#but that also happened?? in our universe?? thats the hint for that cutscene??

[mattibee]

honestly im still not wrong about terastalling being/causing a manifestation of dreams and desires but it sure is also timey wimey i guess

[tumblunni]

MAN NOW I’M RANDOMLY GETTING THE GHOSH FEELS AGAIN

damnit i just think of an oc who vaguely resembles him and now I’m back in the quicksand?? seriously i literally HAVE NEVER EVEN BEEN ABLE TO PLAY THE GAME all i’ve done is see a bunch of lets plays that’re always filled with ~lol gross he looks gay here~ type jokes and gahhh...

And seriously i still don’t know if any of those Kinda Gay Moments were intentional or not, cos the playstation version is really badly translated sometimes. maybe I’m just projecting :P

and seriously he’s SUCH A WASTED CONCEPT! He does nothing! he only exists to be a vague obstacle in other people’s plots to cause stuff to happen. His rivalry with the player is never really explained and never gets a conclusion either way! I was really thinking ‘holy shit this guy looks like a romance route’ but nope instead like three other people get to have the tsundere type smoochies and he just gets a fuckin fully drawn swimsuit scene that appears for five seconds and seemingly serves no purpose. Seriously fuckin walks into your swimming pool in tiny speedo and says ‘ohohoho you should be grateful i am here’ but NOPE NOT A ROMANCE OPTION, NEVER

A HETEROSEXUAL MAN WHO TOTALLY HATES YOU

Seriously, you get SO MUCH consistant hints that he DOESNT hate you, though! its like The Lore is hinting he’s a more complex guy who’s gonna get some kind of payoff to this but NOPE even if you don’t believe that the fact he follows you around everywhere and constantly tries to impress you and his sister says he never shuts up about you and asks ‘seriously, what is your relationship with my brother?’ is actually supposed to be Potentially A Gay Character Whose Route Was Removed, then seriously it still comes off as like.. dude does not hate you He feels like a very performative parody of the weirdness of these rival characters. Why can’t i get my settling our differences route? Why cant i get a conclusion of him actully doing ANYTHING in the plot?

and seriously even if he was supposed to be 100% hateable and just exist to get his ass kicked, he DOESNT EVEN DO THAT! there’s no resolution to the rivalry, there’s no way to actually prove him wrong! i was pretty much only invested in doing [blablabla insert gameplay thing here] because the game always had ghosh come in and be all ‘ha ha u cant do it’. And then even when you max out the whole town, clear the tower, defeat the big bad and are dating all the girls simultaneously, he still doesnt even mildly change his dialogue. You can convince the whole town you’re awesome except him! And you dont even get any kind of knock on effect of that! He’s so defined by being The Better One, yet he doesnt even get to react in shock when you succeed at the stuff he was also aiming for?? And his personality doesnt get even slightly humbled by that? And he just continues doing the same generic rival dialogue even though the tower has already been finished and he’s already lost?? HIS PLOT IS LIKE THEY GAVE UP HALFWAY IN

and DEAR GOD I am just so re-obsessed with this damn game now that I know there was a gameboy port/adaptation/spinoff that ACTUALLY DID GIVE GHOSH A GODDAMN PLOT there’s no dating routes and no town customization and it’s generally universally worse gameplay, but apparantly the few characters who didn’t get removed in this version all got LOTS MORE DEVELOPMENT WOW and fffffff this game is so obscure and i cant even find much info on this even more obscure version!! all i know is that there’s this mythical Ghosh ending, and they renamed the monsters better translated names, and there’s some new characters added that have Backstory Importance so apparantly the whole plot got a real good sparkling lick of paint, not just mr rival dude

and like.. okay... I don’t actually know if this is true or not since I’ve never played the gameboy version and nobody has done a goddamn half decent lets play anywhere as far as I know but tvtropes says ghosh’s expanded role includes ‘his father was also killed by the final boss’, which seems like a bit of a lame way to give him a sympathetic backstory. literally just he had the same sympathetic backstory as you. And seriously who WAS his father? your father was the bad guy’s former friend he betrayed, who made this big sacrifice to stop his evil plan. How could they manage to slot in a second dad into that plot, even? so like, even if this fact being true would COMPLETELY DISPROVE my dumb fan theory, HERE IS MY DUMB FAN THEORY:

What if Ghosh’s father WAS the big bad?

Seriously, its always struck me as odd that him and his sister have no family resembelance, and the only character in the cast she looks like is inexplicably the bad guy. Seriously its quite uncanny! Ok kinda spoils to talk about it, but here’s Ghosh’s sister (not the spoils bit) and here’s the mystery bad guy. And in the brief time you get to see him pre-superform, you can see his outfit looks super similar to Ghosh + sis! I don’t know if its just a coicnidence, or maybe Selfi wasn’t intended to be Ghosh’s sister in pre-production, or something? But I do have this wild theory that this dude was supposed to be their dad and it just got cut out. A lot about the endgame is quite rushed in the playstation version!

So like.. here’s my theory/way to make Ghosh actually relevant/way to make the big bad come less out of nowhere at the very end of the plot, and have to exposition his entire backstory at you in his one and only cutscene. Cos seriously if he was your dad’s best friend who supposedly vanished alongside him, why does NOBODY EVER MENTION HIM? nobody in the town seems to have known he existed! What! My thought is that it coulda been way better integrated if you just hear all these lil stories throughout the worldbuilding about how Ghosh’s dad was totally a great hero too, and stuff. And it’d maybe give Ghosh a bit more motivation to have started his rivalry with you in the first place, if he’s had to deal with being constantly compared to you in a lesser sense. Cos that’s the thing about ‘my father died too’ as a plot point that really should have been expanded upon! The player’s dad is specifically The Most Famous Legendary Monster Tamer, who almost succeeded at beating the tower. Ghosh’s family is rich, yeah, but you’re The Famous Kid. Even if you start off as a total newbie to monster taming and it feels like everyone in town hates you cos theyre saying you wont be as good as your dad, all Ghosh can see is ‘they wont stop talking about your dad’. And sure, maybe he’s just a normal jerkass jealous guy, but maybe its a bit more sympathetic cos its ‘my dad died too, and nobody even remembers him, because he was a ‘failure’’. That would make a lot of sense to define his entire personality into what it is nowadays! And of course he would feel all tsundere as fuck about seeing you as a friend, its like his entire reason for being your rival is just because of something you didnt even do, something HE didnt even do, something two dads did a decade ago and he’s got only second hand info on. And he’s trying to retroactively justify it by finding evidence you’re totally as weak and terrible as you NEED to be, in order to fit this narrative. But also ‘hey I’m defining my life by defeating you and restoring my father’s honor’ can kinda turn into ‘hey i’m defining my life by following you around everywhere and impressing you and asking if you want to hold my hand a little’. (Seriously if the game wasnt intentionally writing him as a love interest, they made one hell of a coincidence! And then like 45 other coincidences every ten minutes in every dialogue!) And then your friendship route with him could just be him loosening up once he gets to know you and realizes all his preconceptions were complete nonsense. And like.. ‘hey ghosh i still like you even if you’re not the most famous and most rich guy ever’. It could be quite easy to make his character more well-rounded just by saying he’s so boastful to compensate for some self esteem issues? Seriously MAN I know none of this is canon but it just frustrates me that it would slot so well into canon!! so much potential!! you dont even have to change a thing!!

AND THEN the reveal of the bad guy could actually mean a bit more! I mean, its still a ‘whoa’ and quite sad just because you’ve spent the whole game hearing how your dad was such a cool guy (theory: his full name is literally Cool Guy) and then you get confirmation that he is indeed dead after all this time of trying to find him. And that he got betrayed by his best friend and all. But.. we dont know anything about the best friend!! he was never mentioned before! He only makes a big impression cos he’s very scary in the ten minutes of screentime he gets the only personality he has is just generic mwahaha villainy and like.. a vague implication that his motive was jealousy or something? thats what got me started on wondering if him and Ghosh are related, cos it would be a really interesting story parallel if the rivalry was destined to repeat itself with their kids. And like.. in the original dads it was a guy pretending to be a friend when he really only saw your dad as a rival, and now its his son trying so hard to be a rival when really he's in denial about being your friend. And it could be SO COOL to explore Ghosh’s reaction to this revelation! The betrayal would feel so much more personal cos we’re not just hearing about this guy betraying someone else a decade ago, we’re seeing him betray a main character right now. And like.. in the original we just hear ‘yeah, your father Guy thought he was good when he was really bad’, we the player are never fooled into thinking this guy isn’t bad, cos the first time we even SEE him is when he does [spoily thing] and [spoily character] is [spoilstuff] and then wham final boss, the end. I guess they kinda substituted it with that other twist? Betrayed by a different character even if this backstory betrayal is super obvious non-twisty. And like.. it could be an excuse to give big bad dude a bigger plot role, too! like, we could hear abot him second hand from Ghosh, we could maybe see some other flashbacks of his journey with your dad prior to the betrayal. Maybe he could even appear in person before the big reveal scene on the top floor? You could find him inside the tower and he could be like a mysterious mentor dude who seems good before the big reveal. And the dad thing could be a great misdirect! The player could think ‘oh, the reveal is gonna be that he’s secretly ghosh’s dad’ and not expect that ALSO he was a bad guy all along! Oh and MAN what if he does the whole ‘come join me, we can rule together’ thing with Ghosh??? Loyalty to your pedigree bloodline that you were once so proud of, or to the protagonist you’ve always pretended you had no loyalty to, but secretly admired as a friend...? And srsly the similarities in their characters are such a good thing for a conflict like that, even if they WERENT supposed to be related! It could be a piercing question to Ghosh, how far are you willing to go in order to prove your the best? Would you kill for it? I mean man Ghosh has more deep plot metaphor connections than the protagonist could ever dream of! A confrontation between these two would have been so damn cool!!

Oh and MAN what if it isnt just one short scene of ‘yeah no fuck u dad i’m saving Koh’, what if he gets a full arc of maybe temporarily switching sides for a while?? That could be SUCH a good twist on the formulaic nature of Ghosh’s role in the plot! So much would change if he was suddenly absent from his comic relief appearances in every scene of everyone else’s plot forever. And it’d be so depressing to see the second floor of the tower finally be empty again for the first time since the tutorial level! (In the game itself, one of his only real roles he fills is being an optional boss fight every time you pass this early room, and giving you a variety of helpful items if you win. he’s kind of an honorable rival beneath all that trash talk!) And like.. man.. imagine how on earth you’d explain this to his sister! it could even be a chance for a big ‘the hero’s fall’ type part of the story? after all this time of winning over the loyalty of the townsfolk, you could suddenly be back to unpopularity cos nobody believes you about Ghosh. he was the town hero! he would never have done that! And even if you chose to lie about it to uphold his positive image with the town (+5 Ghosh romance points?), you’d still get a negative reaction cos you cant explain why he went into the tower with you and never came back. You get treated as if you committed the sin that the bad guy did all those years ago! And maybe this could be another way for the romanced characters to have a minor effect on the plot? like, only if you finished their route do they believe you, and become the few people who keep supporting you from this point on. (Mom would be the only one otherwise, cos she really needs to get a chance to shine. It sucks that her role is so minor after the prologue!)

And then maybe ultimately you find out Ghosh’s betrayal was a lie and he just tried to trick his dad into thinking he was on his side so he could help you take him down in a big ol spectacular battle scene! Woo! Like, instead of [spoily spoils] being brainwashed by big bad and not being able to resist him in order to not kill you, but somehow being able to resist him in order to summon a lgendary sword you can use to win in a glorified cutscene, because the whole fight meant nothing and blablabla. (That sucked! At least the LP I saw last had the player try a bunch of cheats and kick the dude’s goddamn ass with overpowered monsters in an awesome montage just to prove that this was indeed unwinnable.) Nah, it’d just make more sense if your dad’s legendary sword was sitting there the whole time from when it first happened, and like... it just becomes unsealed when the villain starts his spell using your blood and etc. ‘Whoops I accidentally armed you with the key to my own demise’, karmic takedown! And maybe Ghosh plays a role by tossing you the sword, or holding the guy back while you get it, or something? And [spoily character] could still have a redemption cos maybe they could do a ‘kill me to kill him’ moment. Can’t break free of his control, can’t not attack you on his command, but since they’re now linked together in a terrifying final boss body horror mashup, they could sacrifice themself to be a weak point to him. It would make more internal sense than ‘i cant disobey him until the most plot important moment for no reason’. Also it would clear the air a bit about whether that character is meant to be like.,. actually choosing to betray you, or being brainwashed? Either way I’d still love them tho, its still a good plot to think of someone who was used as a literal weapon for so long that they lost hope in ever escaping and just agreed to do spoily things and trick you into thinking they were an ally, just because it meant they could get a chance to pretend to be a normal person for a few months. I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS FOR YOU, SPOILY CHARACTER! OR there’s also the consideration that this endgame plot was so vague and badly translated that the first time I saw it I thought that it meant [spoily character] was actually like an artificial creation from big bad splitting himself into two. Which would have been a real good plot too, if someone literally born from the bad guy’s blood could still choose to be good and turn against him!

And also I dunno, maybe we could have a bit more explanation on why on earth big bad can even do this brainwashy fusion thing in the first place. Honestly, just saying ‘he’s Ghosh’s dad’ would kinda explain that? Cos Ghosh’s lil sis is the only mage in the town and its implied to be rare or something that humans can have magic without the assistance of monsters. So like... just say that her dad’s particular magical talent was this thing of stealing other people’s powers. ...tho again it makes it weird that her and Ghosh dont have any resembelance and he’s just a sword guy?? Hmm ADDITIONAL THEORY: ghosh isn’t actually a blood relative, he was big bad’s adopted son. that could give him even more reason to blindly believe his dad was good even though he doesnt know anything about him. And even more reason to be excessive about reminding people he’s Totally The Heir To The Richy Richerton Family, Here Look At My Cash. And like.. defining himself by proving his own worth as the town’s one true hero.  Mannnn goddammit why am I stuck having so many feelz about a minor as fuck character in a game nobody’s even played...

Oh and I did not know that Ghosh is an indian name meaning ‘quiet’, thank you google! Its a bit confusing tho cos some sites say its pronounced ‘goash’ like I assumed, but some say ‘gosh’? Then again, there are names that’re just pronounced differently. *shrug* I wonder if they intentionally picked that name as an ironic one for him? or, well, the game has a lot of random english names for ‘exotic factor’ so they might have picked it randomly too. Seriously, there’s literally a girl named Selfie. TFW your english is so bad you accidentally predict slang from years in the future...