#aquruby

[junosartz]

a few aquruby sketches

[rintokki]

sweet dreams~ 😴💞

[0bs1dian]

Aqua x Ruby Blinkies.

They are, the peak.

[xia-feng]

Any aqua x ruby enjoyers

[amitysmischief]

well, since the leaks are pretty much true, i'm just gonna say that i was right and everyone was wrong and i feel completely satisfied with myself

[ramblings-of-fessa]

First aquruby now vvcest the twincest revival is coming back fellas

[aihoshiino]

So I actually only just found out that OnK ended and I think I only read up to where S1 of the anime finished, so imagine my horror when I learned that not only did AquaRu happen (technically? I know there was a kiss, at least), but that Aqua dies after coming up with what's probably the stupidest plan I've ever heard of. I'm going off of this from the wiki, btw, so feel free to correct me if I'm missing anything, but I thought this story was going to be a critique on the entertainment industry mixed in with a "catch the killer" plot when I first started, yet it just looks like nobody learned anything by the end of it and the villain's defeat was underwhelming.

Good news! AquRuby did not really happen.

Bad news! AquRuby did not really happen.

Honestly, to this day, I have no idea wtf Akasaka was cooking when it came to the AquRuby stuff... my best guess is that because Oshi no Ko was influenced pretty strongly by Mengo's past works & Aka was trying to emulate some elements of it (to good effect, sometimes!) the AquRuby stuff was inserted to appeal to her and it actually playing out on page was them being like "lalala, playing with our toys" and wasn't ever something the two of them took really seriously.

By coincidence I ended up rambling about this off tumblr the other day, so I'll just grab what I said and slap it here so I'm not just repeating myself;

I'm gonna be so real, I don't think an AquRuby ending was ever something anybody on the series including Mengo ever took all that seriously as a direction the series was going to take. Despite what a lot of people will try and tell you, Ruby and her relationship with Aqua were just never really written remotely in the sort of way you would build up your endgame heroine. Prior to 123 it wasn't really something the series tabled in any meaningful way and even past 123, Ruby's apparent attraction to Aqua is largely just played as shallow brocon gag fodder. It's only when the manga talks about her love for Gorou that it takes her remotely seriously and even then that's dropped like a rock past 150 and never addressed again. The biggest red flag for me though is that the series never actually addresses the concept of incest in the context of Aqua and Ruby's relationship. It is the one big major roadblock to a hypothetical romance between them but the roadblock that is actually, textually floated by the narrative is Gorou and Sarina's past life age gap which is, as Ruby repeatedly asserts, no longer an issue. It's honestly bizarre to see a series have a whole ass subplot about a character falling in love with their blood related twin and pursuing it to the point of forcing a kiss on them and just... never ever address the concept of incest??? It ends up feeling kind of deliberate - like, Akasaka knew that the second the obstacle that is the social taboo of incest came up on-panel it would be the death knell for being able to shiptease AquRuby (and thus, get clicks and attention from hyping it up for better or worse). So we get the... whatever the hell he was cooking that happened on page.

[In response to a comment asserting that Ruby was "absolutely written as the main heroine" as refutation to the above;]

When I say that Ruby was not built up as the main/endgame heroine, I mean moreso in the sense that for over half of the manga, she and Aqua just... don't really have a relationship that is given weight and consequence in the story in comparison to their individual relationships to the other characters. Even before the story was seriously teasing the idea of a romance between them this was always a point of critique in the fandom - hell, if you go back and read comments on it from around 2022 onwards, Ruby's sidelining and the lack of meat to her and Aqua's relationship is always something people have (imo, rightfully) had issue with. And like, sure, maybe Akasaka just wanted her status as the final/true heroine to be a surprise but even if that's what he was going for, there were tons of opportunities in the first 120+ chapters of the manga to properly sow those seeds. I know this is The low hanging fruit to point at and I know we're all aware that Aka deliberately orchestrated this moment to make sure Aqua and Ruby wouldn't discover each other's past identities before he decided it wanted to happen, but it's still characterization that Aka chose to put on the page and informs Aqua's character - Akane and Ruby found a literal dead body and instead of checking in on his sister, Aqua chose to spend time with (and kiss!) Akane. It would've been extremely easy to include Ruby more prominently in moments like chapter 68 when Aqua thinks about living a normal life free of revenge, or when Gorou confronts him in 65 about his 'happy life filled with love'. Even in the anime which makes a point of emphasizing Ruby more in Aqua's 'happy memory' montage from chapter 50's material fails to do this. Or hell, maybe even have it be a point of conflict during the AquAka 'real dating' period, that he ends up prioritizing Ruby more than Akane to a degree that it causes conflict in the relationship and clearly betrays where his real feelings lie. But none of that really happens. Hell, even after 123, Aqua and Ruby still barely interact and all the newfound intensity in that relationship comes primarily from Ruby doing brocon gag bits every time they make eye contact. Even the kiss is difficult to really take seriously because it has absolutely zero impact on Aqua and Ruby both individually and as a duo. It does not affect any change in the series whatsoever to the point where I legit don't even know whether it's been retconned out of continuity or not. That just doesn't feel to me like a 'main heroine' whose feelings and relationship to the main character are being taken seriously by the author. That's why the whole "btw i was reincarnated to be ruby's attack dog them kms" resolution at the end of the series feels so jarring and would have done with or without any AquRuby ship teasing. It was the story trying to cash cheques vis-a-vis the twins' relationship it hadn't bothered to write.

[cori-randomstuff]

Now that oshi no ko is over, I gotta say it's funny how the fandom had a meltdown over aquruby. People were either screaming about how onk is ruined or celebrating because it's peak now with the twincest. Only for the whole aquruby plotline to turn out a nothing burger. The 143 kiss? It's as if it never happened? Ruby's one-sided romantic feelings is never addressed or acknowledged post ch150.

*shrek voice* It's not even good incest.

[writeronartblock]

SPOILERS for Oshi no Ko, chp 150

HOLY SHIT, AQUKANA NATION WE WOOOONNNN!!!!!

Aaahhh, thank you Aka-sensei!

[sachsoup]

Is Aqua really a siscon?

First of all, we'd have to know what the meaning of siscon or sister complex is. According to Wikipedia, Sister complex (Japanese: シスターコンプレックス) is a state of strong attachment and obsession to sisters. It is commonly abbreviated as "siscon" (Japanese: シスコン), and in this case, it is also used for brothers and sisters who have a strong attachment and obsession to their sisters.

And now, let's look at how Aqua acts. He does kind of act like he's very strongly attached to his sister. But there's also another factor why he acts like that and it was the death of his mother, Ai. And also, by the way, Ruby is quite literally the only family Aqua has left. And with the presence of these two factors, it makes sense why he's strongly attached to his sister. He's attached to the point of crushing her dreams because he didn't want her ending up like Ai.

But there's another part to being a siscon, being obsessed. Is Aqua obsessed with Ruby? I don't think so, I think he's just obsessed with protecting her. I mean, as I've said, she's literally his only family left. He isn't obsessed with her really, he isn't fixated or anything like that at all.

But there are also other meanings of siscon that I've found but it was on Urban Dictionary.

I don't really think Aqua is this, when we're in more romantic panels between Aqua and a character. Those characters would either be Akane or Kana. I think he never once saw Ruby to be anything like that. Aqua probably just sees Ruby as his sister or anything familial.

So yeah, my conclusion is, Aqua is not a siscon. He's just some guy who wants to protect the only family he has left.

[delicioussoupandalsoexplosions]

As an Oshi no Ko reader my adjacency to the state of being a Sonic fan continues to do me no favours

[rintokki]

Gift art for someone 💖💕

[mrfangirlapocalypse]

124

oh lord oshi no ko 124 about to be wild. still wont' drop tho cuz I believe in aka to handle it well

how? uh. fuck.

i'm on so much copium please no aquruby pls no aquruby

[sachsoup]

things js feel so rushed

my feelings on oshi no ko are so mixed right now...

I really feel like its going to be impossible to judge this without looking at the whole work at once after it's done with a whole lot of retrospect

just because. this bit of twist, untwist, back and forth, just kind of makes things feel muddled in the moment

[lastthroes]

several people reporting from the q&a section that aka and mengo have been holding during an event in barcelona, spain. it's mostly random tweeting now, but like it was reported already yesterday, news site reports should proceed shortly

this basically re-confirms my suspicions that aka was the one freaking out about the possibilities of getting the manga affected by that one bill that was amended back in 2010, in particular after the kiss. after all, other manga that also dared to engage with themes of incest, like aki sora, already suffered the impact, and i remember siscon ani to brocon imouto coming up with a whole warning about how they did not condone the character's actions. even oreimo, which every normie and their mother cried about, ended its story after the bill was put into effect, and you can tell by how it settled for an ambiguous enough resolution

i can't say i shipped aquruby, if anything because as i said several times in the past, i knew it'd never happen (both because of the bill and because it didn't suit the story as it was being told) and i'm old enough to not be satisfied with shallow bait and breadcrumbs: i have talked before about how i dislike works of the kind of eromanga sensei, that want to scratch at the topic but also not really. i'm not really surprised about this: in the end, any manga that decides to tackle sibling incest in recent years needs to bullshit its way out of it with a non-blood related reveal, "only cousins", they are actually step siblings, they die (and this one actually includes one of mengo's oneshots),... i never expected onk to be any different. even less after it got so popular

that doesn't mean, though, that i don't still find disappointing that after ch143 suddenly aqua and ruby weren't really allowed to interact onscreen. not as twins, and not as former doctor and patient. i always figured aqua would turn ruby down or something, but i did expect them to resolve the entanglement, address where the relationship was supposed to stand. when you set aside the incest angle, it's easy to see how goro|aqua and sarina|ruby never got an actual end to their story together. it even gets cut short with my less favorite way of ending a conflict in a story: one of the character gets killed. but oh well. same old. not the first manga negatively affected by the bill and not the last

[ramblings-of-fessa]

here's how aquruby can still win