#but Aqua always acts painfully aware and uncomfortable with his age

[seeminglyseph]

I feel like since it’s like magical realism and unlikely to happen in real life due to the fucking magic and shit… time travel or reborn in a child’s body stuff sometimes has a character like “I am having a physical or emotional response that seems more in like with my physical age than my mental age”

Like Erased all the bonding moments, or like half the scenes where Aqua in Oshi no Ko acts like a teenaged boy. And I think in these magical body swap universes it’s less a commentary on “are these people perverts” and a lot more… like more than sexual attraction causes reactions.

Like in Erased he’s constantly scolding himself for being 29, but he’s not having his heart race because he’s crushing on another kid, he’s having his heart race because he’s a human making an emotional connection with another person and that’s an intimidate thing, entirely isolated from sexuality and even romance. It doesn’t have to be that kind of thing to move you.

And that’s why Aqua can be like “I don’t actually even understand what feelings I am experiencing in this moment” because honestly he is going through puberty *again* and fucking *trauma* and he hasn’t fucking talked to *anybody* about it. This man is a boy and a mental illness terrarium, and lying is his love language. I don’t know what’s gonna happen to him. They don’t set up a genius type character like this to not have something humble him with the bitter reality of something he can’t do anything about. I’d started reading the manga.