#btw this is old art i wanna revamp their TTL designs

[aviryllis]

just realized i can talk as much as i want on tumblr? wow?? time to seize this opportunity to talk abt polyneed.

anyway i have this au-not-au in my head where its basically canon compliant but i take what crumbs we have in canon and fucking run with them and think extensively about an in-depth theoretical backstory for leoni that makes them feel more... "real"? in a sense? grounded, i mean.

i feel like their backstory, as it stands now in the main story, really only serves as leverage—a means to an end—for the events of the present (i particularly have grievances over how shiho and honami's fallout happened T_T) but i don't hold it against the writers perhaps because it's solely an issue of: really, there's only so much information that you can fit within 20 episodes of a main story.

i dont really mind that their backstory is somewhat vague, because its undeniable that leoni's story focuses on how they move forward /together/ once reunited, with clarity and renewed purpose between them. they reach for the future together, knowing that they wont ever leave the others behind again! in other words, their past is not necessarily the focal point of their present.

but... nonetheless, in subsequent key stories, we only ever look at how leo/need felt abhorrently Bad and Awful and Sad without each other during that middle school period, but we never rlly elaborate on /what/ exactly was the reason why they felt so horrible without each other.

it's like a chain of questions and answers: why did they miss each other so much? -> it's because they had a reason to love each other -> so what was that reason? what made them bond so intimately, that for three years, a life without the others was unbearable?

in essence: since theyre marketed entirely for their bittersweet yearn for the past and how they're finally together once more, it's /extremely/ compelling to extrapolate something more intimate and heartfelt and wax poetic from what little we have already. SO i did that. with To The Left. because i wanted to.

TL;DR: thinking about it, this was an extremely long and convoluted way to say i created a little more backstory for leoni cause i wanted to.. bahah T_T curses to poeticism, you never get to the point within 500 words.

also, i attached my initial art of the au, but i want to draw more when i have more time... :)