#honestly this is YKK propaganda more than anything tbh >:)

[mangatxt]

it was either you or someone else who left a tag about android serizawa on a post i saw and i have not stopped thinking about him since he has been haunting my every waking second. if it wasn't you feel free to ignore this but if it was i Need to know about him

hey hal! hope you're doing well :D thanks for sending this. yup, that was me. oh boy, am i not Normal about him!

ALSO @crownorclover ain't Normal about him either. they have added so much time and thought to the AU too (hi rob bless u for putting up with me <3)

some backstory: android AU serizawa is actually part of an overall post-apocalyptic AU i had intended to complete for an AU Roulette 2023 prompt. unfortunately, i missed the deadline for that this month because i broke my tailbone. unlucky. but deadlines aside -- i'll still get back to it when i'm healed up enough to sit and write, because i NEED THESE THOUGHTS OUT OF MY HEAD IMMEDIATELY.

i wanted to write a post-apocalyptic AU with an iyashikei/healing/hurtcomfort type of feel. ecological collapse but lo-fi girl vibes. yokohama kaidashi kikou / yokohama shopping log is one of my favorite manga of all time and fits the bill exactly, so i was ecstatic to blend two of my favorite things ever.

for the uninitiated, that manga is written in episodic chapters and follows the day-to-day life of a humanoid android named alpha who is abandoned by her owner to run a seaside cafe in post-apocalyptic japan.

(i got excited so this got looooong. more + images under the cut!)

in episodic chapters, alpha interacts with the small collective of people and androids around her, and the narrative follows how humanity adapts to the reality around them, bands together as an inter-generational community, and still lives meaningfully and intentionally -- even in the absence of hope.

(also. i mean. you see the vision here.)

for the fic, i want to mix a good amount of YKK's overall vibe with MP100 canon. like YKK, the fic will be from the POV of serizawa, an advanced and immortal android running a cafe as the tides rise, the infrastructure crumbles, and the people around him continue to relentlessly age.

at the beginning of the fic, serizawa is on year ten of abandonment by his mysterious owner but still holds out hope that The President will return someday despite waning correspondence. in his daily life, he runs an aging rural seaside cafe that few visit (that is, aside from the insistent kurata tome, who would like serizawa's help finding merfolk and other ocean cryptids). he does not go out of his way to make connections with people whom he knows he will ultimately outlive. more than that, he deliberately isolates himself as much as possible to avoid it entirely and passively observes the world around him. he lives as efficiently as possible in a hazy, numb autopilot with no wasted motion and little room for function outside cafe responsibilities, even at the expense of coming off "uncanny" to potential patrons. he even falls into a cosmetic state of disrepair because he doesn't really see the point of his outer shell when it doesn't impede overall functionality. and while he doesn't know the purpose for his creation -- in general, he remains stubbornly committed to directives from an owner who never intended to return.

meanwhile, infrastructure failure displaces much of the human populace in seasoning city with catastrophic flooding and hazardous conditions. reigen -- injured and separated from mob, ritsu, and ekubo in the ensuing chaos, and completely wracked with guilt for his inability to change things -- follows rumors that the brothers survived on a boat to cuticle city and decides to risk the dangerous moped journey across the inhospitable terrain. he ends up literally crashing near the cafe -- where tome finds him and calls in serizawa for help. serizawa treats reigen's injuries, and, because reigen has nowhere else to go and can't continue his journey with a broken hand, allows reigen to stay at the cafe while he recuperates.

there's an inherent friction between the two of them in the early days of this arrangement. reigen's frustration and self-loathing for the present circumstances make him prickly; serizawa tries his utmost to keep his emotional and physical distance. they wrangle with a lot of human & android differences. initially, the more they learn of each other, the less they understand. serizawa calculates the chance of the kageyamas survival as near zero and thinks reigen is irrational for going as far as he does for a rumor -- wasting what little time he has. reigen scoffs at serizawa's misplaced eternal loyalty to an owner who has surely forgotten him entirely at the expense of enjoying his life.

as time passes and reigen works in the cafe, they start to gain an understanding and eventually, an appreciation for one another. reigen's appearance in the community brings in curious customers, which forces serizawa to open up to the idea that cherishing the small moments and departures from his programmed routine might make more meaning out of his immortal existence.

anyway, that's the gist of it! i don't want to give away the ending, but a couple other things in there that i'll highlight -- moped sharing, weird fish, wire and sensor play, trans reigen and android gender????, gratuitous coffee-making descriptions, found family, fireflies, big shirt / small pants, and seri's usb ports are in his mouth :D

thanks so much for asking about this! <3 it's so fun to talk about. i'm on the mend, so i'm hoping i feel well enough to make progress on this + finish the next sage advice chapter before i completely explode.