#but yuuta spent his entire life with his parents who /were/ afraid he would hurt them

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Oh my *god, in most recent chapter of Sea Glass Gardens, the line “It would make sense, being afraid of the nuclear boy. He didn’t mean to make them afraid,” shattered my heart into approximately seventeen million pieces. I think I audibly sucked in a breath when I first read it. Absolute devastation. God, it’s fantastic!! I want to shake your Yuuta like an etch-a-sketch ❤️

See, I really like that line because it really does go to what an unreliable narrator Yuuta is. Nanami and Shoko weren’t afraid of Yuuta. If anything, they were afraid for Yuuta.

Yuuta’s deeply uncomfortable and embarrassed with what he’s experiencing. First, he’s aware that his emotions towards Megumi have exploded past what would normally be acceptable. Which, again, isn’t his fault. It’s a direct side effect of the level of reverse cursed energy he used on Megumi.

I’ve said this in several other places, but this was partially inspired by when I got concussed out of my mind and lost all emotional control. I never cry normally and then I spent weeks weeping and having violent outbursts against my own alarm in the morning. It can be kind of alarming to normally have very solid control of yourself and then completely lose it. It kind of gives me body horror vibes.

I also just like the JJK theme of nothing’s free. And while this isn’t exactly a direct cost imposed, it does impose a negative consequence on gaining reverse cursed energy. Sure, you can heal anyone, but it may destabilise you in an embarrassing way that doesn’t have a way to heal.

And the thing is that it makes Yuuta feel like he’s to blame even if he objectively isn’t.

Overwhelming or driving love that doesn’t have a basis in reality just makes me really uncomfortable, personally. Like, you know that love isn't genuine because it can't possibly be sourced in the person themself. Love can make for an incredibly interesting or compelling motivation or conflict in a story, but if you want love to be healthy (and real), you really need it to be sourced in actual, established knowledge of a person. It's sort of what Maki is talking about at the end of the chapter--there's no such thing as soulmates. Love is a thing you build.

**Minor Spoilers for the manga in this paragraph** It's honestly one of the reasons why I didn't like Hana just as a character design. Just so much of her character and motivation centered on her feelings for Megumi, and she didn't know Megumi. Sure, he saved her as a kid, but she knew nothing of his personality, his likes or dislikes. That kind of sort of baseless affection just makes me uncomfortable. You say that you love them but who do you even think they are?

Which begs the question as to why I just used it in my own work.

When I say a trope or character dynamic makes me uncomfortable, it's almost never absolute. It's up to how it's treated by the narrative. Like, I hate it when it's played straight or genuine, because it can make for a really unhealthy dynamic but the narrative for some reason insists on it being played as a good thing. But Death Note used this exact device with Misa Amane, and I loved it, because how wrong and unhealthy it was was the entire point. The narrative never tried to sell Misa's love for Light as a good thing or as a genuine emotional bond between them. He was always a fantasy to her, and it came to their mutual detriment because it led to her being manipulated and used by him and him having to. be near her.

Yuuta’s emotional response to Megumi is a legitimate source of distress for him. It was never genuine. I wanted there to be some kind of consequence or cost for reverse cursed energy. Since cursed energy is so heavily tied to emotions—both with how negative emotions builds up into curses, and with how being near cursed energy results in ominous feelings—I thought it’d be appropriate to have the opposite emotional response from positive energy.

I also thought that canon just barely had enough room for it to be a possibility. We only see one instance of reverse cursed energy being consciously learned (since Yuuta’s original use of it was canonically subconscious and while in a state of intense emotional distress), and that’s Gojo after his fight with Toji. He was high. He felt amazing, to the point where he couldn’t even feel anything about Riko’s death. Like, yeah, I assumed (and I think most people did) that was some kind of reaction with his Six Eyes and unlocking his full potential, but I don’t remember it ever being explicitly stated. I decided there was space to say that was a reaction to using RCT on a mass scale.

Which is why Yuuta actually says the exact same line as Gojo at one point: The world just feels so damn good right now.

But it just didn’t really do anything narratively to have him feel like he was high or like, seeing shrimp colors the way Gojo did. It didn’t make for compelling conflict. All it would do was have him act completely out of it and a bit looney in the aftermath, and that 1) would have been tonally dissonant with the more serious conversations that needed to follow and 2) would realistically lead him to be cut out of the loop entirely. Like, thank you for your service, Yuuta, everyone’s impossibly grateful to you for restarting Megumi’s heart, but you’re high as fuck and need to go lie down until you start existing on the same spectrum as the rest of humanity again. Please leave the room, guy who is the sole narrator of the fic. We sure don’t need you there, seeing everything.

So I also decided that there was space for tailored responses to positive energy. After all, cursed energy feels different by user, to the point where people can recognize the person it originated from just by how it feels. So I decided that it wasn’t just that positive energy made you feel amazingly good—it made you feel whatever positive emotion felt best to you.

And Yuuta, who had always been so very lonely, suddenly felt that he was not alone.

It wasn’t even that the reverse cursed energy made him specifically love Megumi, per se. It’s more that his brain filled in the blanks. Like, our own brains will lie to us all the time. It was being bombarded with an overwhelming sense of youarefinallynotaloneyouarefinallynotaloneyouarefinallyfinallynotalone, and his own brain filled in the gaps by tying that sense to Megumi, who it seemed to be most directly related to.

It was never real love. It couldn’t be. Yuuta didn’t know him. And Yuuta knew that, logically, but there was just nothing he could do to stop the feeling.

Now, a lot of people would look at that irrational, unprecedented emotional response and say “wow, something is medically wrong with me” and consult a doctor. I actually realized that my concussion was way worse than I thought it was because I could not stop weeping over minor inconveniences and I was like “what the fuck? I am never like this” and went back to the urgent care.

But I didn’t think Yuuta would, because I think Yuuta views his love fundamentally as a bad thing that happens to other people.

Yuuta repeatedly blames himself for things that honestly aren’t really his fault. Rika is the biggest example of it. He blames himself for everything that happened to her, but honestly? He was a little boy who just had his best friend mowed down in front of him. He didn’t even know that he had powers. The only thing he did was just… not want her to die.

This isn’t a habit he’s shaken by the end of JJK0. When he finds out that he cursed Rika, the first thing he says is that it’s all his fault. Not just for her, but for the people that got hurt. For Geto coming after him and almost killing his friends.

Which is a fucking wild takeaway. “It’s my fault that grown man planned and executed my premeditated murder and my friends got hurt voluntarily attempting to save me.” Like. Yuutas not to blame for any of that shit. He blamed himself instead of the adult man who tried to kill him.

Yuuta blaming himself for his irrational emotions around Megumi is just an extension of his own self-hate and tendency to take responsibility for things outside of his control. He’s waiting for his love to be a bad thing again. He gets this irrational, uncontrollable surge of affection around Megumi, and all he can think is “please don’t let me hurt you too”. He keeps insisting that he won’t hurt Megumi because he’s the one concerned about that.

Which is the sort of tint cast over his reading of everything else. He sees Nanami and Shoko’s concern, and he superimposes on a fear of him instead of for him. It’s not accurate at all; he’s just an unreliable narrator.

Nanami and Shoko are actually the most predisposed to be sympathetic to yuuta—shoko went through this herself, and Nanami watched it happen. They’re never worried he’ll hurt Megumi; they’re worried he’ll hurt himself.

And of course they are. Yuuta is visibly distressed, and they can’t give him anything to help. But Yuuta is, fundamentally, an unreliable narrator. He filters what’s happening through his own mental state, which is never good.