listen too much at the insults thrown my way which did nothing but make me more self-conscious.

The constant struggle between wanting to look pretty and not wanting to kill myself was extremely difficult to deal with. Kpop made me shy, it made me reserved and not want to talk. It made me aim for dreams in the wrong way. I wanted to become a translator since I was very small so that I could help governments converse with each other and maybe help countries understand each other. That dream was changed with a want to become a translator to "Translate for my oppas" and become a concert translator or a TV show translator. I want to do seamstress work on the side, originally I wanted to do it to make costumes for Broadway productions, maybe cosplay for characters as well. That dream too, was ruined by Kpop. Making me want to do seamstress work to make stage outfits for my "Oppas and Eonnies." 

All of my dreams have been ruined by Kpop, my body too. To this day I still get confused about why I am doing certain things or why I am eating this or that because it will make me fat.

Because of the constant barrage of hate coming from my own brain, my own friends (Who consequently ended up liking Kpop), from my own family and people who I thought was close to me. I ended up thinking that the only way to escape from all of the hate was to kill myself. I became suicidal, I hated myself, I have scarred my leg so badly that I am scared to wear shorts. I constantly wore long sleeves to cover the marks on my arms, I turned in on myself and became scared to talk to people incase they bullied me or shouted at me. I grew more dependant on Kpop and I'm not proud to admit it but I ended up fetishizing Asian people, it was not a good time in my life, I felt like I could change my life, marry someone who could give me child on the inside of Kpop, it was disgusting but at the time, I didn't see it.

I had no one to openly talk to about what I was going through, nowhere to go but down at the time. I ended up doing performing arts at college, hoping that I could be recruited by an agency and meet my idols, be my idols, I thought I could get somewhere with performance. It helped, but not in the way I would have expected. I became more confident and even though I was still being bullied for my likes, bullied for things that happened in school, I continued. I kept at performance. started liking more Japanese Pop/Rock, I listened to my struggling brain instead of my aching obsessed heart and it led me to become friends with C.

She is into Kpop like me, she understood what I wanted, she understood the Asian fever, we became close friends, close friends very quickly. She lived near to me at the time and would invite me over for Kpop sessions, to have fun making Korean food, singing along to Kpop songs, to learn Korean together. At the time, I thought it was brilliant to have someone like me around but low and behold, I didn't see what she was doing to me in the meantime. I didn't know that she was controlling me.

She kept me interested with stories of becoming a teacher, this would have been the perfect way into Korea. It made so much sense, if I became a teacher I could get into Korea and live in the same place as them. Now and then I would get a small spark of realisation that C was not listening, that she didn't care about anyone but herself but I still ignored it. After I finished my Dance BTEC I decided to work for a while, gain money before looking more into becoming a teacher.

Something that you should know about me is that I am a very dependant person. Due to years of being bullied and shouted at, being constantly told I'm wrong and stupid, I rely on other people to know when I have done good, to know when I can celebrate without it coming off as me getting excited over something insignificant. I rely a lot on other people for my happiness. Emotion isn't my strong-suit so I have to surround myself with happy people who can help me see that I am a good person, who can help me with how to display emotion in a normal way.

C did not seem to realise this throughout our whole friendship and would never try to help when my emotional state started dropping, she wouldn't help me understand what the correct amount of emotion is, what grade is good and what isn't. We started a higher education course together, C basically clinging to me but my dependant ass didn't notice and clung back since she was the only other person who liked Kpop that I knew. During the course I had time to think about what I actually wanted to do. Being part of the English literature course made me remember my dream of translation, in the psychology course I learned more about myself, about how my anxiety works, how my manic depression effects my state of mind. I learned about so many different and interesting things that my brain started to click, I started to realise that I didn't like Kpop, I was obsessed with it.

I was obsessed and infatuated, Kpop was my unhealthy coping method which I didn't see. Kpop was the thing that was hurting me the most. At this time, I was still unable to let go. I still couldn't stop myself. When we applied to Universities somewhere in the back of my head my brain was telling me to apply for another course, and I did. whilst C applied for teaching courses and Korean I applied for nearly entirely teaching and Korean courses but snuck in an application for Japanese and International Business.

I felt like I had to sneak at that point because of her becoming overbearing and controlling, making me feel like the only place I could be was right behind her, following her the whole time.

In some fucked twist of fate me and her got into the same university, her on a Korean and tesol course and me on Japanese and Int Business. The small light in the back of my head was still telling me that it was still twisted, that I should not be how I am. That obsessing over Kpop isn't right but I still didn't listen, thinking that Kpop was the right place to be.

I should have seen what she was doing to me when she came to my Bass Practice at one point and heard me play only to weeks later suggest I don’t bring my Bass to Uni as it would “Distract me” yet she brought her PlayStation. She also tried to deter me away from normal music both at the time and during my time around her at University.

Now, I would never try to fully get rid of that time in my life, I would much rather just ignore it as I made many great friends through Kpop (C not being one of them) and I had a lot of fun at the concerts I went to.

Funnily enough, it was religion that actually jogged me out of this freakstorm called Kpop. I always understood the idea of a higher power, of something more than chemicals but less than a "god" It ended up with me finding Satanism (Laveyan) I realised that Religion is only as powerful as you make it. Obsessions, whilst good, are bad in large quantities, you must indulge yourself but too much indulgence leads to greed which is exactly what happened to me. I got too greedy and neglected the rest of my life.

It started small, I would listen to more heavy metal (thinks like Rammstein and Slipknot) and would practice bass more, listen to Kpop less and work on my course and my grades. Of course this slightly strained my friendship with C, I still listened to Kpop, went to the events at the uni, had a fun time at most of them. It wasn't until mid-year that I started seeing the error of my ways.

We went to another Kpop club night that was part of the uni. Because I was getting more used to normal music I could see people staring more, glancing at us with disgust because we knew older songs, because I wouldn't dance for certain groups. It was a small wakeup call, the feeling of being judged and bullied yet again by people nearing on 3 years younger than me was just a pain.

C had pointed a guy out to us during first year, his name is David, he is Korean and was a little bit of an ass (which was understandable due to the amount of Koreaboos he has had to deal with) I did think he was cute, he was a nice guy, liked music I liked but I was not attracted to him (Like I would have been when I was under that disgusting influence) so I just wanted to be his friend.

It started kicking off one night when C got upset over a what David thought was a joke, they both argued and shouted, I ended up as a go between, figuring out what happened, defending C and stopping David from hurting anyone. C took this as me taking David's side, proceeded to not listen to me, make me upset and with my horrible control over emotions, I started having a panic attack whilst shouting at her. She hugged me during my panic attack (A big no no because she was restraining me and giving me physical contact which I hate. Which she should have known being friends with me for 6 years) that made me pass-out, hit my head and get sent to the hospital with a concussion.

I had to pretend it wasn't her fault even though it killed me to do so. During my night in the hospital she managed to make it about her which really upset me. I ended up hanging around with my classmate/friend M after that. M was nice, she listened to me, her and E helped me realise that Kpop isn't all it's set up to be.

After that it went down hill with argues popping up a lot and for me, no escape since we lived together. I started getting disgusted by the Kpop nights with how obsessive and OTT the Kpop fans were, how horrible they were too. It all snapped one day when I just got my results back for an essay which I got a 1st in, I was over the moon but yet again, didn't know if it was good or not. When I showed people for confirmation that I could be happy I was met with jealous but very happy responses apart from C. The one person who was basically my jailer, who told me when it was okay to be happy or not, she responded with "Oh that's alright then I guess." and brushed it off like it was nothing.

It was then that it hit me she has been manipulating me for years, not giving me any real emotions to show. We were friends for 6 years and at that moment, all of the times she brushed me off or never let me talk, talked over me to speak about herself, it all came back. I was so disgusted and upset that I just stopped talking to her, I was too angry to talk to her and was worried that I may hurt her if I do talk.

She took offence to my silence and called me names, tried to force me to talk to her (Which is also bad because I do not react well to forced confrontation and most of the time lash out both physically and verbally) so I kept ignoring her to the point I felt too threatened to leave my room. It was horrible. I wasn't until she sent me a message telling me to act like an adult that I flipped.

No one, and I mean no one, calls me childish and gets away with it. That is the number 1 way to piss me off and get me to immediately cut ties.

I put in an application to move with the Uni due to being under threat and feeling unsafe. They moved me the next day. Whilst She was still in the flat, she didn't even notice me moving out. I was so disgusted with that.

After that, I met my new flatmates, none of them liked Kpop, they introduced me to nice music, better music which actually made me feel good, not infatuated. Happy. I could talk to them more about normal things. because of the lack of the obsession, my grades went up, I started making friends easier, my confidence went up.

After getting back into normal music, i started to realise how low-quality Kpop actually is. How disgustingly gendered it is and how sexist it is. Kpop ruined me but normal music made me realise who I am and how to become that person I always wished I was.

The only music I strictly don't listen to now is Rap, Kpop and Top-Chart Pop music.

Currently, I am a university student working towards my dream of becoming a government translator. I have prospects to work in Japan after I graduate and I am absolutely ecstatic about that. I cut out so many bad friends and managed to make myself feel more human again just by getting rid of a single music taste from my life.

 -Killian.

(If you’re going to spam me with hate and try to whine about how “Not all Kpop fans are like that” or “Kpop isn’t bad, you’re just stupid” and shit like that then you are just proving my point. If you come at me with a valid argument and actual valid points, I will explain my opinions and my side of the argument.)

BASICALLY, TREAT ME HOW YOU WANT TO BE TREATED.

Don’t be an asshole because I will just be an asshole back.

[trixcuomo]

Vicious Sig Nicious

Next on Desperate Alt’s Lives! Sig Nicious seems to be offering Trixany the ride of her life, in his fancy carriage on the streets of Dalaran. But Sharpen is very suspicious of this mysterious Blood Elf man, suddenly very willing to entertain them...

Trixany: “Hunh? Siggy? I mean…” She clears her throat and Sharpen stuffs her purse back into her hands. A bit of torn cloth is snagged on the ‘yep those are definitely metal spikes’ decorating the front flap. Sharpen looks aside, trying to roll his torn shirt back down over his abs. He can’t, though. “Oh, my! Well if it isn’t Sig Nicious. I um… Uh, excuse me but…” she flutters silver painted eyelashes nervously, tries to smooth down her white A-line dress, “Sorry—it’s just that I’m a big Sig Nicious fan after all, and you seemed really angry with me during the show, so… Is this really happening? Or did I somehow… dream it, just now.” Then, a long pause during which both Blood Elves gaze at each other.

Sharpen: “I’ll just walk…”

Sig Nicious: “Your friend is of course, more than welcome to a ride too. I understand, a lady wouldn’t want to get into a carriage alone with a complete stranger.”

Trixany: “Who’s a stranger?” Blushing and very starry-eyed, “You’re… you’re practically Sig Nicious.”

Sharpen: “We know nothing about this guy, not in any real way…” he tries to whisper, “If we go around some corner and the rest of the burly Elite Tauren Chieftans jump us, I can’t be held responsible for what I do, or say to your little Horde so-called friends!”

Trixany: She mutters back, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To get jumped by a bunch of hot Horde guys…”

Sharpen: Takes far too long to object to that.

Trixany: “I’m not going alone, I’m no idiot. But this is also way too good to pass up. Remember? This whole thing was about saving my career.”

Sharpen: “You’re not thinking with your career right now.”

Trixany: “Nice try, but not how that phrase goes, you himbo.” Then, in a flash of anger, “Just get in, Sharpen!” Trixany smiles politely up at Sig, “So nice of you to help out a lady in distress…”

Sig Nicious: “Distress? I’d say you held your own—” The carriage rocks as the big Night Elf Sharpen takes his seat by the door, on Trixany’s right. Sig sits in the back, facing them both. Sig flicks a wrist, toys with one of his expensive cufflinks. Sharpen glowers at that. “Well, off we go Desmond…” Sig knocks on the carriage wall, and they begin to move down the street. He smooths the lapel of his blazer next. His fine tailored shirt is open and dark colored, though he’s wearing pale blue. It’s a modern sort of look. Sharpen smirks and decides to stare out the window. “I think we got off on the wrong foot—”

Trixany: “I shouldn’t have started that rumor about us, Sig. I’m sorry.” Then, after some more anxious silence, “I take full responsibility.”

Sig Nicious: “That’s interesting.” His false smile wilts a little, but intrigue is there in his eyes, “I fully expected a long B.S. session about how there was this elaborate misunderstanding, probably with your publicist, and you attempting to wriggle out of it. And flirting with me the entire way, of course.”

Trixany: She narrows eyes at him, but an intrigued smile is there as well, “I’m not Haris Pilton. Though, I do get compared with her a lot. I don’t like it.”

Sig Nicious: “No, you shouldn’t be compared to Haris Pilton at all. I… don’t think I like it either.”

Sharpen: He hums to himself as he pretends to be more interested in the sunny Dalaran world whizzing by, to the tune of ‘Sharpen’s OTP Workout Plan.’ Trixany narrows eyes at Sharpen next.

Sig Nicious: “But I do like you.”

Trixany: “Wha—Ah…” but she only blushes.

Sig Nicious: “I’m not stepping on any toes here, am I?”

Trixany and Sharpen at once: “No, we’re just…”

Trixany: She finishes, emphasizing, “We’re definitely friends.”

Sig Nicious: “Well then, after we drop your friend Sharpen off at the flight master’s? Why don’t you and I have some brunch, Trixany. I’d love a chance to get to know you better.”

Sharpen: “It’s noon. Don’t you mean lunch?”

Trixany: “I… Oh, my. I didn’t… Wow.”

Sharpen: “Mister Nicious, forgive me. But I,” and he pauses, wondering how to put this, “Look, I can’t remember the last time I openly hated a woman during a live broadcast, then turned around and asked her out on a date less than an hour later.”

Trixany: “Sharpen, please--”

Sharpen: “I have no place, I know. It’s none of my business. But I’m a Night Elf and I trust my instincts when something smells wrong. You might not understand how a Kaldorei thinks, you may not even believe me, Trix. But this? This is past-ripe.” He turns on Trixany next, “You’re really going out with this guy? I can’t think of a thing that would change his mind between then and now except… Are you in league with Haris Pilton or something? What’s your real agenda here?”

Trixany: “Sharpen, stop.” But she looks from one man to the other, nervous. And both men look at her. They know it’s her decision in the end.

Sig Nicious: “What happened between that first hasty quip out of my mouth and now? I can’t lie, I guess. I did love watching you, um, workout in that dress. And your personality surprised me—”

Sharpen: “Oh. So now he mentions your personality, it’s an after thought—”

Trixany: “Sharpen, please. We’re at the flight master’s now. Maybe it’s time for you to… to step out.”

Sharpen: “You’re telling me to get out? You want me to leave you alone with him? Maybe he got to know you better today and saw what a gem you are. But we also got to know him too, and he just admitted it—he’s a creep!”

Trixany: “Yes, I want you to leave me and let me get on with my day. And for all the reasons I see you ditching me for dates at the bar, all the time. I’m not some priestess of the Light, just like you aren’t walking around in a chastity belt, either.”

Sharpen: “But Trix, this is different—”

Trixany: “Like you said, Sharpen. It’s… it’s none of your business. Now, will you please go? Your bad advice got me into this mess to begin with. I don’t know if I’ll ever live it down, as it is--”

Sharpen: “Wait one hot minute here, you said you forgave me. Just moments ago back on the street you complimented me and called me an alpha male or something and you said it was okay. Now you’re changing your mind because a hot date with Sig Nicious is involved?”

Trixany: “You’re the one who wanted me to go out with him to start with, so will you stop embarrassing me now? Sorry--he’s... I like to joke that Sharpen’s just my emotional support Night Elf. I take him everywhere, I match my outfits to his colorful hair... Everyone has a cool Night Elf friend these days. Seems mine is getting warm, though.” She frowns. “And bland. Sharpy, will you please lighten up? And it doesn’t even have to go the way that you’re thinking, if you’re really that concerned. If Sig Nicious and I can make peace, be seen around in public a few places, then what’s the harm in that?”

Sharpen: “Trixany! All that was before we got real close to the man and I finally got a good whiff of his eau de arsehole--”

Trixany: “Sharpen! You can’t... you just can’t talk to Sig Nicious like that? The lead guitarist of the Elite Tauren Chieftans? In his own private carriage?!”

Sharpen: “Oh no? If he doesn’t like me being honest about his blatant shady agenda, then there’s another way we can settle it. He can step outside into the street with me.”

Sig Nicious: He shakes his head and that gorgeous mane of blonde hair, tight polite smile on his face, “Alright, Kaldorei. Unlike yourself, my manners do have limits. You’re done here, Night Elf. Desmond!” In short order, the carriage stops dead. Both Trixany and Sig wait for Sharpen to leave.

Sharpen: Sharpen gets up, and the carriage rocks again. He growls, flashing a canine right at the other man. “Treat her right. And Trixany? I don’t see how we can remain friends after you let a perfect stranger kick me out into the street. Some loyalty.”

Trixany: Crosses her arms, “Oh come on, we end our friendship in like every DAL episode.”

Sharpen: “Argh!!” Sharpen then yanks the door open, steps down into the street and slams it behind him. The carriage passes him by, and he stares openly at Sig Nicious with derision as they leave him behind.

Sig Nicious: “I can’t say I blame him. I am a threat, you know. I also hate to break up a friendship over some… But as I said, you fascinate me.”

Trixany: She eases back into her seat and crosses her leg. Sig joins her on that side of the carriage, taking Sharpen’s old seat. “Listen closely, Siggy. Nobody said I was a good girl. That I wasn’t the threat in this thing. I’ve wanted you, I made up a lie about us being together, you made a fool of me in a live broadcast, and now I’m angry with you for being an ass to my friend as well. Yeah,” she pets down his arm, “You may be a bull in heat. But I’m about to drag you around town like you’ve got a ring in your nose. And I think you’re going to like it.”

Sig Nicious: “Maybe we’re as bad as each other.”

Trixany: She looks up at the ceiling for a moment, “Funnily enough, I think this is the part where Sharpen would say, ‘Well, you’re both evil Blood Elves,’ and roll his eyes. Something like that.”

Sig Nicious: “Do me a favor. For the rest of the evening… No Haris Pilton. No Sharpen. No Bev Collarbane. I don’t even want us to think about The Daily Mail Dalaran… Why don’t two very vain and naughty people just relax and get into a lot of trouble together? How’s that sound?”

Trixany: “It sounds like… Trixany Cuono finally got the date she always wanted. With Sig Nicious.” And, whether it was cheesy or perfect, precious, ridiculous… Sig Nicious gently lifted, then kissed Trixany’s hand. “Good. Now, honey? Why don’t you aim, this time?” And she laughed while he took his time and finally, their lips met.

Talk started immediately that, after that wild, unusual interview? Sig Nicious was seen kissing Trixany Cuomo on the streets of Dalaran. Omg, OTP confirmed!!

[alwaysspeakshermind]

Varchie Appreciation Week~Day 7: Free Choice

I didn’t really know what to do for the free choice, so I decided I might as well just go ahead and talk about why I love Archie and Veronica together so much. This sucker wound up being longer than intended though so, oops, my bad, and without further unnecessary ado, here’s three quick(ish) reasons why I love the Varchie relationship:

(1)  It’s like a fairytale, but for people who don’t believe in fairytales

I’ve seen a lot of shows/movies and read a lot of books in my life, and I don’t ship easily. As a rule, I tend to gravitate toward fictional relationships that deal with the messiness of reality but also showcase how much fun things can be despite life’s general crappiness and, comics history aside (Riverdale is a TV show so it’s technically as though we’re being introduced to these characters for the first time), Archie and Veronica are like the love story that was never supposed to happen. He’s a small-town guy from a lower/middle income family; she’s a New York socialite born to rule the 1%. He’s the Sweet Kid with a hidden wild side; she’s the Wild Child with a hidden sweet side, and if life went according to plan, their paths would never intersect. So much of them even meeting is random chance, and it’s kind of amazing—if Hiram weren’t crooked, Veronica and Hermione wouldn’t have had to leave New York, and they wouldn’t have met. If Archie had moved to Chicago with Mary, they wouldn’t have met. (And both those scenarios would have been tragedies of epic proportions.)

To me, their story really resonates because in spite of the glorious, jaw-dropping, Love At First Sight scene, it feels more real-life than storybookish. I mean, hey, they meet randomly in a restaurant. They take a look at the other person and think “Hmm. I could potentially be interested in this.” They don’t mean to make out, but the attraction is strong, they succumb to temptation, and they handle their natural but immature slip-up as maturely as possible and deal with all the immature fallout as best they can. They don’t have to apologize for something they had every right to do, but they do it anyway because it makes a friend uncomfortable, and they then try to stay away from each other, but they can’t do it. The thing they wrote off as attraction is too strong because it’s actually something else, and they accidentally fall in love.

Now. 

It may not be everyone else’s cup of tea, but to me…that’s pretty cool. That is a fairytale, except it’s a fairytale that’s grounded a bit more in reality, so it’s easier for me to get invested. It’s cute, but it’s not Disney, singing-birds cute. It’s more like...cynically cute, and thus more my jam.

(2) They’re each other’s first choice, their goals align, they’re a natural match

In the comics, Archie has always been the guy all the girls want, therefore he is also the guy all the guys kind of hate. Similarly, Veronica has always been the girl the guys all want, and thus the girl the girls all hate. The question constantly asked by everyone who hates Archie for dating Veronica is “Why does Veronica date Archie when she could have any other guy in the world?” and the question asked by everyone who hates Veronica for dating Archie is, “Why does Archie go out with Veronica when he could date any other girl in the world?”

Funnily enough, for all the flack Riverdale catches for ‘deviating from its source material,’ it has, if all the over-the-top Varchie complaints are any indication, done an amazing job adapting that particular aspect of the comics. In Riverdale, both Archie and Veronica have multiple people ready and willing to date them, yet they keep focusing on each other.

So, let’s consider that question again: why does Veronica want to date Archie when she has all these other (equally hot, debatably smarter) options? Why does Archie want to date Veronica when he has all these (debatably equally hot, debatably with less-dangerous-family-drama) options?

Spoiler alert: it’s not because of sex. 

I have an entire sermon I’d like to preach on this particular subject, but since it’s far too long to include in this already-too-long post, I’ll just reiterate that last part...it’s not because of sex.

It’s because they love each other. (You know, kind of like they and their actions have been suggesting since the very first season?) 

In the end, it doesn’t matter to either of them how much crazy baggage comes with the other one; the love’s strong enough to outweigh the rest of it, and they’re both the type of people willing to do whatever they can to help those they care about. That’s the thing I really love about them—they take care of family, friends, and neighbors first, because that’s something they can actually do to help. They don’t get hung up on widespread social injustices or the problems of the world at large, because there��s no way to fix all that. They just do whatever lies in their power to help, and spend the rest of their time trying to stick together and have fun in a world that pretty much sucks.

Is that a noble ambition? Eh, maybe not. But it is a practical one, and it’s also one that makes sense for Archie and Veronica as characters. They’re both only children, they both grew up valuing family, they both thought their parents were totally solid units until they found out they weren’t, and they both prefer dwelling on the good things in life rather than the bad. They are a young couple, same as Bughead et. al., but the way they function as a couple really isn’t because they’re both very attractive people with just enough prior experience in life and romance to complicate things. 

Also, their personalities balance each other out: Archie’s hotheaded, Veronica’s coolheaded. He acts on instinct, but can be indecisive. She thinks things through, but is very decisive. He’s trusting, she’s suspicious, he’s optimistic, she’s realistic, etc. etc., but they’ll both punch someone’s lights out if necessary. It’s an adorable combination.

(3) They work at making it work because they want it to work

In essence, Varchie has what I always call the Married Couple dynamic—their primary focus is less on “How do we move forward together,” and more on “How do we juggle pasts, present, and future, because we know we want to be together, but we also know we’ve each made a lot of mistakes, and we don’t know what to expect because we’ve never been in a relationship this high-stakes before.” They’re not discovering how love and sex works, or figuring out how to handle a relationship transition from friends to dating, they’re discovering how love and sex works with a person whose background they don’t share and whose family they know nothing about. That’s the kind of thing that tends to show up more in a post-high school/college setting with twenty-somethings and older, and that’s why, I think, it’s so compelling a dynamic to me—it’s interesting to watch the Meet The Family/Meet The Ex/Let’s Just Be Friends storylines play out with kids for a change.

What makes it even better: they still feel young. They still make young mistakes, like thinking they can stay “just friends,” or that they have to do things on their own to keep the other person safe. But they handle their young mistakes maturely, and that’s frankly remarkable for a couple on a show aimed at teens. I personally love the way they’ve been written, even though it involves a bunch of storylines that made me mad in S3, because whether they’re dating or trying to pretend to be just friends, Archie and Veronica’s connection is strong and obvious. Even when they’re not supposed to, they end up looking at and to each other, so it’s just kind of pointless for anyone else to try and get in the way—from the second Veronica walked into Pop’s, she’s had Archie’s attention, and vice versa.

To me, that’s not a boring, predictable love story—that’s a freaking classic.

“Archie...you’re so good. It’s like you’re filled with it. And I know that I need goodness in my life. I need you in my life.”

“Ronnie, when I first met you...you were it for me. Everything I could have ever wanted.”

[cami-chats]

Cooking Class

Written for @marvelpolyshipbingo​

Rating: Gen

Warnings/Triggers: None

Pairings: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers

Summary: Pepper signs her and Tony up for a couples cooking class, and Tony-- in true fashion-- gets a guy’s number. 

Square Filled: N3-Constellation Square

Read on AO3 or below

"A couples cooking class?" Tony repeated. "Please tell me you're joking. Pep, Pepper, spice of my life, I need you to tell me that you're joking." 

"I'm not," Pepper said, flipping through some papers. 

"Why would we need a cooking class? We eat out most of the time, and when we don't, we have a chef." Not to say that Tony wasn’t capable of cooking rice when the occasion called for it, but anything more complicated than that and it fell apart. 

"Well we're not going to have a chef forever." 

"We're not?" Tony asked, blinking at her. "I'm generational money, Pep, I grew up this way and I'm going to die this way." 

She gave him a flat look. "We're going to get old and be domestic, and I, for one, want to be prepared." 

Tony was about to argue with that, then he paused, raising an eyebrow. Pepper had gotten used to the rich lifestyle when her and Tony were dating, and by the time they got married, it was almost like she'd been there the entire time. She didn’t think that one day they’d be without all their luxuries, this had to be something else. "Uh-huh, what is this actually about?" 

She was quiet for a second, then, "Natasha said it was a good fun couple activity." 

Tony groaned, but they both knew that they were doing this now. "I can't believe we're taking Natasha's advice." 

"She gives good advice." Pepper paused, probably remembering that time Natasha had convinced her to go to karate classes and she'd absolutely hated it. "About our relationship," she added. After all, it had been Natasha who floated the idea of polyamory to them, and that had worked like a dream. 

"Not other relationships though," Tony said with a chuckle. Her matchmaking tendencies normally ended in failure, but that's why she had specifically said 'about our relationship' and not 'all relationships'. "Fine, couples cooking class. Great." 

"I want you to promise me that you won't start playing with chemicals if you get bored." 

"Aww c'mon! It's a kitchen, Pepper, they won't even have the fun chemicals." 

"Allow me to rephrase," she said, her business voice edging in a little, like it always did when Tony was pretending not to get the point. "I want you to either stay focused on cooking or stand there without touching anything. No fires allowed." 

"What if the cooking requires a fire?" 

"Then I'll do it, and you can stand there and tell me how you could make it bigger if I let you. Which I won't, because I like my hair where it is. It's only one class a week." 

"For how many weeks?" 

When she didn't reply immediately, Tony knew he wouldn't like the answer. "Ten." 

"Ten weeks? That's two and a half months." 

"Funnily enough, I can count." 

"You were an accountant when we met, I know you can count." 

"It's nice to remind you sometimes, it's like you forget." 

"I could never forget Mrs. Stark." 

"This is what I get for taking your last name." 

"It was the right decision, people couldn't get mad about the company being out of Stark hands." 

"Right," she said drily, "because that's why I did it." 

"Pepper Potts sounded good, but not as good as Pepper Stark. Is that why you changed it?" 

"Yes, Tony. I took your last name because it made my name sound better. First class is tomorrow, your schedule is clear, I'll pick you up from the workshop at five." 

"Tomorrow? But-" 

"I couldn't give you time to find a way out of it." 

"So you tricked me instead. Very nice. That's not the way for a happy and healthy relationship, you know." 

Knowing that he was exaggerating, Pepper rolled her eyes. 

*

In general, Tony wasn't very good at doing what he was told. In the kitchen however, it was easy to do what the instructor said, and even easier to listen to Pepper when she corrected him on something he hadn't cared to pay attention to. 

Pepper had to go to the bathroom, so Tony was spinning himself in circles on the stool. Literally. The stool could swivel, and Tony was keeping his promise to Pepper by not messing with anything while the lemon bars were in the oven, so he was spinning in circles. 

"You're Tony Stark, ain'tcha?" a man off to the side asked, and Tony slowed to a stop. 

The room was spinning around him, but he thought he did a pretty good job of pretending like it wasn't; he had plenty of practice, after all. "Yep, that's me." 

"I'm sure you get this all the time, but I wanted to say thank you." 

That normally wasn't what followed the phrase 'I'm sure you get this all the time', but it was a happy surprise. "Uh, you're welcome?" 

The room started to settle, and the man came into focus. Right, he'd been at the table next to their's. He was big, like could probably bench press Tony and Pepper at the same time big, with long dark hair pulled back in a bun, stubble lining his jaw, and-- most importantly-- a prosthetic arm that Tony recognized as one of his own. He didn't recognize the person it was attached to though, which meant he hadn't been part of the original trials. "Before you came along, prosthetics cost- well, an arm an' a leg," he said with a half smile. "This one works like a real arm and didn't cost half as much so... thanks." 

"No problem. You should thank Pepper when she gets back, she's the reason they're affordable. I'm Tony, by the way, since we didn't do official introductions earlier." 

"Bucky. I didn't wanna interrupt," he said, smile growing wider. "Seemed like th' two of you were uh, busy." 

Tony snorted. "I don't like quiet and she doesn't like when I talk at her. Believe me, we don't fight half as much as it looks like." 

"Still sounds like a lotta fightin'," he teased. 

"And you and that blond beefcake are better?" 

He snorted. "It's ridiculous to hear Stevie described like that." 

"Are we talking about the same person? What other way is there to describe him?" 

"Nah that's how he is now, but back in the day, he was a shrimpy lil thing. I could pick him up with one hand." 

"You still could," Tony pointed out, poking at Bucky's flesh and blood bicep. "That doesn't feel like it's for show." 

"It ain't," Bucky said, amused and moving slightly closer instead of stepping back. "But he's big enough to fight back now, and he don't like gettin' dragged around." 

"He's missing out, it's pretty fun." 

"That an offer?" 

"Not if your boyfriend is going to punch me when he finds out." 

"Me and Steve have an open relationship. If the news is to be believed, you do too?" 

"I wouldn't call it open but yeah, basically. I'm free Sunday night if you wanted to grab a bite, see if it'll work out." 

"Can't do late Sunday, gotta work early on Monday's, but yeah that sounds good." Bucky fished out his phone from his pocket and unlocked it, handing it over for Tony to put his number in. 

Pepper came back while Tony was typing in his digits, and she shook her head fondly. "I'm gone for three minutes and you get a date." she turned to Bucky and talked like she was confiding a secret, "He does this all the time and acts like I'm the flirty one between us." 

"How rude of him." Bucky accepted his phone back when Tony gave it to him. "And you're really okay with...?" 

"Absolutely," she said, waving him off. "Gives me time to get a few things done that Tony doesn't like." 

"Like what?" 

"Painting my nails, he hates the smell." 

"Can't you do that in the bathroom?" Bucky suggested. 

Tony wrinkled his nose. "The stink gets everywhere." 

"Sensitive nose, got it. Steve's prolly gonna stare at you for a minute straight when I tell him, by the way. He always tries to see what I see in people." 

"He'll love me, I'm an absolute delight." 

"You're damn right you are," Pepper said, peering through the oven door. 

Sure enough, when Steve came over a few minutes later and Bucky told him, he looked at Tony for a long while, his eyes squinting like maybe if he tried hard enough he'd figure it out. At the end of that though, he said to Bucky, "I don't see it." 

Bucky pat him on the shoulder. "I don't expect you to."

[widgenstain]

One quick question to Mr Sogunro: is Lebanon racist too for taking refugees from Syria but not from say, Eritrea? I'm not arguing that we're not racist, we fucking are, but this is the third time I've seen this tweet going round unchallenged today and I'm tired of how dismissive this is of shared history, shared culture, shared fears and yeah, a common enemy. It's almost as if Poland had a very real fear of them being next.

This is also so dismissive of the people who did help back in 2015 and still DO! Starting from private people (lovely older women in my circle), NGOs and leftist parties to actual governments. Do you guys not remember the amount of SHIT Merkel had to eat for saying "Wir schaffen das"? I helped too, I was at the train station where thousands of refugees camped out and yes, I could have done more, but I also remember not being too euphoric about it because I knew that we had problems before and was worried about how our right wing and populist parties would utilise this. AND GUESS WHAT HAPPENED! They did utilise it, oh boy did they ever, and they shot to the top by oh so easily stirring fear in the population and just spewing the most simplified bs (I was going to say something very controversial here) and then, in our case (Austria) we were stuck with one of our worst and most corrupt governments since 1945! Who FUNNILY enough, are the exact same people who sold us even deeper into the dependency on Putin, but I digress.

I'm tired of people pretending that we're standing here on our ivory tower cheering people drowning in the Mediterranean. Yes, there are people on twitter and facebook saying that, but they're the worst, most people, even the ones who voted for the populists are horrified by that. There are different ideas on how to solve it though, there are great approaches and there are less great ones and like it is common in democracies, the fight about which to use is slowing things down. Nevermind that conservative and neoliberal governments, of which there are enough, favour the cheapest solutions, which mostly are not the most humane ones. Yes, the refugee camps are an absolute disgrace, I'm so so deeply sorry for what is going on there, as are the treaties with countries like Turkey and Libya. But it's not like as if they aren't highly contested over here!

Google told me that Mr Sogunro should be very familiar with human rights and refugee laws, so he gotta know what a huge fricking behemoth of bureaucracy Europe and European asylum laws are. They're confusing and often a tragic issue, they're slow, so fucking slow and... complicated. I wanted to say unjust which is partially true but I feel like the laws aren't always the issue, the execution of them is. I've seen people despairing over them, I know people who have been swallowed by them and every time people have demanded an overhaul of the system. This has been a constant demand for YEARS now. And look, suddenly, driven by racism but also the things I've mentioned in my first paragraph and a ton of other reasons that don't fit quaintly into two tweets, the system gets a lot simpler.

I for one try not to be a cynic like the person who stole the caption from reddit (or posted it on reddit first), or an accusing shitbag. I try to be one of the people who perk up, because there apparently IS a way, the system is changing and we now need to see to it that stays that way. This is a precedent of epic proportions, there are people on it to use it, they have been fighting for it the whole time and we can support them! I can't link shit atm and my phone is crapping out, but you all have Google, find the NGOs who have supported overhauls of asylum laws in your country (ours are often affiliated with the Green party, but we at least had religious ones too, Caritas did a lot, fuck if I remember the name of the organisation my friend is translating for), find the people who are fighting the traffickers here and in the countries of origin and support them!

I know these times are scary af and there are more problems than anyone can absorb rn, but instead of spreading simplifying and dividing views on the internet and lamenting how no one does anything, how about you turn to the people who actually DO something and help?

Action is the antidote to despair, I'm out.

This too shall pass (x)

[petersshirts]

Abroad | Part 3

pairing: tom holland x reader

summary: you jump on the road trip train and it’s time for toms and yours first adventure

warnings: none

words: 3,3 k oops

A/N: welcome to Part 3 of these series, I hope that you all get notified that I posted this! As always, feedback is greatly appreciated! 💞

„What am I even doing.“ you mumbled when you steered the Jeep from your Dad in the street of Toms’ apartment. When your mom and your brother had told you to go for it, you send Tom a message on the same evening that you were going with him. His answer was euphoric and he immediately started planning the whole trip.

You let him live out his passion and started to pack all the warm clothes you could find and a lot of blankets that would keep you warm during the drive. Tom and you had discussed who would pay because you just couldn’t let him pay everything - and that’s how you decided that you would pay the fuel while he would pay the accommodation. You knew that it would be a lot but Tom insisted on paying it all by himself.

So that was that.

You could already see Toms’ figure from a few meters away. He had a huge backpack on his back and a smile you could see from miles away. You also had to grin even if he couldn’t see it. He was just someone who could make you happy just by looking at you. You tried to ignore your faster beating heart, trying to put it in the back of your mind to focus on the trip.

Finally, you stopped in front of Tom, who immediately walked to the trunk to put all his stuff in there. After that, he climbed into the jeep and when he looked at you, his eyes were shining.

„This car is amazing! When you said that you had a car we could use, I would’ve never thought of something like this!“ Tom looked so happy and you could only grin at him, happy that he liked it. „My family had it for a long time even though we don’t really drive it. My f… brother is really proud of it.“ You had to refrain yourself from mentioning your Dad - you had promised yourself to not put this burden on Tom.

You were sure that he would notice that you were one of the quiet ones - but maybe he would just think it was your character and not the death of your beloved Dad.

It was always the same thing when you told someone that your Dad had died when you were 20 - they always pitied you and looked at you only like you were the Girl with the dead father and not like a normal person. And you hated that - there was no way to overcome that and enjoy life for once. And that’s why you would keep this to yourself and pretend like everything was just fine. Secretly, you also hoped that maybe for one minute, you could let his death behind you and be yourself for once, without all this sadness. To just forget this, to forget the sorrow.

„It’s so cool, Y/N, you have no idea.“ Tom closed the car door and brought you back into reality. You blinked rapidly and looked over to Tom, who was unwrapping a giant map. You giggled and when he looked at you and raised an eyebrow, you just shrugged your shoulders.

„I thought you would be a bit more modern than a map. We’ve got phones, you know?“ But Tom shook his head and focused back on the map, looking for the best way to get out of Hamburg. „But that’s not an adventure then, am I right darling?“ You chuckled and started the motor and shifter into first gear. „Alright, where are we going Captain?“

__________________________

„So can you tell me now where we are going?“ You mumbled while you overtook a truck that was driving in front of you on the highway. Tom had guided you out of Hamburg pretty quickly and the only thing you knew was that you were driving into the west. But Europe was big and full of wonderful cities, so you could literally going everywhere. When you asked Tom about your stops on your voyage, he stayed silent and told you to be patient. Funnily enough, you had whined for a bit but let it go after a few minutes because he was a hard nut to crack. But now that you had already started the trip, you wanted to know your first destination.

„Oh come on, I want it to be a surprise!“ Now it was Toms’ turn to whine and you just shook your head and send him a frown. „Pleeease? I hate surprises.“ Your thoughts wandered back to your fathers’ sickness that had been a surprise to you too.

Stop thinking about it, you’re here to have fun!!

Tom sighed and closed the map to have a full look on you. „Alright, but I’m only telling you the first one!“ You started to grin because you finally cracked him. Hah, it would not take long to know the whole journey he had planned out for you.

„Come on, spit it out!“ A chuckle came from the british boy and he raised his arms in defense. „Alright, alright, don’t be so impatient! So…“ You rolled your eyes at his childish behavior but chose to not react on his distraction.

„Okay, we’re going to Amsterdam.“ You let out a small squeal that was so untypical for you, that you immediately started to blush and put your hand in front of your mouth. Tom looked at you with a grin, happy that you were excited.

„Have you ever been there?“ „No, but I always wanted to! My parents never wanted to go because of the drugs…“ The two of you fell into laughter because of the reputation of the city.

„But I didn’t pick Amsterdam because of that! Everybody’s always saying that it’s so beautiful and that everyone should have seen it, so we’re doing it.“

You could only grin at him, afraid to show your excitement. Deep inside it felt like you were too happy. The voice of your mother told you in the back of your mind that you should have some fun, but it was hard to push all of this into the back of your mind. You really hoped that it would get better when you were far from home. And you also hoped that the boy in front of you could change that, even if you didn’t want to admit that to yourself. It was too early to think about that.

Even if Tom was unbelievably charming and you were falling right into his trap.

The next four hours was filled with a comfortable silence that was broken with small conversations. The two of you were still kind of strangers and you were not brave enough to ask him any personal questions. Tom was also very careful, only asking about uni and what school was like in Germany. You had to admit, he was very chirpy and you were so happy to have a fun-loving boy by your side. He was here to have fun but you were not so sure if you could have fun with him. You would at least try.

Half an hour before you arrived in Amsterdam, it started pouring.

„Just like in England, huh?“ you joked and threw a wink at him that Tom caught off guard. He had already realised that you were pretty closed off and he accepted your boundaries. He didn’t want to overstep but he knew that he wanted to get to your core. He wanted to get to know the real you, not the facade that you were putting up. But that would take time and Tom was here for that. He was intrigued by you and he wanted to get under your skin, know what made you happy and what made you cringe.

It was unusual for Tom to like a girl after such a short time, but you were something different. There was a way for him to get to know you better and he wouldn’t stop now.

„Yeah, just like home.“ Tom grinned and got lost in his thoughts again, thinking about his family, his dog and his apartment. A warm feeling filled him up but he shook his head to get back into the car.

„W - what’s home like?“ Your voice was unsteady but you wanted to know him better. Know about his family and what he was doing in his free-time. You loved to listen to people talking about things they loved with a glint in their eyes and a warm smile. And even when you had to focus on the road, his voice would do you just as much justice.

„It’s nice. A bit rainy sometimes, but home’s home you know?“ His answer was very short and you frowned, wishing that he would tell you more. „Do you have any brothers?“

Tom chuckled at that question and you send him a quick glance to admire his face. He looked so carefree and a small smile was gracing his features.

„I’ve actually got three brothers and when we’re all together, we’re a bloody nightmare.“ You laughed with him, trying to imagine three other boys just like Tom. England was in trouble.

„Are they older or younger than you?“ „Luckily, they are all younger. There are Harry and Sam, they are twins and two years younger than me and Paddy, he’s the youngest. They are good guys but sometimes it’s a lot.“ You nodded, knowing what he meant.

„I’ve got one older brother and he’s a lot. He always wants to show me stuff and know what I’m doing but slowly he realises that I’m too old for that.“ Tom beamed at you, so happy that you were telling him about your family. „My brothers are kinda cool now. Like Harry is a pretty good photographer and Sam is charming at hell. He gets all the ladies and I always just sit there, completely lost.“ You giggled, thinking about a completely lost Tom in the club while his brother was out there getting all the girls.

„I can actually picture that.“ „Hey!“ Tom nudged your shoulder and pouted at you, what looked really really cute. You just shrugged your shoulders and hid your red face, trying to concentrate back on driving. Tom just watched your face and smiled, knowing that there was a way to your heart.

When you arrived in Amsterdam, the map was no use so Tom got his phone out and directed you to the AirBnB he had rented for a few nights. The streets were small and it was pretty hard to find your way through the streets with the big Jeep. When you finally arrived in front of the beautiful house, you put your head on the steering wheel and let out a breath. You didn’t handle stress very well and all the cars around you made it hard for you to keep your cool.

Suddenly, there was a hand on your back, slowly rubbing it. „Hey, are you alright?“ It took you a few seconds to nod and get back the car. You slowly moved up and smiled at Tom who looked very worried. „I’m fine, just a bit overwhelmed. I’m not the biggest fan of driving in unfamiliar cities.“ Tom send you a sympathetic smile that made your heart beat a bit faster.

„Should I take the wheel next time?“ You nodded and send him a small smile to show him that you would be fine. „Come on, let’s look at the city!“

Tom jumped put of the car and you followed him and got your luggage out of the trunk. The flat Tom had rented was small but still managed to fit two bedrooms in there. You asked around the wonderful apartment, wishing that this could be your own home. The decoration was light but still modern.

Since it was already the afternoon and getting dark outside, you decided to walk around the city for a bit. The pouring rain had come down to a slight frizzle so you walked through the small streets along the canals, the both of you lost in your own thoughts. There were people all around you, everyone talking a different language and you couldn’t get the smile from your face.

You found a small restaurant to eat dinner full of Dutch people. You immediately felt welcome and Tom felt like you were glowing. You ordered your drinks and a comfortable silence settled between the two of you, until you couldn’t hold it in any longer.

„I’m so happy that I came with you.“ Your words could barely be heard in the loud atmosphere but when Tom smiled at you, you knew that he had heard you. „And that’s why?“ You rolled your eyes at his cheeky remark. „I’ve actually never been to Amsterdam before and it’s so full of life every single hour of the day. We don’t have that at home.“

Your own words brought you back into your house, to your mom and your brother. You began to wonder what they were doing right now, if they were together or if Chris was out with his friends. You hadn’t texted them yet and you started to worry that they were awaiting a message from you.

„Y/N?“ You were brought back to reality when Tom waved a hand in front of you with a concerned look on his face. You blinked twice and shook your head. You were here, in this moment with Tom. Not at home. „Sorry, I fazed out for a second.“

Tom send you a small smile when the waitress arrived to bring you your food. When you took the first bite, you nearly moaned out because it tasted so good. Is this what heaven tastes like?

After you finished dinner, you stepped out into the dark night. It had gotten even colder and the streets were only littered by a few night owls who were walking to the next club. Tom and you made your way back to the flat. While your hands were shoved into the pockets of your jacket, Toms’ hands were swinging by his side and it took a lot for you to not grab it and intertwine it with yours.

You wondered if his hands were soft and how his thumb felt when it stroked over the back of your hand. You wanted to see his smile up close, wanted to look at his lips but you were way too shy to ever tell him that or do it. Also you had only known each other for three days. Way to go, Y/N.

„Are there any places you wanna see tomorrow?“ Toms’ voice cut the silence and you looked up to him, literally staring. His curls were everywhere and his nose and cheeks were red from the cold. He looked so cute, it should be forbidden.

„I would love to go to the Anne Frank Museum. Do you know it?“ Tom nodded and scrunched his forehead. „Yeah, I read the book and it must have been really horrible.“ You only nodded, thinking about the small girl that was hiding from the Nazis and never found a way out. But there was not only that you wanted to see in the museum.

„Have you ever watched The Fault in Our Stars?“ You were so embarrassed even saying these words out loud, but you loved being at places where they shot your favourite movies. And the Anne Frank Haus was where Hazel and Angus kissed for the first time.

„Yeah, my ex-girlfriend literally dragged me into the cinema.“ Tom rolled his eyes but you could only grin, knowing that he had liked it. Every single person on this planet liked it even if it was the saddest movie you had ever seen.

„Oh come on, I know that you cried.“ You carefully nudged his shoulder and Tom averted his eyes to the ground, a small blush creeping up his cheeks. „I cried the whole movie. It was heart-breaking.“ You could only nod, feeling with him. It was even worse when you watched it again; knowing that there was no chance for the couple.

„So you wanna recreate that kiss scene?“ The words that came out of Toms’ mouth next, caught you completely off guard. You stopped in your tracks and stared at Tom who had a cheeky grin on his lips. He walked towards you and tugged your hand out of your pocket, slowly stroking it.

„I’m kidding, Y/N.“ His soft strokes sent little shocks through your body that made it even harder to respond. After a few seconds, Tom realised what he was doing and let go of you, a blush creeping up his cheeks. He reacted out of instinct, not wanting to overwhelm you in any way. What a great way to show her that you care, Holland.

„I - It’s fine.“ You slowly started walking again, the two of you not daring to speak up. The air between you was thick and awkward. Even when you would love to recreate that kiss scene with Tom. Not that you would ever tell him that. You were still not over him touching your hand.

You finally arrived at the AirBnB and while Tom slipped out of his warm clothes, you moved into the small kitchen to set up some tea to calm your mind. Tom had most likely moved into his room, trying to avoid you. You knew that you couldn’t approach him about this and how the two of you had acted like two love-sick teenagers. It was ridiculous - you should be only two strangers who were going o a road-trip, getting to know each other better. But you felt this longing, this passion and you hoped that Tom was feeling it too.

„Hey, what are you doing?“ Toms’ voice echoed through the small apartment and you turned around to see him standing in the doorway with crossed arms and a shy smile. It was weird seeing him that way - closed off and not so care-free like you had experienced him for the past few hours. He had changed into some sweats and a comfy hoodie to warm him up.

„I’m making some tea. Do you want some?“ Tom nodded and you filled two cups with the hot water and handed him one. „Thanks.“ he mumbled and the two of you moved to the couch in the living room, sitting down with a sigh.

You felt completely exhausted, ready slip under the warm covers and drift off to sleep. But before that, you had to hand the British Boy right in front of you.

„I’m sorry if I overstepped a line earlier.“ Toms words were careful and he sent you a glance to be sure that you had heard him. „No, Tom, it’s fine. I’m just a bit over sensitive. Don’t worry about me.“ You reassured and send him a smile to let him know that you were fine. You were always fine.

„But I can’t help worrying about you.“ You looked up to Tom but he stared onto the wall, avoiding your gaze. „What do you mean?“

Tom sighed and took a sip from his tea. „I know this might sound weird but even though I’ve only known you for a short time, I really like you.“ You stared at Tom, not understanding what he was saying.

„But please don’t freak out, okay? I just wanna know more about you and what you like to do, but we have a lot of time. I just wanted to tell you because I can get committed really quickly. So please just tell me when I cross a line.“ You were now smiling, happy that Tom was telling you about your feelings.

„I like you too.“ It was the only thing you could say, not ready to tell him about your fastening heart beat. You had a lot of time to get to know him better and you didn’t want to rush anything. You had no idea where this would go, but you hoped that you would be happier at the end of this.

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[laststops-blog]

Headcanon time! What would Gundham, Leon, and Hajime do if someone started flirting with them? Does appearance matter to them when it comes to a significant other? Do you have a specific sexuality or gender in mind for them when you write them for ships?

pop quiz!

            funnily enough you literally just named all my bi boys!! i’ll tackle them separately bc i do have a lot of thoughts and what have you when it comes to them dating/flirting etc and because of that i think this is going to be very long and if so i apologise 

leon: okay here’s my thing. leon looooves girls. i won’t pretend he’s a little white knight or whatever because that isn’t the truth – he finds a great many girls physically attractive and his definition of what makes a girl ‘pretty’ tends to waver and change depending on who he’s thinking of, ygm?? but also, leon’s grown up around kanon, who he ADORES. kanon is like his baby sister, and because of this, he does treat other women with respect… when he’s not pissed off with them. 

leon isn’t ever mean outright to girls, because he really is a nice enough guy, but also he’s like… unintentionally misogynistic, yk? he NEVER knows he’s being a jackass, but he also tells kyouko to ‘smile more’, makes offhand gross comments about the very same girl from the hair salon that he changed his appearance for, he’s a little over the top in an effort to be ‘chivalrous’ etc. leon’s grown up around a lot of toxic masculinity and that’s shaped his views on women and his own sexuality quite a bit. he’s quite naturally flirty when it comes to girls, but if a guy ever flirted with him he probably wouldn’t even notice.

speaking of, here’s the thing with leon and being bi – he’s not quite sure how to handle it. he wasn’t out to HIMSELF until very recently, because ‘i want to be with you’, ‘i want to be like you’ and ‘i want to make you like me’ can merge into one in his mind (as shown by him dyeing his hair and changing himself to please the girl from the salon who i REALLY need to name geez). i think it’d take a little more work for leon to even REALISE he’s crushing on a guy, never mind act on it.

gundham: he’s… a funny one. gundham grew up so removed from his peers that even making friends is really hard for him: he doesn’t exactly understand people and how to interact with them as himself, without the persona, because he isn’t confident. i’ll admit i have a VERY firm sondam bias because, well, he lets her in, and she’s kind to him and never acts like his front is strange or he’s weird for relying on it – but i also fear that this plays into his insecurity in parts (e.g ‘would she still like me if i wasn’t all this’). 

gundham’s got a lot to work through before he even lets anyone past that Stage One Wall. you’ll notice that almost all of his free time events begin with him telling hajime to back up, stay away – he directly refers to the fact that he’s got poison skin and would hurt him if he got any closer, and so he warns him away before he even knows what hajime wants!!! you see!!! he’s pushing people away under the guise of ‘i’m dangerous and i’ll hurt you’, even though he doesn’t really enjoy being alone, because, well, he’s been hurt before, and he doesn’t want to go through all of that again. he’s very wary of being flirted with as a joke in that mean way people do in high school, and because of this will very rarely respond to outright flirting.

he’s acutely aware of how cruel people can be, especially to him, and he’s not willing to bring that upon himself. when it comes to DATING, he’s even harder to get through to. his animals and his mother are his priorities, not to mention he’d just have no clue what to do with a significant other. he knows he’s bi and he’s very comfortable with that, to the point of dismissal. it’s just something about him, like the colour of his eyes, or what his name is. appearance doesn’t bother gundham AT ALL because well have you seen him?? dumb goth?? he’s really just someone who gravitates towards interesting people and good-hearted people like hajime (good-hearted but boring) and sonia (both).

hajime: is a whole other ballpark he’s such a huge disaster like… he’s so clearly bi like that’s just canon but his self esteem is so weirdly manifested?? he very obviously hates himself enough to choose the kamukura project over just being a normal person but also in the simulation every time someone so much as asks to talk to him he’s like ‘in love?? theyre in love with me?? nice!’ which is so strange? i think hajime is no stranger to being flirted with and getting attention from people in that respect, but he very rarely responds (especially when he’s on the reserve course) because he’s… kinda miserable and broody, which is all well and good if you’re into that but he’s very closed off until he meets natsumi and, then, chiaki.

hajime isn’t scared to outright flirt with people in-game, though, and from what we know, the personalities uploaded to the simulation are as close to their real personalities as the programming could get, y’know? and this is what i mean by his self esteem being weird – logically, he should be a little more worried about rejection than he actually is, ESPECIALLY with people like peko, who he knows likes somebody else when he ‘confesses’ to her. 

despite this, he’s still more polite than leon, and i think this is in part due to him having a really good relationship with his mother? leon’s mum isn’t around and he’s been raised in a very male-heavy environment (his dad, his uncle, his trainers and his baseball team), whereas hajime’s mother adores him and dotes on him and was a really good influence on him as he was growing up and even now.